What Is Somatic
Sex Education?
This is generally where the conversation starts. Let’s begin with the body.
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 — and also the lesser known, but just as often experienced.
In addition to sensations, somatic sensing includes images, thoughts, attitudes, yearnings and urges, and dreams.
The word somatics is derived from the Greek word for body, soma — the study of the whole 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.
the body teaches us what it wants us to know.
Following “what happens if…?”
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” 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 with specific curiosities in mind:
“What happens if I… have better sex? Have better orgasms? Eliminate my genital pain? Have more satisfying masturbation sessions?”
So it is an education — but not in the “I know more about your body than you do” 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.
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 sessions we engage the curiosities of the client, always moving at the pace of their Yes.
We learn from finding out together — “what happens if…?”
Always moving at the pace of their Yes.
How does this body make choices?
To move at the pace of a client’s Yes, we first practice with Choice and Voice.
What is the somatic experience of a Yes or a No?
Can this body give a voice to its true Yesses and Nos?
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. Often the first few sessions are spent exploring 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.
the body is never pushed into something that is overwhelming.
Touch that is asked for.
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 client’s body — which they notice in their somatic experience of their Yes — and this touch is provided by the practitioner.
An example 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 — “what happens if we touch here? What if we touch this spot like this? With more pressure? Or faster?”
When we discover a particularly juicy sensation that lights up the client’s Yes, I will model and explain exactly what I am doing with my hands — so the client can bring this information back to their solo or partnered practices.
see what information your body gives you about your pleasure.
Try the first tool.
One of the first tools in many somatic sex educators’ toolbelts is the practice of Waking Up the Hands from Dr. Betty Martin. Try it yourself and see what information your body gives you about your pleasure.