Themes of belonging, sexual freedom & empowerment, confidence & creativity, love & loss, radical acceptance & justice run throughout our lives in different ages and stages, influenced by different cultural contexts.

These might be Age-specific developmental areas of focus (e.g., young adulthood, midlife, menopause, and older age ranges), Specific cultural backgrounds, Specific genders (cis male, cis female, non-binary, queer, and heterosexual-identified people). Specific collective power groups representing aspects of being human that are not represented with ease of participation in mainstream society. e.g., the International Little People's Association, Societies for the Visually Impaired, Multiple Sclerosis Societies, victims of domestic abuse, victims of child abuse, refugees, The Outsiders organisation, etc

• Presence - the ability to show up, to be fully present with availability and receptivity, to listen and to witness your client with compassion and radical acceptance

• Self-awareness is the ability to choose where to focus your attention, to remain aware of your inner experience while also being present with your client, to be aware of your intuition, to be aware of your agendas and tendencies as they arise, to be committed to ongoing self-reflection, to recognise attraction/dis-attraction, and to be able to work outside of this.

• The ability to acknowledge the limitations of your skill base; knowing when to seek supervision or further training; knowing when to refer a client to another practitioner

• The ability to understand how power dynamics and altered states influence consent.

• Understanding that consent changes from moment to moment and that it is the practitioner's responsibility to check frequently that a client is not enduring or dissociating and the ability to update agreements when dysregulation occurs.

• Ability to learn - the ability to receive coaging feedback and to unlearn conditioned patterns to support updating versions of self.

• Care for others: the ability to care and to demonstrate care for others; the desire to serve your client; the willingness to be open to feedback and to hear another's perspective; attunement to another.

• Self-regulation - response flexibility and emotional and erotic fluency - the ability to notice your own responses and the capacity to choose how you respond to them, including the ability to put intense reactions to one side and to remain in service to your client; the ability and willingness to make time to come back to this after the session; the ability to move between client and practitioner role as a student during this training

• Self-care - the ability to notice your needs and to respond to them during a session and outside of sessions; taking responsibility for your self-care so that you are well-resourced to be in service; knowing when you are not fit to see clients; knowing when you need support and being able to reach and request this.

• Curiosity - the ability to bring open-minded, non-judgemental, kind curiosity to every client and every session

• Humility - the ability to be comfortable with not knowing and to allow the client to be the expert of their own experience; the willingness to receive guidance and feedback from the client about what they want; the skills to facilitate clients to feel able to give feedback

Our training equips practitioners with a comprehensive toolkit for deepening embodiment through somatic assessment practices that enhance the granularity of symbolic representation.

All the practices involve the use of Body Poem, which facilitates radical acceptance, along with Wheel of Consent practices for doing something when change is desired. Practitioners are trained in the Right Use of Power to ensure consensual relationship agreements between practitioner and client.

• Somatic Intimacy Coaches (CSI) facilitate guided self-touching for clients to foster personal empowerment with enhanced abilities to participate in this one and precious life.

• Somatic Intimacy Bodyworkers (CSIB) can offer a wide range of bodywork, massage, and mapping skills, with intimate touch when appropriate, including mindful self-pleasure practices, scar tissue remediation, external & internal genital and anal mapping and massage, belly massage, breast massage, and new additions to the syllabus this year.

• Coaching another to explore hidden drivers of core erotic themes

• Facilitating transformation of shame through the exhibistionic routes to shame free.

• Facilitating the integration of voyeurism, exhibitionism and the freedom in trusting spontaneity

• A working understanding of troublesome turn-ons and the indirect routes to pleasure

• Understanding the ‘languages of love’ and facilitating another to notice, value, trust and communicate what they want

• Facilitating the direct routes to pleasure as liberation from addiction and fetish routes to pleasure

• Radical acceptance with the multidimensional realms and aspects of sexual expression

• Enhancing expansions of consciousness in adventure and facilitating play

• Facilitating somatic self-pleasure practices informed by a working understanding of attachment needs.

