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. Practitioners and students of our school do not cultivate or act upon their arousal and do not engage in relationships with other students during the training or with clients or volunteers.

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.

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.

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.

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 emerge from the depths of unconscious realms. During arousal states, recipients may find themselves navigating deep waters and discovering depths of themselves and birthing somatic openings and epiphanies. When facilitated with a practitioner who has emotional and erotic fluency, the Practitioner is simultaneously on the beach and in the water and not out of their depth. This response flexibility is essential for facilitating these kinds of experiences and is of special focus in the Sexological Bodywork training.

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 has not been effectively been practised.

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 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" - it has the potential for expansion of consciousness which can paradoxically burn as well as heal.” Katie Sarra