Still Learning: How My Teachings Have Evolved Through Lived Experience

Based on Episode 119 of the DOM Sub Devotion Podcast

Growth requires the willingness to reconsider what you thought you knew. After seven years of living in a 24/7 dominant/submissive dynamic and several years of teaching these concepts, I've discovered that my understanding continues to deepen in ways I couldn't have anticipated when I first started sharing this work.

Everything I've taught over the years remains true. But lived experience has a way of adding layers of nuance, depth, and clarity that you simply can't access from the surface. The teachings remain the same, but my relationship to them has transformed through the act of living them more fully.

If you've been following along since the beginning (hello to our long-time listeners who remember what we used to call ourselves before Infinite Devotion), you've witnessed this evolution in real time. And if you're newer to this work, understanding how these concepts deepen over time might help you see your own journey with more patience and compassion.

Listen to the full episode:

• Audio on Infinite Devotion
• Video on YouTube

The Paradox of Masculine Emotion

For years, I've taught men about the importance of not processing all of their unprocessed emotions with their woman. This remains absolutely true. But what I've noticed is how many men hear this teaching and use it as permission to shut her out completely, to push everything down, to present a stoic facade that's actually just emotional avoidance dressed up as masculine strength.

That was never the intent. And I didn't fully realize how much I was doing this myself until this past year, when I really started to break open emotionally on deeper and deeper levels.

Here's what I've learned: if I hadn't let Dawn in to what I was feeling as I went through some of this emotional upheaval, it would have driven us farther apart, not brought us into deeper intimacy.

The Difference Between Processing and Presence

There's a critical distinction here that needs to be made clear. Don't use her as your therapist. Don't unload all of your emotional processing onto her. That's where you need an actual therapist, a coach, a men's group, trusted friends, something other than your intimate partner.

But as you're going through this work, you don't have to pretend it's not happening. You don't have to hide your humanity from her. It's not your responsibility to be perfect so that she can let go. It's your responsibility to take ownership of the conditioning and pain you've been carrying around, sometimes for so long that you forgot it was there.

Let her know what's going on with you. Don't shut her out. Let her be there for you.

It's even okay to cry on her shoulder. That's not being "unmasculine." If this is your partner, if this is your one, if this is the person with whom you want to live in very deep intimacy, you can't block her out from your full humanity.

The Temporary Inversion of Polarity

Sometimes she's going to need to wrap you up in her arms and give you a big hug. Dawn has done that for me several times over the last few years as I've worked through some really hard stuff, and it's been intimacy building.

Was it inverted polarity? Maybe. Was she playing the caretaker while I cried like a sad child? Perhaps. And I don't give a fuck, because on the other side of it, when I've let myself be with that emotion, when I've let myself see what I need to see, when I've taken that to therapy or deep presence work or brought it to other men to be heard and witnessed, I can actually start to unwind patterns I didn't even know I was in.

The Goal Isn't Stoicism, It's Wholeness

Yes, the ideal and the long-term way this gets to be on the other side of healing is different. You won't feel so much stuffed-down emotion that you need her to make you feel better. But in the interim, you might. And that's okay.

You can't force yourself to be stoic. You can't make yourself into the image of what you think masculine divine energy is supposed to look like. That state comes naturally when you've healed the wounds you carried from boyhood.

The work is to confront the emotional upheavals you've been avoiding and pressing down. Reconnect to the things that move you emotionally, and let her see you in that process.

Redefining Feminine Chaos

You've probably heard the teaching that the feminine is chaos and the masculine is order. I've used that language extensively. But what I've tried to paint (and not always successfully) is a much more nuanced picture than most people hear when they encounter those words.

Feminine equals chaos does not mean that women are destined to live emotionally unhinged, reactive lives in a state of constant upheaval.

Two Definitions of Chaos

I found two different definitions for the word chaos that completely changed how I understand and teach this concept:

The first definition: Complete disorder and confusion.

For many women, especially in the earlier stages of this work, this is exactly what their emotional state feels like. When you start to feel all of the feelings that have been pressed down, complete disorder and confusion is an accurate description of the internal experience.

The second definition: The formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.

Read that again slowly. The formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.