• A working understanding of Pleasure Activism

The Somatic Intimacy Coach training program has evolved to facilitate teaching and practice of the Wheel of Consent online and in person.

In the second year of the CSIB Bodywork Practitioner Training Program, you facilitate all the bodywork modalities using the WOC in person in the practitioner and client roles and learn the difference between this and practising as peers.

The 11-day embodiment retreat in year two includes daily WOC practice to deepen these essential relationship micro-skills to support your confidence in facilitation.

You will gain skills in the following:

• An understanding of the Wheel of Consent and the ability to work within the Wheel of Consent

• To have a clear understanding of the four quadrants and the ability to inhabit each quadrant and facilitate others in these relationship agreement roles

• The ability to teach a basic understanding of this to others and to coach others in enthusiastic, empowered consent

• The ability to recognise the difference between "willing to" and "want to" and to recognise when a client is not in enthusiastic consent

• The ability to understand how power dynamics and altered states influence consent

• Understand that consent changes from moment to moment and that it is the practitioner's responsibility to check frequently that a client is not enduring or dissociating and be able to update agreements when dysregulation occurs.

Developing your Power Awareness skills in the following areas:

From our experience in training and certifying practitioners and from the public and private grievances across the board in many professional fields, we have learned that practitioners may often lack awareness and skill, especially in the following areas:

• Awareness of power dynamics, dual roles, power and consent, systemic power and privilege

• Awareness of additional power dynamics and responsibilities when working with altered states, trauma and arousal

• Misuse of power wounds - An awareness of your relationship with power and historical and current wounding from misuse of power

• Understanding the power differential and the responsibilities of up-power roles as a practitioner

• Understanding the vulnerabilities of down-power roles and cultural and internalised influences that may affect a person's confident self-expression.

• The ability to track your impact as a practitioner and recognise when it may differ from your intention.

• Rupture and repair - duty of care - The ability to use the five-step repair process when a client experiences unintended impact with you as a practitioner (acknowledgement, understanding, remorse, repair, learning)

• Honouring the client's experience of harm with open receptivity and empowering clients to feel confident about voicing and sharing upset or impact as a result of your or another's power and influence.

• An understanding of how you notice your reactions to receiving difficult feedback and what supports you to feel resourced to inhabit your duty of care as a practitioner at the effect of these reactions and to transform these into responsiveness so that you are available to facilitated the five-step repair process.

• A commitment to seek supervision and to apply the repair process whenever another has been impacted.

Honouring our Right Use of Power teacher, Dr Cedar Barstow - Founder of the Right Use of Power Institute

From your up-power role as a practitioner, you will enhance your awareness in the following areas.

• Coaching all aspects of identity with ethical understanding and radical acceptance of the differences between sexual expression, gender identity and sexual orientation.

• Coaching another in enhancing their personal power and role power

• A working understanding of the ranges of visible and invisible disabilities and the ability to facilitate guided practices that are inclusive and adaptive to different learning styles, enhancing ability to participate

Some common presenting concerns:

• Overcoming loss of libido, difficulties with managing arousal or achieving orgasm

• Recovery after surgery with our tried and tested scar tissue remediation practices that transform scars and gain flexibility

• Preparation and recovery from genital reconfiguration surgery and re-routing new orgasmic/pleasure pathways

• Overcoming Emotional pain, anxiety, and loss of confidence in relationships

• Navigating and recovering erotic confidence during and after childbirth, menopause or any other event in life where the relationship with our body is changing.

• Recovery from relationship grief and reclaiming your life.

• Intimacy training for those lacking experience or who are virgins

• Healing from historical traumas that affect intimacy and confidence, and learning new ways of strengthening resilience and robustness in relationships.

• Overcoming feeling numb with loss of sensation and learning new ways of feeling more of yourself

• Developing ejaculatory choice and enhancing your range of pleasure

• Finding new ways of managing sex and porn addiction or fetish entrapment.

