PSYCHEDELIC CO-JOURNEYING AND SOMATOSENSUAL THERAPY
SomatoSensual Psychedelic Work
Pleasure is a right. This is a relational, pleasure-centred way of working with sexuality, trauma and spirit before, during and after a psychedelic journey. It runs as a process, so that safety can be built and we both understand what we're working on.
Touch
Only when supportive and agreed to in a consent process.
Who
Individuals and relationships, of all genders, sexualities and relationship structures
Ethical
All processes are grounded in ethical training and practice.
Accountable
Member of the Safety Network and The Psychedelic Society.
What is SomatoSensual Work, in
plain terms?
Sexuality is something every person works with at some point, and for many of us it runs through a whole life. Sometimes the work is painful: shame learned in childhood, an assault, a relationship that ended badly, a body that changed, a religion that taught that desire was dangerous. Sometimes it's joyful: curiosity, a new relationship, a sense of calling that arrives through the body.
Grief is a good comparison. Loss is part of every life, so there is a kind of support built specifically for it, and a grieving person is met by someone who knows how to stay steady while it moves through them. SomatoSensual Therapy is that kind of support for the sexual side of life. It's unshaming, it's designed for this subject, and it works with the body and nervous system as well as with words.
SomatoSensual Psychedelic Work brings that support into the preparation, the journey and the integration around a psychedelic experience, for people who choose to include one.
Grief Counselling
FOR LOSS
Support built for one universal part of life. It names what's happening, doesn't shame it and knows how to hold it.
SomatoSensual Work
FOR SEXUALITY
Support built for another universal part of life. It names what's happening, doesn't shame it and knows how to hold it.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
Meeting instead of redirecting sexual material in psychedelic work
Standard facilitator training teaches facilitators to redirect a journeyer who becomes sexually expressive. There are sound reasons for the caution. Professional standards, such as the MAPS code of ethics, prohibit sexual contact between facilitators and the people they work with, and I keep to that in my own work: no sex with clients, and I never initiate anything sexual.
Redirecting a person's sexual material is a separate question from sexual contact. Nobody tells a facilitator to redirect grief. When grief arrives, the facilitator stays steady, the person is allowed to feel it, and it moves. SomatoSensual Therapy gives the erotic and sexual material the same treatment. It's met, honoured and held within clear limits.
A journeyer who is redirected can be left with the material unprocessed, and with shame, confusion or a sense that something was wrong with them for what arrived. In my experience, material that is met has room to move, and the people I work with often leave with a different relationship to their body and their story.
POST JOURNEY ACCOUNT
Hear about
it firsthand from a client
TOUCH AND CO-REGULATION
Why is touch part of this work?
Most psychedelic and therapeutic work keeps a no-touch rule, and I understand why. Touch has been used to harm people, including by practitioners, and a clear rule protects clients from that. During a psychedelic journey I keep to the strictest version: no physical contact while you aren't lucid enough to ask for it, refuse it or understand it.
A no-touch rule also leaves many people without something they need. In safe, controlled and consented conditions, touch and relational work let your body experience safety directly.
Nervous systems respond to each other. When a calm, attuned person is close by, a frightened body can borrow some of that calm. When we co-regulate, breathing slows down, muscles soften, and attention returns to the present. This is how babies first learn to settle. Many adults have had very little of it and grew up with caregivers who were frightened, absent or unpredictable. Our bodies learned to stay on guard.
I also work with people who are touch-starved. They live alone, or with a partner they no longer touch, or the only touch they've known has been rushed, sexual or unwanted. Shame keeps this quiet, so people rarely share how painful it is, and the isolation grows.
Our nervous system learns what safety feels like through experience. When you ask for a hand on your back and receive exactly that, when your no stops something at once, and when the person beside you stays calm and grounded, your body collects evidence that closeness can be safe. Once people have felt that, they have a blueprint to recognise and strive for.
TOUCH AND CO-REGULATION
How does touch connect to colonial history, queerness and feminism?
How touch works in SomatoSensual sessions
Touch is optional. You decide whether it's part of your work at all.
Anything physical is agreed in advance, while you're sober, and you set the limit.
We start small and build slowly, with pauses for your nervous system to settle.
You can lower the limit or stop at any moment. Raising it needs a later conversation when you're sober.
During a journey there is no contact while you aren't lucid enough to ask for it, refuse it or understand it. If you're deep in process with your eyes closed, the most I'll do is offer supportive touch. I ask first, and if you can't answer clearly, the answer is no touch.
There is no sex between me and clients.
Many cultures understand healing as something that happens between people, within families and communities, and often through the body. Colonisation and missionary religion brought a different story. Holding, tenderness, sensuality and closeness were treated as sinful or barbaric, and the indigenous cultures that valued them were labelled primitive. Western medicine and psychology grew up inside that story. They built models of care around the individual and around talking, with bodies kept apart and touch allowed for medical procedures or for sex, and very little in between.
Individualism adds another layer. We're taught to cope alone, and needing other people gets treated as a weakness. Many people I work with describe parents who didn't hug them when they were growing up.
In South Africa, our bodies, who we can love and how we can love have been policed and politicised by law. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 made marriage and sex across racial lines a crime until 1985. Sex between men stayed a crime until the Constitutional Court struck the law down in 1998, and same-sex couples could only marry from 2006. There is deep systemic wounding around openly displaying affection.
We are social creatures, and isolation harms us physically. A review of 148 studies covering 308,849 people found a 50% greater likelihood of survival among those with stronger social relationships (Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton, PLOS Medicine, 2010).
Queer feminism asks who gets touched with care, who gets touched without being asked, and who gets no touch at all. Women and queer and trans people have often learned touch as something done to them. Many people, men especially, learn that the only touch available to them comes through sex. Touch that you lead, where you set every limit and can stop anything, turns that order around.
Carrying the old narratives forward keeps people away from pleasure and from liberation. My answer to Unethical Touch isn't "No Touch": it's Ethical Touch: agreed in advance, specific, open to being stopped at any moment, and accountable to people outside the session. For me, reindigenising this work means returning touch, co-regulation, tenderness and community to their place in healing, with consent built into every step.