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

What if consent isn’t just a rule—but the foundation of how you live, love, and get your needs met? This article explores consent as a daily spiritual practice, revealing how to navigate needs, boundaries, and relationships without manipulation, obligation, or resentment.

“Buck 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, raised by a strong-minded 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 she taught me. I learned endurance from her—the ability to do things you really don’t want to do for a long time. At its best, that becomes discipline: consistent effort toward long-term goals. Its shadow side, however, is carrying painful experiences and quietly suffering in order to simply keep going.

In a culture built on extraction from other beings—whether through 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 is far more important than most people realize. Consent is more than 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 SSC, RACK, FRIES, and CRISP are not quick checklists to run through. They are meant to make you pause and think—similar to a Buddhist koan—and ask whether you are truly 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 write theoretical, philosophical, or opinion-based pieces. Opinions are like assholes—everyone has one, and most could use a better cleaning. I prefer to write educational content so others can learn something and then decide how to apply it in their own lives. However, this concept of consent is a hill worth dying on, being resurrected, and dying on again.

I call it a practice because all of us have room to improve—including myself—and it’s taken me three decades to begin understanding how to actually live it. Maybe I’m just slow on 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 are not infringing on another’s consent. Here, self-interest means attending to your own needs, desires, boundaries, and limits.

I love D/s dynamics because, when done properly, they allow us to engage in 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 we are capable of—creation and devastation alike. I learned that desires we might otherwise coerce for, because they are shamed by the majority, can instead be accepted, fulfilled, and even celebrated.

That is only possible with consent.

We Have Needs

If you haven’t recognized it in your life already, here is an essential truth: you are a limited being with needs. No one escapes this reality—unless they’re a god.

Needs are core emotional, physical, or psychological requirements that must be met for a person to feel safe, fulfilled, and secure. These are not arbitrary; they are non-negotiable for regulating the nervous system. When they go unmet, a person cannot remain healthy, thriving, or, in extreme cases, even survive.

That said, there is 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 when they are not met.

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—repeatedly asking, manipulating, coercing, or creating covert agreements where you meet their needs in hopes they will reciprocate. Alternatively, you suppress your needs entirely, pretending they don’t exist.

I want you to consider how you’ve been going about getting what you need in life.

Do you ask—and then accept whatever the answer is, even if it’s no, even if it’s something you deeply need?

Or maybe you:

• Skirt around asking for what you want, offering only vague hints
• Do things for others in hopes they’ll do something for you
• Guilt them into action by begging or pleading
• Hold leverage or power 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
• Bulldoze, intimidate, or overpower them
• Set up systems you control so the other person has no real option

I’m not bringing these up to say you’re a bad person. Quite the opposite. You’re a human being with needs, trying to get them met in the ways you learned were safe or acceptable.

The truth is, most of us were never 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 having needs at all. When that happens, we learn that our needs might never be met—and that we aren’t capable of meeting them on our own. So we adapt. We manipulate subtly. We ask indirectly. We try to get our needs met without ever clearly stating them.

We all do this.

A simple example I like to use was when I was cooking in my partner’s kitchen and I wanted a towel to wipe my hands but couldn’t find one. I told her “you need to have a hand towel in your kitchen.” Then I quickly caught myself and said, “Correction. Could you have a hand towel in your kitchen when I’m here?” 

Do you see the difference?

In the first statement, I framed it as something she needed to do. 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 swap out “towel” for sex: “You need to have sex with me” versus “Will you have sex with me?” The implications become much larger, very quickly.

Much of the toxicity in relationships comes from expectations that were never explicitly agreed to—because they were never clearly 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.

That’s the vulnerable step most people try to avoid.

It sounds like this: “I have this 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.

It is in your best interest to grant others that 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 genuine desire to contribute, those needs are fulfilled more fully, more effectively, and with far greater consistency.

However, expressing a need does not obligate anyone else to meet it. Other people are autonomous beings with the absolute right to decline. This is often where we reach for control or manipulation—when we fear our needs won’t be met.

I say it all the time: I don’t want you to do what you genuinely don’t want to do.

Because what you receive out of genuine desire hits differently—it lands deeper, feels 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 you think a “no” might be—and when the answer is “yes,” you feel accepted for being yourself.

