What is Body Awakening ©?
“When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.” – Dr. Dan Siegel
Body Awakening © is the use of soft, slow, present touch combined with breath and imagery to awaken the body to increased sensations, expand capacity for pleasure and support sexual functioning. Body Awakening can be facilitated by practitioners supporting clients to attune to their body, increase pleasure and resume sexual functioning. Alternatively, it is a wonderful practice for couples and individuals wanting to learn more about themselves and each other, explore pleasure, build capacity for edging orgasms and maintain high states of arousal without the stress of goal-oriented intimacy.
Body Awakening as a modality was inspired by the symbiotic relationship between attuned mothers and their infants. Our initial experiences with attunement begin when we’re born and we attune to the sensations in our own bodies to feel our needs for safety, hunger, closeness, touch and more. Attuned caregivers seek to understand what their infant needs through skin-to-skin contact; touching, feeling, noticing and listening to their infant’s body so they can respond appropriately.
A sense of safety is essential for infants to attune to themselves and this – along with how well their needs are attuned to by their caregivers – will impact their developing self-concept, body awareness, intimate experiences, capacity for feeling pleasure and inform their understanding of how important their needs are in relation to others.
Unfortunately, not all infants grow up within the safety of an attuned relationship and the effects of this are evident in many of the adults I work with. Clients come to me struggling with sexual functioning, performance anxiety, shame, disconnection from their body and desiring “something more” but not knowing what “more” can be. A commonality amongst many of them is a lack of attunement to the felt sense of their own body, which holds the wisdom of what they need to feel safe and connected. Safety and connection are essential for awakening the body to experience more pleasure and optimal sexual functioning.
This Body Awakening Course teaches practitioners, individuals and couples to attune to themselves, learn the language of their body’s expressions, understand their needs in intimacy, increase sensations and support sexual functioning. With this embodied self-understanding, they will then learn to help others attune to themselves, connect to their own breath, breathe to feel more, focus on sensations of soft, slow and present touch and use imagery designed to awaken the body to an expanded capacity for pleasure.
Body Awakening recreates the attuned relationship that infants and children need to feel safe to connect to the wisdom of their body and trust that the people caring for them will listen. The lack of self-attunement is at the core of many of our adult intimacy issues. As the facilitator of this style of touch, your present attention to their body and their body’s signals provides them with a mirror into their inside world that they might not be aware of. Your outer reflection of their inner world, as expressed through their body, will offer them the safety needed to understand what gets in the way of their pleasure, self-awareness to recognize how this is being expressed through their body and ultimately awaken them to feeling greater sensations and deeper states of pleasure. To feel pleasure is to enjoy feeling, and in order to expand our capacity for feeling, we need to feel safe enough to attune to the sensations in our body that are awakened by this style of touch.
“Body Awakening has been a revelation for me, personally and professionally. As a certified Somatic Sex Educator working with clients for over 10 years, I felt I had turned over every stone offering new insights into embodied erotic awareness, arousal edging, awakening, pleasure, sensate focus, and down-regulating nervous system via touch. Body Awakening provided new lessons and somatic understanding in each of these realms at once.” – Rahi Chun, Somatic Sexual Wholeness
About Me
I am a Trauma Informed, Holistic Sex and Intimacy Counselor, Genital Dearmoring Practitioner, Orgasm, Intimacy and Breathwork Coach, Bodysex® Facilitator and the Creator of Body Awakening ©.
In my early twenties, I spent several years living amongst the Maasai tribe in East Africa and became fascinated with the way Maasai mothers attuned to their infants bodies to learn and understand their needs. Rather than thinking they knew what was best for their babies, they listened to them – feeling, noticing, and interpreting what their body was asking for – then responded accordingly. It was the most beautiful example of intimacy I had ever seen and I carried this example forward into parenting my own five children.
Learn More About Me
As my children grew up I realized that, having focused so many years on their needs, I’d been avoiding doing the same for myself. I felt completely disconnected from my own body and unsatisfied by the lack of pleasure in my sex life. I had no idea how to change these things within my relationship so I went to the source for answers – ME. Once again following the example of the Maasai mamas, I applied their model of attunement to myself – devoting time daily to touching my body and listening to what it could tell me. The more I touched, the more I felt, and the more I felt the more I understood what my body needed to experience pleasure. Orgasms became plentiful and, while simply having them had once been revolutionary for me, I was now realizing I wanted something more. I practiced playing with my breath and using imagery to increase and plateau sensations of my touch – allowing me to edge orgasms and remain in extended states of pleasure for longer. My marriage ended and when I expanded this practice into my new intimate relationship, we both experienced extended states of pleasure. Learning to reconnect to my own needs had allowed me to awaken my body and provided me with the attuned intimacy I had always longed for.
