PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

THE  SEA  SCHOOL  OF  EMBODIMENT

T R U S T I N G S P O N T A N E I T Y

The Sea School of Embodiment

The Sea School of Embodiment hosted the first UK & Ireland Certificate in Sexological Bodywork® (CSB) and Certificate in Somatic Sex Education (CSSE) in 2014; the first European workshops with Betty Martin in the Wheel of Consent® & the first UK training of Cuddle Party facilitators in 2015; and the world's first comprehensive training in Women's Pelvic Health: Scar Tissue Remediation, Education and Management (STREAM) taught by Ellen Heed & Kimberly Ann Johnson in 2016.

Due to demand and logistical reasons, in 2022 we launched two new schools under the umbrella of the Sea School of Embodiment, to deliver our Certificate in Sexological Bodywork® (CSB) & Certificate in Somatic Sex Education (CSSE) trainings going forward. These are described below:

The Sea School of Embodiment Story

  • Sexological Bodywork Training

    After three years of studying and teaching alongside Deej Juventin and Uma Furman, Katie and Kian stepped up into leadership co-directing and developing the uniquely specialised Sea School of Embodiment's Somatic Sexology Curriculum.

    Between 2014 - 22, the Sea School of Embodiment Certified over 200 CSBs as part of 9 cohorts.

    In 2023 two new training schools were created by the Sea School of Embodiment: the School of Somatic Sexology and the Institute for Relational Harmony Studies.

  • The Sea School of Embodiment

    The Sea School of Embodiment presents leading-edge, international training in the fields of embodiment, including Professional training in Somatic Sex Education, Sexological Intimacy Coaching, Sexological Bodywork, Body Poem®, The Right Use Of Power®, the Wheel of Consent® and continuous professional development (CPD) training for professionals working in the field of somatic sexology.

  • When Sexological Bodywork came to the UK

    2014 saw the launch of Sexological Bodywork being offered in the UK with The Sea School of Embodiment inviting and assisting Deej Juventin & Uma Furman from the Institute for Somatic Sexology, Australia, to come and lead these first waves.

    In 2024 The Sea School of Embodiment will be setting sail with the 12th and 13th Sexological Bodywork and Somatic Sex Education trainings. Katie Sarra and Dr Phoebe Garland leading the UK, Ireland and Portugal training and Kian de la Cour leading the UK and Ireland Training.

  • Sea School of Embodiment Certificate in Sexological Bodywork & Somatic Sex Education

    There are two distinguished schools facilitating professional training in Sexological Bodywork and Somatic Sex Education under the umbrella of The Sea School of Embodiment:

    The School of Somatic Sexology is based in the UK, Ireland & US - Directed by Kian de la Cour.

    The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies is based in the UK & Portugal - Directed by Katie Sarra.

    Both certify practitioners in Sexological Bodywork & Somatic Sex Education under the umbrella of The Sea School of Embodiment.

  • Two Pathways to Certification

    Practitioners can choose between two pathways to certification as Sexological Bodyworkers & Somatic Sex Educators as part of The Sea School of Embodiment.

    The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies - Directed by Katie Sarra and Dr Phoebe Garland, based in Portugal, the U.K, Ireland and Africa.

    The School of Somatic Sexology - Directed by Kian de la Cour, based in the U.K. Ireland & the U.S.

    Both include the significant Sea School-developed 50% additional course material and length of training that is an add-on to the original State of California-accredited CSB curriculum.

  • The NEW Curriculum

    The new curriculum for both schools incorporates somatic assessment, body image, genital story, erotic bodywork, affective neuroscience, Body Poem, Clean Language and Wheel of Consent® trauma-informed practices.

    Differences between the two training schools include that the School of Somatic Sexology training is a 10-month course, taught by Kian de la Cour and JoJo Bear and includes specific fasica-informed bodywork and Transformative Justice routes to repair.
    The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies training is now in two 6-month courses taught by Katie Sarra and Dr. Phoebe Garland which includes the online Certificate in Sexological Intimacy Coaching for international practitioners working online and The Right Use of Power curriculum.

