Understanding Somatic Sex Education (& how it can help you)

As Somatic Sex Educators (SSEs), we teach through body-based experiences that are designed to awaken, nourish and deepen our awareness of ourselves as sexual and sensual beings. We teach people how to inhabit their bodies and experience a felt sense of safety within their body, first and foremost. Oftentimes for the first time in their lives.

When we teach, we do so in ways that assist our students in developing deep presence within their own body, learning to “speak its language” in the form of somatic awareness and its varied dialects of sensation, breath, movement, emotional attunement, vocal toning, and image. Over time (as this truly is a process like learning a language – fluency comes from consistent practice again and again) this allows them to open to the interior awareness that is necessary and – in my experience – the most effective way I have found to parse who am I (both sexually and otherwise) vs. who have I been conditioned to be?

Our sexuality is one of the areas in which we are most heavily policed and conditioned by dominant culture “norms”. Most of us get our pleasure-based sex education from our peers as teens, from pornography, or from media depictions of what sex is or what it should look like.

I find that many of my clients mimic what they see in these media formats at the expense of enduring touch or intimate acts that don’t actually fulfill them at best, or deaden them inside at worst.

Interrupting conditioned patterns of behavior is brave and messy work, but is absolutely vital to answering the question honestly, Who am I?

In the field of somatic healing, the body is understood to be SO MUCH MORE than a machine that our mind directs and controls. We recognize that the body has its own unique wisdom – as well as its own memory – that is distinct from that of the thinking mind as well as from instinct. By attuning to the body’s wisdom, we experience our body as a vital compass that can guide us towards integrating the various fractionated “sub-selves” that we develop to survive in our modern world, back into the whole, organistic being we were born as. 

The various experiential learning techniques provided by Somatic Sex Educators can help our students heal sexual trauma, find empowered voice and choice, and engage in honest and respectful dialogue with their own nervous system responses, allowing the physical and emotional responses that usually happen to them to be brought out into mindful awareness, and thusly, worked with in a conscious way, from a place of empowered self understanding.

In this way, SSE is a uniquely effective method for addressing all kinds of sexual concerns, ranging from healing sexual trauma, replacing pain during sex with embodied pleasure, addressing unintended ejaculation as well as the inability to orgasm (among many more). 

People in romantic partnerships can learn to navigate erotic mismatch in an attuned and tender way, as well as learn how to explore new erotic possibilities individually and TOGETHER through embodied consent practices and specific communication tools that serve us in ALL our relationships, not just the sexual or romantic ones.

We teach people the art of slowing down to cultivate attunement, move at the pace of trust, and self-realize their true erotic nature in a titrated, safe-enough way – a little bit at a time.

We do not diagnose people. And many of the “problems” people come to us for are often discovered to be not problems at all, but merely the body organizing around unspoken and unrecognized erotic expression that doesn’t fit societal “norms” of what sex is or should look like. 

We teach people how to pendulate between their pleasure and their pain, their Shadow Self and their beauty – cultivating resilience by using conscious pleasure as a resource, as a way of replenishing oneself from the exhaustion and overwhelm that can come along with doing deep inner work around shame and repression. 

Pleasure-Centered

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. Many of us internalize the believe that pleasure is earned, something frivolous that we will get to when our serious work is complete.

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 habitual responses. It becomes the default, and subsequently, so does the sense of being entirely disconnected from oneself and from others.

As SSEs, we can assist our clients in expanding the pleasure that is possible through all the layers of their being: physical, emotional, mental, energetic and spiritual. 

Additionally, we see pleasure as a resource as well as a form of political resistance, steeped as we are in a “rise-and-grind” culture that teaches us to martyr ourselves by overgiving, burning out, and abusing our bodies – all in service to the socially lauded lie that is measuring our worth by our level of productivity.

Slowing down, regarding rest as a sacred and devotional practice, and attuning to our pleasure in an embodied way, allows us to cultivate resilience to address the world’s problems from a space of non-avoidance. 

We learn to trust our body, trust ourselves, and come back to ourselves as our own inner authority, rather than outsourcing to external authority figures. 

This is, in my opinion, precisely the consciousness shift we need as a collective human species to directly challenge the systems of power that keep us locked into cycles of addiction, self harm, disconnection and disempowerment.

A conscious, healthy, pleasure-full body is a difficult one to control and manipulate. 

Hence why so many of these systems of power do SO MUCH to police and demonize these aspects of ourselves – because it is there that our true personal power lies. 

SSE & Working with Sexual Trauma

There are many things I could say about trauma as it’s understood through the somatic lens (in fact, that will most likely be a blog post in and of itself) – so I will try to be succinct and keep it simple here. 

Trauma is often mistakenly thought to be an event that happens to you. 

When our nervous system detects a threatening situation, it is designed to move into a threat management zone. In this zone, there is a sweeping cascade of physiological effects that happens in our soma: stress hormones and various neurotransmitters are released in our body, shifting our blood chemistry and causing our neurons to fire differently.

