Kink as a Path to Healing with Tigress Lily

In this episode of BodyJoy After Office Hours, Melissa sits down with Tigress Lily, certified Erotic Blueprints coach and somatic practitioner, for a wide-ranging conversation on kink, power dynamics, and presence as tools for healing and connection.

Tigress shares her unconventional path from the corporate world into erotic leadership, including how intensive therapy, somatic work, and BDSM helped her work through control, grief, and trauma. Together, they explore how kink can function as nervous-system regulation, why presence—not pain or performance—is often the real medicine, and how Erotic Blueprints can radically transform intimacy inside and outside the bedroom.

The conversation also dives into:

• Using kink consciously and responsibly for healing
• Erotic vs. sexual energy (and why confusing them limits pleasure)
• Submission, responsibility fatigue, and the relief of surrender
• Vetting professionals and understanding when support is needed
• Desire mismatches and Erotic Blueprints in long-term relationships
• How slow, attuned touch can heal where force or speed fails

This episode offers a trauma-informed, deeply human look at eroticism that goes far beyond stereotypes—centering consent, attunement, and care.

Guest Links

Tigress Lily’s Website: https://awakeneddomme.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/tigress_lily

Transcript

Tigress Lily (00:00)
let's say you're in a relationship and you wanna incorporate it into your relationship, you can still hire a professional to help you do that. Or couples who wanna experience a threesome.

hire a sex worker who knows what they're doing and is actually like not gonna create any sort of weird emotional interruptions or whatever, you know? So I think we get into this weird thing that like it's not real or people don't care about us, but we go get professional massages. We're not like, wow, why are you getting a professional massage? Shouldn't your partner be doing a 90 minute massage for you? Like it's the same thing, right? And so.

Melissa D. (00:16)
Yep. Yep.

Professional cleaners

too, I mean come on, how far do we want to go?

Tigress Lily (00:38)
Yeah,

Melissa D. (00:50)
Welcome to Body Joy After Office Hours podcast where I chat with Tigris Lilly, who's a certified erotic blueprints coach who also helps individuals and couples in deepening their intimacy, self-trust and erotic authenticity. Her work bridges her interest in psychology, somatics and power dynamics to guide people beyond shame and into embodied pleasure. In our conversation, Lilly shared about how she got started in this world.

speaks to vetting, working with different professionals, and ways that this work may also support you and your relationships. I hope you enjoy.

Melissa D. (01:29)
Tigress Lily, thanks for being here.

Tigress Lily (01:33)
It's great to be here with you, Melissa.

Melissa D. (01:35)
I feel like we've been trying to get together or have a conversation for what feels like a few years now.

Tigress Lily (01:44)
This is true, this is true, busy schedules.

Melissa D. (01:47)
Busy schedule. we're both based in Austin, Texas. And Tiger Silly, I wanted to bring you on just to share, first of all, your path and how you got to where you are today. And also specifically go into the erotic blueprints because you have a lot of training, actually certificate around that. And I use that very lightly in my work. So let's let's dive in.

Tigress Lily (02:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I am really excited to be able to share this with people today. I feel that the erotic blueprints, as well as other parts of my work have just proven to be so foundational in helping people unlock their arousal, but beyond just the bedroom, it's also their arousal for life, right? It's that life force, sacral energy. And that's something I think that I bring to the teaching of the erotic blueprints that's

Melissa D. (02:34)
We gone.

Tigress Lily (02:44)
A portion, but not as heavily focused on by a lot of the Blueprint coaches is how does this show up for you at work? How does this show up for you with your family? How does this show up for you in literally every facet of your life? So to rewind a little bit for context in case people are new to it, the erotic Blueprints I often describe as basically the five love languages of arousal. So we have energetic, which is like the process of energy, not being hyper.

Melissa D. (02:51)
Hmm.

Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (03:11)
a sensual, which is engaging the sense, kinky, which is anything taboo or sort of power dynamic, sexual, which is kind of that really straightforward, I want to have sex, very genital, very visual, ⁓ and then shapeshifter, which is I really need a combination of all of them. So people can speak all of the languages, but not necessarily need to have all of them, whereas a shapeshifter to be fully fulfilled needs all of them.

So that's kind of the work that we're talking about. This was created by a woman named Jaya Ma and her partner Ian. And you can find more about that online. There's a really great quiz that you can take to kind of get yourself started on it. But I like to expand on that as well and bring that work into some of my other areas of focus, which are I go really deep into psychology. I'm not a licensed therapist, but I sort of trained myself as if I were one.

Melissa D. (03:47)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (04:08)
I'm really interested in polyvagal theory and internal family systems and somatic therapy and all of these different methodologies that really help people heal through trauma or live lives that feel more fulfilling. So I'm kind of weaving all of those methodologies together in the work that I do.

Melissa D. (04:29)
I love that. So what were some of the things for you that helped you really open up and get started on this path, maybe even before you became like a practitioner or spaceholder in community? Do you want to share about that?

Tigress Lily (04:43)
Yeah, absolutely. So my background is very actually corporate vanilla before all of this work. I built a consulting company, that's still in operation. My team is mostly handling that now. ⁓ And in the process, I went through a year as we do sometimes, it was just full of what I sometimes refer to as tower moments, which is a tarot reference actually. Everything seems to be crumbling, right? I found out that my partner had had an affair.

found out that my mom was going to die in four months of cancer. My grandmother passed the same year. It was just, it was a rough year. And in that process, I did leave my partner and I was kind of redesigning my life. I moved to Santa Barbara just on a whim and there was this therapist there, an unlicensed therapist, which tends to be my favorite kind, honestly, as long as they have the stuff behind it. ⁓

Melissa D. (05:19)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (05:39)
And she would do these seven hour sessions with me where we'd go really deep. And so I had done a couple of those seven hours, not during those, no, just really like for somebody who tends to intellectualize like myself, it got me past that initial layer of the traditional like 60 to 90 minute therapy session where I was just starting to touch the surface and got me deeper. She'd bring in some somatic elements to help me get into my body more.