• Support with navigating challenging ‘turn-ons’, intrusive inner dialogue or imagery and learning new ways of being that effectively manage and transform your life from passivity to agency.

• Overcoming loss of confidence with identity and enhancing body image confidence

• Wanting to explore sexual orientation concerns and discover what and who is attractive

• Expanding sexual and intimacy repertoire and learning new intimacy relationship skills

• Changing outdated strategies that are not working for you anymore.

• Genital Anatomy with genital prelude practices, genital mapping and genital massage. Understanding of binary and non-binary genital configurations

• Anal Anatomy with anal prelude practices, mapping and massage

• Enteric Nervous System with belly mapping and massage

• Understanding the anatomy of skin, how scar tissue is formed after adhesions, and how it can be healed.

• Understanding the role of fascia as a global body antenna

• Intrinsic Cardiac system with heart rate variability, response flexibility and attunement

• Anatomy of Breath and changing states

• Anatomy of chest, breasts and nipples with prelude practices, mapping and massage.

• Central and autonomic nervous systems - Poly vagal theory model: ventral vagus social engagement and attunement, sympathetic with and without safety, parasympathetic with and without safety, dorsal vagus immobilisation with and without safety

• Drivers for motivation towards pleasure and away from pain or Core erotic theme circuitry drivers to revisit pain.

• Hormonal activations with the nervous system responses that contribute to emotional affect, including motivation, addiction, excitement, anxiety, arousal, shame, trauma, pleasurable, relaxed intimacy, confidence, safety and relaxation.

• Anatomy of arousal and orgasm

• Neuroanatomy of right and left brain hemisphere integration

• Understanding the relevance of symbolic representation in creating shared reality explicitly referenced memory

• Understanding the ways somatic unconscious recognition in implicit memory influences learning and unlearning

• Brain structures activated and deactivated in trauma and shame responses,

• The Emotional Command Systems as drivers for motivation towards pleasure and away from pain, or the core erotic theme circuitry drivers to revisit pain.

• Understanding empathy versus compassion and working with sociopathy

• Understanding the role of the default mode networks that are in service to identity maintenance and belonging

• Understanding prediction error circuitry in the maps of living and addiction to maintaining these.

• Mirror neurons’ role in co-creating social reality for learning and unlearning.

• Understanding how repeated practice stimulates myelination and formation of new neural pathways and grows dendrites, contributing to neuroplasticity and the expansion of consciousness as new ways of being are experimented with.

Facilitating embodiment practices during this training involves drawing from a range of categories, insights, and symbolic references found in:

• Mindfulness

• Psychological and behavioural studies

• Biological research

• Animals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects,

• Plants

• Philosophical perspectives

• Eastern spiritual paths

• Shamanic traditions

• Medical model categories of body anatomy

• Neuroanatomical research

• Psychoanalytic theory

• Affective Relational Neuroscience research

Your research explorations will bring these perspectives to life, aligning with the natural laws that govern our living processes as we update the maps of living that govern us.

Translating these concepts into formats that clients can easily understand may empower them to navigate, categorise and normalise their relational, somatic, and emotional experiences.

Coaching self-touch Bodywork Practices:

All of the following practices have been updated to include guidance on solo and prelude practice within the RHI Session Structure.

• Self-pleasure coaching, the two types of Sex Coaching - Mindful Self-Pleasure coaching and Live self-pleasure coaching

• Self-regulating touch and arousal management

• Belly massage

• Breast and chest massage

• Genital mapping

• Genital massage

• Anal mapping

• Anal massage

• Active receiving

• Erotic massage dancing

• Scar tissue remediation

• Listening skills - a working understanding of phenomenological listening

• Clean Language - working knowledge of the basic Clean Language questions; understanding the impact of the different questions with the depths of waters that some questions facilitate and then coming back onto the beach that other questions facilitate. The ability to track the client's response flexibility; the ability to reflect back using the same language the client has used without reframes, interpretation or meaning-making.

