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
F A C U L T Y
‘We create a culture of mutual welcoming. This means we invite people into our experience. This means quieter voices are invited and welcomed. This means that everyone in this gets to belong fully to this group. Through acts of positive affirmation, celebrating each other’s risks, failures and successes, and offering loving feedback when requested, we come to belong to each other as educators weaving a world of liberation.’
- P A V I N I M O R A Y - C S B, C S S E
Katie Sarra founded the Institute of Relational Harmony Studies, where 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 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.
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 Gabon 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; Certified 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 17 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.
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 places. 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.’