This is pure potential. This is every possible outcome existing at once. This is the empowering, embodied version of what chaos gets to be for a woman who has connected all the way back to her soul.

The Journey Through the Shadow

One of these definitions feels very unsafe and scary. The other is limitless possibility. Both of them are real, and you can't skip from one to the other.

The only way to a different experience of chaos, to an embodied experience of chaos as pure potential, is to go back through the disorder and confusion.

There will always be a time for a woman who is wanting to go deeper where she is feeling unfelt feelings, letting suppressed emotions from the past come to the surface and move through her. This is the shadow side of chaos, and it's unavoidable.

But it doesn't mean that disorder and confusion will be her state forever.

Embodied Chaos as Pure Calm

Her natural state, and I believe this to be true about all women who have a feminine essence to their soul, is that she is pure potential energy.

When a woman has descended very deep into her body (and this is something I've started to witness on levels I can't even begin to put words to in my experience of Dawn this last year), she descends out of emotional reactivity.

When she is no longer living her life in reaction to conditioning and triggers, when she's no longer operating from beliefs she built about herself and the world as a child, there's nothing left to be emotionally reactive to.

She becomes less and less able to be triggered. More and more calm and at peace.

Embodied chaos is very calm and still. It holds the potential energy for everything. This is a very peaceful state, a matter-of-fact connection to her body, trusting the physical sensations of her body as she feels them in response to actual experiences, not the fears about experiences.

This is a state of freedom from combustible emotion and emotional reactivity.

You Can't Fake It Until You Make It

But this isn't something that can be forced or faked. It requires going back into those places you don't want to go, feeling those feelings you're afraid to let resurface.

That is what feels like disorder and confusion, because it is. But that is also the shadow side of chaos that must be moved through to reach the other side.

All of the control mechanisms, the burnout, the exhaustion, the things that so many women deal with as part of their daily reality, that's the shadow chaos. That's all coming from reactivity. And it doesn't always have to be that way.

Slowing Down on the Inside

The importance of slowing down your external life to make space for what you want is something we've talked about extensively over the years. It's an essential first step.

We have two major examples of this in our own lives. Ten years ago, on January 2nd, 2016, I quit everything. All the groups, organizations, boards, nonprofits. I carved out time for myself after realizing how burned out I was. Out of that space came everything we get to do and live now.

The second example was the shutdown time around COVID, when life slowed way down and we used that extra time to go inward and go deeper.

But here's what I've noticed recently, especially over the last six months: you can slow down your life as much as you want and still be just as fast-paced going on inside of yourself.

The Tension in Little Moments

I first started to pick up on this in myself with how I ate. How fast I would chew. How quickly I was shoveling food into my mouth. I'd get through a meal and realize I didn't even know if I was breathing.

Then I started noticing this in more and more little moments. Washing dishes like I'm holding my breath and tense in my body. I wasn't in a hurry, but I was definitely not feeling calm.

And here's what was fascinating: I could do the things at the same speed without all of the tension. The rushing wasn't about the task. It was about something much deeper.

Bringing Curiosity to Resistance

One of the phrases I've been using a lot lately is "bringing curiosity to resistance." When I'm rushing through a little moment, when I'm tense about scrubbing a bowl, I ask: what am I resisting here?

What I started to see is that on an internal level, on some really deep level, I was very uncomfortable just being in the present moment. It was always about what I had to do next. What do I have to accomplish? What else is on the list? What might I be forgetting?

When I was doing that, I was tense all the time. My breath was tense. My body was tense. And I don't really know why. Probably just leftover habits from when I was over-committed and super busy, always scanning for the next problem.

The Power of Internal Calm

As I started to breathe more deeply, I realized I could get through the same thing, even if I was in a hurry, at the same speed, without having to be tense. Without it being so stressful.

I didn't even realize how much stress I was putting myself under in all of these little moments. It felt like I wasn't okay, but I'm just washing a bowl. I'm okay. Why am I in such a hurry?

And here's the profound lesson this taught me: how important this internal calm is for Dawn's ability to relax.

As I've relaxed and brought more calm and peace into myself as I move through my day, as I've reminded myself that it's okay to be gentle with myself, that it's okay to move at my pace, that I'm okay right now, she also calms down.