This doesn’t mean we stop asserting our needs. If you don’t express them, they can’t be fulfilled. As my mother used to say, “Closed mouths don’t get 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 onto others.

That’s the aggressive shadow of the Dominant—the one we all fear. The person who makes others do what they don’t truly want to do.

What’s worse is when someone imposes their wants—desires, fantasies, preferences that add pleasure or novelty but aren’t essential for safety or 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 easier to spot.

What’s harder to see is the passive-aggressive shadow we all participate in. This shows up when we guilt or shame someone into doing something they don’t want to do.

Consider this: when someone makes a statement about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of another person’s behavior, it’s often a distorted expression of their own values, feelings, or unmet needs. “Shoulds” are frequently disguised forms of “I want…” or “I value…” (assuming they aren’t just repeated conditioning).

Instead, own what you want. Speak what 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, move on.

At the same time, you can’t ignore your own needs. Assertiveness is about expressing how you want to be treated and ensuring your needs are acknowledged. Because assertiveness highlights differences, people often fear it will create conflict or distance.

More often, it does the opposite. It strengthens the relationship—because both people are honest, fulfilled, and not quietly building resentment.

If you don’t assert yourself, someone else will unknowingly neglect your needs, cross your boundaries, or override your limits. Not necessarily out of malice, but because they are focused on meeting their own needs and are 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, I can trust 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 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 avoid the vulnerability of asking, risking rejection, and possibly having our needs go unmet. But the long-term cost is high: unfulfilling relationships filled with 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:

• Meet the need yourself
• Ask your partner and receive a yes
• Find someone else who can meet the need and receive a yes
• Accept that the need will not be met and cope accordingly

These options are listed in order of effectiveness for meeting your needs without violating another person’s consent.

Option 1: Meeting Needs on Your Own

Our first option when a need arises is to meet it ourselves.

Developing the capacity to meet your own needs is essentially the process of:

• Learning: Gaining the competencies required to create outcomes that serve you—becoming self-sufficient
• Maturity: Moving from dependence on caregivers to independence

Even many of our psychological needs—such as a 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 what challenges arise, 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 rely on others to meet them
• The more energy others have to meet their own needs—and, at times, to support yours where you truly cannot
• The less likely you are to encroach on their limits or capacity to give

That said, some needs—such as 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 singular, clearly defined ones.

“Sex” is often used as a stand-in for a range of needs: touch, relaxation, connection, expression, release, and more. Even as a man, I’ve used sex as a way to get cuddles instead of directly asking for what I actually wanted—physical closeness, touch from another person. With more awareness, I now ask for hugs or cuddling when that’s what 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 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 these do involve other people, you might be surprised by how much can be met through cultivating your relationship with yourself—and by recognizing how much is already being fulfilled through 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.

We can 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.

Option 2: Ask Someone to Fulfill the 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 someone else for support.

Human collaboration is built on the principle that working together increases the likelihood of meeting individual needs.

At its core, this is a system of reciprocity. You can make it more likely that someone will say yes to meeting your needs when you provide value to them. Here, value means contributing to the fulfillment of their needs. In doing so, they expend less energy meeting their own needs and may have greater capacity—and willingness—to support yours. Ideally, it becomes a win-win.

Relationships are ongoing commitments to this process. The type of relationship determines which needs are being supported and how. It’s important not to approach this in a strictly transactional way—doing something for a loved one with the expectation of immediate return (unless explicitly agreed upon). Instead, the healthier approach is to contribute to their well-being for its own sake, trusting that, in a functional relationship, your well-being is also being 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—is one in which both people can be asked, at any given time, “Do you want to continue this?” and genuinely answer yes. Not out of obligation. Not out of expectation. But out of choice.

This is a personal bias, but I don’t particularly like marriage for this reason. It can turn a relationship into an obligation rather than a conscious, ongoing recommitment. In that environment, it becomes easier to tell someone what they “should” do because of their role—wife, husband—rather than asking them.

Even if someone promises to meet your needs “until death do us 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 and values will be. So how can we make binding promises on behalf of a future version of ourselves that we don’t yet know?

Promises can create a false sense of security—an attempt to secure trust or approval on uncertain ground (because we cannot know who we will become).