Reflections from our Certified Sexological Bodywork Practitioners

“This is a deeply empowering opportunity to integrate and learn constructive, empowering practices working with sexuality. It's a Certified training with an international network for support and continuing professional development. I feel equipped with an empowering and essential tool kit for my practice.”

"It's serious, practical and incredible. And heart-opening. It's very well organised and you start at your own level of knowledge and that's completely valued and supported."

"Do it! If you want to know how to teach classes in sexuality and how to work somatically with clients it is brilliant learning."

Why we co-created the Sea School

The Sea School of Embodiment is a collaboration between Kian de la Cour and Katie Sarra.

We created the Sea School to host and share the teachings, training, and workshops that had most facilitated our embodiment and creative growth.

Both of us had been working for many years in the field of sexuality and we felt called to share trainings that had broadened our horizons, liberated us from old patterns, deepened our integrity, developed our skills and supported our relaxation into our naturalness.

It can be confusing for practitioners wishing to explore working with sexuality with so many training and workshops in this field not informed by professional codes of conduct or the ethics of consent.

Our events are intended to support the expansion of informed dialogue about intimate conscious relating and to support professional development in this field - Katie Sarra & Kian de la Cour

The SEA SCHOOL OF EMBODIMENT

Professional Training

  • CERTIFICATION IN SEXOLOGICAL BODYWORK® - Year 1

    This is professional training leading to a Certificate in Sexological Bodywork (CSB). This training is a combination of in-person and online learning. Students are guided and supported as they develop the core competencies required to become a practitioner and includes 30 hours of supervised practice sessions with clients.

    The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies syllabus is 12 months in length, the first 6 months being an independent qualification and certification in Sexological Intimacy Coaching for practitioners to learn ways of facilitating Intimacy Training, working online from anywhere in the world. The 6 month CSB is for practitioners ready to work with clients in person and this traning includes a 12 day in-person retreat in Portugal.

    The School of Somatic Sexology syllabus is 9 months in duration, delivering the expanded Sea School Certificate in Sexological Bodywork® curriculum to practitioners, preparing them to work with individuals and groups, online and in-person. This training includes two 7-day in-person Embodiment Weeks in England.

  • CERTIFICATION IN SOMATIC SEX EDUCATION - Year 2

    This is the second year of training in Somatic Sex Education for Certified Sexological Bodyworkers. During this CSSE training, you will have an opportunity to revisit the CSB training material from a new perspective, exploring areas of your choice in more depth and developing teaching material in your areas of interest. You will be part of the teacher team in the role of coach and supervisor supporting the CSB students during their training, learning coaching and supervision skills and developing as an educator in your own unique style.

  • 6 Month Professional training in Body Poem Coaching

    Body Poem is a practice that facilitates illuminating unthought unknowns and unspoken parts of the self into spontaneously emerging poetry that brings alive exiled aspects of the self which become somatised when not acknowledged through symbolic representation.

    This process is relational, the world of one person being received into the chords of the heart and voice of another.

    The structure of Body Poem has specific rules of engagement that facilitate the harvesting of projections into digestible poetry. In moments of gratitude, when exiled parts are resonated with and acknowledged, there is the potential for receptivity into the precipice of presence. With a shared niche of attention, with symbols and metaphors, we learn to recognise; we are not on our own in the soup of undifferentiated realities that otherwise disable us from playing and co-creating relationship agreements to meet our needs.

Our Schools

  • The School of Somatic Sexology

    Directed by Kian de la Cour

    Next Training enrolling now

    January 20th - November 23, 2025 The 9 Month Online & In-Person Somatic Sex Education professional training (Level 2 Certificate in Somatic Sex Education)

    ~ Includes 2, 7-day in-person Embodiment Weeks in England.

