Somatic Sex Education and Sexological Bodywork are counter-normative healing and wholing professions - as a field, we strive to be anti-oppressive and liberatory. Yet as a collective that is still populated by a majority of white practitioners and teachers, we have much to learn about weaving both racial safety and racial justice into our work. The stories of racialization, racism, and colonization are woven deeply into our bodies, in an infinite number of ways, and these stories hold huge implications for the ways that intimacy and touch can either heal or harm.

In this live webinar, Kai Cheng Thom, SSE and Adjunct Faculty at the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, will present some basic concepts and practices that we may use to work towards "somatic racial safety" in the field of intimacy and erotic healing. We will explore frameworks such as cultural humility, embodied attachment, sexualized racism, and collective trauma healing, and experiment with practices for feeling and attending to the impacts of racism and racial privilege in our bodies.

Please note that this will be a mixed space - that is, Black Indigenous, and People of Colour as well as white folks are invited. We ask that all participants come prepared for a deeply care-filled and sensitive discussion, and that those with white, light-skinned, and other forms of racial privilege come ready to share space with response-ability and account-ability. PLEASE READ BEFORE WATCHING: We recognize that during the beginning of the webinar it was awkward and inappropriate for Corinne, a white-bodied practitioner, to take up so much space with her own thoughts and feelings, when the topic of this webinar was “somatic racial safety”. We want to say “Oops”, recognizing that this had a harmful impact for some BIPOC attendees. We are committed to doing better in the future