What Is Somatic Sex Education?

This is generally where the conversation starts with folks in person so we’ll start with what even is somatics. Somatics is a field of study focusing on the sensations that arise in the body. These sensations include the more commonly known taste, touch, smell, sight, sound, and also include lesser known but just as often experienced texture, temperature, weight, movement, pulsations, vibrations, and proprioception (which is the sense of the posture your body is holding). In addition to sensations somatic sensing includes images, thoughts, attitudes, yearnings/urges, and dreams.

The word is derived from the Greek word for body, soma. So, somatics is the study of the body, the whole of the body in which “human beings are recognized as a unity that expresses biological, linguistic, historical, social, and spiritual lives.” The sensations are the language of these different expressions. Somatics is the language through which our bodies teach us about our sexualities.

Sex Education grounded in the somatic experiencing of the entire body is a practice of following “what happens if…?” into the realm of sexuality and desire. The “what” here being some kind of somatic experience, something with the soma.

A somatic sex educator, like myself, is a guide and partner in the information gathering and uncovering process that the body of a client undertakes as we follow their arising curiosities.

Generally folks arrive to a somatic sex educator with specific curiosities in mind like “what happens if I…have better sex? Have better orgasms? Eliminate my genital pain? Have more satisfying masturbation sessions?” Things like this.

So it is an education but not in the “I know more about your body than you do, and I am going to teach you about yourself” sense that we often find in fields relating to the body. The education piece comes entirely from the individual’s body. Everything we learn about a client’s sexuality or pleasure, we learn from their body. We learn from finding out together “what happens if…?”

The somatic sex educator comes equipped with various tools to create opportunities for the body to teach us what it wants us to know. Over the course of an arc of somatic sex education sessions we engage the curiosities of the client always moving “at the pace of their Yes”.

To move “at the pace of a client’s Yes”, we first practice with Choice and Voice. How does this body make choices about what they want and what they don’t want? What is the somatic experience of a Yes or a No? Can this body give a voice to those true Yesses and Nos, or do they say “no” when their body says “yes”? Or “yes” when their body says “no”?

We might play a game asking what happens when the client is presented with something that they want. What happens if they say Yes to this thing? What happens if they say No to this thing that they want?

There is so much that can affect a body’s access to their choice and voice—including but not limited to social, familial, gender, and race dynamics that they’ve experienced in their lives—that often the first few sessions are spent digging in to this. This is to ensure that any curiosities explored in a somatic sex education session are done from the client’s full hearted Yes, so the body is never pushed into something that is overwhelming.

Choice and voice, having Yes and No readily available, is so important because some somatic sex education sessions include one-way touch from the practitioner. This touch is always for the benefit of the client, and is always touch that is asked for by the client. A curiosity around a specific type of touch arises from the clients body— which they notice in their somatic experience of their Yes—and this touch is provided by the practitioner.

An example of a session that could include touch is a Pleasure Mapping session during which the client guides the practitioner in providing touch all over their body (including their genitals if the desire arises) where they desire to be touched and in what way they desire to be touched. This is an opportunity to follow curiosity and really play with “what happens if…we touch here? What if we touch this spot like this? What if we touch that same spot with more pressure? Or faster?”

When me and a client discover a particularly juicy sensation that lights up the client’s Yes, I will model and explain to the client exactly what I am doing with my hands. This is so the client can bring this information back to their solo or partnered practices.

One of the first tools in many somatic sex educator’s toolbelts is this practice of Waking Up the Hands from Dr. Betty Martin. Try it yourself and see what information your body gives you about your pleasure!