How Self-Touch Within Yoga Help Restore Agency & Safety

In the previous blog featuring the podcast on Touch into Yoga, Charlotte Watts and Leonie Taylor discussed how touch can be supportive within a yoga practice on many levels. The blog included the very real biological effects of touch and can be listened to and read here. 

In this edition, we continue this exploration by offering some of the themes covered in the podcast conversation that are part of the self-regulation that a yoga teacher might offer to a student.  

Reclaiming the Body Through Hands-On Awareness

When we consider bringing touch into movement practice, it’s easy to imagine hands-on adjustments or external techniques. But there’s another layer, one that’s deeply internal, invitational, and self-directed. This is the practice of self-touch as a bridge back into bodily presence, especially when we’ve become disconnected or disoriented. It is connection from the person who can most feel what you experience - you - and that is very different in quality to that coming in from an externalised perspective. 

Touch is one of our first languages, a way we learn safety, boundaries, and connection. When we consciously engage with it in yoga or somatic work, we offer ourselves a way to soften back into the body, to re-establish a sense of contact, and to begin moving from the inside out.

Awakening Tissues Before Movement

Bringing touch into class can be a subtle but powerful starting point. Before even moving, simply contacting the skin helps wake up the sensory layers. We begin to reinhabit the outer edges of the body, the place where we meet the world. 

This kind of initial contact can begin the process of restoring agency, or even offer in the moment if we are ready. Unlike receiving a massage where someone else determines the pace and depth, self-touch offers autonomy. We can hold a shoulder, rest a hand on the belly, or press gently into a thigh, all at our own tempo, without needing to fix anything. From there, we might feel the impulse to move deeper, or not. The body leads, we can make intuitive choices - from how we feel, not how we think we feel.

 As teachers we might offer hands on the heart or belly - always in the neutral tones that state "if comfortable for you" so there is no imperative for the student to take up that invitation if it doesn't feel ok for them; if it crashes into their boundaries. Hands to the arms or together might feel less confronting. 

Reassurance and Regulation Through Contact

Touch isn’t always about technique, it can be a spontaneous response to what’s needed. Often, our stored experiences live in the tissues in ways we can’t always name. Bringing in gentle, organic contact can help orient us back to now, to the current moment, and to the truth that we are here, alive, and feeling.

It’s a practice of reminding, of checking in, of letting the body know that it’s safe enough to be sensed.

Especially for those who may have spent time disassociating from their bodies, whether through trauma, illness, or chronic stress, this kind of touch can help re-establish a boundary between the internal and external worlds. A hand on the skin becomes a gentle beacon, saying: “I’m here. You’re here. We’re together.”

Meeting Ourselves with Hands and Breath

Touch can be still. It can be movement. It can be a dialogue between tissue and intention. For teachers, inviting this into classes is less about giving answers and more about offering options, ways to come back to ourselves. Whether through guided self-contact, hand placements, or pauses that invite curiosity, we begin to build trust with our body’s language again.

There’s no ‘right’ way to do it - just ways to listen more deeply.

And in that listening, touch becomes a tool not of correction, but of connection.

If you'd like to study more on these mindful, somatic and therapeutic practices I invite you to look at my Therapeutic Somatics for Yoga Teachers certification. The 170 CPD hours are made up of my Somatics for Yoga Teachers course and Yoga & Somatics for Healing & Recovery.