Sexological Bodywork Training Courses

The Sexological Bodywork Homestudy invites you to experience how humans learn sex. Profound embodied learning takes place when we repeat a practice mindfully over time. Erotic practice is fun, rewarding and transformational when we use this conscious, focused, yoga model of education. 

The Sexological Bodywork Homestudy, offered by Joseph Kramer, Ph.D., the creator of the profession, offers a wealth of teachings and practices available here for all types of sex educators and coaches. Your lovers and friends will also benefit from your learning in this training! Learn about the Sexological Bodywork Homestudy curriculum in the five course descriptions below.

ENROLL NOW   in the Sexological Bodywork Homestudy (the Yoga of Sex)

Though this course does not provide professional certification, many students do use this training to prepare for future certification as Sexological Bodyworkers at the following schools:

The Institute of Somatic Sexology in Australia

Pacific Center of Somatic Sexology in Hawaii

The Institute for Relational Harmony Studies in Portugal

The School of Somatic Sexology in the UK and Ireland

Instituto Latino Americano de Sexologia Somática in Brazil

Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education in Canada

Institut für Somatisches Lernen, Sexualität und Körperarbeit in Germany

Orgasmic Yoga: Practicing Sex

Humans learn sex through practice, especially solo erotic practice. Your clients will develop new sexual skills and capacities by regularly engaging in mindful, erotic exercises we call Orgasmic Yoga. Your clients may need Orgasmic Yoga coaching to make the best use of their breathing, sexual arousal, savoring, movement, touch, placement of attention, and awareness of intention. Just as you will help your clients choreograph their solo sex sessions, you are invited to create seven solo sex sessions for yourself.

Teachings Explored in Course One

• Course One encourages you to immerse yourself in solo sex explorations with creativity and with a willingness to feel sensations.
• Remaining mindful of intention during erotic practice enhances learning in your clients and triggers profound changes in their prefrontal cortex.
• Most sexual learning takes place outside your clients’ comfort zone.
• Therapist Rick Hanson’s “installation” method helps your clients remember new erotic skills.
• Evaluating practice sessions: reflection questions are suggested about stated intentions, feeling-states, surprises, distractions, habits, frozenness and more. 
• Twenty-five different Orgasmic Yoga choreographies are available for individuals to make use of in creating their practice sessions.
• Do your clients have sex in order to feel, to connect or to play?
• Standing during self touch allows your clients to bring more movement into their practice while breaking long-term habits.
• Clients will not learn just by watching videos, but by watching and involving their bodies.
• Conscious breathing at different rhythms during solo sex helps us awaken our erotic potential.
• In addition to sexual learning, erotic practice brings innumerable benefits for the brain and the body.

Learning Materials in Course One 

• 20 videos (172 min)
• 5 essays (52 pages)
• 7 practice sessions

Coaching and Witnessing Mindful Masturbation

Sexological Bodyworkers help their clients to choose mindful practices that transform long-term habits, routine sex lives, feelings of shame, difficulties in arousal, lack of sensation and chronic disembodiment. Body-based practices like Orgasmic Yoga are surprisingly effective and efficient in helping clients have better sex.  

Witnessing a client’s solo sex sessions is one of the most powerful practices utilized by Sexological Bodyworkers. Witnessing requires an attitude of acceptance and kindness and provides a fertile space for the student to notice what is happening in their own body.  Non-judgmental witnessing is the foundation for all Sexological Bodywork sessions.

Teachings Explored in Course Two

• The intention of Sexological Bodyworkers is not to “fix” clients or solve sexual problems, but rather to help their clients have better sex.
• Even though our work is about fostering good sex, it is important to recognize the traumatic influences of religious upbringing, cultural norms and socioeconomic conditions on our clients’ sexual health. 
• Betty Dodson’s approach to coaching masturbation: begin with an exploration of genital anatomy before clitoral stimulation with a Magic Wand.
• Introduction to Mindful Masturbation Coaching by Joseph Kramer (complete text)
• Arousal coaching involves: 1) awareness of the aliveness within 2) noticing any changes in our habitual ways of arousal and 3) exploring those changes with on-going practice.
• Body scanning may be the most important mindfulness process we can teach our clients.
• Daniel Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness body scan is explored because it brings attention to more dimensions of embodiment than most body scans.
• Skilled erotic coaches can discern the degree of sensory-motor amnesia (or genital numbness) in their clients by witnessing them masturbate.
• Masturbation coaching and masturbation witnessing are two powerful but very different modalities of Sexological Bodywork. And can be done over Zoom.
• Witnessing your clients masturbate helps them to break habits. Watch them with curiosity and unconditional acceptance, avoiding judgements and making no evaluations during or after the session.