These shifts cause a variety of bodily responses to happen: it increases our heart rate and the pace of our breathing, it shunts blood from our genitals and digestion to the muscles of our limbs to prepare us to fight the threat or run from it. Even our eyes dilate to better see the threat (among many other responses). 

In short, our system activates in milliseconds (before our cognitive mind has even registered the threatening stimuli) to react to the threat. This wonderful and wise function of our nervous system kept our ancestors alive in a hostile environment for centuries.

Once the threat has been neutralized, our system is designed to revolve back into what I call a zone of connection. Often referred to as the “rest and digest” zone, this is where our social engagement capacity comes online and we are available to connect with other humans (sexually and socially), to rest, and process our food for nutrients.

In situations in which we are not able to fight the threat or run from it – but must endure – all of that activation doesn’t just dissipate into nothingness. It actually gets stored into our tissues.

THAT is the trauma.

I love the way Resmaa Menakem, psychotherapist and author, refers to trauma in his book My Grandmother’s Hands: he describes trauma as “wordless stories” that get stuck in our body’s tissues and somatic memory. 

What this means is that, as a somatic practitioner, I don’t actually have to know the story of the traumatizing event. That is something one would be better suited working with a therapist around.

That said, I can hold the story of my clients’ trauma if they want to share it with me because they find it helpful or healing. However, its completely unnecessary, as their body will tell me while we are in practice. 

I am trained to recognize when people go into a threat management zone, I am trained in how to bring them back into the present moment, and I am trained in how to help their bodies “complete the stress cycle”…meaning, whatever action/movement/noise/words that were not able to be expressed during the original experience they endured, I can create space for them to express it, discharging that stuck traumatic energy from their tissues.

From there, it is a process of re-orienting the client towards pleasure and forming new neural pathways in service to that. Again, this is a titrated process that happens over time. Oftentimes, sexual assault survivors can access neutral sensations in their body after completing a stress cycle…and then slightly more pleasant than neutral, and then a bit more pleasureable than that…all the way to accessing orgasmic energy and holding it in their bodies for prolonged periods of time. 

We teach survivors how to, with empowered voice and choice, interrupt intimate play when a trauma trigger arises so that they never ignore or override their trauma response and deepen it by continuing to play on top of it. We teach them (and their partners) how to do this in a way that doesn’t disrupt the intimate connection, but honors the emergence of the trigger with integrity.

Oftentimes, people will override their trauma trigger in sex because they fear ruining the play or the connection of the intimate moment with their beloved. We provide education on ways of staying in connection with each other without continuing the triggering act.

We do this because we endeavor to teach people how to stop enduring. We all get plenty of practice at that in our daily life.

When we are in a space of enduring (defined as, something is happening that is hurting me, but I don’t feel like I can say no) – it actually shuts down the part of our brain that allows us to relax into our experience. And relaxation is necessary for us to feel ourselves fully, to experience pleasure as well as hold orgasmic energy.

SSEs work with this by helping clients understand their habitual trauma responses and how to recognize what zone they are in by their somatic cues. We help them discover what presencing tools work for them to bring them back into a zone of connection.

In bodywork practice, we use slow and skillful one-way touch that is client-led to help the client complete their stress cycle, come back to themselves, and re-orient towards pleasure/relaxation/aliveness in their bodies.

Over time, they see their nervous system responses not as an enemy to be vanquished, but as a helpful and wise system that merely needs to be understood and allowed – which is much easier to do when one knows what specific tools can bring them back into a regulated place. It is this powerful process of self-acceptance and understanding that truly transforms: allowing the client to open up, explore and accept their own unique erotic signature.

We create a space for people to practice attuning to their body, communicating their desires and boundaries, and exploring their erotic tastes without having to give anything back or track the needs of the practitioner (as one might do with a romantic lover). In this way, people can discover what touches light them up and which ones shut them down, as well as unexpected personal erotic expressions that don’t fit the porn depictions, such as playfulness/sillyness or the “weird”. 

On a physical level, scar tissue is also something we are trained to work with, as it can be a common block that limits our capacity for pleasure and/or causes pelvic pain that doesn’t seem to respond to any treatments. SSEs are trained in scar tissue remediation techniques that can put a halt to pain during sex or allow parts of the body that are feared or associated with brokenness to be re-integrated into the whole erotic being.

Relational Integrity

We often get clients who have just come back onto the dating scene after ending long term, dysfunctional relationships or marriages. Who feel lost or confused by the modern day ways of meeting new people. Who are aware they lack foundational skills of knowing what they want and asking for it, or are struggling to interrupt deeply ingrained patterns of enduring stuff they never wanted. 

With the “Me Too” movement, we get many folks who want to truly understand embodied consent to reduce the harm caused by rape culture, but who never learned how to receive a “no” without feeling a rejection. On the other side of that, many folks are so steeped in habitual patterns of people pleasing or fawning that they feel completely disconnected from when their body says “no” and powerless to voice it within intimate relationships because they assume it will hurt the connection. 

Due to the fact that we have all been deprived of legitimate, non-biased sex education and steeped in socially reinforced sexual repression, we learn to rely on substances such as alcohol or drugs to lower our resistances so that we can engage intimately with others. Ironically, this directly counteracts what I might argue is THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of embodied intimacy: presence. 