    February 3rd - November 23, 2025 The 9 Month Online & In-Person Somatic Sex Education professional training (Level 1, Certificate in Sexological Bodywork)

    ~ Includes 2, 7-day in-person Embodiment Weeks in England.

    School of Somatic Sexology Website

  • The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies

    Directed by Katie Sarra and Dr Phoebe Garland

    September 1st 2024 - February 28th 2025 ~ The 6 Month Online & In-Person Sexological Bodywork Certification ~ Includes a 12 day in-person Embodiment Retreat in Portugal 15th - 26th October 2024 - FULL - Enrolments closed

    February 1st 2024 - February 28th 2025 ~ The 12 Month Online & In-Person Somatic Sex Education Certification ~ Includes a 12 day in-person Embodiment Retreat in Portugal 15th - 26th October 2024 - FULL - Enrolments closed

    Next CSI Training enrolling now - Start Date September 1st 2025 - 28th February 2026

    Next CSB training enrolling now April 1st 2026 - September 30th 2026

    Institute for Relational Harmony Studies Website

  • Kian de la Cour

    SEA SCHOOL CO-FOUNDER

    Kian is the founder of the School of Somatic Sexology, where he directs the UK and Ireland Certificate in Sexological Bodywork professional training, together with an international team of leading-edge educators. He follows the Code of Ethics of the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB).

    He is a Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker; Certified Wheel of Consent® Workshop Facilitator and Cuddle Party™ Facilitator; Vice President of the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB); co-founder and Chair of the Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS); Chair of Judges for the Sexual Freedom Awards; a structural integration bodyworker and nutritional therapist.

    He brings a thorough grounding in Somatic Sex Education modalities to the training, having first encountered many of them when training as a Sacred Intimate with the Body Electric School at Wildwood, California in 1994. He qualified as a Certified Sexological Bodyworker in the UK in 2014, gained the CSSE in 2015, interned with Deej and Uma at the subsequent UK training and co-directed the following 6 CSB/CSSE UK & Ireland trainings. In 2022 the Sea School held our first CSB / CSSE embodiment intensive in Portugal. The second training under the School of Somatic Sexology banner is underway with the third enroling now.

    ”I create a world of safety and connection through touch and open-hearted communication so that my clients can access open-hearted choice in manifesting their life potential.”

    He is passionate about sharing the joys and trials of greater embodiment with the world.

    https://linktr.ee/kiandelacour

  • Katie Sarra

    SEA SCHOOL CO-FOUNDER

    Katie Sarra is the founder of the Institute of Relational Harmony Studies where she choreographs and teaches professional certification in Sexological Bodywork, Sexological Intimacy, Somatic Sex Education & Body Poem with an international team of leading-edge educators. She follows the Code of Ethics of the Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS) and the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB).

    She is a Certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker; Certified Wheel of Consent® Workshop Facilitator and Cuddle Party™ Facilitator; Ethics board member of the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers (ACSB); co-founder of the Association of Somatic and Integrative Sexologists (ASIS), 2008 Erotic Artist of the Year Winner at the Sexual Freedom Awards; Founder of Body Poem™, Certified Art Psychotherapist (Post Grad Dip AT), Certified NLP Practitioner, Certified Right Use of Power™ Teacher, Gabon Bwiti Initiate, Professional Artist, Professional Playback Theater Practitioner over 17 years, Tantra Teacher, Quodoushka I-III Shamanic Sexuality, Recapitulated Shamaic Dearmouring & Aura Perception Analysis I over 15 years, Visceral Mind Professional training in Functional NeuroAnatomy and Member of The International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.

    Katie has developed her practice over 35 years of professional clinical practice and research. She specialises in facilitating radical acceptance and the integration of exiled aspects of the self to enhance trusting spontaneity, inhabiting personal power and play, understanding what supports our belonging to feel more and fear less using understandings from affective neuroscience and its application with the Wheel of Consent® to support "trusting spontaneity" and co-creating win-win harmonious decisions.

    She believes every human being has gifts to share and that our self-acceptance, kindness, and ease with ourselves ripples out to support ease with each other in service of care and our purpose in life.

