As Somatic Sex Educators, we teach through body-based experiences that are designed to awaken, nourish and deepen our awareness of ourselves as sexual and sensual beings.
When we touch, we do so in ways that assist our students in developing deep presence within their own body. This allows them to open to the interior awareness that is necessary to learn how the body can feel more and more alive.
The various experiential learning techniques provided by Somatic Sex Educators (SSEs) can help our students engage in honest and respectful dialogue with their nervous systems, allowing the physical and emotional responses that usually happen to them to be brought out into mindful awareness, and thusly, transformed. As humans, we fluctuate widely between various states: love/fear, excitement/relaxation, arousal/happiness, reverence/bliss – and all of these have biochemical and physiological components that can be regulated with training and conscious practice over time.
In this way, SSE is a uniquely effective method for addressing all kinds of sexual concerns, ranging from premature ejaculation to inability to orgasm. People in romantic partnerships can learn to navigate their sexual differences and explore new erotic possibilities with body-based learning and guided practice.
Pleasure
We live in a culture that idolizes sacrifice, pain, and difficulty while simultaneously promoting over-stimulation and isolation. Living with chronically high stress is normalized (and even celebrated), as is workaholism.
Pleasure in this culture is seen as weak, indulgent or sinful. Accordingly, we all set limits on the quantity and quality of the pleasure we embody and receive.
Limits to pleasure are ubiquitous in a culture that shames sexuality and fails to teach us how to honor and celebrate our erotic energy.
Caffyn Jesse, founder of Somatic Sex Education
Due to this skewed perspective, sexual wounding becomes paramount and widespread; becoming embedded in the body’s tissues and in our responses.
As SSEs, we can assist our clients in expanding the pleasure that is possible through all the layers of our being: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
Physical
Many things happen to our physical body when we are experiencing nervousness or anxiety, especially in sexual situations.
First, there is a cascade of stress hormones including cortisol and adrenaline that are released in our body. These chemicals cause a variety of bodily responses to happen: it makes our breath come quick and shallow, prompts our heart rate to jump up, and it makes our gut clench. Additionally, blood leaves our genital tissues as the body redistributes it to the muscles of the limbs, preparing us to “fight or flee”.
This literally shortstops our ability to feel fully.
SSEs help with this by coaching students to open up the body with breath and deep relaxation. We use, slow, careful and skilled touch – in a very safe situation that is completely controlled by the student’s needs – to help the student open up and understand the full potential of what is possible.
SSE bodywork in particular often generates a powerful cascade of endorphins, hormones that diminish anxiety and pain while cultivating a feeling of bliss.
Scar tissue is also a common block that limits our capacity for pleasure. SSEs are trained in scar tissue remediation techniques to bring life and suppleness to these areas.
Emotional
When an environment of loving kindness and complete acceptance is opened up for us, we are able to expand our emotional range.
As SSE practitioners, we offer this environment to all of our clients, regardless of their erotic identities, challenges, wounds and joys.
When we as human beings are able to receive caring, conscious touch, this activates hormones like oxytocin. Multiple studies have demonstrated a distinct correlation of increased oxytocin levels with increases in bonding and trust, boosts in stress tolerance, as well as decreases in fear.
Additionally, working with an SSE can provide opportunity for you to learn to be emotionally empowered in your sexual relationships; learning how to direct sexual touch, experience and express erotic boundaries, and encounter and release trauma imprints.
Mental
I think we can all agree that, as individuals as well as a culture, we seriously lack erotic knowledge. This leads to misguided expectations of oneself as well as from one’s partners, relational discord between what we are told is true (ex: there are only two genders, male and female) and what is actually true (there’s a ton of gender variance in genital anatomy and that gender isn’t even about anatomy), not to mention rape culture and normalization of sexual assault and human sex trafficking.
To help our culture heal, SSEs teach genital anatomy, the physiology of multiple orgasms, how to touch, how to negotiate desires, how trauma presents in the body and in relationships, and especially – how to listen to the body and its wisdom.
The somatic practices we teach in particular help students to develop expanded capacities for mindfulness.
When we coach our students in the conscious placement of attention, our students in turn can learn to bring more focus and presence to their sexual exchanges. In so doing, they are invited to recognize habits and patterns that are limiting their pleasure.
SSEs are also trained to help students address “pornography addiction” or transform unwanted fantasies.
In essence, we build a bridge between the conscious and unconscious responses we hold, thereby opening ourselves up for making new choices about our pathways to pleasure.
Spiritual
Pleasure is not just a physiological and neurological event, it also a potent force that can connect us to the divine, within ourselves and the divine that resides all around us.
Sexological bodywork can teach us how to consciously access profound ecstatic and erotic states.
We also can learn to tap into our sexual energy, how to move it and how to amplify it.
We are better able to explore the beauty and mystery of our sexual nature when we learn to give our sexuality our deep, focused attention.
Sexual energy can be experienced in a variety of ways:
- Transformative spirit working through us
- An aspect of the sacred
- A way to dance in union with all things
When we choose to interact with love and mindfulness, making deep connection from this core part of our Self, we can experience sacred presence in ourselves and in others.
In the sexual continuum of body, mind, spirit and emotion, we can learn to trust and expand our capacity for joy, experiencing ever more deeply what it is to be fully alive.
