More About Sexual Healing
Somatic sex education has the potential for creating a revolutionary new paradigm shift for the healing approach utilized for sexual, and other types of, trauma because the approach used is somatic. The body experiences deep learning at the tissue and cellular levels when touched. Practitioners are taught to offer touch that is clearly client-directed, safe, loving, and pleasurable. This approach sets the process of neuroplasticity into motion creating new pathways for increased pleasure and healing to occur for our clients.
Affecting many in the world today, sexual trauma from the past has resulted from lack of choice about touch that was unpleasant and unwanted. Supporting the authentic empowered choice about touch and finding voice to ask for the touch that clients want lies at the foundation of somatic sex education practice. It builds confidence in their ability to know what kinds of precise touch they want and how to ask for that precise touch. It builds confidence in their ability to be in control of who and how their own body is touched for their own self-defined comfort and pleasure.
Positive new changes to brain chemistry and to the neuropathways can occur from repeated experiences of safety, loving presence and pleasurable touch felt in one’s body. Trauma is processed and released through the tissues with less pain and less potential for harm when chosen, safe, loving, and pleasurable touch is skillfully used as the active healing agent.
This repeated experience gives way to our clients becoming more embodied and experience even greater pleasure. Our client’s quest to pinpoint their desires, and feel into their pleasure-orientation, becomes the new normal. What also becomes the new normal is their awareness about the precise touch they want, and do not want. And their ability to voice an enthusiastic ‘yes’ to wanted touch and an unapologetic ‘no’ to unwanted touch is expressed with greater ease. They gain new clarity and self-assurance through somatic awareness. Somatic awareness acts as a new finely tuned compass for navigating their life going forward with more pleasure and with less trauma.
Both intellectual talk-based and somatic touch-based approaches to sex education are valuable. Both offer teachings about increased access to somatic awareness, sexual pleasure, and sexual healing. Both support authentic connection to one’s erotic self and healthy agreements and communication with intimate partners. Both approaches also support neuroplasticity establishing new permanent neuropathways to pleasure in the brain.
However, it is the benefits of the traditional talk-based approach combined with the benefits of the non-traditional somatic touch-based approach of somatic sex education that makes it a unique modality and sets it apart from other standard approaches to sex education.
Many people I know have experienced somatic sex education sessions as being transformational with respect to increased sexual pleasure and healing in their life. I started off as a client of this modality, and it was a transformational experience for me in this way.
Pleasure is healing. Pleasure begets more pleasure. And pleasure also inevitably begets healing; healing from sexual shame, repression and trauma affecting many of us in today’s sex fearful and sex negative society.
As a professional somatic sex educator, I bring good news. Our teachings move past outdated norms that limit access to pleasure. Our teachings reclaim hope for a more liberated and robust sex life as nature intended. Healthy sexual pleasure and healing in the context of respectful and consensual relationships with self and intimate partners is foundational to our modality.
My name is Wendy Scheirich and I am a proud somatic sex educator from Manitoba Canada. The shared ethos of our modality is ‘Pleasure is Healing”.