    "Its a joy to be hidden but a disaster never to be found" - Donald Winnicott

  • What is Embodiment?

    Our ability to come into a relationship with ourselves requires finding ways of connecting to, feeling and expressing what is happening inside our body. Embodiment can be understood to be this symbolic relationship with our feeling states, senses and how we create meaning from these experiences.

  • Symbol Formation

    Discovering, and gaining access to symbols and language can help us self-reflect, communicate and integrate the visceral responses from our bodies and embody these. This work guides us into an exploration of embodied states, enhancing our capacity to be intimate with ourselves and with each other. This supports co creating relationship agreements with conscious awareness and integrity.

  • Why are these trainings political?

    The first thing that we lose is democracy when management administration systems of power, informed by left-brain survival functions to categorise, evaluate, strategise, commodify, compete, grasp and dominate our relationships with our bodies and each other.

    By informing the ways we govern our relationships with ourselves and each other through our senses, we can grow our ethical potential enhancing our personal power, agency, kindness and care for making change.

  • Purpose as part of the ecosystem

    We are dedicated to facilitating practitioners wanting to embody their purpose. Contributing and participating in co-creating win-win harmony is how we can contribute to the politics of the civilisations we inhabit. Purpose can be understood to be the erotic charge of our libido that magnetises us to be part of the repair that is needed with inhabiting new ways of being that authentically contribute to us indigenously coming home to belonging to our erotic, emotional and sensual naturalness.

  • "We are all the same under the skin, but as humans, we have a special responsibility"

    - Jaak Panksepp

  • What is Radical acceptance?

    To love is to accept, receive and digest. Humans are alchemical ecosystems in the process of digesting our life experiences in symbiotic union with the colonies of bacteria and viruses that live in us and around us.

  • Self Acceptance

    Radical acceptance begins with our own ecosystem. 

    Before we can integrate, we need to see the forms within us differentiated out of the blind soup of our beings.

  • Justice is being with the Just is

    Radical acceptance includes our rejections and the harm we have caused and the harm we have been impacted with. The pain of this acceptance is an understandable withdrawal from love and unity.

  • Self Expression

    Finding words that come close to describing these emotional, sensual, and physical multidimensional aspects of ourselves literally activates receptors of self-acceptance when we are witnessed with radical acceptance.

  • Kindness with our inner critics

    Radical includes acceptance with our internal self-referencing inner dialogue. For example to self-evaluating aspects of ourselves that are maintaining our adaptive belonging.

  • Easing the pain

    Reframes, advice and affirmations may feel comforting like a bandage for our wounds to feel protected and cared for but when the time is right to be freed from these, it is radical acceptance that will ease the pain

  • Courage to be seen

    Under the bandage, wounds from our dark nights of the soul remain unseen and these exiled aspects of ourselves are sent back into the unseen bowels of humanity to endure continued separation until we are supported with courage to be seen with radical acceptance

  • Repair

    Cycles of undigested exiled aspects of humanity are ultimately seeking to be seen from underneath the shame bandages that have been nursing them.

    Being seen requires acknowledgement and understanding so we can repair and allow our remorse to teach us to learn not to harm again. 

  • What is the difference between Somatic Sexology and Tantra?

    Somatic Sex Educators work with the coaching model in client-led sessions, adhering to the ACSB code of ethics and conduct, with roles and relationship agreements being clearly defined that primarily support embodied choice and agency. The practitioner always remains clothed and uses gloves for any intimate bodywork and erotic touch is one way.

  • Titration

    The practitioner clearly holds the duty of care recognising the responsibility of holding space for altered states. Relational embodiment sessions are based on the foundations of the Wheel of Consent™ that facilitate somatic openings and the integration of exiled aspects of the self in co-created relationship agreements where the client directs what happens in titrated stages.