Melissa D. (05:45)
Seven hours? Does she do medicine as well or?

Tigress Lily (06:10)
So it was a really effective thing for me. So when all of this started happening, I contacted her and I was like, look, I know that I'm gonna wanna avoid all of these uncomfortable feelings, but I would like to not be able to. So can we please set up a structure that makes that not possible? So we started doing one of those sessions, like three out of four weeks in a month, and we did that for six months. So almost every week I was having this deep dive, like really forcing me to take care of it, because I didn't wanna do it.

Melissa D. (06:10)
Hmm.

Tigress Lily (06:40)
five years later, right? And I'm really glad that I listened to my intuition and did that. But the story being that part way through that, she's like, look, we're doing some work on your control issues, but we're still, we haven't really been able to break through. And I'm just feeling like you should look for a DOM to work with, like BDSM, you should look for a DOM and you should do some sessions with them. Because I think that

Melissa D. (07:02)
Hmm

Tigress Lily (07:09)
working on Surrender is gonna help with your control issues. And I was like, I mean, okay, never thought about this, but I've been working with you long enough to trust your weird instincts. And so...

Melissa D. (07:19)
And so

when she mentioned that, did you have a concept of what that actually meant? Had you done any kinky play? Did you understand like, okay.

Tigress Lily (07:26)
I had no, like, I had

not done any kinky play. I would be on the dating apps and guys would ask if I was kinky and I was like, I don't really know how to answer that. I don't know what that means. Like, I know it means something, but I don't really have a definition. but I knew what BDSM was, just, I don't even know how I knew. I just kind of broadly knew. I suppose 50 Shades of Grey was already out, right? So we kind of knew those, some things. ⁓ But I was like, okay, well.

Melissa D. (07:35)
You're like, I have no idea what that is.

man.

Tigress Lily (07:56)
How do I do that? And she's like, well, get involved with the BDSM community. And I was like, do they have like monthly meetings? what, how do I do that? And she's like, well, I'm not in it, so I don't really know. Great. So on my own here, but with a mission. So I literally Googled how to find your first Dom because I didn't know where else to start. And.

Melissa D. (08:09)
Hmm. Okay.

Tigress Lily (08:22)
I found the world of vet life, I often describe as Facebook for kinky people. luckily had a pretty good experience there. Oftentimes female bodied people struggle a little bit getting into there. can be, it's not a vetted space, right? So it can be open to a lot of things, but I found some community there. I found some events there. I started making friends in the community.

Melissa D. (08:28)
Totally, yep.

Tigress Lily (08:49)
⁓ I was kind of amused because everybody in my life that I told about this was like, yeah, that track's for you. And it was like, what do you mean that track's for me? Why am I the only person who's surprised by this journey? ⁓

Melissa D. (09:04)
Right,

or why didn't they tell you sooner? You had to go through six months of seven and a half hour sessions to get this. Okay, okay, so you find a community, you're on FetLife, you're knowing that it's not completely a vetted space. It is the Wild West, I've been on there and there's a reason why I'm not on there now. But it sounds like you found some people to quote unquote play with or go into this.

Tigress Lily (09:07)
Yeah, like... ⁓

Yup.

Yeah.

Yeah, yep.

Melissa D. (09:31)
dynamic to explore your control issues. Yeah, tell us about that.

Tigress Lily (09:35)
So interestingly,

I did not successfully find a dom to play with. ⁓ There are a lot of men on FetLife who say they are doms that really just want to be aggressive in the bedroom, right, which is not the same thing. And I also found myself struggling to vet really well because I didn't exactly know what I was doing even in the vetting. So I was trying to read up on it. And then I got an email from somebody that I was following that they were offering a dominatrix training. And I was like,

Melissa D. (09:39)
Okay.

Yep. Not even.

Tigress Lily (10:06)
Well, that should help me vet. If I know how to be a dom, then maybe I can vet for a dom better. And so I went down that path and actually ended up continuing to expand that. I actually took training under two different mentors. ⁓ One of them locally, Kimmy Inch, who I know that you know and does some really great work that's somatic therapy based and found that that actually also did for me what my therapist was wanting for me.

Melissa D. (10:24)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (10:36)
because being a dom is not about control, which is something that people get wrong a lot. It's actually about inspiring and leading and making people feel safe and guiding them into areas where they feel shame and allowing them to feel fully seen, right? You can't control somebody into that space really well. And so...

Melissa D. (10:57)
Right, right.

Tigress Lily (10:58)
I was like, wow, this is an amazing world and there's so many therapeutic elements. I thought I was the first person to ever think of the fact that this could be somatic therapy. And then I realized a lot of really famous pro doms are like former or current somatic therapists. And I'm like, okay, fine. Great minds think alike.

Melissa D. (11:12)
So do

you remember in your mind and in your body the exact scenarios, being in this dungeon or this play space with whoever you were working with and going, ⁓ that's what we're doing. It went from this. Yeah, do you want to share about that?

