West Edwards,
Certified Somatic Sex Educator
west.bodywork@gmail.com
www.westsomaticsexeducation.com/
@west.bodywork
Hours
TUESDAYS 3:00 – 7:45pm
Offerings
All sessions are 90 minutes
$80 – 200 sliding scale
I accept cash, debit, credit & e-transfer.
There is a $80 fee for missed appointments and late cancellations (less than 12 hrs notice) – these fees can be paid by e-transfer to west.bodywork@gmail.com.
Note: If cost is prohibitive please reach out – I reserve a portion of my practice as “Pay What You Can” for clients who require it access my services.
Free 30 minute consultation
An opportunity to ask questions and learn more about my work to see if we are a good fit.
Somatic Sex Education
Somatic Sex Education (SSE) works with the body and the energy that animates the body. SSE breaks down larger life goals into smaller skills that we practice together. We learn together to increase capacity for pleasure, joy, discomfort, new/challenging experiences, and ultimately to live more deeply in line with our authentic selves.
SSE is tailored to meet each client’s individual goals and intentions. Sessions may include a combination of exercises, games, meditation, client directed touch, education, and take home practice.
Somatic Sex Education has the word ‘sex’ in the title because it is a very unique part of this modality. Welcoming your whole self may include your erotic self but SSE is about so much more than sex! The tools learned with SSE have the potential to nourish every part of your life, strengthening relationships with yourself and others.
Somatic Sex Education offers tools to help with
- Experiencing and expanding pleasure
- Support exploring gender or sexuality
- Rediscovering and reconnecting with pleasure and sexuality with a disability, after surgery, injury, illness, or any major life changes
- Discovering the erotic self
- New skills to navigate relationships, communication, and intimacy
- Supporting your journey in healing from sexual trauma
- Shifting unwanted sexual patterns
- Staying present during intimacy
- Exploring embodied consent
- Connecting to desire, preference, and asking for what you want
- Welcoming counter-normative ways of being
- Befriending difficult parts of ourselves
- Addressing pelvic pain, numbness or challenges with orgasm
Learn more about Somatic Sex Education here, somaticsexeducators.com/about/
Scar Remediation Therapy
The body creates brilliant ways to heal and protect itself. Working with scars starts with honouring the job that scars do: they hold us together and create a protective boundary and closure between in/out. By meeting this boundary with presence and touch the body can begin to soften and the possibility for sensation and new shapes emerge. It is imperative that we develop active dialogue between us in our sessions and encourage the receiver to be active in the process. Scar work involves hands on body work but it is still something that we do together as opposed to something “done to you”. Scar work can play a particularly supportive role in gender affirming surgeries.
Scar work sessions are tailored to each client uniquely and may include exercises to develop communication and trust between client and practitioner along with client directed touch, education, and take home practice.
Bringing in touch work to past injuries and scar healing can
- increase circulation and blood flow
- increase sensation and encourage nerve growth
- increase mobility and relieve tightness and pain
- increase awareness and felt sense of your whole body
- support you on your journey
- teach you new tools for at home care
“I started seeing West after a bottom surgery experience that left me feeling physically damaged. I had more scarring than I had really bargained for, which was having a lasting, compounding effect with the psychological trauma of having been repeatedly violated and disregarded in the medical system. I always felt like my experiences, my gender identity, and my autonomy were at the center of West’s care. West worked with me and my body through this absolutely magical intuitive body work that gave the subtle, otherwise invisible and uncharted scar, fascial, and energetic networks a voice, recognition and holding. I was able to develop a visual map of scar anchors throughout my body. With this improved sense of proprioception, I have found living in and tending to my body easier. I have experienced both physical and emotional/energetic shifts from our work together that allowed me to re-integrate pleasurable experiences again.”
Cancellation policies
Clients who provide less than 12 hrs before the scheduled time or not show for an appointment may be subject to an $80 missed appointment fee.
Informed consent forms
SOMATIC SEX EDUCATION INFORMED CONSENT (pdf)
SCAR WORK INFORMED CONSENT (pdf)
About West
West (they/them) is a Somatic Sex Educator (SSE), painter, kitchen witch, and a Pisces. Blending science, spirituality, care work, and relationships has always been at the core of West’s learning and it brings them joy to continue down this path and to share this learning with others.
West has been working with bodies since 2013 but started their formal training with Caffyn Jesse and their in-person Intimacy Educators Training in 2018. West completed their Somatic Sex Educators Certification 4 years later in 2022 at the Institute For the Study of Somatic Sexology (practicum supervised by Katie Spataro). Further trainings completed with Holistic Resistance (“Disrupting Our Whiteness” – 2022) and Dr. Betty Martin (“Like A Pro: Wheel Of Consent Training For Practitioners” – 2022).
West is particularly excited about how SSE can be of service to the communities they are a part of with a lens of harm reduction, Disability Justice, and creativity as a way towards joyful survival.
For many years West witnessed a need in their communities for competent and affirming care for folks who have had gender affirming surgeries. As well as education and tools for accessing pleasure, communication and embodiment. West has focused their training on working within their queer, trans, and sex working communities.
Living with chronic pain unexplained by western medicine led West down a path of endless learning and informs their deep respect for the body’s mysteries and inherent wisdoms.
West is in the process of completing certification as a Death Doula with the Home Hospice Association and also works on the Peer Health Advocate Training Team at PEERS.
When they are not working one on one with people West can be found following their dog through the tall grass, reading stacks of books in their arm chair, and making dinner for a kitchen filled with friends.