Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Hello and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and I’m so glad you’re listening. Today I’m joined by Aaron Johnson, a powerful social activist and thought leader whose Ted Talk, “Chronically Undertouched” shed light on the profound absence of safe, loving, platonic touch in the lives and communities of many Black men. Aaron’s work is rooted in addressing this deep cultural wound and creating pathways for healing. He helps men of African descent move from being chronically undertouched to experiencing what he calls touch plans, offering practices that honor, safety, connection, and dignity. As part of his work, Aaron is cultivating retreats and workshops on Black-owned land in the Mojave Desert and elsewhere where BIPOC communities can gather in healing, meditation, song, and collective renewal. In today’s episode, we talk about his film “Dark and Tender,” which documents a retreat for men of African descent who are reclaiming the power of platonic touch. We also explore the enduring legacy of slavery, lynching, and violence that has contributed to this absence of safe touch. And Aaron shares his vision for a future where young people, especially young men, are taught safe loving ways to touch that both acknowledges their history and creates new possibilities for connection. So let’s join in together and listen to this very powerful conversation.

Aaron, it’s a pleasure to have you on the Conversations on Healing Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Aaron Johnson It’s so good to be with you.

Shay Good. Your work is so powerful in the domain of healing, and so I want to start from that place and share that my heart feels like a lot of what we’re going to be talking about are aspects of healing that are really unaddressed or under-addressed. So I’m excited to have that conversation. I know one of the things that you and I talked about is, since a lot of people are listening and can’t see the bodies that we’re in that for the purposes of this conversation in particular, it might be useful to just describe a little bit about the physical selves that we’re embodying as we begin this dialogue together. So I’ll first extend an opportunity to you to describe yourself.

Aaron Yes, I am of African heritage. I have facial hair, I’m wearing a baseball cap and glasses. I have kind of a brown with little red undertone skin. In the United States, I’m considered on a darker end, but I think in the world I’m probably more actually light to mid level as far as darkness. I’m wearing a green shirt, and I stand about six foot tall and weigh about 245 pounds.

Shay Thank you for that. And I’m Shay. I am of mixed descent- primarily a lot of different European descent- and then my great grandmother was Lakota, born on a reservation. I appear to be very fair skinned. I have kind of reddish-blondish hair. I am about five feet, seven and a half inches tall and physically able-bodied. That would be a quick snapshot of some of the things that you would see as we begin this conversation. Part of why we’re starting where we’re starting is because a big piece that’s central to what we’re going to be talking about today is how we are treated so differently based upon the bodies that we embody and the space that we occupy in the world. You’ve created a really beautiful film called “Dark and Tender” that carries as one core central element of that film. The way that men in particular that are living in a body of African descent are not given opportunities consistently in our culture for platonic touch.

And there’s all sorts of reasons that you can speak to in much greater depth and detail around why that is, but I want to give you an opportunity as we start the conversation to really look at how you saw this huge, horrifying gap- even to the degree that when you went on Google to look at “platonic touch for black men,” you couldn’t find anything that was in that category. So I want to give you an opportunity first to address the problem and then we’ll dive into some of the work that you’re doing to address that issue.

Aaron Totally. It’s almost 10 years from the initial investigation for myself that progressed to a mentee that progressed to more of a public-facing practice. And I can’t help but notice how, initially, it felt like maybe something was wrong with me for asking for platonic touch- or that there was no problem that I was making up a problem that didn’t exist, but it didn’t take much examination of just my own practice and committing to my own touch experience that I really examined how little opportunity it was for me to create a platonic touch for my own body. And at that point, I was just simply trying to receive touch. I wasn’t trying to receive touch from anyone particular, just anyone that had to the attention and basic skillset to hold my body thoughtfully. It was just that simple idea. When I started to notice who stepped up as volunteers who became part of my touch plan, the last people, actually none of them were African heritage men.