This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t get married. If that is what you want, go forth and be merry. I only encourage you to do so with an informed decision, explicit expectations, and strong intentions.

Strong intentions are not the same as promises. They can be powerful because they orient us—they set direction toward 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 those tied to your survival—unless they have explicitly agreed to take on that responsibility. And even then, they remain autonomous beings who can revoke that consent.

If they do, it affects trust. It means they can no longer be relied upon to consistently meet that need. In that case, it’s wise to adjust your expectations—or stop depending on that person for that particular need altogether.

Of course, losing that reliability brings you back into uncertainty. You’ve already determined you can’t meet this need alone, so now you feel the scarcity of it. At the root, we are trying to meet our needs in order to survive. If those needs go unmet, we face loss—ultimately, even death. And death is the ultimate unknown.

It’s this uncertainty that drives the impulse to control.

But you cannot truly control another person without their consent—not without manipulation. Even in D/s dynamics, you don’t literally own or control another person. It is roleplay, even when embodied deeply enough 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 you ask to meet your needs says no—at any point—you must accept that and move on.

Option 3: Ask Someone Else to Fulfill the Need

If someone says no to meeting your needs, that’s okay—you can ask someone else. With over 8 billion people on the planet, it’s likely 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 turns into obligation—no matter how much we care about the person.

Take the need for emotional support during grief. Grief is a massive emotion. It can feel like a weight far too heavy to carry alone. When my mother passed, what helped me most was not relying too heavily on any one person.

Instead, I distributed my need for emotional support across multiple people—especially those who proactively offered it. Too often, we expect our partner to be our sole source of support, forgetting that friends and family are also part of that ecosystem.

During the most intense periods of grief, I rotated who I spoke to each day. That way, each person held a small portion of the weight 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 also allowed me to meet other aspects of my grief—such as the sexual dimension—with partners who were best equipped to hold that space. They weren’t burnt out from carrying all of my emotional weight, which made them more available for the specific forms of connection only they could provide. Even for that need, I had 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 no, it may be worth examining your reciprocity. What value are you bringing into your relationships? How are you contributing to the needs of others?

At some point, you will find people with whom there is a balanced exchange—where both of you can meet each other’s needs in a sustainable way. If not, you’ll need to learn how to cope with that need going unmet.

Option 4: Accept 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. It helps reveal whether something is a deep-seated need or simply a want. Frivolous wants tend to fall away; they’re not worth the energy required to bring them to fruition.

Some long-standing wants, however, may actually be needs you haven’t fully acknowledged. You may find yourself willing to pursue them no matter the cost. At that point, the choice becomes clear: continue the search, or give up. And as humans, we are wired for survival—we tend to keep searching.

If the desire truly is a need, this is where life becomes difficult. This is where endurance takes over. It is not a state of thriving. In this space, we look for anything that will relieve the pain—therapy, substances, distractions—anything that helps us get through another day.

It’s easy to recognize this with physical needs like food. We can see when someone is starving. What’s harder to see is the silent starvation of emotional needs—loneliness, depression, unresolved trauma—happening inside someone’s mind.

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 isn’t enough, 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 where the practice of consent becomes most difficult.

It asks us to allow others the right to say no—even when that no means our needs may go unmet, even when it leads us into discomfort, scarcity, or despair. Because if we override their consent to meet our needs, we perpetuate the very cycle that brought us here—for ourselves and for others.

The practice demands this:

You must be willing to accept a no—no matter the circumstances.

Live As You Will

I don’t expect you to adopt any of these views. Doing so would be hypocritical. If you tried to live them without choosing them for yourself, it would likely create resentment and bitterness—and you’d eventually push back. Consent is a choice, both to give and to respect, and it’s a choice you make every day.

Instead, I offer this as a perspective on the practice—one I continue to wrestle with and attempt to embody as I move through the world as a human with needs, just like everyone else.

One of the most beautiful outcomes of accepting others as they are—without expecting them to meet your needs—is that you grant yourself that same freedom. When you recognize that no one is obligated to meet your needs, you also realize that you are not obligated to meet theirs.

Paradoxically, this leads to greater assertiveness. You become more 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.