Tigress Lily (11:32)
Yeah, I eventually, for me, a lot of these somatic pieces came up through impact play, which could be spanking or flogging or anything where you're using some implement even your hands to strike somebody at a consensual level, right? And what I found is that that helped me drop into my body more, kind of the way a massage might also drop you into your body a little bit more. And with flogging specifically,

it would sometimes just escalate to a point where an emotion would start to bubble up. And sometimes that was grief, sometimes it was anger. And when that would happen, I often didn't know what it was connected to. I didn't know why or what I was grieving or angry about, but it still gave me that somatic release. And for anybody who's been in somatic work, you know, it doesn't always matter. It doesn't need the why all the time. Sometimes it's just like,

body keeps the score, trauma that's been stored in your body that's being released. And so I found it very therapeutic in that way. And for me, that type of play was not at all arousing. It wasn't something that felt inherently sexual in nature or anything like that. It just really felt like body work for me. And so then also just learning specifically from Kimmy because she practices conscious kink.

Melissa D. (12:30)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (12:55)
which is kind of bringing in those therapeutic elements and whatnot. Other ways to use the different styles of, even if it's humiliation or degradation or all these different forms of play, both psychological and physical, to help people unlock shadow work, essentially, that helps them face these parts of themselves, helps them feel accepted in their shame, helps them feel, you know, just more

Melissa D. (13:15)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (13:25)
because they're no longer trying to push away this part of themselves that feels shameful.

Melissa D. (13:31)
Yeah, and I imagine being with someone that's, whoever's holding the container, the dom or the erotic leadership has to have this level of awareness to hold space for all that to happen. Instead of just, we're gonna do this impact scene and if emotions come up, I'm not there to really unpack it or help you with it. ⁓ At least that was my experience in certain kinky spaces is there wasn't that more.

Tigress Lily (13:47)
Yeah.

Melissa D. (14:00)
those nuances, the deeper layers that come out. So it's been beautiful to see practitioners like yourself and Kimmy Inch that have more zhuzh there to help people. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (14:12)
Yeah, yep.

Because I think the other thing I really love about BDSM and King, because it's very playful. And a lot of people think it's very sexual and I find inherently a lot of it is actually not sexual. You can go play with a variety of people or friends or whatever, doing a lot of things that are just not genitally focused and not specifically for arousal. They're just for fun and play. And I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that without having a therapeutic element to it. But I do think it's important.

Melissa D. (14:18)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (14:42)
to know that it can trigger emotional responses or somatic responses and just be educated enough to know and negotiate around like what you are and are not capable of holding. I actually have a lot of requests for people to be like, teach me how to do a therapeutic scene. Like I wanna do shadow work through this and all of that. So one of the classes that I teach is called BDSM and Kink for Healing. And we talk a lot about

Melissa D. (15:01)
Hmm.

Tigress Lily (15:09)
All of these other things like I mentioned earlier, polyvagal states and IFS and shadow work and things that can come up. one of the emphasis points that I have there is on how much can you do without that training? And when do you actually need a facilitator? Because ideally, if you're going to intentionally work with that, you need to have some training in being trauma informed or somatic therapy practices.

It's not an area that you wanna just dive into without that knowledge because you're dealing with really deep parts of the human psyche that need a specific level of care. So I try to make it accessible at a high level where it's like, okay, if you have a fear of spiders or something, we can play with that through kink. And that's probably, unless it's a phobia where you go nonverbal and shut down, like that's too deep of a level. But if you're just like, I'm uncomfortable with this and I wanna learn to be comfortable with it, that's something that with

Melissa D. (15:35)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Tigress Lily (16:04)
something as simple as that class, people can probably play with that on their own. But I always encourage people to be cautious of jumping into childhood trauma around violence or sexuality or abandonment without the proper tools or sort of a spot or a facilitator like Kimmy or myself to ensure that everything is being done in a way that's psychologically and emotionally safe for everybody involved.

Melissa D. (16:24)
Sure.

Right, and you mentioned IFS, the internal family systems. ⁓ What are some ways, and you can keep everyone's names private or whatever you need to, but like, what are some ways you've explored, like parts work or IFS, in a kink scene? Like, what would that even look like for someone that's like, wait, what's the connection there? ⁓

Tigress Lily (16:55)
Yeah, absolutely. So I

find that a lot of our kind of trauma points, right, in our lives tie back to a certain age. One of my favorite things to do is if I or somebody else is having some sort of trigger response to ask, old is this part of me? And that usually produces an answer, surprisingly, sometimes it surprises me that it comes right up. Okay, you were 10. I'm like, okay, why do I know that? I don't know.

but what happened around the time I was 10 that created similar feelings and you can start to go into that. So in that, it could be a way to find points to work on within kink, but then also there's this whole realm of littles, as we say in BDSM, where somebody may act in a way that feels like age regression or there's even as far as things like diaper play or whatever, which are often really misunderstood areas of kink.

Melissa D. (17:23)
That's it.

Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (17:51)
They are

not the same as something like incest play, which people get really weirded out sometimes by like the daddy dom little girl or the mommy dom little boy element. But it's really not about being aroused by somebody who's a younger age. It's really about caretaking and that deep desire to feel held maybe in ways that you were not in your childhood. So some people will role play in

little spaces, what we call it, where they will kind of intentionally put themselves in that mindset and they're essentially playing a role to try and evoke that. But I've also seen pretty often what tends to come up are wounded parts or protector parts, as we say in IFS, that actually almost take over the system in ways that are not necessarily role play. So you don't completely

Melissa D. (18:40)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (18:48)
experience is split, right? It's not a dissociative identity disorder, but it's almost similar to that in that sort of alter way where you're like, I'm noticing that this part of myself that's maybe as young as four to six years old is popping up and I'm starting to reason and think like a four to six year old in this moment. And my mommy Dom or daddy Dom or whatever caretaker, whatever role that is, is kind of caring for me.

