T H E R E L A T I O N A L H A R M O N Y I N S T I T U T E
T R U S T I N G S P O N T A N E I T Y
P R O F E S S I O N A L C E R T I F I C A T I O N
Training directors Katie Sarra & Dr Phoebe Garland
The Relational Harmony Institute hosts and facilitates the following training pathways:
We offer the following professional Certified Somatic Intimacy Practitioner trainings:
Year 1 - CSI - Certified Somatic Intimacy Coach Training (online - previously known as Sexological Intimacy Coach)
Year 2 - CSIB - Certified Somatic Intimacy Coach and Bodywork Practitioner Training (online and in-person - previously known as Certified Sexological Bodyworker)
Years 3 & 4 - CSSE & Supervisor - Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Supervisor (online and in-person)
The coaching model for all these trainings is REEF™ (Relational Erotic and Emotional Fluency) - a unique synthesis of Wheel of Consent®, Right Use of Power, and Body Poem™, developed by Katie Sarra and Dr Phoebe Garland, designed to facilitate the application and integration of somatic sexology practices to support transformation.
We also host postgraduate continuous professional development (CPD) for our practitioner community.
1st year: Certified Somatic Intimacy Coach training, 800+ hours of experiential community learning and practices. These include a foundation in REEF (Relational Erotic and Emotional Fluency) coaching, somatic sexology practices and education and client sessions facilitating 1-1 intimacy coaching. This training is conducted online, and CSI practitioners learn how to guide clients in self-touch, whether online or in person. The certification process included supervised and video-recorded client sessions to earn the required 20 learning credits, leading to certification as a Somatic Intimacy Coach (CSI)—one-year training commencing on 1st April each year.
2nd year: Certified Somatic Intimacy Coach and Bodywork Practitioner - 800+ hours of experiential community learning, practices and education. This training includes working with practitioner touch including genital and anal touch and working with arousal in person. This training is offered online and in-person, and includes a 2-week retreat where practitioners receive live demos and one-on-one coaching during bodywork sessions. Practitioners will receive supervised client sessions and coaching through video sessions to earn their 20 learning credits, leading to certification as a Somatic Intimacy Coach and Bodywork Practitioner (CSIB). A one-year training program commencing on April 1st each year is open to CSIs who have completed their first year with us. Small group size (approx 12 places only) to support your learning.
3rd & 4th year: Somatic Sex Education and Supervisor - This is a 2-year experiential training in giving and receiving coaching and supervision, revisiting the CSI and CSIB curriculum, and deepening your practitioner skills. You will also develop educational materials as you step into leadership positions within your specialised area of this work. There are opportunities to teach and present during the first and second years, as well as to share your CPD offerings in our postgraduate program.
We also offer free, ongoing Continuing Professional Development and peer supervision through our monthly Postgraduate Program during your certification phase and beyond, in a thriving multi-year community that supports practitioners in maintaining ethical practice.
REEF™ Relational Erotic & Emotional Fluency Coaching and Bodywork was developed by Katie Sarra and Phoebe Garland and has its foundations in Mindfulness, Sexological Bodywork®, Body Poem™ , Wheel of consent® and Right Use Of Power® and Affective Relational Neuroscience teachings and practices.
Each practitioner engages in unique ways to transform the literal into poetry. We are all welcomed wherever we are; however, we are to be a balm and bridges with each other’s loneliness as facilitators of radical acceptance.
The Relational Harmony Institute was co-founded in 2022 by Katie Sarra and Dr Phoebe Garland with the development of the REEF™ Coaching model.
This training evolved from The Sea School of Embodiment with Katie Sarra, who trained and certified 200+ Practitioners in Sexological Bodywork between the years 2014-2022
The original Sexological Bodywork training has been developed into a two-year program to equip practitioners to work with and without practitioner touch, either online or in person. The REEF™ coaching model supports practitioners to work with emotional and erotic fluency when working with eros, intimacy training and sex education.
Diversity Policy
Our training are informed by the Right Use of Power teachings training practitioners with the knowledge and skills required to effectively provide somatic sex education to people of all gender identities, sexualities, relationship structures, race and cultural backgrounds, in line with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy BACP Good Practice across the Counselling Professions 001: Gender, Sexual, and Relationship Diversity (GSRD).