Learning Materials in Course Two 

• 10 videos (103 min)
• 3 essays (120 pages)
• 4 practice sessions

Professional Preparations for Touch

Sexological Bodyworkers work with a “code of ethics that prohibits sexual and romantic relationships between practitioner and client. Our professional education includes hygiene standards, anatomical knowledge, sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual orientation, practice with empowering vulnerable clients, intake and assessment procedures and commitment to client-centered care.” (From Sexological Bodywork teacher Caffyn Jesse). In all Sexological Bodywork sessions, erotic touch is intended to be for the benefit, learning and pleasure of the client. 

Anal Explorations

“Virtually anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, can become more aware of the anal area, learn to relax anal-rectal muscles and expand their capacity to enjoy whichever types of anal stimulation may be desired. Required, however, is sufficient motivation, a little patience, and a clear idea of how to proceed. Most important is the willingness to devote regular time and attention to anal exploration and to carry it out with calm persistence.” Anal explorations as described by Jack Morin, PhD., co-creator of Sexological Bodywork and author of Anal Pleasure and Health.

Some Sexological Bodyworkers work on the anal area as a metaphor for waking up the whole body. This can be true and effective when working with any part of body, but it is especially effective when working with the anal area because that part of the body is so often shut down and disassociated. Often, the results of anal work are incredibly powerful.

Teachings Explored in Course Three

• Sexological Bodyworkers create safety by encouraging clients to direct their own touch sessions.
• Intake and assessment include: Clarity about why clients have come to us and an agreement about what will take place during the session. Course Three presents five different intake templates.
• Impeccable hygiene protocols create safety for the client and the practitioner. Sexological Bodywork professional protocols include one-way touch, informed consent, confidentiality, and focus on the client’s bodily experience and not the practitioner’s.  
• Knowing one’s Core Erotic Theme can be invaluable for understanding the motivations and passions of both the practitioner and the client.
• External anal massage (without entering the anus) offers a transformative, safe and pleasurable experience.
• Sensory-motor amnesia (the numbing of the neurology) is common in the anal area. This numbness is seldom contained and often extends to the whole pelvic area, negatively affecting sexual functioning.
• Jack Morin, author of Anal Pleasure and Health, offers step-by-step guidance for self-anal exploration.
• In six hours of video, Chester Mainard and other skilled anal practitioners demonstrate solo and partnered, external and internal anal massage to guide your practice and learning.
• The interruption of pleasure by shame is indicative of the inability to maintain mindful attention during sexual experiences, either solo or partnered. The practices and teachings in this course assist individuals in maintaining mindful attention during sex.
• Anal Mapping is a contemplative touch practice that brings awareness and sensation to the tissues of the anal canal, rectum and prostate. This pleasurable practice helps the receiver to train their placement of attention.

Learning Materials in Course Three 

• 16 videos (354 min)
• 4 essays (95 pages)
• 4 practice sessions

Erotic Massage Dancing

All too often, erotic massage involves a bodyworker sexually stimulating a passive receiver. This is not the case in the sex education practice known as Erotic Massage Dancing (EMD) or “active receiving”. In this somatic practice, an erotic bodyworker (an EBodyworker) provides stimulation to a receiver (a Dancer) to help them focus their attention on their own sexual arousal. The Dancer actively brings an awareness to their own sexual arousal through breathing rhythms, simple body movements, sounds and self-touch.

Erotic Massage Dancing invites the receiver to “dance their arousal” by bringing more movement, sound, breathing and self-touch into their massage session. In addition, the Dancer guides the EBodyworker’s touch. These practices help the Dancer to regulate their level of arousal and integrate it into all parts of their body.