Melissa D. (18:52)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (19:17)
accordingly to being in that level of emotional state. So it's a really unique way to access some of the wounded or protector parts and work with them in that way that goes beyond just role play.

Melissa D. (19:29)
Mm-hmm. Wow. That's beautiful. So someone may come to you not being aware and someone may may go, okay, someone suggested to me that I should explore this and in the kinky lens to ⁓ kind of integrate and experience something different now as an adult. So almost like reclaim it.

Tigress Lily (19:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And I find that it's a really effective tool if people are wanting to do it therapeutically, ⁓ especially alongside a therapy practice, right? Where you've built some cognitive awareness of some of your patterns and then you're ready to move it. And it's kind of more fun, honestly, than some other forms of therapy because it is a form of play. It is a form of just being in that. But if I were to boil

Melissa D. (19:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tigress Lily (20:19)
kind of BDSM specifically within Kink down to a single point of why it's so effective. It's because we so rarely experience full presence from anyone in our lives, right? Where we're really like fully energetically attuned to them, we're synced up with them, the rest of the world sort of fades away and we're just locked in on our experience with this other person. So few people have that and I think

Melissa D. (20:31)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Tigress Lily (20:49)
Men in particular, and that's probably why we have so many submissive men looking for female doms, there's actually a supply and demand issue there, ⁓ is that men in particular at an early age are kind of shamed for having emotional expression. Boys are touched less than girls in a healthy platonic emotional caring way, and so they grow up with this deficit of

emotional care because of the way that as a society we've defined how men should show up in the world. So it can affect both genders, of course, but I find that that happens even more so with men. And so to be working with a female dominant who is locked in on them and is touching them in some way, even in a non-erotic way, or just really tuned in and caring about them is

Melissa D. (21:27)
Hmm.

Bye.

Tigress Lily (21:49)
an experience that they sometimes have never had, even after being married, right? Even after some experiences we feel like that should be taken care of. People are presence starved. And that's where really good BDSM and kink training can come in and help to soothe some of that and create more connection for people.

Melissa D. (21:55)
Right.

Mm, I love that. I get a number of requests ⁓ through, you know, like, let's say a six month timeline of someone looking for, you know, to hire a femdom or someone to just, you know, create some sort of container for them to do these tasks and, you know, be cared for and fed and, you know, whatever the scene dynamics, but. ⁓

Yeah, that's beautiful that people can hire that out if they're not getting it in their relationship.

Tigress Lily (22:43)
Yeah, and I think there's still a lot of stigma around that, whether it's pro-dom or whether it's sex work or whatever. And I'm actually a really big proponent of hiring a professional is smart, especially if you don't know what you're doing, right? You do need to know how to vet them, but if you're just trying to incorporate it, like, and

let's say you're in a relationship and you wanna incorporate it into your relationship, you can still hire a professional to help you do that. Or couples who wanna experience a threesome.

hire a sex worker who knows what they're doing and is actually like not gonna create any sort of weird emotional interruptions or whatever, you know? So I think we get into this weird thing that like it's not real or people don't care about us, but we go get professional massages. We're not like, wow, why are you getting a professional massage? Shouldn't your partner be doing a 90 minute massage for you? Like it's the same thing, right? And so.

Melissa D. (23:19)
Yep. Yep.

Professional cleaners

too, I mean come on, how far do we want to

Tigress Lily (23:42)
Yeah,

Melissa D. (23:43)
go?

Tigress Lily (23:44)
yeah, I've even heard that about therapists, like, well, because I'm paying them, they don't really care about me. I want somebody who actually cares about me. So this should be my romantic partner doing this. And I'm like, if they're really loving their job, they do care about you. It's just that they're not requiring any other reciprocation from you. So the money keeps it clean because it is a skill that they've built in it, is their time. And so that is a fair exchange, but it doesn't mean they don't care about you.

Melissa D. (23:51)
you

Yeah.

Yeah, and I do know just from experience that the world of erotic labor, let's call it, or hiring someone to do erotic massage, maybe to be that third person because you have this certain fantasy, there's going to be people that have the skill to hold it and some people that are advertising that don't. So ⁓ what are some ways that people can vet?

Tigress Lily (24:31)
Right. Yeah.

Melissa D. (24:38)
I mean, you can talk about all of those are just one of those. But when someone's looking like, hey, I've got this experience that I want to explore, or I want to do something with my partner, but I feel like we need someone that's a little bit more educated and experienced. What are the questions should they be asking these people that have profiles and websites and things like that? What should they ask to see if they're getting the right professional?

Tigress Lily (25:01)
Yeah, that's a really great question because it can be the wild west out there, right? And that's how my story started was not knowing how to vet for it. So, and also there's a lot less professional male doms. So that was a little bit harder for me to find at that time. ⁓ But one thing is just how long have you been doing this? What do you love about doing this? What are your favorite activities? And also what is your domination style? So there's a lot more ⁓

books and kind of articles out now about the different types of domination, whether it's authoritarian or sort of a seductress or goddess or there's all these different things and most really great dominance have some blend of all of them, but might be more heavily one versus another kind of kind of like the erotic blueprints, right? They're going to have sort of a stack of I'm more authoritarian or I'm more seductress or I'm more goddess or whatever. And

what that looks like and what their expectations are of a submissive coming in. ⁓ If a provider's like, I'll just do, know, whatever it is that you want, just let me know. To me, that's not necessarily a red flag, but it's not probably gonna be the best experience because you want to know that they're specialized in something that they're focused in. ⁓ But the other thing is to look at their intake process and what questions they're asking that might actually give you more information.