Leading Through Nervous System Regulation

I couldn't see how much the things I was doing were affecting her. I would wonder why she was still so anxious, frustrated, tense. Those states started going away. She started crying out some really big feelings she'd been carrying, feelings that we didn't have to process or figure out or understand. She just started having deeper and deeper realizations about herself when I calmed down.

As the dominant, as the masculine, we are the leader. And because of how sensitive a woman is to her physical surroundings, and because the man she's devoted and committed to is a big part of those surroundings, if I'm tense, anxious, nervous, how could she be relaxed?

Especially if I'm looking at her thinking, "If she calmed down, I would feel a lot calmer." That puts her in the role of being in charge. She has to go first. That's not going to happen.

The Feminine is Receptive First

The feminine is receptive. She will follow. And if she's tense, stressed, anxious, a lot of that can't start to unwind if I am tense, stressed, and anxious.

If she's going to be pure potential energy, that chaos that is pure being, pure erotic potential, a big can of gasoline waiting to be lit on fire but completely inert without something to activate it, how could she relax if she's protecting herself against your tension?

We can't expect the one who exists to receive and be to lead the calm. Her calm is a response to my calm.

Don't Use This as Strategy

You can start by using some intentionality around bringing calm to your moments. But don't use this as a strategy. Don't try to get somewhere or force something or influence an outcome.

If your goal is to try to get her to calm down, so you're going to calm down to get her to calm down, you're still putting all the impetus on her changing for you to feel okay. That's still manipulative. You're trying to influence an outcome.

This is about you feeling okay so that she can.

Opening to the Feminine

And if your woman is a feminine energy in your life, she's not the only feminine energy in your life. All of the different places from which you can receive as a man are feeling your stress and tension, and they will not be able to give to you when you are closed off to them.

Money is a big one. If you're looking for a deeper connection to financial abundance and you're walking around tense, stressed, afraid, you're blocking the thing you want most.

You can't fake this. You can't pretend like you're calm when you're really a mess inside. You can't manipulate your way to the truth.

You have to go back inside deeper and look. Don't try to seek calm. Don't try to seek a feeling of relaxation. Instead, seek the reasons why you can't. Seek the blocks that you have to the state of calm that already exists in you.

And then sit with those. Those are going to bring up some emotions (back to the first point in this post).

Your Heart is Your Receptive Center

When you're actually, honestly calm and relaxed, you are open to receive from the feminine. You are also able to lead the feminine. You're able to step into that pure potential energy and create with the energy that she is.

From her calm, relaxed state, you get to help create an environment where she gets to experience that.

But the reasons that you aren't relaxed now as a man, that you don't feel calm on the inside, are the same reasons that your heart isn't open. And your heart is your receptive center as a man.

So she, being your woman, but also she being the feminine on a universal scale, cannot receive from you or give back to you until you open your heart. Until you deal with your conditioning. Until you face your own programming.

Slow down with yourself. Be gentle with yourself. This is essential for men to lead in relationship, and it's more important than I could have ever realized until I started experiencing it for myself and witnessing the ways that things around me just open in an entirely new way.

The Role of Fear in Desire and Dynamics

The role that fear plays, especially in desire and in the desire for intense dominant/submissive dynamics, is something I've given less energy and attention to over the years of teaching. But as I go deeper with people in one-on-one coaching and mentorships, it always comes down to very deep embodied fears built out of beliefs we made about ourselves at probably three, four, five years old.

It always goes back there.

We're in Relationships with Each Other's Programming

What's become obvious to me now that wasn't a few years ago is this: most of the time we're not even in relationships with other people. We think we love someone. We don't love them.

We are in relationships with each other's fear and programming and conditioning.

When fear is driving the bus (and it is the most motivating emotion that we have as human beings, which is why marketers play to your fears to sell you products), the only thing we can do is try to make ourselves unafraid.

When you have two people who are both terrified of something (of losing love, of being wrong, of not being good enough, of not being wanted or needed, whatever the fear is), that's what's leading the relationship.

This is where you have a couple that goes through a decade of marriage and all they do is fight and bicker and argue with each other. They're both just trying to assuage their fears.