And it is from this poisoned root that so many relational violations occur. It is this that absences us from ourselves, from our pain, and from each other. 

Additionally, we learn to be anything but direct about what we want from others. We haphazardly engage in intimacy in an altered state, believe that spontaneity is somehow more sexy than consciousness, and hope for the best. 

I offer my clients tools and skills around creating more sober and conscious sexual interactions, that – while maybe not as spontaneous as media depictions like to show – create sooooooo much more safety and alignment with each other before we ever lay hands on each other. By the way, this “safer sex talk” is something I use myself when engaging with new people sexually and there is absolutely a way to do it that doesn’t feel contrived and is 100% sexy. 

In fact, pretty much every time I deploy this talk with new people, they look at me with wonder and gratitude (as well as lust) because of the safe-enough component that it provides as well as the way it acknowledges our individual dignity as differing people with differing erotic signatures coming together and giving a fuck about each other, caring about our respective desires in how we want to fuck and what it means for us to fuck on an emotional level. The clarity and consciousness it provides has allowed me (& many of my clients) to have incredibly fulfilling first sexual encounters that are sexy, but vulnerable and real…as well as to avoid sexual connections where the erotic chemistry was there, but there was some major mismatch in values/safety needs and desires. 

Further, we teach people how to stop outsourcing their pleasure to everyone else, take responsibility for their own pleasure, and come back to themselves as their first and most important sexual partner: how to be their own safe haven and secure base. This allows people to engage in intimacy without grasping or clinging to the other, from a place of personal wholeness, which is tantamount to preventing one from losing themselves entirely in a new relationship. This is what helps people who have patterns of choosing abusive relationships to interrupt that shit and choose something better. However, it starts and ends with the Self. 

Perhaps you are your own soul mate, friend. Perhaps your “twin flame” is your body/mind finding cohesion together. Perhaps it’s not someone else’s job, whether they are married to you or not, to fulfill all your sexual needs and be responsible for all your pleasure. 

Troubling “Normal”

Nearly every person who walks into my office arrives with some version of the question, “Am I normal?” 

As I have said before in this blog, dominant culture ingrains us with all kinds of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” when it comes to being a sexual human in the world. It projects a whole slew of meaning-making and high, high stakes to our sexual choices and erotic expression. 

Deviate from the norms and you are sick, twisted, mentally ill, sinful – and therefore, unlovable and most definitely unworthy. Participating in the denial of major aspects of yourself – both sexually and otherwise – is regarded as “purity”, righteousness, godliness and disciplined. It is this that makes you respectable to your family of origin, your community, even to god. 

Who decides what is “normal”? 

So many of those “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that get passed down from generation to generation actually stem from trauma and survival techniques that helped our ancestors live in a world of colonization and hierarchal rule. Our (usually) well-meaning parents or primary caregivers when we are young teach us (and imprint us) with conditioning around what we should expect of ourselves and others sexually and relationally – it’s what their parents taught them, and their parents before them. 

And maybe that worked for those previous generations….but maybe it doesn’t work so well today. The process of shedding those conditionings and coming back to our own innate truth is a difficult one. This fraught path towards self-realization often results in the people who say they love us the most harshly judging us and criticizing us for being who we really are. 

So we learn to hide ourselves, to mask, to cast pieces of us into the Shadow Self, to fractionate our whole being in service to pleasing others and finding validation externally. And while that conformity offers us external approval and even access to love, it also bears a cost. A cost that oftentimes isn’t recognized until decades later, when we realize the heavy price that we paid in the form of empty, loveless relationships, fueled by sexual atrophy and self-abandonment that inherently results in spiritual turmoil and deep disconnect from ourselves.

So many of my clients report that they don’t actually know who they even are, much less what it is that they want. The television show “Dying for Sex” is a beautiful depiction of exactly this dynamic. 

As someone who has embraced my sexuality as it is: a queer, non-monogamous, kinky slut – I know what it is to pay the price for accepting myself. I lost almost my entire large family when I came out as queer, not to mention my religious community. Some of the people closest to me projected mental illness onto me, selfishness and weak spiritual constitution. 

Yet for all the people I lost in the process of my self-realization, I gained so many deeper and more authentic connections in the end. As one of my queer mentors once told me, “Sherika – you have your biological family…and then you have your logical family.”

Every member of my “logical family” is worth their weight in gold to me, as I never have to apologize for being my whole self. My current day relationships are deeply meaningful and nourishing and sustained by integrity. It was a rocky road getting here, full of grief and loss – but well worth it, for I know who I am and I have found my tribe – and I don’t have to dissemble for some watered down version of love that asks me to kill off parts of myself for empty approval. 

And that brings me to the final gift I offer to my clients: community. I help them find community that loves and supports them in their unique erotic signature. I help them create relationship structures that enliven them, that operate on tenets of honesty, clear communication and trust. To be received exactly as you are, first by your own self, and then by your community is itself a powerful path to transformation and healing.