T H E I N S T I T U T E F O R
R E L A T I O N A L
H A R M O N Y
S T U D I E S & R E S E A R C H
Presents leading-edge, international training in Embodiment and Somatic Sexology, including professional training and exploring the Wheel of Consent®, Right Use of Power® and Body Poem™. We also host postgraduate continuous professional development (CPD) events for professionals working with facilitation, consent, bodywork, somatics, and sex education.
The Institute for Relational Harmony hosts and facilitates the following training pathways:
1st year: CSI Practitioner training - 6 months experiential community learning and practice followed by three months of supervised client sessions and certification as a Sexological Intimacy Coach
2nd year: CSB Practitioner training - 6 months of experiential community learning, including a two-week in-person embodiment intensive followed by three months of supervised client sessions and certification as a Sexological Bodywork Practitioner
3rd year: CSSE Coach Certificate - 9 months of experiential giving and receiving coaching and supervision, developing your Right Use of Power™ and Wheel of Consent™ mentorship skills, providing supervision to the CSI students along with spiral learning opportunities to revisit the online Sexological intimacy skills curriculum and to build your educational material to present in our postgraduate program.
4th year: CSSE Certificate in Supervision - 9 months of advanced experiential supervision training and joining Faculty in leadership educator roles. You will become part of the necessary ethical ways forward for our profession by providing Right Use of Power™ and Wheel of Consent™ informed supervision to bodyworkers & practitioners working in the field of Sexuality. This training is taught and supervised by Dr Phoebe Garland - a professionally trained supervisor.
We also offer free of charge ongoing Continuing Professional Development and peer supervision in our monthly Postgraduate Program during your certification phase and beyond that to support practitioners in maintaining ethical practice.
Welcome to our Institute for Relational Harmony Studies & Research!
The IRHS presents leading-edge, international professional training in ethical Somatic Sexology and Body Poem, inspiring professionals with practices for enhancing new ways of being in the emergence of living.
The Professional Body Poem training is intrinsically part of our trainings as our coaching model for radical acceptance. The Body Poem training serves as an evergreen library and continuing professional development community for deepening the practice of trusting creative spontaneity as a practitioner. Becoming a Body Poet with the emotional and erotic fluency of radical acceptance in the emergence of living requires kneeling at the precipice of presence, letting go, surrendering into the waves, and trusting in the self-organising intelligence of your creative spontaneity as a holder of space.
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.
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.
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 (700+ hour) training is the only certified training using the unique combination of The Wheel of Consent, The Right use of Power and Body Poem taught in English. We are based in the UK, Ireland, Kenya and Europe. Our CSB in-person Embodiment retreats are held in Portugal for easy travel, beauty, warm weather and finacially accessible residential costs. 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 Faculty includes 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 (CSB) in the second year, and in the third year the Coaching Certificate of Somatic Sex Education (CSSE) and in the fourth year the advanced CSSE Professional Supervisor Certificate of Somatic Sex Education.
Students of this 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
The Certificate in Sexological Intimacy Coaching CSI offers working from anywhere in the world, providing these essential intimacy skills for loving relationships in the privacy of their own homes. The training includes support with envisioning and planning your career development. Graduates have tremendous scope in choosing areas of specialisation: for example, by focussing on a particular interest group (e.g. older people, young people, specific cultures, queer, women, men, couples, group work); presenting concerns (e.g. overcoming fears of intimacy, loss of libido, body image confidence, developing ejaculatory choice, recovery after giving birth, becoming orgasmic, sexuality during menopause); or intimacy training using the Wheel of Consent practices. There is a comprehensive tool kit including mindful self-pleasure practices, scar tissue remediation, genital mapping and massage, anal mapping and massage, belly massage, and Breast massage.
CSIs facilitate guiding self-touch for personal empowerment and CSBs, after training in the Sexological Intimacy Coaching modalities, have the scope of practice to include intimate touch when appropriate. As a qualified CSI and CSB, having experienced all the taught modalities in your own body and been through your growth and transformation means that when working with clients, your presence and knowledge come from real embodied experience, and not from theory alone.
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 sopecialised 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, if you had 3 sessions per week, this would take less than 3 months.
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.
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.
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 - Founder
I specialise in practising radical acceptance with the versions of ourselves that secure our identity and belonging and the unthought knowns in 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 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 and teacher of The Sexological Intimacy Coaching Curriculum and the 3rd & 4th-year Supervision Training.
Dr Phoebe Garland is a certified CSB 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.
Her passion is to bring her expertise to the profession of somatic sex education, developing the curriculum, supervision and continued professional development structures and resources to support excellence in the profession.
At the Institute of Relational Harmony Studies Phoebe is developing and leading the 3rd and 4th year Supervision training, bringing teachings from The Right Use of Power to the CSB, CSSE and Supervision training curriculum, developing Core Competency assessment and providing supervision for practitioners.
