Consent Is Not Just a Framework. It’s a Spiritual Practice.

0:00What if consent is not just a rule, but the foundation of how you live, love, and get your needs met. We're going to explore consent as a daily spiritual practice, revealing how to navigate needs, boundaries, and relationships without manipulation, obligation, and resentment. I'm Brandon the Dom, let's dive in. But the fuck up buttercup that phrase was never directly said to me, but it perfectly encapsulates the paradigm it represents. One where life is hard and you're going to have to deal with it if you want to survive, whether you like it or not. Growing up, I was poor and raised by a strong single mother. That woman endured more than any person should have to. Any strength of mind that I have can likely be traced back to the lessons that she taught me. I learned endurance from her. The ability to do things that you really don't want to do for a very long time. At best, that ability becomes disciplined, consistent effort towards long-term goals. Its shadow side, however, is carrying painful

1:02experiences and quietly suffering in them to simply keep going. In a culture that's built on extraction from other beings, whether that's capitalism or consumerism, endurance may be a required skill. However, I don't find it particularly useful in interpersonal relationships. In fact, it's harmful. I love BDSM first and foremost because of its direct communication practices and its centering of consent, because it's far more important than people realize. Consent is more than just a set of frameworks or acronyms. It's a living, breathing, spiritual practice. On the surface, it's easy to understand. In practice, it's challenging to live because it forces us to confront how we pursue getting our needs met, both individually and collectively. Frameworks like SafeSane and Concentrual, Rack, Fries and Crisp are not just quick checklists to run through. They are meant to make you pause and think, similar to a Buddhist Kowon, and to ask whether you are

2:03truly offering the other person a choice grounded in free will. It's important not to mistake the finger for the moon. Normally, I try not to record too many theoretical, philosophical, or opinion-based videos, because opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, and it could probably use a better cleaning. I prefer to create more educational content so that others can learn something and decide how to apply it in their own life. However, the concept of consent is a hill worth dying on, being resurrected and dying on again. I call it a practice because we all have room to improve, including myself, and it's taken me three decades to understand how to actually live it. Maybe I'm just low upon the uptake. Part of my personal mission in life is enabling the well-being and thriving of others. I believe that's only possible when people are given the choice through their own free will to live in alignment with their self-interest, so long as they're not infringing upon another's consent. Here, self-interest means attending to your own needs, desires, boundaries,

3:07and limits. I love DS Dynamics because when done properly, they allow us to engage desires that might otherwise be taboo with the full acceptance of the other person without causing unnecessary suffering. It becomes an acceptance of the whole being, the full spectrum of what they're capable of, creation, and devastation like. I learned in these practices that desires that we might otherwise coerce for because they are shamed by the majority can instead be accepted, fulfilled, and even celebrated, and that is only possible with consent. I want to first start with the idea that we have needs. If you haven't recognized in your life already, here is an essential truth. You are a limited being with needs. Now, when escapes this reality, unless they're a God, needs our core emotional, physical, or psychological requirements that must be met for that person to feel safe, fulfilled, and secure, these are not arbitrary, they are non-negotiable for regulating

4:07that person's nervous system. When they're not met, that person cannot remain healthy, thriving, or in extreme cases, even survive. Now, said there's a razor-sharp distinction between asking for your needs to be met and expecting them to be met, regardless of another person's consent. The key difference lies in how you express those needs and how you respond to them when they are not met. Here's the difference. Needs with consent, you express a need. If the other person says no, you either find a way to cope without that need being met or seek an alternative way to fulfill it, often beginning with fulfilling it yourself. Needs without consent, you express a need. If the other person says no, you persist. Repeatingly asking, manipulating, coercing, or creating covert contracts where you meet their needs in hopes they won't reciprocate. Alternatively, you just suppress your needs entirely, pretending that they don't exist. I want you to consider for a moment how you've been going about getting what you need in life. Do you ask, and then accept whatever