My application is so robust if I'm gonna do pro-dom work, which I occasionally will operate in that space. I find some people come to me for therapeutic work and get some BDSM and other people come to me for BDSM and get some therapeutic work. So either way, I'm kind of doing the same thing. ⁓ But for my process, they have to fill out a basic form that kind of talks about what they're looking for because in the reverse, in a professional capacity,

Melissa D. (26:28)
Mm-hmm.

Ha

Tigress Lily (26:55)
I'm also not interested in working with somebody who's like, oh, I don't know, just like whatever you want to do. And they don't have a defined desire, right? Yeah, no boundaries or no desires is just as scary to me because if you don't know what you want, I also don't know where the boundaries are or where I might be playing with some difficult things. So they do that initial form. We'll have sort of a vibe check, a coffee meeting, something along those lines so that I can gauge.

Melissa D. (27:00)
Yeah, do whatever. I don't have any boundaries.

Absolutely.

Tigress Lily (27:22)
if we have a good connection because I tend to be very picky. And then I'm like, great. Yeah, and I had somebody recently say to me, okay, great. So like, what's your calendar like? How do we schedule? And I was like, no, that's not the next step. So now you go into a second forum, which is gonna take you probably 90 minutes to fill out.

Melissa D. (27:27)
Selective, yeah.

This is

actually part of the DOM process are these forms, right?

Tigress Lily (27:47)
Yes,

yeah, for me, right? I do, like sometimes people are like, I don't know how you get any clients or get them to stick with the process. But the ones who do stick with the process are like, I'm with you because you asked for this. And I'll ask for things like, what was your relationship like with your mom? What was your relationship like with your dad? Like, where do you feel a shame in your life? So really getting into some of those psychological threads, because for me, I would get bored if somebody just wanted me to flog them for an hour, right? That's not.

That just doesn't get me excited. For some people it does and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not my flavor. For my flavor, I want a psychological thread that I can pull on where I'm like, okay, so at a young age, your mother left and you were the most responsible person left and blah, blah. This is really tracking because you're showing me that you feel like you've never been seen for your value or that you had to overperform.

whatever. And I can then take that information and start to work with that in the scene in ways where it doesn't have to be a highly therapeutic scene if that's not what they're going for. But I can still use that undercurrent in order to make it a better experience for them because I'm going to be able to touch on those psychological pieces in ways that make them feel more fulfilled than if I just do a specific activity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Melissa D. (28:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

What are some of the most common requests or dynamic or like story if you will that people come to you for to explore?

Tigress Lily (29:25)
say most of my male clients, it's actually really ⁓ bondage and helplessness. That's exactly, and that's what it comes back to because they are responsible for a lot in their everyday life. Maybe, you know, this comes up also with women who are very in their masculine if you follow kind of polarity studies, right? Masculine energy being that direction, responsibility, holding the container, you know, all of that sort of energy. So,

Melissa D. (29:31)
Feeling like they don't have to hold the power basically. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (29:55)
executives or things like that are also often looking for submission because it gives them permission essentially to let go of all that and just be one thing. And being that one thing might be a slut or it might be a worthless piece of trash or whatever. But even, yeah.

Melissa D. (30:04)
Thank you.

A worm.

Tigress Lily (30:17)
And it took me a while to understand how I could do humiliation or degradation in a conscious way because I'm very much about building people up. And so I struggled with the idea of like using some of these things and I still have some boundaries around what I will do. But I finally understood it when somebody was like, yeah, because they have no permission to be imperfect. They're required to be perfect all the time. So if they're

Melissa D. (30:23)
Right. Yeah, same.

Tigress Lily (30:44)
called imperfect and allowed to be imperfect and you see them as imperfect during a session and stay and still hold the container and still care for them and they still get after care and you still praise them at the end of the session, it's like, ⁓ maybe being imperfect is okay. Right? And so once I understood that, I'm like, okay, this makes a lot more sense to me because just like

Melissa D. (31:04)
Hmm.

Tigress Lily (31:13)
you know, wanting to be in a helpless bound situation. It's like, can somebody else please hold this for just a minute? Can I just hand this to you for the next hour? And can I just rest is really what it comes down to, like mentally, emotionally, and using the psychological techniques that you learn as a dom to help kind of like steer them into that. I want you to give up your thoughts right now. You don't need to think about anything that's not inside this room.

really steering them into that place of just deep surrender that just feels like a spa day for your brain.

Melissa D. (31:50)
Yeah, yeah. You know, as you were speaking, I was remembering just, and we don't have to go into it, but I'm just gonna kind of, can decide if we want to. ⁓ When you had an event at your house and there was a group of all friends, right? And y'all are exploring some of these concepts in these micro ways. So you talk about how, you know,

a lot of men show up and they want someone else to hold and make decisions and kind of be helpless. ⁓ What is some of the common dynamics that you show up for women or like the female friends in your life? And then my next question is, do we want to go into, you know, a light conversation around some of the play that I know that you kind of hold for your friends, which is so beautiful. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (32:39)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I think for women, it can be a mixture. I see a little bit more interest in dominance from women, ⁓ which I think might also be a cultural situation to some degree where women have been repressed or not seen as powerful or whatever. I actually see a lot of women get into domination from a standpoint of wanting to punish men, which is a bit of a red flag, but

Melissa D. (32:58)
and

Yes.

Tigress Lily (33:09)
⁓ that can be an origin story that actually turns out well because they realize it part way through when they do their own work, right, and they turn that around. But that idea of almost like a reparation for the way that they've been held down in the past. So I don't recommend that you play with anybody who's specifically trying to do that, but has been a situation where I've seen people come in like that and then be like, wait.

Melissa D. (33:29)
Yeah.