For the past nine years, I have supported thousands of clients to connect to their bodies, explore pleasure and enhance their sexual intimacy. While I have been practicing Body Awakening informally in my personal life for several years, I was called to offer it as a therapy three years ago, when working with a client who required something beyond what my services provided. Since then, I have helped hundreds of clients learn to attune to their bodies, expand their capacity for pleasure and restore sexual functioning. My passion for this approach led me to design Body Awakening as a course so that practitioners, couples and individuals can learn to embody these understandings and become empowered to apply the practices in professional settings, intimate relationships and with their own bodies. The Maasai mamas taught me that the answers to what our bodies need are within us, and have been within us all along, we just need the safety and connection required to listen. Will you join me in learning how?
“Natasha has developed a new sensate-focus modality that offers individuals greater agency and understanding of their own arousal system, practitioners a beautiful new toolbox of skills to add to their business, and couples endless adventures in arousal and pleasure without the distraction of being hijacked by goals or performance. I cannot recommend Body Awakening and Natasha as a facilitator/teacher highly enough.” – Rahi Chun, Somatic Sexual Wholeness
Who can benefit from Body Awakening Course?
- Practitioners wanting to offer a new modality to support their clients with mind/body connection, enhancing sensations, building capacity for pleasure and restoring sexual functioning
- Couples wanting to explore and play with their arousal and pleasure in a non-performance or goal-oriented way
- Couples interested in deepening their emotional and intimate connection, growing and learning together
- People wanting to awaken their body to feeling more sensations
- Individuals and couples interested in gaining self-awareness, deepening their understanding of their body, arousal, pleasure, orgasm and expand their intimacy “toolbox”
- People interested in learning how to curiously touch in a present and non-goal-oriented way
- Individuals and couples wanting to experience more pleasure
- People interested in developing a mindful touching practice
- People wanting “something more” in their sexual intimacy
- Couples and individuals struggling with erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, difficulty orgasming, performance anxiety etc.
- Couples and individuals who are bored with their sexual intimacy
- People wanting to learn to attune to their own body and understand what they need to feel safe to experience optimum arousal in intimacy
- People wanting to learn to attune to other’s bodies
“The breathing is so, so important. Not just for staying in pleasure but I notice myself doing it at work when I feel stressed or when someone’s around me that has bad energy. It’s crazy what I can handle when I breathe” – Body Awakening client
What’s Included In The Body Awakening Course
This course has online, in-person and certification options. The Online Body Awakening Course is foundational for all and stands alone. A 4 day, in-person training will be held after the completion of the online course for individuals interested in guided hands-on experience with attunement, presence, touch and supporting others to sustain high levels of arousal (edging). For those seeking certification, the online course, in-person training and further learning assessments are required.
The 8-month live, online course includes 3 Explorations: Attuning to Self, Attuning to Another and Awakening to Life. Within these 3 Explorations are 18 modules, 14 live (and recorded) Zoom calls and multiple demo videos designed to support you to embody and apply the Body Awakening principles with yourself, clients, intimate partners and life.
Course Begins February 24th, 2025!
Attuning to Self
This exploration will begin in infancy, inquiring if and how your earliest environments supported the safety and closeness needed for you to attune to yourself and be attuned to. From here, you will learn how those early experiences with attunement formed your “window of capacity” and how it relates to your adult experiences with pleasure, orgasm and sexual functioning. You will then learn to attune to your breath, discovering your baseline and recognizing it as a tool for self-awareness and understanding. With this discovery you will learn to change your baseline and breathe in ways that support safety, feeling more and expanding your capacity for pleasure. From here you will begin to curiously and mindfully explore the sensations of your body using slow, soft and present touch. As your capacity for feeling more increases, so will your pleasure and you will learn (if you wish) to combine breath, touch and imagery to identify the edge of your orgasm, plateau and prolong sensations of pleasure and develop an understanding of what your body needs for optimal sexual functioning. The self-awareness you develop through attuning to your own body, breath and thoughts that get in the way of your ability to remain present, will be essential to your ability to safely attune to another.