5:12the answer is, even if it's a no, even if it's something that you deeply need. Or maybe you skirt around asking for what you want, offering only vague hints, doing things in the hopes that they'll do something for you, guilt them into action by begging or pleading, holding leverage over them, implying something will be taken away, or go wrong if they don't comply, expect them to meet your needs because you're in a relationship, without ever clearly expressing those expectations, bulldozing, intimidating, or overpowering them, or setting up systems of control so the other person does not have any real option. I'm not bringing any of these up to say you're a bad person. Quite the opposite. You're a human with needs, trying to get them in ways you learned were safe and acceptable. The truth is, many of us were not taught that it was safe to ask for our needs directly. As children, when we spoke up, we were often told to be quiet that our needs didn't matter or simply ignored. In more extreme cases, we were rejected, demoralized, or shamed for even

6:16having needs at all. And when that happens, we learn that our needs might never get met, and that's we aren't capable of meeting them on our own. So what do we do? We're humans, we adapt, we manipulate subtly, we ask indirectly, we try to get our needs met without ever clearly stating them, and we all do this. A simple example I like to use is when I was cooking in my partner's kitchen once, and I wanted a towel to wipe my hands, but I couldn't find one. I told her, we need to have a towel when I'm in your kitchen. And then I quickly caught myself and said, correction, could you have a hand towel in the kitchen when I'm here? Do you see the difference? In the first statement, I framed it as something that she needed to do, and that's bullshit. She doesn't need to do anything. She can live however she wants. In the second, I expressed my actual desire. I asked for what I wanted, instead of framing it as her obligation. It may seem like a small, even silly example, but if you swap out towel for sex, saying something like, you need to have sex with me versus will you have sex with me? The implications become much larger, much quicker.

7:19Much of the toxicity that happens in relationships comes from expectations that were never explicitly agreed to, because they were never closely related communicated. The flip side of speaking up for your needs, desires, boundaries, and limits is that your partner now has the opportunity to exercise agency by saying yes or no. And that's the vulnerable step that most people try to avoid. Basically, sounds like this. I have a need or desire. I would like you to fulfill it. Would you be willing? When you ask, rather than coerce, manipulate, or posture, you give the other person the ability to say no. And the only yes that is meaningful, authentic, and truly nourishing is a yes that could have been a no. And is in your best interest to grant other people this freedom. As an act of love, we offer invitations to our partners opportunities for them to contribute to our well-being. When someone freely chooses to meet your needs out of a genuine desire to contribute, those needs are fulfilled more fully, more effectively, and with far greater consistency. However,

8:20expressing a need does not obligate anyone else to meet it. Other people are autonomous beings with the absolute right to decline. And this is often the point where we reach for control or manipulation when we fear our needs will not go met. I say it all the time, I don't want you doing what you generally don't want to do. Because what you receive out of genuine desire hits differently. It lands deeper, it's far richer, and creates far more intimacy. It feels like being accepted without performance. Like you didn't have to change who you are to be loved. You ask for what you want, no matter how likely that no might be. And when the answer is yes, you feel accepted for being yourself. Now this doesn't mean that we stop asserting our needs. If you don't express them, they can't be fulfilled. As my mother used to say, close mouths, don't give fed. People can't read minds. The only people who consistently get their needs met are the ones who speak up. That said, assertiveness is not about forcing your will on others. That's the aggressive shadow side of the dominant. The one that we all fear. The one who makes people do what they truly don't want to do.

