Teaching Adults to Play

Bastinado: Photo from my recent Dominance Development Seminar weekend intensive.

Last weekend was the first of Miss Couple’s and my Dominance Development Seminar (DDS) intensives, which we held in an entirely new state from where they’ve been in the past. We were holed up at the Star and Snake, a church-turned-pagan art and ritual space in New Hampshire. At this weekend-long workshop students develop skills and traits applicable to Dominance in BDSM play, for both lifestyle and professional practitioners. It’s a very packed weekend, and this last one went wonderfully!

The Dominance Development Seminar is a three-day workshop full of information, skill practice time, play opportunities, bonding, personal introspection, and support from the group itself. All the while we’re blessed to work with fantastically trained submissive and switch individuals who demo bottom, allow for students to practice various skills and scenes, and who serve us three nourishing meals a day! We’ve primarily held these seminars at a venue where most students are able to stay overnight. I’ve found it flows best when we’re able to host most people on site. Luckily, the Star and Snake was able to provide sleeping accommodations for everybody involved. It was wonderful utilizing every nook and cranny of that creative, inspiring, well equipped, and energizing venue toward our purpose.

Miss Couple and I frequently consider new spaces to hold these instructive weekends, other workshops, and destination kink vacations. We teach the Dominance Development Seminar a few times a year, and have considered offering it at various location sites. If there’s a state or place you’d like to see us bring our workshop, let us know your thoughts on the subject—you can contact me here. We’re happy to entertain ideas about where to produce and teach, as well as hear your inquiries or feedback about what you’d like to learn and/or experience.

Along with our ongoing search for great spaces to teach at, we’re developing new content this year! We have ideas for a reunion event for past DDS Students, developing a counterpart to our Dominance Seminar geared toward submissive types, and working on a webinar series.

Added to these developments, I’ll (hopefully) have a space I can teach in regularly very soon. If you’re interested in keeping up with my going’s on and the workshops and events I’ll be offering, please stay tuned. I’ll have a mailing list you can sign up for one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications when I publish. What I love and adore about this work is the planning, sessioning, consulting, and teaching—what I’m not so savvy about are the technological components which make producing more straight forward in this day and age…

Regardless, there is both a will and a way! I look forward to seeing some of you in my future classrooms.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

My writing takes time, research, and consideration: it is my art.
Please help me continue by joining my Patreon campaign, Donating, or booking a professional or educational Session with me. Thank you!

Submission Training

I have been engaged in various forms of training submissive types for the past 3 years. How training goes is specific to every trainee. I have my own interests, of course, so there are particular lessons everyone learns and experiences most everyone is subject to (within negotiated consent boundaries, of course). An emphasis in my teaching though, is to connect with those areas an individual sub needs help with in order to meaningfully gain the skills they require to serve Me skillfully, pridefully, and with heart.

With heart. Teaching to the heart and spirit as much as to the body or to the mind is ideal. To serve with heart means to be capable of being fully present and attentive, energetically generous, to be open and capable of sharing, to roll with the punches and mistakes which inevitably worm their way into situations, to have boundaries and communicate appropriately, and to care about service itself—to care about it internally as much as it is a gift to Me.

The protocol I start with is: keeping  a journal. I require my subs to journal at least once after each time we see each other, and I leave it open to them to make entries more frequently. The purpose of this journal is to keep communication open between us, to give them a place to think about our time together, to critique it, to reveal their own thoughts and feelings, and to offer me something of what is hidden in our interactions: their experience, their feelings, their heart and my effect on it. It’s a way for them to be held accountable to the homework I give, and for me to read through the results of their daily practices when I assign such things. I have them keep a written account of the protocols I teach, which is useful as I don’t get to see trainees daily or even weekly sometimes. In this journal I also offer insights in response to their entries and I give homework assignments. At times I find myself very touched and inspired by what is shared with me.

[NOTE: It is the best thing in the world to inspire one’s Dominant! Though be careful how you inspire—not all reactions to inspiration may be to a sub’s benefit… 😜]

Recently I received an entry that made my week, and one that I think is fitting to share. For some background, the training session my sub is writing about was a bad day for me. Service morning had arrived and I was struggling emotionally. I decided to invite my sub on a trip to a huge gorgeous plant nursery in my area, then we got lunch together. I’m training my sub in cooking and dining service currently, so we’ve been sampling food from restaurants to critique, break down the recipes, and get inspired… By the time we were back at my place for chores to get done all seemed much better with the world. This was the journal entry I received the following week:

Dear Sir,

We walk together through the warehouse of growing things. Lost in the labyrinth of plants of all shapes, sizes, colors, and hues, i breathe deeply in the natural aroma of it all. You show me Your favorite plants, sharing what You find beautiful and special. i begin to see the forrest for the trees, and the jungle for the plants, as i look with new eyes at the things around me, sharing in Your joy and finding things of my own to admire.

We return, bellies full, to your house, where you take home small plants to feed and water and grow into thriving, brilliant, impressive houseplants. Here we connect, and water each other with stories and dreams, energy, and foot massages. As the spicy tang of sautéed asparagus and sweet flavor of mango dance in my stomach, i begin to plan which tasty treats i will prepare to add warmth and joy to this space.

Nature is a beautiful mystery. Everything exists within a symbiosis; the soil feeds the plants and the plants feed the soil. Small sprouts grow and evolve into tall trees, and all is fed by the brilliant, beautiful sun that feeds all living things as the ball of life known as the Earth spins about it. And on that ball of life, in a small one bedroom apartment in a small city, two living, growing souls embrace, feeding each other in a symbiosis, two travelers through the ups and downs and cycles of this existence.

To many more days like this.

Your sun whenever You need it,
xxx

###

My sun indeed. It turns out D/s is an offering to one another, not just the game of “breaking wills” so many so-called “Dom(me)s” seem to believe it is. I left that training session uplifted, and the following week when I read this journal entry I was grateful. I was grateful for this person in my life and all they have come to be (and are continuing to become) under my tutelage. Every success of theirs I feel as a success of my own.

If you are interested in expanding your skills in Dominance, providing training to a submissive partner of your own, or want to know more about the ways Dominant partners construct D/s relationships, please join Myself and Mistress Couple for our “Dominance Development Seminar“. The next weekend intensive dates are January 24-26, 2020, and we’ll be housed in a gorgeous location in New Hampshire. The seminar is open to anyone regardless of whether you identify as a lifestyle, professional, or private player, and we’re happy to have students who are switches and even submissives who want to learn more about Dominance. I hope to see some of you there. Don’t hesitate to contact me with questions through the seminar’s application link.

I wish you and yours ever-mounting meaning and warmth this season.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

My writing takes time, research, and consideration: it is my art.
Please help me continue by joining my Patreon campaign, Donating, or booking a professional or educational Session with me. Thank you!

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