Touch, Consent, and the Future of Hands-On Assists

An editor's note:

Conversations about touch in yoga spaces have evolved significantly in recent years. While Kripalu does not teach or offer hands-on assists in our yoga classes or schools, the role of touch in learning and healing continues to be explored across the broader yoga community. In this essay, teacher Miles Borrero reflects on his own experience with hands-on assists and why he believes the conversation around touch remains important.

“The body thinks in feels.”
—Jill Miller

When I started practicing yoga, almost twenty-five years ago, hands-on-assists were an ubiquitous part of the practice, something that made a yoga space a yoga space. I remember stepping into my first yoga class while in my second year of graduate school in 2001, without knowing a thing about yoga, and the indescribable feeling that emanated when the teacher placed her hand on my sacrum in downward facing dog, offering just a little bit more space. I felt my spine literally lengthen two inches. It was my first introduction to the power of good assists and how they form a doorway to our own potential, healing, and the regulation of our nervous system. After all, the body’s most direct language is touch.

In recent years, hands-on assists have quietly disappeared from many yoga studios. In some spaces this shift has happened without much conversation about what might be lost, gained, or reconsidered along the way. There are many possible reasons for this omission: more people are practicing online, studios don’t want to grapple with creating new ways for people to opt in and consent, fear of legal ramifications in the post-#metoo era, or simply because many teacher trainings are happening online and thus are ill-equipped to truly educate and teach the art of hands-on assists. All of these variables have brought us to a time when the art itself is on the verge of extinction, leaving a hole that some of us don’t realize needs filling.

Reckoning With Our Past

In order for us to have any kind of meaningful conversation around the immense benefits of offering assists in yoga rooms, we must first reckon with yogic traditions in which consent and care were not considered in yoga spaces. Many of the male yoga masters from lineages that brought yoga to the West– lineages people still follow– inculcated rigid and harsh teaching methods which, in packed yoga rooms, led to assists that were unethical, injurious, or often uninvited. I myself have been on the receiving end of these kinds of assists. If assists are offered in modern yoga spaces, they must be grounded in enthusiastic consent from the student and thoughtful training on the part of the teacher.

Why Should We Keep Hands-On Assists In Yoga Spaces?

One question that often arises in this shift is whether something meaningful is lost when touch is replaced entirely by verbal cueing, but in my experience, touch communicates information that words alone cannot. For many practitioners, a well-offered assist can communicate something unique in the body. Words scratch the surface, but they are no substitute.

Assists can communicate care and safety to the brain in an immediate, direct way that is hardwired into our nervous systems as mammals. That is why we understand them in a primal way. Going further, an excellent assist is not felt by the student as a correction or critique of their pose. Instead, it offers the student access to a universe of somatic intelligence, delivered in the most effective way possible, conveying more space and breath to their physical structure, in addition to a deep energetic well of possibilities. Done well, assists can be a gateway to transformation, connection, intimacy and community. They light up our brains, settle our nervous systems, and release all the happy hormones that support our well-being.

Culturally, we have come to equate touch almost exclusively with sexuality or romantic love —a false equivalent that is not doing us any favors. This narrow appreciation is wreaking havoc on our ability to relate to one another and feeding into two of the biggest cultural challenges we are facing: the pandemic of loneliness and the growing divide between us. Situations that set the groundwork for the kind of extremism, lack of empathy and overall lack of humanity that we are encountering. They all come hand in hand. Clear, clean hands on-assists are a space from which we can begin to heal this divide and create a bridge toward one another, one that acknowledges safety, care and consent as its most valued tenets.

“We think we are thinking beings who feel but the reality is that we are feeling beings who think.”
—Brene Brown

So How Do We Move Forward?

Even though taking touch out of yoga classes seems like the overall easiest solution, some teachers worry that something meaningful may be lost. So it feels important for us to continue to grapple with what it means to keep wanted touch in yoga rooms and the dire implications of discarding it, and to fight for it not to vanish quietly into the night.

For this, I believe it's worth continuing the conversation about touch, consent, and how we can care for one another in yoga spaces. We must take responsibility and confront yoga’s past, acknowledge the harm that was caused, and make reparations. And we must find new solutions for creating spaces where consent is a part of the conversation. We must also teach hands-on assists as an essential arm of teacher trainings and not just as a “nice to have” afterthought.

I believe the answer is to lean in, rather than away. I also firmly believe that there is a way to deliver touch in an ethical, meaningful and supportive way that is not injurious for the body and that honors the boundaries of consent. But yes, as with everything else, it will require some tending to, a lot of education, conversation, and probably some grace around mistakes. A worthwhile endeavor, as I believe touch will help us heal and move forward with more empathy and decency—which we are really needing right now.