9:24What's worse is when somebody imposes their wants, their desires, fantasies, preferences, the ad pleasure and novelty, but aren't essential to save your well-being, at the cost of another person's needs. And this isn't always overt force. More often, it's subtle systems of control and extraction that make compliance feel like the only option. Those are actually typically easier to spot. What's harder to see is the passive aggressive side that we all participate in. This shows up when we guilt or shame someone into doing something they don't want to do. Consider this. Once someone makes a statement about the rightness or wrongness of another person's behavior, it's often a disorientated expression of that person's own values. Feelings are unmet needs. Shoulds are often disguised as forms of I want or I value, assuming that that should isn't just repeating conditioning trying to be put onto someone else. Instead, own what you want. Speak

10:25what matters to you. Then, grant others the freedom to be exactly who they are. Release the idea that your loved ones or anyone should share your values. If those values are fundamentally incompatible, then you move on. At the same time, you can't ignore your own needs. Assertedness is about how you want to be treated and ensuring your needs are acknowledged. Because assertiveness highlights the differences in people. People often fear it will create conflict or distance. More often, though, in intimate relationships, it does the opposite. It strengthens the relationship, because both people are honest, fulfilled, not quietly building resentment. If you don't assert yourself, someone else is going to unknowingly neglect your needs across your boundaries or override your limits. Not necessarily out of malice, but because they're focused on meeting their own needs and unaware of yours. To me, the ideal submissive is not passive or without needs or limits. It's someone who knows their needs and asserts them. Because when they say yes to mine,

11:29I can trust that it's genuine. And again, I feel fully accepted. I don't have to pretend to be someone else to receive love. So the core issue here isn't that we have needs. It's that we don't have control over whether others will meet them. Trying to control others feels safer. It helps us to avoid the vulnerability of asking, risking rejection, and possibly having our needs go unmet. But the long-term cost is high, unfulfilling relationships, full of resentment at best, and serious harm at worst. Realistically, when you have a need, no matter how big or small, your options are limited to meeting the need yourself, asking your partner, and receiving a yes, finding someone else who can meet the need and receive a yes, or accept that that need will go unmet and cope accordingly. Now, these options are listed in the order of effectiveness for meeting your needs without violating another person's consent. So let's talk about option one, meeting your own needs. Developing the capability to meet your own needs is essentially the process of one,

12:32learning, gaining the competencies required to create outcomes that serve you, basically becoming self-sufficient. And to maturity, moving from dependence on caregivers to independence. Even many of our psychological needs, such as the sense of safety or comfort, are developed through this process. Over time, they begin to arise from within, rather than being sourced externally. This is a significant part of becoming secure. Building certainty in yourself that, no matter whatever challenge rises, you can still provide for your own well-being. One of the reasons I'm so bullish on education is because I've seen how developing skills across practical, emotional, and spiritual domains dramatically improves your ability to meet your own needs. The more capable you are of meeting your own needs, the less you won't rely on others to meet them. The more energy others have to meet their own needs, and at times to support your's where you truly cannot meet your own. And the less likely you are to encroach on their limits or

13:34their capacity to give. That said, some needs, such as the need for human connection or physical touch, are not as easily fulfilled alone. I would argue that sex and love are both needs, but more accurately, they are clusters of needs, rather than a singular, clearly defined one. Sex is often a stand-in for a range of needs. Touch, relaxation, connection, expression, release, and more. Even as a man, I've used sex before as a way to get cuddles instead of directly asking for what I actually wanted, which was physical closeness and touch from another person. With more awareness, I now ask for hugs or cuddles when that's when I'm truly seeking. When these needs are recognized and addressed individually, many of them can be fulfilled in other ways, some on your own, and some from others with less demand or intensity placed on another person. Love functions similarly. It is made up of needs like belonging, validation, nurturance, companionship, and more. While many of those do involve

14:37other people, you might be surprised about how much you can meet those on your own by cultivating your relationship with yourself and to recognize how much is actually being fulfilled already through your non-intimate relationships. Some needs, however, do require another person. For example, companionship by definition cannot exist in isolation. That's both natural and healthy. Now, we can sit here and debate which needs absolutely require others and which do not, but regardless of where that line is drawn, the underlying principle of consent remains the same. All right, option two, ask someone to fulfill a need. If you're unable to meet a need on your own, either because it inherently requires another person or because you lack the capacity, you will need to ask another person for support. Human collaboration is built on the principle that working together increases the likelihood of meeting individual needs. At its core, it's a system of reciprocity. So you can make it more likely that somebody will say yes to meeting