We have trained practitioners from many parts of the world who represent diverse cultures, and we are especially grateful to have members of our faculty who represent all voices as part of the conversation.
‘Having known being an outsider from a young age uprooted from cultural belonging, these matters matter to me personally’ - Katie Sarra
At the Relational Harmony Institute, we are deeply committed to inclusivity and recognise systemic power structures that impact the ability to participate in Up Power roles.
We have developed our curriculum and ethics and positively received practitioners from marginalised minorities to join the training with bursary plaes. We are currently training a bank of professional supervisors and are keen to welcome underrepresented aspects of being human into these up-power influencer roles. We have exceeded the requirements of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy V2, which states:
‘Those with a responsibility for training will work to ensure that training prepares therapists to have sufficient levels of cultural competence such that they can work effectively with gender and sexually diverse clients.’
We value feedback
“This training of the Institute for Relational Harmony Studies is the most comprehensive sexuality training I have found.
The syllabus is rich and covers an incredible breadth of subjects - neuroscience, embodied boundaries & consent, emotional command systems, somatic coaching techniques, rupture & repair processes, session structure, hygiene protocol, and of course, all the anatomy & physiology Sexological Bodywork tools.
This training teaches the core competencies of how to meet another Human in their wholeness - with radical acceptance of all of their parts, including their erotic & sexual expression. It encourages you as a practitioner to trust your spontaneity, creativity, and intuition while equipping you with everything you need to build an ethical, trauma-informed practice. Katie’s passion, skill, embodied experience, and wisdom are the essence of this training which make It come alive with joy, love, care & laughter.”
- Luzi Pods (Certified Practitioner and Somatic Sex Educator and Super-Vision Coach)
Testimonial
2024-2025
MADHURYA BALAN
India
“What this training softens to cascade change inside the self is priceless, surprising and delightfully pleasurable. I am in deep gratitude and fierce appreciation of the ethics of the course created and facilitated by Katie and Phoebe. Truly incredible! I look forward to deepening in this work with the school and weaving in the practices I am in self-scholarship around. This is the change each cell of the universe has been calling for. Love and creative power.”
Why our training might be right for you.
“This training is without a doubt the most comprehensive, holistic, and ethically sound training I could have hoped to come across. I looked at many different training and coaching programs in the field of sexuality, tantra, + embodiment, and when I read through what was offered in this training, I was an immediate FULL BODY YES!
I’m so grateful and honoured; this has been such a rich, profound, and transformational journey. I’m growing in ways that bring me immense joy, knowing that I’m receiving so much more of my authentic liberated self, which is coming back online from participating in this training.
Through this first-hand experience of updating so many new versions of myself, I am blooming with excitement to be able to share this with my clients. The course is delivered in a very considerate and digestible manner. This is the kind of healing work that will help change the world. Thank you, Katie & Phoebe.”
TESTIMONIAL - A CSB Student practitioner part of the 2023-4 Cohort
Our comprehensive (800+ hour) training is the only certified training using our unique REEF coaching model:- a combination of The Wheel of Consent, The Right Use of Power and Body Poem taught in English. We are based in the UK with practitioners and faculty members worldwide in Ireland, Europe, the USA, Canada, Africa and India. The Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers recognises the CSB training, and graduates are eligible to apply for insurance specific to this modality.
Course Director Katie Sarra has been delivering this training since 2018 and has guided over 250 students to becoming Certified. Our free Postgraduate program offers continued support and CPD after certification. Our Second year includes teachings from the founder of Sexological Bodywork®, Joseph Kramer, plus world-renowned Betty Martin, the founder of the Wheel of Consent® and Ellen Heed of Scar Tissue Remediation Education and Management (STREAM). Dr Phoebe Garland, co-director of training leading the Professional Supervision track, brings her 30+ years of professional practice as a medical Doctor to the student experience, aligning our training with medical standards of ethical discipline with receptivity to all aspects of being human.
Professional Membership
Certification and Insurance
Upon completion of all requirements, The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies & Research awards the Certificate in Sexological Intimacy Coaching (CSI) in the First year, Sexological Bodywork (CSIB) in the second year, and the third and fourth year Certificate of Somatic Sex Education (CSSE) and Professional Supervisor certification for supervising any professional working in the field of sexuality.