And a part of that has a geographical impact from where I live- in California and southern California, Mojave Desert and a pretty small community- but a lot of that has to do with just American culture. And so, for me, I was able to hand build what we call now today, a “comprehensive touch plan. At the time, I was simply trying to get my nervous system balanced and somewhat plugged into touch again in my late twenties, early thirties. So in the context of how I stumbled across it, it was realizing even before that that I had been working for about two years to reclaim my tears. I had not cried in almost 20 years. I realized there was a huge tragedy that just took place in my life that highlighted the inability for me to grieve. And once I got my tears back, my emotional body was like, oh, what about platonic touch?

It almost craved it, but I don’t think I could even gotten to the crave for physical touch if I had not moved enough of my conditioning and trauma stories to get access to crying. And so, that tenderness that started to come available allowed my body also to then seek out the next level for me, the next level of nourishment, which was touch- and specifically platonic touch- which was the hardest part of my life design. Being an African-heritage man living in the United States was very difficult and that I didn’t have any kind of lifelines or references, and I started to do some casual looking for support. The crickets were so loud, it got very disturbing. The level I say crickets, the silence, I should say. The silence was so loud. The no books, no films, no essays that were helpful directly to my desire of how do I build what I call now a comprehensive touch plan for my body in this country at this time.

Shay And you talk about in the film some of the barriers. So one of the things that I think would be good to define a little bit for our listeners is this “Black brute” narrative- which I think will sound familiar once people hear the definition. It permeates culture. But I think having you share a little bit about that- about the hypersexualization of black men, the pieces that you want to call out a name that you’re speaking to in your work- would be valuable for listeners to understand as well.

Aaron It’s one of the tender parts of this work. I’m trying to understand touch. I’m trying to understand why I’m not fighting touch. As my investigation goes, it ends up arriving at one of the most horrific parts of American history. So it’s this place where we’re seeking tender, thoughtful touch. In my simple investigation, I start to see this narrative emerge- which I was softly aware of and even casually exposed to. My awareness of it was force-fed to me from a young age, but this idea that post-slavery, there needed to be a justification to continue violence on the black community. They had many avenues to do this, but lynching was a common place. And even though black folks were considered subhuman at that time, you still couldn’t go out and just kill them without some kind of narrative and without some kind of justification. And so, the newspaper was the big social media at the time, as we have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter now.

At that time, the newspaper was the high technology that spread ideas, postcards, and other kind of very physical ways, hence why we have a lot of evidence of the lynchings. We can go back to old newspaper clippings and articles that speak to this directly, but they had to start to tell a story to justify. It didn’t have to be that accurate. It didn’t have to have hold water, but it had to have some kind of narrative. And so, this consistent story of trauma started to form itself. It was established before slavery ended, but it definitely put fuel on as we get the post-slavery experience. And so, we saw that they had to tell a story that Black men were innately violent. What I mean by that- is they can’t help but be violent. And the only reason that they’re not violent, is because of the firm, violent behavior of white men.

But they weren’t just violent. The Black brute narrative says that black men have a insatiable- the word they often use- insatiable, unquenchable desire for white women sexually. And the only way to protect them is to be violent and make an example of them. So even though people were lynched for a variety of reasons- for organizing, for voting, for organizing people to vote- there was this consistent common theme of accusations of sexual misconduct with white women, just the whistling like Emmett Till. But, any level of accusation was put towards this. This is the “evidence” of the Black brute. And the Black brute is oftentimes framed as very large, physically strong, but emotionally unable to do complex things, unable to have complex emotions. So rage, extreme arousal, hard work, and brute violence is about all the black brute is capable of anything outside of that is interruptive or silenced.

