I thought this may be of use to anyone trying to do this.  Start of by opening up an SSH client / terminal.

ssh -L 3310:127.0.0.1:3306 user@remote_server.com

Enter a password when prompted.

Once logged in, **keep **the connection open.

Connect your MySQL workbench, command line client, or equivalence to port3310.  This is the port you are listening on “locally”:

mysql –host=127.0.0.1 –user=username –port=3310 -p

Once you have established a connection, any commands you run on your local client - will “impact” the remote database.