Fear Isn't the Enemy

Fear isn't a bad thing. We can't just say, "I can't be afraid now." That makes you afraid of being afraid, which doesn't get you anywhere.

Our fears and the belief systems that cause those fears are there for a really good reason. They exist in our lives to protect us from something.

And we actually don't know what's going to happen in the future. We don't know. Fear will tell us that the future has all these potential bad things that could happen, but we actually don't know that. Most of the time, the things we're afraid of don't actually happen.

But it's our own brain that puts the fear out there in the future and then convinces us that the thing is going to happen.

Fear Protects Itself

We have to acknowledge the role that fear has played and accept and really welcome that fear before we can ever hope to move beyond it.

And we can never, ever get someone else to overcome their fear for us.

Another person's fear is theirs, dealing with their entire history, their entire life's history, all the way back to when they were a small child. So to say "don't be afraid of that, I've got you" is wasting your breath.

This is one of the most misunderstood things: how difficult it is to let go of fear. Because when you're afraid, the fear that you feel is making you afraid of letting go of the fear. The fear protects itself.

If you imagine a life beyond the thing you're afraid of, that life is going to feel scary and unsafe. You'll probably convince yourself that you just can't do that thing or have that experience, that it must just be the way you are.

No. The fear is informing the future that you're trying to imagine without the fear.

The Example of Snake Phobia

If you're really afraid of snakes and you try to imagine what it would be like to not be afraid of snakes and to be playing with a snake, that's going to feel scary because you still have the fear now. The fear will protect itself by making you afraid of even imagining a life where you're not afraid.

The Fear of Losing Love

One of the biggest fears that people have when they're having relationship troubles is the fear of losing love. They might know in their head that they would be okay if this relationship didn't work out.

But on a much deeper level, they may be afraid of what it says about them as a person if this relationship doesn't work out.

If they hold a very deep belief that they are unworthy or unlovable, then a relationship not working out is deathly terrifying. And that is going to influence the ways that person relates to their partner.

Instead of being able to speak up honestly about what they want or don't want or like or don't like, they're going to people-please in some way. Tell that person what they want to hear. Try to make themselves want something they don't want because they don't want to upset that person.

They're terrified of losing love because losing love would validate some very deep belief they already hold about themselves.

You Can't Relate Honestly When Afraid

You can't relate to another person honestly when you're afraid of losing them.

You can't relate to another person honestly when you're holding very deep beliefs about yourself: that you don't deserve love, that nobody wants you, that you're not going to be okay.

These really deep beliefs are built out of our conditioning from childhood.

Sitting With Fear

You can't try to force your way through fear. Fear will stop you from trying to make it go away.

You can't talk yourself out of or convince yourself not to be afraid. The fear informs and distorts your future view of what that looks like.

So the longer you go trying to force your way out of fear, the more you are reinforcing that fear. You are keeping it around.

You have to slow down. Sit with fear. Be with it. Let it be there. Be curious about it.

Until you do this, you really don't get to experience real deep intimacy with another person or with yourself.

Structure vs. Containment: The Game-Changer

This is the newest of these evolutions for me, something I've really just been getting language to and deeper understanding of even over the last few weeks. It's the difference between structure and containment when it comes to dominant/submissive dynamics and masculine/feminine polarity.

If we think about the masculine as order and the feminine as chaos (chaos being what I spoke about earlier), we have these two halves of a whole that make one.

The Masculine Role: Creating Order from Chaos

It is the masculine's role and purpose to put order to chaos. To reach into that infinite potential energy of the feminine (of which his woman is a representative) and to create out of that. To create out of that energy.

It is not our role to limit that energy.

Creating order, creating something out of nothing, cannot coexist with keeping that energy suppressed.

The Mistake of Trying to Control Her

When people come to me where the feminine or submissive partner is feeling the shadows of chaos (a lot of stress, emotional activation, anxiety, showing up as controlling, nagging, whatever), there's this feeling that she needs to be kept down. That she needs to be limited because she feels out of control.

That isn't what she needs.

What she needs is to be held and contained.

One of the places that dominant/submissive dynamics can go very wrong is when the dominant leads in a way that suppresses the freedom of the feminine. Giving her rules about what she's not allowed to do. Trying to exert control over her feelings and her emotions.

