Our Practices
Foundational practices for embodying and expressing The Experience of We
Negotiating and Renegotiating Consent Together
A quick start guide
You know what a real yes feels like. It comes from somewhere genuine. Your whole body is in it. You chose this, freely, and you could have chosen differently.
You also know the other kind. The yes that comes out because the cost of saying no felt too high. The guilt, the disappointment, the withdrawal of warmth. You said the word, but your body was saying something else entirely. And afterward, the resentment settled in quietly, like heavy weight.
Most of us carry both of these experiences. We know what it feels like to have our choices genuinely honored, and we know what it feels like to go along with something we never really agreed to. The difference isn't subtle. We feel it in the body: the openness and ease of real consent versus the constriction and heaviness of compliance.
Consent isn't a gate we pass through once. It's a living quality we tend continuously. It applies to everything: how we spend our time, how decisions get made, what we share with others, what we ask of each other. Every day, in countless small ways, we are either honoring each other's choice or overriding it.
One practice to try
Think of a person in your life who’s open to experimentation, and invite them into trying something new with you.
Name one implicit agreement
Think of something in your relationship that just happens. An arrangement, a pattern, a division of labor, a recurring dynamic. Something that was never explicitly discussed or agreed to. It just became the way things are.
Name it out loud. "I notice we seem to have an unspoken agreement that [you/I always do this]."
Check whether it’s actually agreed. "Is this what you want? Have you genuinely consented to this, or has it just been happening?"
Listen without defending. If it turns out they've been going along without genuine willingness, receive that honestly and in good faith.
Make it explicit. If you both agree, name it clearly. If one of you doesn't, talk about what would actually work.
One implicit agreement, brought into the open. That's all. Sometimes what we discover is that the arrangement is fine. Sometimes we discover that one of us has been accommodating silently for a long time, and naming that pattern out loud is the relief.
The full guide, Negotiating and Renegotiating Consent Together, holds ten practices for building a living consent culture: the consent conversation, ongoing check-ins, recognizing when renegotiation is needed, navigating power differences, and more. It also explores the domains where consent lives (physical, emotional, informational, temporal, decisional, financial, relational) and how to keep agreements current as we change.
When consent is alive between us, everything else has ground to stand on. If naming that one implicit agreement shifted something, there’s a whole practice waiting for you.
If this resonates. we recommend trying …
Sensing, Naming, and Negotiating Boundaries Together
Practicing Accountability Together
Creating Safety Together
