Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to another episode of deep in your practice. I'm Lauren Leduc and I'm your host. I'm the owner of True Love Yoga and our lead yoga teacher trainer for our 200 hours yoga teacher training. And today we're going to talk about the power of hands on the so this is for yoga teachers, yoga teachers in training, and also for yoga students. I'll go into why, using hands on assists, disadvantages of hands on assists, and a lot more. Great info. So let's go. So my experience with hands on assists when I did my first yoga teacher training eleven years ago was that hands on assists separated good yoga teachers from great yoga teachers. The training that I did was very assist heavy. I learned assists for pretty much every single posture. And then when I started teaching, I used them a lot in classes, especially the first year that I taught. One year later, I went back and assisted this same teacher training. And my job as an assistant was to walk around and give hands on assists for about two and a half to 3 hours every morning during practice. And I had my hands on students all day long. And I noticed one of the students was having a hard time. And what I was trained to do when somebody was crying or having a hard time in class was to sit with them, maybe to have a hand on them, act almost motherly in a way. So this is what I did.
[00:01:45] And then I find out later on that this student had undergone severe, complex trauma throughout their whole childhood and adolescence and she was having bad flashbacks. The yoga was bringing a lot up for her and then the assists were actually making it worse and I felt completely devastated. However, this really started my journey and interest into trauma informed yoga and into really like harm reduction when teaching yoga. So when I came home from this training, I learned about using some sort of consent tool for teaching classes. So I asked the main studio where I worked if we could get these cards. And one side of them say yes, one side of them say no, and students can flip them around. So that was kind of the solution for the moment before. What we did was typically, and you'll still see this in classes, say something at the beginning of class, like, if you don't want hands on assists, raise your hand. And maybe the students have their eyes closed at this time, maybe they're open. But sometimes people raise their hand, sometimes people don't want to be singled out. And that was the case with the woman that was having the traumatic issues during the teacher training. She didn't want her friends to know what she had gone through. She didn't want to feel different, singled out so she wouldn't raise her hand, which I totally understand. So for me, the consent cards or the consent tools were a good way to be discreet and to be able to change your mind throughout the class as well. So we do still use these when we do hands on assist during class at true love yoga, but there's so much more than that. So we'll talk about that later on in this episode. But just know that it can be a little bit tricky. While the assist can be extremely beneficial for both teacher and student, they also can be problematic. So I really want to look at it from all sides. And real quick before I get into it, I will be leading a hands on assist for yoga Teachers workshop coming up here really soon at True Love Yoga. It's November 10, from twelve to 03:00 p.m. so if you are in Kansas City and you're a yoga teacher, it's three ceus and we'll cover a lot of what I'm talking about in this podcast episode, but go into more depth and then obviously get a lot of practice assisting each other. So why do we use hands on assists? Well, there's a few reasons. We use them to increase proprioception with sensory input. And so sometimes when people are starting yoga, they don't exactly know where their body is in space. They don't have that neural connection just yet. So gentle and purposeful touch can help students better understand where their body is in space, which improves their alignment and body awareness, which is, you know, a nice positive outcome. There's also a really nice connection that can happen through loving, professional, consensual touch. Think about how good it feels to get a massage. It can be similar to that in some ways. It can create a sense of trust and connection between the teacher and student when done with professionalism and care. This also can help students avoid unsafe alignment, so they can help guide students out of potentially harmful positions and into a place that is more aligned, more safe, more integrated. A cyst can also help reveal the energetic dynamics of a pose, so allowing both the student and the teacher to feel subtle shifts. So as teachers, we use so many different words to communicate how to find the energy of the pose. And by that I mean, like, what are you lengthening? What is relaxing? How does it feel energetically? And assist can really help with that insight. It can also help you blossom more fully into the posture. So by that, I don't mean pushing you deeper into a posture, I just mean facilitated stretching. So it might be using some gentle pressure to help you feel more deeply into the posture. My background with that really comes with thai yoga or Thai yoga massage. My teacher Jenyaro, who I learned both hands on assists and thai yoga massage from, has taught me all these beautiful techniques to help facilitate the stretching while the student is passive and it's really safe. It's been done for thousands of years and it can feel really, really good. So there are also big disadvantages of hands on assists at times. Sometimes there can be this one size fits all assumption. So for teachers, it's really important that we're individualizing assists rather than assuming what works for one person will work for another. And it's the same with teaching posture. It might look a lot different from one person's body to the other, and it's not really up to us to decide what is optimal alignment for somebody. We can help them get there, but it's up to them to feel it in their own body, not up to us to push them there. There also is a risk of harm, physical adjustment or assist if they're not done