con = together/with/thoroughly
sentire = to feel/experience/perceive

 

To make consensual decisions, to create consensual culture, we must be able to feel.

This comes from access to our bodies.
Access to felt sense.
Access to our non-distorted experience.

Which comes with access to space and time:
to have our own experience,
to be clear on what we’re even experiencing.

 

To be in consensual relationship

is to enable each other to thoroughly feel—
to let people move at their own pace,
to support each other's processes,
to walk on interrelated paths.

 

There is no coercion here.

There is recognition:

• We experience the full spectrum of experience.
• It is physically and temporally impossible to experience everything with everyone.

So we make choices:
about how we spend our time,
with who,
doing what,
and why.

 

This is choice.

This is agency.
This is basic human dignity.

This is stripped from dominant coercive culture where:

• Urgency replaces clarity
• Productivity replaces presence
• Appearance replaces truth
• Metrics replace meaning
• Numbness is rewarded and feeling is punished.

 

We need to be witnessed and held

in our sacred humanity—
and access the space, the time, the support, and the money
to live in reverent dignity.

We need this. Collectively.

This is not an unlived theory of possibility.
Honest love exists.
Consensual connection exists.

A post-coercive world exists
when we finally stop pushing past our limits.
When we trust our disgust
and take our needs seriously.

It does not kill us when we slow down to feel something—
again and again and again.

It is what builds structures of care.
Slowly. Devotionally. Imperfectly. Committed.

 

Consensual culture

is the outcome of a million micro-choices—
made in silence,
in darkness,
in unpaid labor,
in impossible circumstance.

Staying with yourself is enough.
Learning your needs and your limits
and holding your line is enough.

Trusting that people will meet you is enough.
You being yourself is how we build this.

 

A post-coercive world exists

not because we believe in it,
but because we live in it.

You are not alone here.
We live here too.