PASSION & PRESENCE®
Mindful Couples Sex Therapy
16-Month Online Training Certificate Program For Helping Professionals
Our Certificate Training isn’t just a program; it’s a gateway to becoming a sexually informed professional.
25 Online Classes
- Are you a helping professional who works with couples (or wants to)?
- Do you sometimes find yourself feeling uneasy or ill-equipped to address sexuality?
- Would you like to enhance your skills and explore this intricate, complex, and sacred facet of human expression?
Sexuality is an integral aspect of our humanity, intricately woven into the fabric of intimate relationships. However, even therapists well-versed in relationships may tread this terrain cautiously, wary of making a potential misstep or being intrusive. Yet, our clients need a safe place to explore all aspects of their lives.
The Mindful Couples Sex Therapy Certificate is an empowering journey designed to instill confidence in navigating the delicate realm of sexual issues within long-term relationships.
It equips you with the skills, experiential activities, and mindful methodology necessary to address the spectrum of challenges partners face, including “low” or discrepant desire, shame, power struggles, performance anxiety, infidelity, and more.
As a program participant, you’ll:
- Engage in real-world scenarios with plenty of opportunities to watch demonstrations.
- Practice and refine your skills in interactive breakout rooms and monthly Peer Pods.
- Receive group case consultation providing practical guidance for real-world scenarios.
- Craft activities designed for immediate implementation with your clients.
Curious about the full spectrum of possibilities?
Click here to explore our comprehensive Program Objectives.
Equip Yourself to Make a Profound Impact
COMPASSIONATE EXPLORATION
Learn to navigate sexual issues with empathy and collaborative inquiry, fostering an environment of trust and understanding.
UNCOVER HIDDEN BARRIERS
Delve deep into the “Hidden Factors” that obstruct pleasure and expression, unlocking new pathways to intimacy.
INNOVATIVE APPROACHES
Design “little experiments” to explore unconscious couple dynamics, unveiling patterns that may be impacting your clients’ relationships.
COMPASSIONATE EXPLORATION
Utilize processes grounded in neuroscience to effectively address and heal erotic wounds, empowering your clients toward positive transformation.
TRAUMA-INFORMED PRACTICE
Equip yourself to support trauma survivors in reconnecting with their bodies, fostering a safe space for healing.
INFIDELITY RECOVERY
Guide individuals and couples through the delicate process of erotic recovery after infidelity, helping them rebuild trust and intimacy.
NAVIGATING LIFE CHANGES
Assist those grappling with medical or age-related changes in finding new pleasure pathways, ensuring that pleasure remains a central aspect of their lives.
What is Passion & Presence®?
Passion & Presence® is a method of sexual healing and enrichment for couples/partners rooted in Mindfulness.
It focuses on pleasure and connection rather than sexual functioning and uses “bottom-up” interventions from somatic psychotherapy to access barriers to erotic fulfillment.
The depth-oriented, experiential techniques of Passion & Presence® are suitable for addressing a wide range of sexual issues and combine well with other clinical modalities.
Passion & Presence® has three levels:
Understanding the three levels helps you know which path to start with and orients you and your clients to the process.
LEVEL 1
Use mindfulness to plumb the depths of your clients’ erotic lives gently.
LEVEL 2
Give clients the skills to work with triggers in real-time so they can stop fearing running into difficulties during sex.
LEVEL 3
Offer a path and practice of “Awakened Intimacy” for those who choose to use the erotic portal for transformation.
Mindful, Somatic, Process-Oriented, and Experiential
These words describe the Passion & Presence® approach (and how we teach).
TRAUMA-INFORMED PRACTICE
Mindfulness offers a new paradigm for helping professions emphasizing exploration rather than treatment.
The state of Mindfulness also has many eros-enhancing benefits.
- It cultivates an embodied, wakeful presence that supports pleasurable, pressure-free encounters.
- It sharpens the senses and enhances pleasure.
- It helps partners wake up from eros-inhibiting body-mind states.