carefully, if they're done fast, if they're done with too much force, can unintentionally cause harm. A student might have an injury already that we don't know that we're pushing on. We can definitely minimize this risk, and I'll talk about that later. There's also this issue of external aesthetic versus internal experience. So as teachers, or even as students, if we are obsessing on how a pose should look rather than how it feels in the student's body, that can really detract from the posture and become downright dangerous for them. So it's more about how it feels, finding the energy of the posture rather than trying to push someone into looking a certain way. My right arm just doesn't internally rotate that much. So when I do postures like Gomukhasana or cow face pose and I have my arm behind my back, it just doesn't. The hand doesn't slide up very high. It's hard for me to join my fingers when I have my left arm overhead, my right arm underneath, and I have had teachers try to push on that before to get my fingers together, and that does not feel good to me. It hurts. If someone was to try to bring my fingers together, likely it would result in some sort of injury. So I just prefer not to be touched in that way. I don't really care if I ever reach that aesthetic. What I care about is, am I fully blossoming into the posture for my body. And lastly, assists can cause a sort of codependency, so students can become a bit too reliant on the teacher for assists rather than exploring their own limits and abilities. And there's a lot of exploration that can be done within a particular posture. So why are we trying to push them to achieve it in one specific way? Also, when it comes to learning, we actually learn better, and we're able to repeat things better when we're able to find something ourselves. So if we rely on someone to push us into a particular position every time, our brains and our nervous systems don't actually make the connection that they need to to repeat. Another thing to consider is, what are assists and what are adjustments? They're actually two different things. So assists support students in finding their own alignment. It helps them deepen their experience. It fosters internal awareness. And you're with the student typically through the duration of the pose. Or if you're a student, the teacher's with you through the duration of a pose. And adjustments are just quick. They help fix quote unquote or reposition the student, and both are fine. Adjustments would be like if your knee is out of position in warrior two and it looks dangerous, the teacher might come and help you find that alignment really quickly instead of holding your leg. The entirety of the pose, something we go into in the training, something I talked about a bit earlier, is the importance of consent. So hands on assists should always be consensual. Personal boundaries, experiences, trauma vary greatly beyond students. We cannot know what that is just by looking at them. We cannot assume what their experience is. So consent is really, really important. There are different ways to receive it. There are, of course, like the consent cards or chips that I talked about earlier.
[00:10:15] There is verbal consent, and yes, you could get that before a class begins, but I would prefer to do it before each assist. So saying, can I put my hands here and here in this posture instead of just, like, walking up behind somebody and grabbing their hips or something like that, which could be extremely triggering. You don't have to have trauma for that to be triggering.
[00:10:39] I have pretty strong personal boundaries, so unless I really have a lot of trust in somebody, it's just not something I like that much. Personally, I'll say that consent, to me, is really a continual conversation. So if you're a new student, if I'm giving assists within a public class, which, to be honest, I do pretty rarely these days for a few different reasons. One, most of my classes are also online, so I'm not walking out of camera range a whole lot. Sometimes classes are quite full, but in a public class, I'm more likely to touch students who I already know, who I have a conversation going with, whose bodies I have more awareness of, and who I feel more comfortable around. So if you're a new student, know that I'm not trying to leave you out. It's just that we have more of an established relationship, so I feel more comfortable receiving consent for them. And I might give assists as well to beginner students, but I'm going to probably be more explicit verbally before doing so. I'll also say that I'm personally going to use assists a lot more in a private session or with a retreat or a group of students who I'm working really intimately with for a period of time. And I'm not going to do so many assists, like the first couple days or so. It's something that I'll do more of over time. And we have this conversation of consent happening. So instead of never seeing you before and making assumptions about your body, and maybe I ask if I can give you an assist and you don't even know what that is. It's different. We have time to build a relationship and trust, trusting from me to you and you to me. And then I think that the hands on work is a lot more effective, honestly. So there are different types of assists and adjustments. The one I use the most are verbal assists. So these have no hands involved whatsoever. So I can guide you with words instead of physical touch. And honestly, this is what I prefer. In a public class, I like to use verbal assists. And touching might come again with like a building of trust or with safety. It might be because I've said something, it might be because I've said something a few times, and it's kind of the another way to communicate, but verbally usually. First, I also love, love, love self assists. So I like having my students use their hands on their own body in the same way that I'd use my hands on their body to adjust or assist themselves, and that can be extremely effective. They're also stabilizing assists, so it's basically like being a wall for somebody, which helps them with balance. There are deepening assists, so that's using gentle pressure to help the student blossom more fully into the posture.