Tigress Lily (33:35)
I realize I'm doing this, that's not what I want to be doing. I want to be a better Dom. And so it can turn out okay over time. But that is, think one of the things is women just having the option to feel powerful. And maybe at work, they're never listened to by men. And so to have male submissives that want to do or serve or like hang on their every word, right?

Melissa D. (33:54)
This is my line.

Tigress Lily (34:03)
feels good for them and allows them to really get into that and get paid, right? Maybe if some lifestyle sometimes too, but also could be getting paid for it. Yeah, even better. And then for women, submission is honestly similar. I think submission is pretty similar for most people as that wanting to just let go. I think that with the rise of either understanding of or more cases of neurodivergence,

Melissa D. (34:06)
and get paid.

Yes.

Tigress Lily (34:33)
⁓ I think there's a huge overlap with neurodivergence and kink because people with ADHD, their brains are going a mile a minute and they might be overthinking, high anxiety. so having a singular task, I don't have to plan anything. All I have to do is focus on this one thing. I was actually telling ⁓ the women who runs my other company who's like, this is a weird life that you've decided to move into, but I'm here to hear a few stories.

very accepting, which I appreciate, but it's like, you know, it's kind of like during COVID, I had to lay off my, almost my entire team. I was working for no money to keep my company running. There was a huge weight on me of the fact that I was affecting people's lives and doing all of this, but I also needed to make money. So I went and got a job at Walmart because I needed something to bring in some amount of money.

And the amount of relief that I felt, like I enjoyed that work so much because I just, didn't think about work when I left. I got to go in, do the task and leave. And so submission is kind of like that where you're like, I don't have to plan this person's life. I don't have to think about the repercussions. All I have to do is follow directions real well and I will succeed. And so it's an easy mark of success, right? Where it's just that ability to focus in

Melissa D. (35:54)
I love that.

huh.

Tigress Lily (36:02)
And then also for individuals who are on the autism spectrum, where they maybe struggle with social cues and they just want a real prescribed like step by step, you're receiving very detailed instructions from somebody and you know exactly what's expected of you and that can reduce their anxiety because they're not having to interpret the weird emotional ways that we sometimes communicate with each other that

we say one thing but we mean another thing or we're just being polite or you know we do a lot of that in society and so for those people on the spectrum who can't interpret that as easily this can also be a real anxiety reducing container for them to just breathe out and know that they're going to do the right thing and have the experience that they want.

Melissa D. (36:48)
Mmm, I love that. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I want to, do we want to go into like the little slip and slide adventure at your house or do we want to go? I think what I'm remembering in that event was,

There was a group of friends and throughout the night, almost like a ritual, it would be like, how can all of us support you in having this experience or having this release or having this, again, whatever. was so, and again, I'm not sharing too many details because I want you to ⁓ either say no, thank you, we can go to a different thing or we can double click on this and go into it a little bit. Do we want to talk about this?

Tigress Lily (37:31)
Hahaha!

Yeah, I mean,

I think that's one experience within multiple experiences. So I'll kind of speak to them as a whole, right? Is that in my friend group and partly because my friend group comes from this world primarily, right? So we all have similar training in using kink in therapeutic ways. And so that allows us to support each other a lot in this and whether it's as simple as words of affirmation or really like diving into

almost like I think I did some mommy-dom type stuff in that particular situation and like, oh, you just want to feel held? Let's just feel held.

Melissa D. (38:16)
Yeah, my whole system, I remember my whole system being super excited because I actually really love that and want to have experiences with that just based on if I was like circle it back or like go back to my childhood of like, I was doing a lot of responsibility and had a lot of things going on and so ⁓ there was something really beautiful when you offered me that in that space. I was like, wow, okay, I want to.

I want to circle back to you and actually have this experience. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (38:49)
Yeah,

exactly. I actually had something similar in a, it was a workshop that I was in as sort of a supporting role with some people and I just had been watching this guy and some of his mannerisms and the way that he's showing up and I've developed a lot of intuition around what people might be going for just based on, I don't even know that I could define exactly what they're doing but I'm somehow tracking like micro moments and how they're showing up and so at the end of the

event I was like, you know, I've just been keeping an eye on you and is it okay if I just share an observation or a feeling that's coming up for me? And he was like, sure. It's like, I'm getting this feeling like there's a little boy part of you that really wants to be taken care of and it's bringing out this nurturing instinct in me. And I want to like, almost do a mommy Dom scene with you that's not about domination as much as it is like.

Melissa D. (39:28)
Hmm.

Tigress Lily (39:47)
to sit you down with a coloring book and make you a sandwich for some reason. Like that's the instinct that I'm getting is to like just put you in this mode." And he was like, that actually sounds really nice actually. And so the instinct was correct and we talking a little bit and I was like, do you want to just come sit over here? So we kind of sat and I was kind of holding him a little bit and just introducing that concept and then holding him. He unexpectedly dropped into that space.

and became what I would probably define as about like three years old and was just like nestling up with me and like fell asleep and I was like, well, this was unexpected. So I'm gonna carefully guide him back into adult space because he needs to go home soon. ⁓ But it was a really beautiful example of like when you can connect with that piece of somebody that really needs it or a more kind of playful one ⁓

Melissa D. (40:34)
Yeah.

Tigress Lily (40:46)
in one of the experiences like the one that you and I were in with ⁓ one of my best girlfriends and we were all giving words of affirmation and she had kind of like started this train and she struggles to receive sometimes. So she thought she was just gonna fly under the radar as the facilitator of this and not have to hear words of affirmation and then we got to her and she was like, nope, ⁓ nope, I don't wanna hear that.

Melissa D. (41:08)
Right.

