Continuing Education Series
A Free Self-Paced Online Course Series for SSEs, CSBs, Bodyworkers, Coaches, and Therapists
While each of these 90-minute recordings are structured as stand-alone classes, the curriculum, from session to session, is interrelated and will build on itself as we progress through all four, so you may find that you get much more if you watch in order. This series includes the following four classes.
Continuing Education Series
A Free Self-Paced Online Course Series for SSEs, CSBs, Bodyworkers, Coaches, and Therapists
Finding Pleasure in Sensation:
An Introduction to Erotic Embodiment
Embodied pleasure, in its many forms, is a basic requirement for our neurological, spiritual and embodied wholeness. Yet understanding and cultivating embodied pleasure can be a confusing endeavor.
The cultural controlling arm of Western Industrial Culture demonizes pleasure, while the economic and marketing arm sells us pleasure as if it is junk food -– to be binge consumed voraciously and without care. Within that confusing swirl is the individual themselves; a person who was raised within a family with its own unique ethos around pleasure, both its overt and covert narratives, rules and expectations.
As practitioners within the fields of sexual wellness and arousal, it is all-too-easy to find ourselves preferencing the peak arousal experiences, the overtly ‘ooh-ahh’ experiences, without reminding our clients that embodied pleasure comes in myriad form -– including the subtle, including the experiences that are more sensation than pleasure.
Here, we expand our work so we are helping clients orient toward and be attuned to sensation – including but not limited to what feels ‘good’. Here, we are in the terrain of erotic embodiment, where we prioritize participatory, ever-unfolding, nutrient-dense experiences which truly feed brain and body, spirit and soul. Providing our clients with the permission and guidance to welcome and even seek out sensation (as opposed to the pressure of high-octane pleasure) not only expands the field of possibilities for satisfaction and embodiment but also helps nourish the often-starved neurology within bodies containing unsequenced trauma.
This 90-minute class includes:
An introduction to the terrain of ‘erotic embodiment’
Understanding the role of sensation in our clients’ wellness
Creating the conditions to find pleasure within sensation
An exploration of barriers to sensation
An exploration of, and discernment between, numbness, lack of sensation, discomfort, and pain
An Introduction to Attunement:
Transforming Theory Into Practice
Co-regulation, verb: the constantly unfolding dance taking place within our emotional and physiological terrain as a result of another’s emotional and physiological state; A fundamental requirement for human health, resilience and belonging.
As humans, we are born helpless and vulnerable. We rely on the well(enough) adults in our midst to regulate our body temperature, to feed us, and to offer us nurturing touch; all of which requires that we are attuned to. While our needs are not complex, they are all-too-often unmet, misunderstood, unheard or judged. Our early attunement experiences remain alive within us, as narratives that not only script our behavior but sculpt our neurology. Our early attunement experiences front-load our interactions with all others and determine the narratives we craft to describe those interactions after the fact.
Being well(enough) attuned to is a fundamental human requirement for the healthy development of our bodies, brains and experiences of well-being and belonging. Our nervous systems are brilliantly designed not only to attune to others, but to be deeply resourced by them. As practitioners working in the terrain of human wellness and healing, one of our primary tasks is to provide safe(enough) containers within which our clients can explore and experience the healing benefits of attunement and co-regulation. It is within this terrain that they have the opportunity to rewrite and rewire long-held narratives that create roadblocks to their belonging. Within attunement, we find the opportunity to co-regulate our nervous systems, including a decreased heart rate, respiration and even digestive ease. Within attunement, we eventually experience the beginnings of secure attachment – a state of being that arises naturally when narratives of danger are quieted in the presence of the consistent, spacious, curious presence of another.
As practitioners, one of our most powerful tools is our capacity to attune to our clients. Regardless of the reasons that have brought your client to you, your primary and likely most helpful offering will be your capacity to attune to them.
This 90-minute class will include:
The basics of attunement theory and its application to our work with clients
The art of making contact
An exploration of embodied listening – a cornerstone capacity for adult attunement
What to do when you have misattuned – how to navigate ruptures and mend attachment
Fostering Belonging in a Fractured World:
An Introduction to Trauma Through a Soulcentric Lens
There is an ever-growing array of training focused on teaching practitioners valuable techniques and tools to help clients heal their trauma. These are essential pieces of our tool kit as somatic sex educators and sexological bodyworkers. Because of this, The Institute for Erotic Intelligence (IEI) teaches many of these skills and practices to its students. Yet we do not stop there.
We teach and guide belonging. We believe that our central human need is, simply, to belong. We believe our resilience and our brilliant wellness come from our lived experience of our belonging. We believe that our wounding and trauma – all the ruptures that crack our tender human foundation – come from a lived experience of not belonging, of not having an intrinsic, safe(enough) experience of mattering to the world around us. It is because of this that the IEI orients itself and all its programs from both an ecological and a soul-centric perspective.