Teachings Explored in Course Four

• Course Four is where your hands and heart are educated in offering erotic bodywork. The more skilled you are with erotic touch, the better the experience will be for your client. However, even individuals who do not have a background in massage or erotic touch can effectively use the savoring techniques taught in Course Four to offer powerful somatic learning to their clients. 
• Managing sexual arousal involves learning new sexual skills while letting go of limiting sexual arousal habits. Some of the most common arousal habits involve shallow or constricted breathing, limited body movement, squeezing of thighs, mechanical rubbing of the genitals, stifling of sound, and going away from the body into fantasy or thinking.
• One of the joys of erotic massage is accessing different types of arousal. With your help, your clients will discover states of arousal that make learning easy, offer full body pleasure and open up their hearts.
• In EMD, one learns to manage sexual arousal with touch, breath and movement to either increase sexual arousal, decrease sexual arousal or maintain a level of arousal. The increase of sexual arousal, which involves an increase in neural firing, is called up-regulation. Down-regulation names the calming of sexual arousal and a decrease in neural firing.
• Erotic massage separates the experience of giving and receiving touch. The Dancer can practice regulating arousal and savoring sensations without having to be concerned about a partner’s pleasure.
• Guiding your clients in fast circular breathing during erotic bodywork helps them to stay focused on their bodily sensations and interrupts habits of going off into erotic fantasy or self-judgment. 
• Ten different breathing recordings will guide your practice of circular breathing, Wim Hof breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, resonance frequency breathing, and more. Different ways of breathing change how we feel the sexual arousal in our bodies.
• Several ways of moving while receiving erotic massage and breathing are taught, including Betty Dodson’s Rock ‘n Roll Orgasm, where you “move your pelvis like Elvis.”
• The Five-Minute Savoring practice helps the EBodyworker learn erotic touch skills and helps the Dancer learn placement of attention skills.
• During an erotic massage, conscious breathing synchronized with body movement can spread feelings of sexual arousal throughout the body.
• The erotic roots of Sexological Bodywork can be found in the Taoist Erotic Massage created by Joseph Kramer–where the emphasis is on sexual arousal rather than orgasm/release.
• Course Four ends with several videos demonstrating somatic creativity during erotic massage.

Learning Materials in Course Four 

• 11 videos (86 min)
• 3 essays (13 pages)
• 10 audio breathing tapes
• 4 practice sessions

Trauma-Informed Erotic Bodywork

Sexological Bodyworkers are not trauma therapists, rather we are trauma-informed somatic sex educators. “A trauma-informed practice means we have learned how to spot the living effects of trauma in a human body, to assess when a client is in acute distress and in need of more specific professional support and how to, above all, create a space and a way-of-being in our practices where we are eminently careful of and sensitive to the many ways trauma shows up and can be triggered.” From Trauma, Sexological Bodyworker Christiane Pelmas’ textbook available in this course.

Genital Mapping

Genital Mapping is a contemplative touch practice developed by Joseph Kramer that brings awareness and sensation to forgotten tissues. With the tip of one finger, the mapper touches points on the vulva, vaginal wall or penis. The receiver decides where the mapper touches, how long a point is held and with how much pressure. Using touch to consciously bring attention to specific tissues of the genitals is crucial for reclaiming and coming home to the body.

Awakening Sensations

The loss of sensation from scar tissue, especially in the genital area, is accepted as normal. The good news is that massage on scar tissue overtime, especially with castor oil, can bring back erotic sensations. These regular touch sessions for remediating scar tissue are best done as a self-practice.

Teachings Explored in Course Five

• Assumptions we make about gender can shape and misshape our relationship with clients and the choices we offer them.
• Barbara Carrellas of Urban Tantra demonstrates both intake and ways to massage trans bodies.
• Massaging a two-month old genital scar with castor oil helps avoid the spread of fibrotic tendrils and brings back sensation.
• Somatic educator Staci Haines offers a series of body-based exercises in her film Healing Sex (2 hrs), for use in our trauma-informed work with clients.
• As a trauma-informed practitioner, how might you support clients in feeling grounded, safe and empowered?
• The prolonged arousal of erotic bodywork can help us move beyond sexual habits and facilitate interoceptive awareness. This creates the opportunity for our clients to make good decisions. 
• Jaiya offers guidance for teaching intimate touch skills to couples. This is crucial sex education.

Learning Materials in Course Five 

• 21 videos (322 min)
• 9 essays (124 pages)
• 4 practice sessions