Structure Applied to Her Will Crush Her Spirit

When we think about applying structure to the relationship dynamic, yes. Structure to her existence? That will crush her spirit.

If you want your submissive, if you want your feminine partner to really come alive, you have to set her free. Not try to control and limit her.

She needs containment, not structure.

She's not the thing that you are creating. You are creating in the world through the energy that she brings you. And you can't access that energy if you are shutting it down.

Where Structure Actually Belongs

We apply structure as men to our lives first. We build a solid sense of our own inner authority. We build solidity in ourselves.

We create structure in the world around us so that things function well, so that they move, so that they operate with efficiency.

She is not the thing that you are creating. She is not the place that you are applying order.

She is what you are setting free so that you can bring order to what she brings forth.

If you don't get that right, you are just going to destroy a spirit by trying to dom her. Don't do that.

She Isn't the Problem

She isn't the problem. She isn't a problem at all. She doesn't need to be fixed. She doesn't need to be ordered around. She doesn't need rules to control her emotional experience.

What she needs is an environment where she can be okay. Where she can be safe. Where she can let her guard down. Where she does not need to be afraid.

Creating the Garden

We apply structure as the dominant, as the masculine, to ourselves and to the world around us. We create a garden in which she can play freely, and we offer her containment.

What do I mean by containment? Let her run around in her life and explore what it means to be her. And then if there's a need to grab her by the little tag on the back of her shirt and go, "That's far enough for now. Let's not run off into a place that isn't safe. Come back here. Come back home." That's containment.

Being able to see when she needs to be reigned in a little bit. But not because it makes you uncomfortable. That's yours.

Structure Does Not Exist to Limit Her

Structure in a DS dynamic does not exist to limit the submissive partner, even if she thinks that's what she needs because she feels chaotic inside.

That chaos is something she needs to feel through to find herself back to the embodied version of chaos, the pure potential energy.

All of her emotional upheaval that feels chaotic is very important for her to feel. And it's your calm, your sense of solidity that makes it possible for her to find her way back home.

If along the way you are choking the life out of her spirit to try to get her to behave in a way that makes you feel okay, that's not okay.

Order the World, Free Her Spirit

We can offer containment, but she's not the thing that we are ordering around.

We apply order to the world around us in order to make her able to be free. Because that is the place from which we can receive everything through her.

The Work is Individual

This last piece ties a bow around all of this, and it's something I've come to really believe is at the core of any work we want to do to improve a relationship between a man and a woman:

A relationship is made up of individuals.

If we want to change the relationship, we don't try to work on the relationship. We don't try to work on the communication. We don't try to fix the relationship.

We heal the individuals.

Healing Your Own Pain

We heal our pain. We deal with our conditioning, with our programming, with the things we are reacting to, with our fears.

On our own.

And we do it in the presence of each other.

Devotion. It's in our name. That unbreakable commitment to doing this alongside each other, even when it is excruciating, makes so much possible.

When You're Not Afraid of Losing Each Other

When you're not afraid of losing each other and you can really work on your own stuff, and you become more whole and complete as individuals, the relationship works itself out.

The communication is easy when you're not afraid of what it means about you if they say something or feel something.

The work is individual. It always will be individual. And that's what allows you to live in true interdependence with another human being.

Evolution is the Point

Thank you for being here with me through this evolution. Thank you for sticking with us as I grow and change and get better as a man, as a dominant, as a teacher.

My hope is that this evolution gives you both permission and perspective. Permission to know that you don't have to have it all figured out. Perspective to understand that things are going to change with you, with your partner, with your relationship.

And they can get better and better and better. No matter how good it is right now, it can probably be even better.

That's the entire point of this work. Not perfection. Not arrival. But continuous deepening, continuous growth, continuous willingness to see what you couldn't see before.

Ready to go deeper?

If this resonates with you and you're ready to do this work for yourself, I offer one-on-one coaching and mentorship for men who are committed to becoming more whole, more authentic, and more capable of leading in their relationships and their lives.

Learn more at infinitedevotion.com

Listen to the full episode:

• Audio on Infinite Devotion
• Video on YouTube

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