15:39your needs when you provide value to them. And here, value means contributing to the fulfillment of their needs. In doing so, they're going to expend less energy on meeting their own needs and have greater capacity and willingness to support yours. Ideally, the situation becomes a win-win. Relationships are an ongoing commitment to this process. The type of relationship, the term in which needs are being supported and how. Now, it's important to not approach this in a strictly transactional way, doing something for a loved one with an expectation of immediate return, unless that's explicitly agreed upon. That's fine. Instead, the healthy approach is to contribute to their will being for its own sake. Trusting that in a functional relationship, your well-being will also be supported. That said, a true commitment is one that can be voluntarily ended at any time. Otherwise, it becomes an obligation, which is often met with resentment, half-hearted effort, or even active resistance. To me, the only meaningful relationship, regardless of its form,

16:44is one in which both people, when asked, at any given time, do you want to continue this, and they genuinely answer yes. Not out of obligation, not out of expectation, but out of choice. Now, this is a personal bias, but I don't particularly like the institution of marriage for this reason, because it can turn a relationship into an obligation rather than a conscious ongoing commitment. In that environment, it becomes far easier to tell someone they should do something because of their role, wife, husband, rather than asking them. Even if someone promises to meet your needs till death do his part, they must fully understand what that actually requires. And given the impermanent nature of the mind, body, and personality, we cannot reliably predict what our future needs or values will be. So how can we make binding promises on behalf of future versions of ourselves that we don't yet know? Promises create a false sense of security, an attempt to create

17:44secure trust or approval on uncertain ground, because we cannot know who we will become. Now, this doesn't mean people shouldn't get married. That is what you want. Go forth and be married. I only encourage you to do it with an informed decision, explicit expectations, and strong intentions. Strong intentions are not the same as promises. They can be powerful because they orientate us, and they set a direction for what we genuinely desire. But they also leave room for human fallibility and changing circumstances. And sometimes, those circumstances make it impossible to meet the needs we once agreed to fulfill. The truth is, no one is obligated to meet your needs. Not even the ones tied to your survival, unless they explicitly agreed to take on that responsibility. And even then, they still remain autonomous beings who can revoke that consent. If they do, obviously that affects trust. It means they can no longer be relied on to consistently meet that need. In that case, it's wise to adjust your expectations or to stop depending on that person

18:49for that particular need. Of course, losing that reliability brings you back into uncertainty. You've already determined that you can't meet the needs on your own, so now you feel the scarcity of it. At the root, we're trying to meet our needs to survive. If those needs go unmet, we face loss. Ultimately, even death and death is the ultimate unknown. And it's this uncertainty that drives our impulse to control. You cannot truly control another person without their consent, not without manipulation. Even in DS Dynamics, you don't literally own or control another person. It is still roleplay, even when embodied deeply enough for it to feel real. At all times, the other person is choosing to obey or not. Control, in this sense, is an illusion, one that attempts to mask uncertainty. If the person that you ask to meet your needs says no, at any point, you must accept that and move on. All right, option three is ask someone else to

19:50fulfill your need. If someone says no to meeting your needs, that's okay. You can ask someone else. With over 8 billion people on this planet, it's likely that there is someone who can meet them. No single person is meant to meet all of another person's needs. We all have limits. When we give beyond those limits, that giving gets turned into obligation. No matter how much we care for that person, take the need for emotional support for grief. Grief is a massive emotion. It can feel like a weight that's far too heavy to carry on your own. When my mother passed, what helped me was not relying too heavily on any one person. Instead, I distributed my need for emotional support across multiple people, especially those people that proactively offered it. Too often, we expect our partner to be the sole source of support, forgetting that friends and family are also part of that ecosystem. During the most intense parts of my grief, I rotated who I spoke to each day. That way,