  • Sacred Intimacy

    Tantra training and individual sessions may involve immersive role-play or sensuality-focused experiences where boundaries and roles between practitioner and client may vary. Practitioners engage with clients in ways that can sometimes be understood as sex work, sacred intimacy resembling surrogate work.

  • Ancient Eastern Philosophy

    There are many schools and interpretations of this ancient Eastern philosophy. Tantra practitioners guide recipients into trusting bathing in unknown waters and entering experiences that potentially access altered states of consciousness.

  • Unchartered Territory

    Informed consent is an agreement to trust in these unknown waters where frames of reference may be suspended while the recipient explores uncharted territory which can facilitate unintegrated aspects of self to swim with. Recipients may find themselves navigating deep waters and discovering depths of themselves and birthing somatic openings and epiphanies. These experiences are guided and led by the practitioner who might also be in the water with the client.

  • Immersive experiences

    These immersive experiences may sometimes result in emotional hangovers of exiled aspects of the self having being discovered and exposed without the recipient necessarily having the capacity to integrate these. This is possibly part of the reason why there has been such a wave of reactions against tantra where the wheel of consent and integration support is not been effectively been practiced.

  • Self Gain motivations

    This reactionary wave has been magnified by emotional hangovers from Tantric practitioners following their erotic self-gain motivations with recipients in vulnerable or disinhibited altered states of consciousness.

  • Role Play

    Role play or tantric rituals, like in any group setting, where there are participation expectations can sometimes disable participants from feeling they can direct their experience at the pace and depth they have the capacity to digest. The impact of this is magnified when playing with sexual expression which is the root of our deepest wounds. This is possibly why the Quodoushka shamanic sacred sexuality path calls this type of altered states work "Fire Medicine" and the potential for expansion of consciousness which can paradoxically burn as well as heal. - Katie Sarra

  • Working with Trauma

    When we are touched or we touch another, sensory receptivity may awaken memories into conscious awareness.

    Opening the senses involves discovering our limits with the intensity of affect (affect relates to visceral responses in the body).

  • Radical Acceptance

    The relational embodiment curriculum of this training, includes the Wheel of Consent, Body Poem and Clean Language coaching models, supporting creating clear relationship agreements that honour, with radical acceptance, all aspects of self.

    We understand that nobody needs more practice enduring the stress of over-adaption.

  • Co -creating clear relationship agreements

    Practitioner Client relationship agreements are updated at regular intervals attuned with all parts of the self emerging from being hidden by shame.

    Co-created practices are agreed to in stages where clients learn to participate in inhabiting new ways of being with agency and choice.

  • Inhabiting new ways of being

    Relational embodiment practices facilitate people feeling more of themselves in practices within a container of radical acceptance. Clients can privately inhabit new ways of being with kindness risking islands of self-acceptance that with practice have the potential to build supporting people to reach the shores of belonging.

  • Interpersonal neurobiology

    We teach the interpersonal neurobiology of trauma and how to support agency with ways of co and self-regulating intensity. Holding space for people braving exiled aspects of the self requires specialist training in this field especially to work effectively with people who are living with the effects of developmental Trauma. We also understand that we are always working with aspects of being human that can disable ability to participate.

  • Integration of encapsulated exiled aspects of self

    Many Somatic Sex Educators specialise in this field as trauma shows up most intensely in relation to intimacy and sexual expression. Part of the training is to network and collaborate professionally with trauma specialists and psychotherapists when supporting the integration of encapsulated repressed aspects of self.

  • Courage to be seen

    Under the bandage, wounds from our dark nights of the soul remain unseen and these exiled aspects of ourselves are sent back into the unseen bowels of humanity to endure continued separation until we are supported with courage to be seen with radical acceptance

  • Repair

    Cycles of undigested exiled aspects of humanity are ultimately seeking to be seen from underneath the shame bandages that have been nursing them.

    Being seen requires acknowledgement and understanding so we can repair and allow our remorse to teach us to learn not to harm again. 

Post your unanswered Question here

We welcome you to post any questions that haven't been answered here and Katie or Kian will respond as soon as we have availability.