- It brings freshness to couples/partners who feel stuck in predictable routines.
- It helps partners access the “Hidden Factors” shaping their avoidance and can illuminate their deepest desires.
- It helps couples caught in “blame and shame” cycles see what’s beneath their protective patterns.
- It enables couples/partners to befriend the inescapable change, uncertainty, disappointment, and grief of long-term erotic coupling.
SOMATIC
The body offers avenues to healing that go deeper than words alone.
Passion & Presence® relies on the body’s wisdom to guide the process, using the felt sense as a bridge to early imprints partners encode around sexuality, pleasure, connection, and self-expression.
PROCESS-ORIENTED
We don’t know where we are heading until we get there.
Passion & Presence® recognizes that transformation is an iterative process of uncovering the next piece…and the next. Each discovery informs the path forward, which means, like good sex, it’s wildly creative and unpredictable.
EXPERIENTIAL
Instead of analyzing and reflecting, Passion & Presence® practitioners activate the core pattern and explore it in real time.
The approach goes beyond discussion and reflection by offering ways to bring the issue “into the room” to study the unconscious dynamics shaping each partner’s experience.
Who is this training for?
This program is for psychotherapists, counselors, couple’s therapists, relationship coaches, sexuality coaches, and healthcare professionals.
YOU’LL TAKE TO THIS APPROACH IF YOU:
- Are more interested in discovering than diagnosing, exploring than explaining, listening & learning than dispensing advice (Although sex ed is important too!)
- Want to give the power back to your clients to honor what feels realistic, desirable, and pleasurable to them.
- Believe that all sex is “good sex” if it’s pleasurable and consensual.
- View pleasure as a birthright regardless of a person’s gender identity and expression, sexual and relationship orientation, size, age, race, or ability.
Who can benefit from this approach?
Whether you work with spiritual seekers or salt-of-the-earth types who want better sex – or any sex – you can tailor this approach to a wide range of clients.
What's Included
As a participant of the training, you will receive:
COMPREHENSIVE TRAINING HOURS
100 live/synchronous virtual training hours spread across 25 classes, each lasting 4.5 hours.
EXTENSIVE TOOLKIT
40+ Experiential Activities ready for immediate use in sessions and as impactful homework exercises.
MINDFULNESS PRACTICES
Mindfulness practices designed to initiate sessions, fostering a bridge to the “deeper issues” right from the very start.
ESSENTIAL READING
A copy of the book “Passion and Presence: A Couple’s Guide to Awakened Intimacy and Mindful Sex,” serving as the primary text for the course.
DIVERSE LEARNING MATERIALS
A curated collection of videos, audios, and articles to enrich your learning journey.
LIFETIME ACCESS
Unlimited access to a dedicated learning portal with recordings, activities, and worksheets, ensuring your ongoing growth.
Meet Maci Daye
AASECT-CERTIFIED SEX THERAPIST, HAKOMI TRAINER, AUTHOR & PLEASURE ACTIVIST
Maci is the creator of Passion & Presence® and lead instructor of the course.
With graduate degrees in human sexuality, human development, and counseling from both Harvard and Georgia State Universities and training in Somatic Experiencing, Matrixworks Group leadership, and coaching, Maci possesses a unique, multifaceted perspective on sexuality and human connection. As a Trainer, Maci brings clarity, authenticity, and a contagious enthusiasm that transforms learning into an engaging exploration of the beautiful complexities of being human.
Why We Created This Program
The 2020 publication of Maci’s book Passion and Presence: A Couple’s Guide to Awakened Intimacy and Mindful Sex seeded the idea for this training.
Couples reached out for individual support (more than we could provide), and practitioners, inspired by our gentle, trauma-sensitive approach, asked for training in the model. We wanted to develop a curriculum that captures the heart and soul of Passion & Presence – its mindful paradigm, experiential orientation, and respect for each partner’s inborn growth path and unique erotic expression.