20:51each person held a small portion of the way, rather than absorbing the full intensity of my emotions. I didn't feel like I was burdening anyone, and they were able to support me within their own limits. This approach is what allowed me to meet other aspects of my grief, such as the sexual dimension, when grief and sexuality start to mix, with partners who were best equipped to hold that space. They weren't burnt out from carrying all the emotional weight, which made them more available for this specific form of connection that they could provide. And even for that need, I have more than one partner. That said, we're still operating within the principles of human collaboration. If you're asking multiple people and consistently receiving a no, it may be worth examining your reciprocity. What value are you bringing to the relationships? How are you contributing to the needs of others? At some point, you will find people with whom there's a balanced exchange, where both of you can meet each other's needs in a sustainable way. If not, you'll have to learn

21:54how to cope with that need going on met. Option 4, except that the need goes unfulfilled and cope accordingly. If a need cannot be met on your own and is not met by another person, you must learn to cope and continue your search. With honest introspection, this state can bring clarity, at home to reveal whether something is actually a deep-seated need or simply a want. Because at this point, frivolous wants tend to fall away. They're not worth the energy required to bring it to fruition. Some long-standing wants, however, may actually be needs that you haven't fully acknowledged. You may find yourself wanting to pursue them no matter the cost. And at that point, the choice becomes clear. Continue the search or give up. And as humans, we're wired for survival. We tend to keep searching. If the desire is truly a need, this is where life becomes difficult. This is where endurance takes over. It is not a state of thriving. In this state, we look for anything that will relieve the pain. Therapy, substances, distractions, anything that will help us get through another day.

22:59It's easy to recognize this with physical needs like food. We can see you when someone is starving. What's harder to see is the silent starvation of emotional needs, loneliness, depression, unresolved trauma that might be happening in someone's head. Coping and enduring are not the first options. They are the last. We begin by trying to meet our needs ourselves, either by expanding our capacity or by letting go of or minimizing less essential desires. If that's not enough, then we seek support from others. The problem arises when others or systems built on extraction drain us beyond our limits. In that depleted state, we lose the capacity to meet our own needs. And from there, we may begin extracting from others, slipping into shadow behaviors as a means of survival. This is the point when the practice of consent becomes most difficult and asks us to allow others the right to say no. Even when that no means our needs may go unmet. Even when it means

24:00that leads us into discomfort, scarcity or despair. Because if we override their consent to our needs, we perpetuate that very cycle that brought us here for ourselves and for others. The practice demands this. You must be willing to accept and know no matter their circumstances. Now, I don't expect any of you to adopt these views. Doing so would be hypocritical. If you tried to live them without choosing them yourself, it would likely cause resentment and bitterness, and you'd eventually push back. Consent is a choice both to give and to respect, and it's a choice that you make every day. Instead, I offer this as a perspective on the practice. One that I continue to wrestle with and embody as I move through the world as a human with needs, just like everyone else. One of the most beautiful parts about accepting others as they are, without expecting them to meet your needs, is that you also grant yourself the same freedom. When you recognize that no one is obligated to meet your needs, you also recognize that you're not obligated to meet theirs. And paradoxically, this leads to greater assertiveness. You become

25:05more aware of systems built on extraction, both in your personal relationships and in the broader world. You develop more compassion for others, and just as importantly, you develop more compassion for yourself. And in doing so, you often become the kind of person others want to support. Someone they willingly choose to help in meeting your needs. Now, one of the concepts that I brought up during this video was the illusion of control. And oftentimes, it's a shadow side of the dominant, a way that we're reaching for control in order to create certainty than our life. If that's something that's peaked your interest, I recommend checking out this video on the illusion of control, especially if you're dominant to understand what the shadow side of your desire for control might be. So check out that video. Thank you so much for your time and attention.