Attuning to Another
In this exploration, you will learn how to apply your understandings from Attuning to Self, to Attuning to Another by embodying the qualities of an attuned caregiver. You will begin the process of attuning to others with an attunement conversation where you will become curious about their body language, experiences in infancy and intimacy as well as what they’re hoping to gain from Body Awakening. This conversation will support your understanding of them as well as promote safety as you prepare to begin touching. You will practice with them attuning to what “yes” and “no” feel like as sensations in your bodies to further support trust and safety for both of you. Just as you learned to attune to your own breath, you will learn to attune to theirs, identifying their baseline way of breathing and supporting them to create a new baseline that allows them to feel more. From this, you will learn to connect to a place of reverence towards them, their body and their stories as you apply the same soft, slow touch that you practiced on yourself. You will curiously discover different ways and parts to touch that increase sensations for both your hands and the body of the person(s) you touch. You will learn how to apply trauma-informed practice including safety considerations, things that can show up in their body or yourself and how Body Awakening can be a corrective experience for people who’ve experienced trauma. Throughout these practices, you will be reminded of the importance of being present and mindful for both you as the giver of touch, and for them, the receivers of the touch. You will learn how to identify shifts in your own baseline as well as theirs that signify a lack of presence and be able to support both of you to come back to that. As their “window of capacity” begins to expand, you will provide the safety and encouragement for them to expand it further through a combination of touch, breath and imagery. If applicable, you can safely guide them to discover their own edge of orgasm, learn to plateau that edge to prolong their pleasure and discover what their body needs for optimal sexual functioning. Interwoven throughout these two explorations are continual opportunities for self-attunement, reflection and learning.
Awakening to Life
In this final exploration, you will integrate your learnings by applying the Body Awakening © principles to Awaken To Life. When you Awaken To Life, every moment holds within it an opportunity to experience pleasure. This exploration also provides practitioners with ways to support their clients to continue their awakenings and ways for individuals and couples to carry forward the practices into their intimacy.
The Online Body Awakening Course Includes:
- 200-plus page manual detailing all that you need to learn and understand in order to practice Body Awakening with clients, yourself and in intimate relationships
- 14 live (and recorded) 1.5-2hr Zoom sessions over the course of 8 months, designed to guide and support your understanding from the explorations and modules
- Course begins February 24th, 2025 with zoom dates as follows: March 4th, March 18th, April 8th, April 22nd, May 6th, May 20th, June 10th, June 24th, July 29th, August 19th, Sept. 2nd, Sept. 16th, Oct. 7th, Oct 21st
- Self-reflection exercises for each module to support integration of learning
- Video demo of attuning to breath
- Video demo of attuning to touch with self and others
- Video demos of widening capacity for feeling pleasure through edging and plateauing pleasure using breath, touch and imagery
- Video demo of working with trauma
- Recorded audios of guided visualization practices
- Homework to practice for integration of learnings
- Group support in WhatsApp
- Couples are welcome to take the course together through one email and one zoom link (refer to fees for couples)
- Option to attend an in-person Body Awakening Training to practice and gain more confidence in your skills of attunement/touch etc.
- To get the full benefits of this course anticipate spending 25hrs for zoom learning, plus approximately 51hrs of reading, practice and videos through the duration of the 8 months. This works out to a time commitment of approximately 2.5hrs/week.
The In-Person Body Awakening Training Includes:
- 4 day in-person training in November, 2025, Saskatoon, SK. Canada (dates TBD)
- Lunch and snacks for the duration of the 4 days
- Brief overview of course contents
- In-person demonstrations to support your learning
- Practice attuning to another’s baseline breath, supporting them to create a new baseline and teaching expanded breathing practices
- Hands-on practice attuning to touch, using different parts and in different ways with multiple people
- Practice supporting others to use imagery to enhance their pleasure
- Practice supporting others to combine touch, breath and imagery to enhance their pleasure
- Gain hands-on experience with Trauma-informed practice
- Practice with edging and high states of arousal depending on interest and consent
- My guidance, expertise and help with everything pertaining to practicing Body Awakening with clients or in your intimate relationships
- Accommodations not included
- Registration for in-person training open until August 1st.
- Note: In-person training open to individuals and practitioners only. Couples interested in in-person support can come for private sessions with me at $325/2hrs or contact me to discuss the delicacies of practicing as a couple in a group setting.
