**CW: I do reference trauma and the experience of violating touch in this blog.

Recently I was doing a Spring Clean and came across a book on how to assist/adjust students in a yoga class. It looked so dated to me, and not just in its style and illustrations, but in the idea itself.

There is value in touch if it conveys intelligent information, and that’s true whether it’s guided to come from yourself (directed self-touch) or from a skilled teacher (who has consent and possibly a license to touch, which is another issue I won’t go into in this blog).

I remember my first Ashtanga class. We were in a seated twist and the teacher, whom I had never met before, came and sat with her legs wrapped between mine and pulled my body toward hers to help “deepen the twist.” In that moment, I was so confused as to what was happening. It was not just that it was physically intimate, I thought, “what am I doing wrong?” There was no direction in terms of how I might achieve a better twist on my own and, really, isn’t that the goal? To find it myself? I thought, “wow, this teacher must really know her stuff.”

Years later, here I am reflecting on the issues with touch in a yoga class. Thanks in advance for taking this journey with me, which has been complicated for me for years and I only feel like now I’m able to express why.

-First, the wording we use: adjustment. To “adjust” means to make a small movement or alteration to achieve a desired result. So, what is that desired result in a yoga pose?

What is the goal? And I mean, the big goal. Is it to have someone experience their body going beyond what they could find on their own? It’s not Thai Massage (and, yeah, I LOVE Thai Massage. But this isn’t it).

In my understanding, some of the goals of a physical yoga practice are to release tension, to feel/connect to the body and to prepare levels of attention to go into deeper realms of awareness. Does being pushed and wrung out by someone else achieve that?

-Secondly, there is an instant hierarchy if, as a yoga teacher, I physically move someone. I’m communicating to them, “I know you better than you.”

There’s far more skill in educating that person into the goal of the movement/pose so they can make those decisions for themselves.

-Thirdly, most yoga teachers have not had enough education in terms of anatomy or functional anatomy. Do they even know what’s happening anatomically in a pose/movement? If not, I don’t want their hands communicating that lack of information with my body. Nothing against yoga teachers. I am one! But in a standard YTT, there are 10-20 hours of anatomy and that’s just enough to learn names of things, not enough to learn function or arthrokinematics (the movement inside a joint).

-Furthermore, we have to acknowledge trauma. For those of us who are working on connecting with our bodies due to past trauma, the last thing we need is to be physically forced into something.

In my teaching, I do use physical communication with students I know very well and have worked with for years. Often I’m using it to provide proprioceptive feedback. I first will explain what we’re after in a movement/pose then if I do use my hands to convey a message, I will first explain exactly what I plan to do and why. For example, “I’m going to lightly place my hand on your shoulder for feedback. Can you move into my hand?”

Why is this important to me?

Years and years ago I studied with a teacher that I really loved. His style was forceful and rigid but that appealed to me at the time, since I hungered for a sense of black and white, right and wrong and a disciplined practice. I liked striving for the 30 degree turn of my foot and the exact 90 degrees of my knees.

Again, dated.

In one particular practice, he had us standing in mountain pose/tadasana with our eyes closed.

The next thing I know he is standing in front of me and before I could open my eyes, he struck my breastbone with his open palm and said “lift your heart.”

I was obliterated. My ears started ringing. I went home, threw up and crawled into bed where I stayed for a long time. I felt so violated.

My father is a martial artist and I was always taught that a palm strike to the chest is a fatal strike.

My body was reacting as though I had experienced a fatal strike.

I never talked to this teacher again. I never told him why I stopped coming to class.

The other day, though, I saw him walking in the neighborhood. I felt a pang of fear and sickness travel through me.

So, that’s another way touch can influence a practice.

Touch is one method of communication. And just like we try our best to communicate our ideas as intelligently as possible with words, we need to see touch the same way.

For years, I thought it was something that I had to do as a yoga teacher. My first teacher trainer said “if you don’t do at least 5 adjustments in each class, it’s as though your class is just doing a video.”

Flash to post-pandemic where I’m mostly teaching over Zoom.

I’d like to believe my classes are just as deep. I can’t “fix” anyone through the screen, but I also believe they don’t need to be fixed.

And I also believe being fixed isn’t the goal of yoga. You are already whole and if your practice doesn’t let you experience that, then it should be adjusted.