From an ecological perspective, we understand that it is only when we are rooted in our wellness and the abundant wellness all around us that we have the power and fortitude to fundamentally heal our traumas. In fact, looking through these lenses, we do not specifically and directly heal our trauma. Instead, we tend to our belonging, nourishing what is already deeply well within and around us, letting the wellness of our belonging unwind unsequenced trauma, while re-narrating old stories of scarcity and danger that keep us mired in maladaptive neurological habits.
From the soul-centric perspective, we honor the particularities of our wounding. We explore the critical connection between our wounding and the unique gifts we each carry. We honor the specifics here, everything from the unique physiological attributes and felt sensations of our trauma to the detailed narratives determining our place in, and value to the world.
In fact, we have found that we are far more empowered and inspired to orient to our wellness when we understand this connection; when we are given permission to imagine that the specific textures, sensations and stories of our wounding matter to our wellness – woven inextricably with the vulnerable, intimate expressions of the gifts we most long to contribute to the world.
This radically different way of imagining, and tending to our humanity is at the core of The Institute for Erotic Intelligence’s teaching. This class will provide you with an introduction not only to working with trauma, but also to the pillars of the IEI. The focus on our belonging, and the ecological and soul-centric lenses we use, are what make our teachings unique.
This 90-minute class will include:
A quick synopsis of the culturally accepted definition and description of trauma
An introduction to the concept of soul-centric practice
An introduction to the concept of ecological practice
Some introductory ways to explore our clients’ wounds and gifts through these lenses
Ethics & Power: Cultivating Ethics From the Inside Out
The fields of somatic sex education and sexological bodywork are the newcomers in the arena of human healing and wholing. Pushing back on the puritanical over-culture’s shaming and vilifying of our genitals, our erotic expression and our sexual arousal, SSE’s and SB’s boldly charge into scenarios other practitioners in the healing realm would never dare explore. We are the erotic warriors of our time, protecting and attending to the aspects of our humanity most assaulted by Western Industrial Culture. And we do this powerful and treacherous work all without a governing body to ‘watch over us’. We do this without any outside force of ethical well-being to keep us accountable to ourselves, our profession or our communities. In fact, we do our work without being raised within cultures that teach us, through modeling, what it means to be truly, ecologically ethical.
It is both a blessing and a burden that the modalities of somatic sex education and sexological bodywork are professions unregulated by governmental control. The responsibility falls to us to establish the systems and structures of ethics and accountability that will allow us to grow and develop as practitioners while expanding our scope and respectability. In order for us to evolve and grow as powerful contributors alongside the well-established, highly regulated fields of psychotherapy, therapeutic massage, and western medicine, we must make careful choices as to how we establish the credibility, structures and systems that make us recognizable while preserving our radical, grass-roots, counter-culture nature.
One of the critical areas of development for our professions is that of Ethics and Professional Conduct. Within the paradigm of Western Medicine – which encompasses most healing modalities – ethics is handled within a carceral model of top-down, outside-in ‘ethics’. Here, the word ‘ethics’ is, in truth, merely a set of external rules we either follow or break. If we follow these rules we are ‘good’. If we break them we are ‘bad’. There is only the threat of professional punishment to keep us in line. Within this model the practitioner needs not concern themselves with the critical development of an internal compass because the rules are right there for them, printed in black and white. They need only to follow the rules with no true inquiry into why or how or what it means to be ‘ethical’. They need only to obey.
Within this model – which not only doesn’t encourage inquiry into the depths of the why’s and how’s of our ethical practice, rather, actively discourages it – it is no wonder there has always been a steady stream of abuses of power. And while it is arguable that it is simply a fact of human nature that a certain percentage of our community will abuse power, the current top-down, outside-in concept of ethics, one that relies on punitive measures, is only set up to manage, rather than ever prevent this endless parade of personal harm and the rupture it causes to the fabric of our communities.
In this class we will explore the terrain of ethics. But rather than do it using the language and models we’ve been handed, we will start where it is appropriate to begin when speaking of something as intimate as ethics and power. We will start in the intimate terrain of our own bodies, psyches and souls.
We will explore what it feels like to be ethical, and from where, within our bodies, the impulse for a living intimate ethics emerges.
From within the terrain of our embodiment, we will explore the current model of ethics as a regulated set of rules governed by carceral and punitive control.
And from there, we will feel our way into the model we, at the IEI are advocating: a living, breathing ever-evolving body of ethics that comes from the inside-out, firmly rooted in the soil of our belonging.
We will explore how it is we might create vibrant cultures within which we, as individuals and communities, hold ourselves accountable and how we hold each other to the responsibility of our purpose and power.
This 90-minute class will include:
What is the point of ethics? What do ethics do?
Where do ethics come from? If not from above or outside or over us, where are our ethics sown and from where do they sprout?
What does it take to germinate a generative and well body of personal ethics?
What role does community play? Transparency? Accountability?
What is community? What are the central characteristics of a vibrant, diverse and generative community? And what role does community play in cultivating and tending to ethics?
What does a living transparency look like?
What is accountability? How does it work? In our culture we often hear the phrase “I’m holding you accountable!” But can we ever actually hold someone else accountable? Or do we hold ourselves accountable? If so, what are the mechanisms or internal and communal structures within the culture that make this more likely to occur?