This training is our offering, guided by the same creative process that births all of life and sparks our pure erotic potential. If it speaks to you, please join us.
Full Curriculum
About
Ten Segments Consisting of One, Two, or Three Sessions Each.
1. The Path and Practice of Passion & Presence ®
In our opening segment, we look at the core aspects of Passion & Presence as we identify common couple/partner issues. We will explore our internal reactions when eros enters the space and practice deepening with mindfulness. You will use techniques to work experientially and experimentally, embodying a compassionate presence that creates safety and invites humor and authenticity into the helping relationship.
Skills: Reporting from the Observer, Contacting the here-and-now, Accessing the Sexual Operating System, Deepening, Designing Experiments
2. From Disenchantment to Re-Enchantment
In the second segment of our training, we start to understand the power of consciousness in shaping our erotic experiences. You will begin to recognize the presenting issues accompanying the “familiarity trance” and how to help couples that have fallen into a deep sleep revitalize eros through presence and “Seeing Fresh.”
Skills: Seeing Fresh, Erotic Mapping, Mindful Touch, Catch & Release Technique
What students say
Program Detail
FORMAT
24 online, 4.5 hour, synchronous classes
DATES
To be determined...
TIMETABLE
Coming soon...
OBJECTIVES
REGULAR TUITION: $4900
$4650
Pay in Full
Save $500
Price goes up on March 19, 2024.
€4900
Payment Plan
4 installments of $1,037.50
(Save $250)
Price goes up on March 19, 2024.
Read our Financial Terms and Conditions here.
Contact us at info@passionandpresence.com
There is a $75 application fee to apply, payable through PayPal.
Q & A
The Passion & Presence® Certificate Training is primarily for helping professionals, although anyone who wants to help couples/partners have pleasurable and connecting sex may apply to the program. If you are not a licensed professional, you may need additional training or qualifications to practice sex therapy with couples. We require you to adhere to the practice guidelines in your area.
Sexologists, sex therapists, and clinicians who want to learn experiential ways to access unconscious barriers to pleasure and expression will benefit from this approach. So will experienced practitioners who wish to practice within a mindful paradigm emphasizing awareness and exploration rather than diagnosis and treatment.
Expect to spend an average of 8-12 hours per month on the course, which includes:
- One or two synchronous/live virtual 4.5-hour classes
Participating in a 90-minute peer group
1-2 hours of reading or listening to recordings
An individual session with a practice partner - One or two synchronous/live virtual 4.5-hour classes
Participating in a 90-minute peer group
1-2 hours of reading or listening to recordings
An individual session with a practice partner
The training consists of 25 live/synchronous virtual classes and supplemental video and auditory recordings by Maci and other experts to watch or listen to between sessions.
Yes, we will record each session. If you miss a class, we expect you to practice the experiential activities with your practice partner before the next session.
Please note: To be eligible for certification, you must attend at least 22 live sessions.
You will have lifetime access to the materials unless you withdraw before completing the training. Upon withdrawal, you will no longer be able to access the learning portal.
We want to ensure a fit between what you want to learn and what we offer. Specifically, we want to know your goals for taking the program, how you will practice the skills outside of class, and that you are comfortable and aligned with our mindful, experiential approach.
If you have not had previous training in Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy, you must take a Hakomi intro workshop before starting the Passion and Presence practitioner training. Click here to find upcoming workshops.
Hakomi’s principles, skills, and spirit greatly inform Passion and Presence. For this reason, we want everyone who joins the Practitioner Training to have some understanding of Hakomi and a felt sense of the Method.
You will learn techniques and a perspective on sexuality that can guide your work with individual clients. However, most of our practice sessions involve a “therapist” and two other students role-playing partners. Many skills have one partner say or do something so the other can study what happens within and between them. Also, the issues we are exploring show up primarily in long-term relationships.
We want you to explore your feelings and reactions to the material throughout the course. The peer gatherings are a place to do that. You will also discuss reflection questions on readings and recordings and practice the skills together.