[00:13:24] And there are also pnef assists. It's using resistance stretching, like applying actual resistance with yourself or with the student. So they actively engage in the posture and that can help strengthen the student and their muscles and improve flexibility and mobility as well. And I really love those kinds of assists. I like to teach them as self assists and I like to do them especially like in private sessions or somebody maybe has some kind of mobility goal. I can really help with that. So there are a few rules of thumb for hands on assists. Of course. Consent first, just like I said earlier, it is always important to receive explicit and enthusiastic permission from your students. Approaching students with reverence. This is a sacred act. You are in their space. You can be mindful and present and with them the whole time, and it can really be a special experience. They're service oriented, so they're nothing about you as the teacher showing off or controlling their practice. It is simply being of service. This is a funny one, but one of the rules, I think, is no petting. So that's like just lightly rubbing the student's skin or walking by and kind of petting them. And I know it sounds silly, but I wouldn't say it if it hadn't happened to me before. I know that the intentions are typically really, really good, but I don't think that's appropriate to touch in a yoga class. I wouldn't want a massage therapist or a physical therapist to touch me like that. We want professional, intentional touch. Also, we avoid any inappropriate, inappropriate areas like the chest and the groin. I learned this in my training way back in the day. But we call it the sacred triangle, like around the groin area. We don't touch anyone's sacred triangle. We don't put our sacred triangle near anybody. We just totally stay away from that area.
[00:15:18] And that helps us, again, maintain professionalism and be appropriate. We're also typically looking for bony landmarks on the body. So we're using solid and safe areas of the body, like the hips and shoulders and ankles to provide stability. This is important when we're using pressure and assists, we're going from gentle to deepening. And this is such a thing from thai massage, but you start gently and then you deepen it. That way you can feel any resistance that happens in the body and it helps protect you and the student and just keep it really safe. And lastly, for teachers, it's really important to watch your own posture. So standing safely while you're giving assists, you're usually in some kind of yoga posture that's really, really stable while you're giving an assist. You usually have a nice long spine, usually straight arms as well. And this helps create some leverage and also keeps your body nice and safe. So sometimes assists, even for the teachers, can feel like a nice stretch or can feel like a practice in and of itself. So I'd really love to hear about your experience with hands on assists. Have they been yummy? Have they been yucky? Have they been somewhere in between? Are you ever like that changed my life for the better or what happened to me? I'd love to know. I received all kinds of assists and they have really ranged from terrible to wonderful. And for me, you don't have to assist to be a great yoga teacher. Remember I said at the beginning of class, I think the old school way of thinking was what separated the good teachers from great teachers were hands on assists. I think that's completely B's. Honestly, I think you can never touch a student and be a great yoga teacher. But if that is something you want to start exploring in your public classes, especially in your private classes, I'd love to support you again. If you're in Kansas City, I'll be leading my hands on assist for yoga teachers workshop. We'll go into lots and lots of different postures and it's one of my favorite workshops to lead because it feels so good. Everyone usually leaves having received a lot of assists and feeling really relaxed so you can actually feel the benefits of them, which I think is really cool. So I'd love to see you November 10 from twelve to three at True Love yoga and we'll be talking about advanced techniques, detailed explorations of different assists and we'll do live practice with feedback. So I walk around and help you feel it in your own body and help you with your alignment with others. In my opinion, you can really enhance your teaching, build trust with students, and create more impactful and supportive yoga experiences. So thank you so much for listening today. Let me know what you think of this episode and I'd love to see you in my workshop. Om Shanti om peace.