Tigress Lily (41:13)
And I was like, no, no, you come here, we're gonna do this right now. And so I just playfully started telling her she was gonna deep throat words of affirmation. And I was taking my hand and putting it around her neck and stroking her neck downward as people were talking to her and I was like, take it, take it deeper for me, like acting like it's a blowjob or something, right?

Melissa D. (41:26)
Take it.

Tigress Lily (41:39)
it added just enough like weird playfulness to it that she actually was able to receive more and was able to like lean into it more. So it can be pretty serious, it can be really playful, but I love having groups of people who know more about this work or are at least open to receiving it. And because I know so much about them,

Melissa D. (41:48)
I love it.

Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (42:05)
I don't have to do as much of an intake form, right? Like I know what they're struggling with. I know what their shadows are. I know all of that. ⁓ But my friends tend to call me the shadow slut because I will find a shadow work and I'm like, ooh, that's what I want to play with. How do we get in there?

Melissa D. (42:21)
I love that. ⁓ because you see these people in their regular lives, you see them with their partners or you see them with their families or how they conduct business. And so you are tracking some things that show up and then you're bringing it into this playful space. It doesn't have to be explicitly erotic or it doesn't have to be explicitly, you know, kinky, but it's this altered space to go into play and exploration, much like when we were children, but for adults now. Like, yeah.

Tigress Lily (42:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And I often

try to impress upon people the difference between erotic and sexual because a lot of people conflate the two. And sexual I think of as genitally focused with the purpose of arousal, right? Your purpose is some form of sexual arousal. Whereas erotic energy goes beyond that. It's a bigger umbrella and it's that life force turned on by life energy.

Melissa D. (42:55)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Mmm.

Tigress Lily (43:13)
which

may have nothing to do with the genitals or any form of arousal in terms of sexual play. so, exactly. So I have, I actually rarely do anything that feels sexual with friends or clients or whatever in that realm. I tend to be in the erotic, but not necessarily in the sexual. And so I find that

Melissa D. (43:18)
⁓ Like Eros. Yeah.

Mmm.

Tigress Lily (43:42)
when we immediately assume everything is sexual, miss this huge variety of experiences that we can be having because art is erotic. Going out for a picnic in nature and feeling completely just at home in the environment is erotic. It's the senses and the life force energy and all of that.

Melissa D. (44:06)
Thank you for catching that, conflating those two happens so much. Having that Eros run through you and how it touches your entire life, how you move in the space, how you let your energy flow. I love it. Before we wrap up today, I wanted to touch a little bit about how the blueprints may show up between partners.

and some of your favorite ways to integrate what would normally be maybe a quote unquote mismatch, but it's actually just having these different lenses that they're working through and how you actually work with it.

Tigress Lily (44:46)
Yeah, absolutely. So ⁓ my boyfriend, my current romantic sexual partner, I'm polyamorous so I have multiple partners, but he's currently the only romantic and sexual partner that I have. And we have opposite primary blueprints. And so we're constantly navigating it and it's made our sex life way better ⁓ because we're able to meet each other and understand each other more. But...

For example, I'm high on energetic and kinky. And energetic being that feeling into energy, they tend to need to feel safe. It's the slowest blueprint. It's all about anticipation, not quite touching that spot, moving slowly, right? And very juicy. ⁓ For him, his brain works really fast. It's hard for him to slow down that much sometimes, although he does enjoy it when he can bring himself into that space.

Melissa D. (45:27)
Mmm. Yeah. ⁓

Is

he more of a sexual type then? Okay.

Tigress Lily (45:42)
He is, so he's more

of a high sexual where a sexual typically can like see something or have a stimulus and be like ready to go, right? It's kind of what we're taught sex is. It's genital, it's penetration focused, it's all of that. ⁓

Melissa D. (45:59)
It's often

what we also see in movies is this example that's hot and fast, ready to go, doesn't need a whole lot of warmup. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (46:08)
Exactly, exactly. the blueprints

are like the advanced version of foreplay in a way. But a high sexual might not need foreplay. And sometimes I find that they're more misunderstood than any other type, even though they're the most well represented, because the people who need something else first are like, why are you forcing me into this? Why are you rushing me? Why are you whatever?

But one of the things that I had to really understand and we constantly circle back to this, my partner and I, is that the high sexual sees sex as connection and love. It's a way that they're attempting to say, I love you, I wanna feel connected to you. And I'm like, okay, great. For me, sex is a byproduct of connection, not a creator of connection. So I need the connection and then the sex. So how do we work together to make sure that

Melissa D. (46:52)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Tigress Lily (47:01)
I'm not feeling overridden and you're not feeling neglected because if I tell you no about sex and I don't give a reason or I don't explain, you can easily feel rejected. So, and then he's also high sensual, which is all about like touch and environment. I'm finding, although it's not part of the traditional training, that sensuals can kind of be split into people who are more environment focused and those who are more touch focused. So for him, the environment doesn't matter as much, but the touch is more important.

Melissa D. (47:10)
Hmm.

Tigress Lily (47:30)
And so he just needs constant, like a lot of touch. And I enjoy that as well. But if he tries to get me going by doing that, I just relax, because I'm like, great, massage. Not turned on though, that's not turning me on the way that it is for you. And then for me, I'm higher on the kinky and specifically the psychological side as opposed to the activity side. And I'm like, I wanna feel contained. I wanna feel like,

Melissa D. (47:30)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (47:59)
you've got me, I want to feel like we have like a little free use agreement which is like he gets access to me whenever he wants and we play with that in a nice healthy way where I'm like I'm just not sure that I feel up for sex tonight and he'll just like put his hand on my neck and be like I need sex tonight and you may safe word if you don't want to have it and that immediately turns me on and then we're like good to go because it's it I need that

Melissa D. (48:24)
Interesting.

