The necessity of touch: local yoga instructors are spreading the word with a new book

If you practice yoga, and have been lucky enough to have a teacher skilled at hands-on assists, you know how good that firm yet gentle touch feels as it encourages you to take your pose just a little bit deeper. But many have never experienced it. Local yoga instructors Allie Chisholm-Smith and Wendy Martin hope to change that.

The pair have just published a new book, Fundamentals of Yoga Assists: The Necessity of Touch, aimed at giving yoga teachers across the country and beyond the skills to better connect with their students.

“In the way that both Allie and I teach, it’s a really big piece—knowing how to be with people in their space, knowing how to support and assist without fixing or changing,” says Martin. “There can be a lot of focus in the yoga world on right posture. We come at it differently. Each body is built so differently so there’s no one way to do something and our hands can translate support.”

Chisholm-Smith acknowledges that in the midst of #metoo revelations, yoga teachers can be fearful of any touch with their students.

“A lot of teachers are incredibly terrified to touch, (with potential for) lawsuits, wrong communication, injury. So they think, ‘I’m just not going to then,’” she says. “Our feeling is you have to. We need touch more than ever now but it’s got to be smart and it’s got to be discerning. There’s an intimacy with the students for sure, I know that’s a risky word, but it helps to make that contact and get people opening up better and more comfortably. And one of the things we really want to create here is a sense of intense safety where you can let go however you need to, whether it’s that you need to cry or scream, whatever. For us, assisting is a huge part of that, it’s like a welcoming of someone into the room, more than just doing yoga for yoga’s sake.”

The teachers they’ve reached out to so far are excited.

“Our immediate yoga community is thrilled,” says Martin, adding that many books have already gone to yoga teachers they’ve met over the years at various retreats. “I don’t think there is anything like this out there. The way that Allie and I teach is quite different from the way a lot of other people are teaching. The style is different, the language is different, it has a very feminine, soft feel, where a lot of yoga is hard, fast and loud. I feel like it’s been kind of a welcome reprieve for people to slow down and reconnect.”

And it’s made the pair really look at what it is that they do differently from many other teachers. “We’re really clear that we don’t just teach yoga,” notes Chisholm-Smith. “You’ve got to use yoga as a vehicle to look at health. It’s not about doing the pose well, but how do you use it as a tool not a destination.”

This week, Chisholm-Smith and her partner Paul Fairhurst will embark on a cross-Canada trip to introduce the book to yoga studios as far away as Victoria, B.C. She and Martin will be offering to travel to studios to present workshops on the techniques outlined in the book, and will host one in Huntsville in the future as well.

“We are hoping it can augment people’s teacher training,” says Martin. “We have several weekends of hands-on assisting built into our teacher training (at Ahimsa yoga studio) but that’s not the case everywhere.”

But even without a workshop, they hope that teachers will find value in what’s offered in the book. “It would be better learned in a workshop, for sure,” says Chisholm-Smith, “but I think we were really careful with our words. It took us a year and a half to write it and I think you could get the gist of it just by reading the book.”

They also have long-term plans to produce a video series to illustrate the techniques in the book so teachers who aren’t able to host or attend a workshop can see the assists in motion.

The book has also had an unexpected audience: some yoga students have purchased it to better understand their own practice. “One of the deepening things for students when you receive a hands-on assist or when you are looking at it in the book is it allows you to understand the anatomy a little bit more,” says Martin. “You understand that when you pull your hip down here, your spine lengthens. So it brings you this deeper understanding of yourself on multiple levels, this kinesthetic awareness that may not have been there before.”

That connection—between practitioners and their own bodies, and between teachers and students—is what they hope will be the long-term legacy of this book.

“My hope is that we start to touch again, that we’re not afraid,” says Chisholm-Smith. “We are getting more and more anxious and less and less with the earth because we’re not touching, we’re not in connection. We text, we email. To get people comfortable with touch again, we get back into our selves and maybe create some more mental health. People are also deeply disembodied, we just aren’t in connection with our bodies any more. So the whole process of what we teach is to get back in your body and make friends again.”

A page from Allie Chisholm-Smith and Wendy Martin’s new yoga assists book. Paul Fairhurst was the photographer; Celine McKay did the book layout and arranged for an environmentally-friendly, waterless-ink printing process.

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