Participants of the CSIB professional training can become Student members (and on certification, Professional members) of The Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB), the Somatic Sex Educators’ Association of Australasia (SSEAA) and the Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS). Certified graduates can be admitted to the World Association of Sex Coaches (WASC) with no further requirements.
This course is recognised by The Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists as offering a training of sufficient depth for practitioners to be eligible for insurance for their work. See the-asis.org for more details.
Katie Sarra Founder and Co-Director of the Sea School of Embodiment, has certified 200+ Sexological Bodyworkers and welcomes our historically trained CSBs and CSSEs from the Sea School of Embodiment to join our 3rd and 4th years if you want to widen your influence and train to be a professional supervisor for our profession.
Career Development
As a qualified CSI and CSIB, having experienced all the taught modalities in your own body and undergone your growth and transformation, means that when working with clients, your presence and knowledge stem from real, embodied experience, rather than theory alone.
The Certificate in Somatic Intimacy Coaching (CSI) offers the flexibility of working from anywhere in the world, providing essential intimacy skills for loving relationships to people in the privacy of their own homes. Being professionally touched intimately by another, for other than medical examination and treatment reasons, outside of an intimate relationship, for many people, is outside of comfort and, in some countries, illegal.
Graduates have tremendous scope in choosing areas of specialisation: for example, by focussing on a particular interest group and their belonging, sexual freedom and acceptance, e.g. older people, young people and consent, specific cultures, non-binary, heterosexual & queer-identified, women identified, men identified, couples and other relationship configurations, group work; presenting concerns, e.g. overcoming fears of intimacy, loss of libido, body image confidence, genital pain, health related body functioning changes, recovery after surgery, genital reconfiguration preparation and post rerouting orgasmic pathways, emotional and physical pain, loss of sensation, interrupted decision making, not knowing what to want, developing ejaculatory choice, sex & porn addiction, erotic expression confidence, fetish entrapment, troublesome ‘turn-ons’, recovery after giving birth, becoming orgasmic, expanding repertoire, changing outdated patterns, sexuality during menopause, relationship grief, intimacy training for the inexperienced and recovery from historical traumas that impact intimacy confidence.
Return on Investment
A typical hourly rate for many CSBs is £120 - £250 per hour in the UK, and a typical session time is 2 hours given the highly specialised nature of this work. This varies around the world in economically disadvantaged regions. Hourly rates for online sessions vary in the different areas, usually between £75 - £150. Given those figures, it would be possible to recoup your training investment in less than 3 months with only three sessions per week.
The training includes support with envisioning and planning your career development with post-graduate backing.
All students begin earning before the course ends by charging a reduced rate for sessions while completing certification during the Supervised Practicum Phase of the training.
There is a comprehensive tool kit …
… for deepening embodiment with somatic assessment practices for enhancing the granularity of symbolic representation.
All the practices involve using Body Poem that facilitates radical acceptance and the Wheel of Consent practices for doing something about it. Practitioners are trained in the Right Use of Power to ensure consensual relationship agreements between practitioner and client.
Somatic Intimacy Coaches (CSI) facilitate guiding self-touch for personal empowerment. Somatic Intimacy Bodyworkers (CSIB) have the scope of practice to include 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, and breast massage and many new additions to the syllabus this year.
Katie Sarra founded the Institute of Relational Harmony Studies, which grew from The Sea School of Embodiment Somatic Sexology Training, where she certified 200 + practitioners in Sexological Bodywork. She choreographs and teaches practitioner professional certification in Body Poem, CSI Sexological Intimacy Coaching, CSB Sexological Bodywork and CSSE Somatic Sex Educator and training in the UK, Ireland, and Europe, with embodiment intensives in Portugal and the UK which include Wheel of Consent and Right Use of Power training. She is an active ACSB Ethics Committee and Grievance Council member, facilitating grievance processes.
I believe that repairing ruptures of intention-impact mismatches is essential for us to learn about care and trusting spontaneity with our self-expression with hedonistic pleasures and the pleasures of being in service enhancing personal power and play.
Every human being has gifts to share, often grown from where we have suffered the most. When we feel acknowledged and witnessed, our self-acceptance, kindness, and ease with ourselves can have a profound ripple effect, supporting ease with others.