Tigress Lily (48:27)
kinky like containment because I have that whole like responsibility fatigue thing. So as a low sexual, somebody who's not just ready to go all the time without having my blueprints met, I feel like sometimes it's a lot of work for me to work up to sexual desire. And so when he does that though, I'm like, oh, I no longer kind of feel like I have to work at this. I feel like you're taking the lead and now I can just lean in.

Melissa D. (48:46)
Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (48:55)
and enjoy myself and so that actually ends up working even though like to some people that would sound really toxic because they're not kinky and they're like he's forcing you i'm like no no no it's not i can like that's what safe words are for right so that we can play in this area and know that that like if i actually call the red we immediately stop and he's like what's wrong how do i support you like what what can we do i'm not trying to override your your free will

Melissa D. (48:55)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it takes some setup. You know, you don't just come out the gate with this thing. It's teaching people. Yeah.

Tigress Lily (49:25)
Yeah, and you have to have trust. Yeah, you

have to build trust with this person. You shouldn't just be giving free use agreements out like candy to somebody you meet that turns you on because they're dominant, right? Like you need to have some real conversations before, that's advanced level stuff. ⁓ But I know we're running out of time. I just want to tell one quick story because I think it's really amazing. I was brought in as a facilitator for

Melissa D. (49:37)
Right.

I would love that. Yes.

Tigress Lily (49:51)
⁓ a couple that a friend of mine was working with, she does a lot more like hands-on, like being in the room with couples, helping them have sex better, right? It's a really unique thing. And that's not specifically what I'm trying to do, but the blueprints lend themselves to that a lot. She's like, I'd like to bring you in to teach them about their blueprints and help them with that. And so this couple has been married for 15 years and had never had sex.

Melissa D. (50:00)
Yum.

What?

Tigress Lily (50:19)
never had sex in the 15 years that they were married. And she was struggling with a lot of pain. She'd been working with a pelvic floor therapist anytime he would try to enter her like that was happening. right, right. And so we also found like some of the erotica that she used to read was like, and then he pierced her with his sword. And so there was this weird like thing that was in her mind that it was going to hurt.

Melissa D. (50:31)
Yep, her body would be clenching.

Tigress Lily (50:45)
And so the pelvic floor therapist brought in my friend because she's like, this feels not simply physical, this feels maybe psychological. And then she in turn brought me in for part of this. And one of the things we found was that the woman was highly energetic, which is the slowest blueprint. And she needed that slow, super like fingertips, like around the body. And when her partner started doing that for her under our direction,

Melissa D. (50:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Tigress Lily (51:15)
you could see her whole body just soften and exhale. And in about four days, so they met for a day, I came in on day two, by day four they had had intercourse successfully. After 15 years, yeah, after 15 years of not being able to do that, because she's like, I wanna have kids. Like these things need to happen, not just for pleasure, but also there's, I wanna build a family, I wanna do all of these things. And so.

Melissa D. (51:18)
Yeah. ⁓

Yes! You're doing God's work!

Tigress Lily (51:43)
It was just a really beautiful example of how, you know, there was other work they were doing, of course, I'm not taking credit for this whole thing, but the blueprints were a key piece because learning to meet each other, he was highly sensual and she was highly energetic and being able to meet each other and how to sort of speak those languages was a big piece, according to my friend, of how they were able to open up and how she was able to finally like receive him in ways that felt good enough.

painful because it was just going too fast. They had movies to base sex on because we just don't do good sex education. We don't do good erotic education growing up. It's just about how do we mechanically create this thing and there's just so much more to it that can make it so much better.

Melissa D. (52:14)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, it was like the fast and furious watching that and saying, OK, this is how everyone does it. And sometimes that can be really hot. But I love that this couple seems like they felt, you know, empowered enough to ask for professional help, bringing someone in to interrupt what was happening and add more context to like, yeah, what happens when you actually slow down and approach your body very differently? And how do we also nurture your the way that you're moving, you know, erotically? ⁓

Yeah, it's so beautiful. It's life changing.

Tigress Lily (53:03)
Yeah, actually did. One of my childhood friends came to one of my blueprints workshops with her fiance. They've been married since and ⁓ her comment to me at the end was like, I think you just saved our marriage before it even began because they were having trouble meeting each other and then learning the blueprints over in depth over several days. They were like, ⁓ this is...

This is reinvigorating it. This is also a communication class and how to explain things to each other. So it feels so great to get those types of feedback where this work really does change lives and saves relationships, honestly.

Melissa D. (53:44)
Mm-hmm. Oh, I love that. Oh, Tigress Lily, it's been such a delight to chat with you. Do you want to share with our listeners where they can find you and read more about your work?

Tigress Lily (53:52)
Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. So my website's a great place to go for that. It's awakeneddom.com and dom is spelled D-O-M-M-E. And there you can find all the different types of coaching and mentorship services and my latest workshops and things like that. You can also follow me on Instagram at tigris underscore Lily. Lily is spelled L-I-L-Y. And on TikTok it's d underscore tigris underscore Lily because

My normal name wasn't available. So you're welcome to follow me or reach out. I try to put out a lot of free content ⁓ on those channels as well so that people can gain as much as they want. And then of course, would love to have the listeners join any of our upcoming workshops.

Melissa D. (54:29)
Yeah.

Okay, wonderful. yeah, head over there. We'll also type it down in the show notes. Again, Lily, thank you so much for being here and offering your wisdom and experience in the field. And let's get together soon.

Tigress Lily (54:58)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa D. (55:00)
Yeah, talk to you soon. Bye.

Tigress Lily (55:02)
Take care, bye.