• Body Focusing—the ability to facilitate Body Focusing to support a client in finding words that come close to what they are experiencing; the ability to ask for clarification and not to assume; and the ability to use Clean Language questions with Body Focusing to support the client in updating newly emerging versions of themselves.

• Body Poem - Our kind presence with curiosity and acceptance is the most significant gift we can offer another human being, trusting that we each have an inherent self-organising intelligence if we are given acceptance and structures to explore this.

• The ability to write down the exact words shared by a client; offer and read these back as a body poem, trusting your creativity and spontaneity with the rhythm and order of reading the poem. Stress tested and confident understanding of how Body Poem supports both the practitioner and the client in being with things as they are with radical non-hierarchical acceptance. The ability to be present with non-hierarchical, radical acceptance with all communications being received.

• Welcome and arrival check-in - transitioning into the session

• Arrival embodiment practice to attune and arrive together

• Check in to discover what is present and review learning since the last session to illuminate current learning edges

• Elicit the learning intention for the session

• Co-create a practice agreement offering a choice of somatic practices, informed by a shared somatic assessment of what the client is ready to explore

• Installation time to support integration

• Client reflections - an enquiry to harvest insights and learning

• Co-create a home practice to support ongoing learning and somatic transformation

• Facilitate empowered feedback from your client and receive feedback to support client learning in future sessions.

You will develop your skills with informal somatic assessment which begins in the first moments you receive communications with your client. How we are in anything is how we are in everything.

Formal somatic assessments are specific practices in a co-created relationship with a shared intention to experiment and be curious.

Somatic Intimacy Coaching includes trauma training as an intrinsic part of the curriculum, informed by Affective Relational Neuroscience understandings of the mammalian emotional command systems and defences to feelings, how memories are stored and the origins of shame. The training supports a compassionate understanding of how experiences can become traumatic. It offers titrated ways of supporting the development of trust in confident self-expression and spontaneity, being liberated from predictive inhibitory coding.

Most of all, this training offers practitioners the confidence to not also fly out of the room in fear when holding space for a person in an altered state reliving a traumatic experience. The training includes deactivating shame practices and structures to support trust in self-organising intelligence while maintaining safety. Katie and Phoebe have extensive experience working with trauma to teach this confidently..

Power Awareness - the Right Use of Power and Awareness of systems of power and power dynamics

This is a coaching model that illuminates the blind spots we all carry regarding role power and the power differentials that affect agency, choice, and decision-making.

The RUPI syllabus teaches the essential repair processes and we include training in all the micro-skills you will need to support you to receive difficult feedback without moving into reactivitry. We have woven these teachings into the Wheel of Consent in a unique blend that informs the ethics of how we say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in service of recognising the power differentials that influence them.

Honouring our Right Use of Power teacher, Dr Cedar Barstow - Founder of the Right Use of Power Institute

We are passionate about supporting practitioners in developing the skills to facilitate and respond to feedback. Without supervision, practitioners are vulnerable to ruptures that could escalate into complaints or grievances.

Complex power dynamics are at play, which can be extraordinarily dysregulating and upsetting for a client who experiences a failure of duty of care and for the practitioner who has missed what was needed.

When the practitioner's up-power role shifts to a down-power role as a service provider, navigating defensive reactivity requires support and the humility necessary to maintain ethical up-power responsibility.

We all sincerely intend to provide excellent care and practice, but we will likely be experientially blind in some areas, creating ‘blind spots’ that can make us vulnerable to unintentionally causing harm.

Understanding that, with experiential blindness to the complexities of power and consent, we will inevitably cause unintended impact or even harm, and that, if we are skilled in our response to ruptures, this creates opportunities for healing, transformation, deepening trust, and justice for old, recurring wounds.

An understanding of the personal, role, status, collective and systemic power categories as defined in The Right Use Of Power training.

See our Empowering Feedback and Repair CPD Training for practitioners in our field.