Katie Sarra - Co-Founder & Course Director
I specialise in practising radical acceptance with the versions of ourselves that secure our identity and belonging, as well as the unthought-knowns within us seeking recognition in the emergent process of living. I advocate for pro-social empathy and compassion in a world where ‘the dehumanisation network’ brain structures are at large. I also advocate for us human beings who need support with discernment. I also trust in the self-organising intelligence inherent in us, both individually and collectively, as part of the ecosystem.
From my 35+ years of clinical practice, I have discovered that listening to feedback, Phenomenological listening, Clean language enquiries, and Body poems can harvest projections and support the integration of exiled aspects of ourselves. After radical acceptance with the grief and remorse of just how lonely we have become, I facilitate The Wheel of Consent practises that lovingly support new relationship agreements for coming home. Whether you recognise yourself as avoidant, anxious or disorganised in your attachment wounds that hamper being intimate, there is hope for coming together with these tried and tested intimacy skills practices.
In the 80s, after my Fine Art Degree, I trained and worked with older people, learning the gifts of remorse and gratitude that come with age and then in acute adult mental health services in Hackney, London, as an Art Psychotherapist witnessing and resonating with people like myself who had lost their roots. I was raised in Kenya where I now return each year inhabiting Swahili life.
Over many years of research in understanding the origins of projections, the magic transformational gift of what is now referred to as Body Poem emerged into becoming a modality.
Weaves of knowledge inform me from stress testing professional Western disciplines, including Psychoanalysis, Affective, relational neuroscience, and ancient spiritual paths grown from living indigenously with nature. I was initiated five years ago in The Gabon, West Africa near where I was born with the Bwiti.
Over the years, I have discovered that meditation journeys with medicines from the plant and fungi worlds, from frogs and toads, can help us with our kindness. I live by the ocean in Kenya, in the mountains in Portugal and the UK. I am a practising artist painting oil paintings that transform grief into beauty. I have been part of Red Earth Playback Theatre for eighteen years, practising ‘Intimacy in the community’.
Katie is a Body Poet, Artist, Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker; Right Use of Power™ Facilitator, Certified Wheel of Consent® Workshop Facilitator and Cuddle Party™ Facilitator; Completed the year-long facillitator training with The Right Use of Power™, Ethics board member of the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB); co-founder of the Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS); 2008 Winner at the Sexual Freedom Awards; Founder of Body Poem™, Certified Art Psychotherapist™ (Post Grad Dip AT), Certified NLP Practitioner, Gabon Bwiti Initiate, Professional Artist, Professional Playback Theater Practitioner over 18 years, Tantra Teacher for 12 years, Quodoushka I-III Shamanic Sexuality, Recapitulated Shamaic Dearmouring & Aura Perception Analysis over 15 years, Visceral Mind Professional training in Functional NeuroAnatomy and Member of The International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.
Dr Phoebe Garland - Co-Founder & Course Director
Phoebe is a certified CSIB and CSSE. She brings over 30
years of experience as a GP and mindfulness teacher as well as her
own life-long journey of seeking and personal growth practices,
including working with Dr Claudio Naranjo in the SAT program,
working with plant medicines and many years as a composer and
singer-songwriter.
Her passion is to bring her expertise to the profession of somatic
sex education by developing the curriculum and the certification
process at the IRH to ensure that the IRH training equips
Practitioners for ethical practice.
At the Institute of Relational Harmony Studies Phoebe has brought
her expertise to the structures of the existing training and the
coaching model.
Phoebe has collaborated with Katie Sarra to develop the REEF
coaching model (Relational Emotional and Erotic Fluency) to
support the application and integration of Somatic Practices for
Somatic Intimacy Practitioners and to develop the new updates
training structures including the 1st year CSI and the 2nd year CSIB.
Phoebe has also developed the 3rd and 4th year CSSE
Supervision training to support CSSE students in their personal
and professional growth as well as to support the growing
community of Practitioners by providing much needed
professional supervisors in the field of somatic intimacy.
Historical Video Testimonials from the Sea School of Embodiment 2018 Training.
I am sharing these here as this was one of the first trainings where I introduced Affective Relational Neuroscience and Body Poem to the curriculum in addition to The Wheel of Consent. I am particularly fond of this as the late Sue Sutherland is featured here, who we all miss.