The Body Awakening Certification Training Includes:
- Everything included in the Body Awakening Online Course
- 200-plus page Practitioners manual
- The in-person Body Awakening Training
- 3, 1 on 1 Zoom or in-person sessions with Natasha spread over the course of the training
- 3, Body Awakening personal sessions facilitated by Natasha
- Written record of required practice sessions
- Feedback on submitted self-reflection and “Integration Understanding” questions
- Take home final exam
- Approximately an additional 1-2hrs/week required for answering “Integration Understanding” questions and practice. Total time commitment of approximately 4-5hrs/week
- 1-year time allowance to complete the training requirements (barring exceptional circumstances)
Fees
Individual Online Course:
- Super early bird before January 20th, 2025 – $1500 CDN
- Early bird before February 1st, 2025 – $1700 CDN
- Regular price until March 1st, 2025 – $1900 CDN
Couples Online Course:
- Super early bird before January 20th, 2025 – $1900 CDN
- Early bird before February 1st, 2025 – $2100 CDN
- Regular price until March 1st, 2025 – $2500 CDN
- Note: Couples online course available to one email only
In-Person Training:
- Early bird before March 1st, 2025 – $1500 CDN
- Regular price until August 1st, 2025 – $1600 CDN
- Note: Individuals and practitioners must be comfortable with nudity and touch with others
Certification Training:
- $4950 CDN
- Note: Individuals registered in the Online Course who wish to transfer to Certification Training may do so as long as they can meet the additional requirements before the In-Person Training
*payment plan available on request
*payment via e-transfer is preferred. An additional 4% fee will be added to payments made through PayPal to cover their transaction fees.
FAQs
- How much time will this course take? There are 18 modules in this course and included in them are 14, 1.5-2hr live Zoom sessions between March 4th and October 21st. (1.5hr content and 30 min for questions) The Zoom sessions are scheduled 2X/month for the months of March, April, May, June, September and October and 1X/month in July and August. In addition to each Zoom there will be 1-4hrs of reading, practice and videos to watch per module which amounts to 1-2hrs/week. If you’re not pursuing certification, you’re welcome to do as little or as much as you like, while keeping in mind that you will get back what you put in. For individuals pursuing certification, more time in addition to the Zooms will be required, approximately 4hrs/week.
- Cancellation Policy: Transfer of tuition to a following year’s course can be provided under certain circumstances, however no refunds will be offered.
- Do I need a background in sex and intimacy to do this course? No, you don’t. Anyone and everyone can benefit from this course and it is designed to meet the needs of participants of all backgrounds.
- Can I do this course with my partner? Yes, you and your partner are welcome to enrol in the Online Course through one email address and using one Zoom account. Couples who are interested in in-person experiential learning are welcome to book 2hr sessions with me where I will support and guide you in your practice together. Couples interested in the In-Person group training can email me to discuss the many considerations for couples practicing this in a group setting.
- Is the manual downloadable/printable? Yes, it is, and I encourage every participant to download and print it to support their practices and understandings.
- How long will I have access to the content for? You will have access to your manual forever if you download it, and the rest of the course will be accessible to you for 1 year from the start date.
- How long can I take to complete certification? Under normal circumstances, you have 1 year to complete certification. If there are any extenuating circumstances preventing this, please talk to me.
- What’s the difference between getting certified or not? If you become certified you can legally call yourself a Body Awakening Practitioner and offer this as a service to clients. Without certification, you can’t do that. As well, the certification process is more extensive and in-depth which will support the deepening of your skills and confidence in practicing Body Awakening.
- Do I need other training in Sex and Intimacy to offer this to clients?The certification training is designed for practitioners to develop the skills that they need to offer Body Awakening to clients within that scope of practice. As certified practitioners we can all benefit from additional trainings in Body Work, Sex and Intimacy Counselling etc. as well as life experiences that enhance our understandings and limit our biases. * Note: The Body Awakening Online Course by itself does not qualify you to offer this to clients.
- If I have a lot of trauma, can I still do this course? Yes, absolutely. This means you do as much of the self-reflection and practice as feels safe for your body while at the same time, supporting the widening of your window of capacity. This means you need to only go as far as is safe for your body while at the same time, supporting the widening of your edges. This course however does not take the place of individual therapy that may be necessary to integrate and heal your trauma.
- If I’m already a practitioner, how can this course complement my work? From my experience, there is nothing even close to Body Awakening offered by anyone. This course is unique and one of a kind and will complement existing Body work beautifully – especially with clients struggling to connect with their body, want to feel more and who desire optimal sexual arousal and functioning.
- If I don’t have a partner, can I still do this course? Yes, the foundation of this course is based on attuning to yourself and requires only you to do that. For the Attuning to Another exploration, it will be helpful to have someone to practice with (not required) and they can be a friend, child, elderly person etc. Body Awakening supports attunement and expanding capacity which can involve sexual touch but isn’t limited to it. As well, this course will support any future intimate experiences you may have.