And so, the Black brute narrative was then born, and wrote about in the papers, and then justified as a template for lynching narratives. So if somebody was in an elevator, was accused of molestation, rape, or some kind of sexual misconduct- which oftentimes had a sexual energy to it, then they would take the Black brute template. I don’t care if a 13-year-old boy, or a grown man, they would put that template on him, and then the mob would surround. The paper would write from the point of view of the Black brute, even describing the actual lynching itself in grand detail. We’ll break down the language they’d use- oftentimes feels animalistic. It feels aggressive. So that was the kind of birthing story of the Black brute- in a kind of simplified but yet succinct way. And then that narrative has started to embed itself into American culture. Which for my thesis and my observation and my study, is one of the major barriers to the tender black male body today. Because it’s impossible for the Black brute to be tender- to have feelings or desires for tender, specifically platonic, touch that’s interruptive to the idea. So that’s the birth and yet how it’s wielded in America of the Black brute narrative.

Shay And what’s so powerful in your work is you’re bringing men together of African descent to begin to explore platonic touch with one another, but also to explore all the barriers to that historically, the legacy of which you’re just describing and defining very well that’s led to where we are today. And then you also, there’s another layer that’s woven into the film as well around homosexuality, right? Can a man touch another man? We have these strong narratives too of “that’s not acceptable.” So it’s this multi-dimensional layering. And a third piece of that that I would add that you also touch on in your work is that we’ve created a culture where if you think about young boys, they’re often at a very age in general moving into sports like football that are very aggressive. So the forms of touch, especially in a lot of athletics, are very physically domineering, tough, harsh.

You want to try to conquer your opponent, and we don’t have a whole other curriculum that’s developed around “what is gentle touch?” You talk about “could you get a PhD in cuddling?” Where in our society are we creating- particularly for children, and then as people become adolescents, and young men, and women, honestly across the board- where have we developed the kind, consensual, loving, peaceful, platonic forms of touch at any kind of level of sophistication? And what your work makes very obvious because you can hear it in the stories. People have these huge gaps where they’re not experiencing touch sometimes for years- kind, gentle, platonic, loving touch, not experiencing it sometimes for years. Eespecially if they’re in a body of African descent and they’re a male- it’s more likely that they haven’t been experiencing that because these other narratives are so predominant. And so, I want to hold that vision of that world that you’re creating- of what if we had this whole other design, where from an early age, this was actually something that was taught and embraced in early childhood education

Aaron That layers the homophobia where the investment is- it kind of reminds me, there is a pretty common study now, but I heard it maybe 15, 20 years ago. Someone let me know that Johnson & Johnson chose blue for boys and pink for girls to help sell, I can’t remember if it was a baby clothes, but they had to decide- and they could have probably gone either way. Pink could have been for boys and blue could be for girls. And there’s a way that I’ve been so unconsciously conditioned about these colors. Like blue is for boys and pink is for girls. And sure we’re trying, but that’s still kind of just an unconscious, it’s almost like the sun rises- and it didn’t blow my mind. That wasn’t always the way things were until about 20 years ago, I was like, what is this? Someone had to choose that.

And then we all just kind of fell in line for the most part. They probably get edgy with fashion and try and cross pollinate, but there’s this unconscious conditioning, at least here in the United States about pink and blue. And I share those examples because it’s just awareness of capitalism. When we invest in a narrative, it almost feels normal. It almost feels this is the way it’s supposed to be. And I think there’s something to realize that the violent sport activity, the normalization of it had to be decided upon and then invested in financially again and again to normalize these behaviors. And it had to specifically deinvest into the alternative options of creativity or wherever we could have gone if we would’ve spent the same amount of money and resource that we’ve put into the NFL for the last 50, 75 years or almost a hundred years. If we put that same, or even half the budget, half the penetration to the cultural mind of America and eventually the world, but mostly American football, as far as we look as America, as America kind of experience.

And I think I say that because it kind of highlights the weirdness of violent sports. Early on, we had to convince people- the first Super Bowl was not sold out. I mean, people weren’t necessarily thinking this was an important part of our pastime, but over time we’ve been attached it to our masculinity who we are. It’s an American combat sport as opposed to if we would’ve put a magic wand and imagined another budget, another cultural investment. And how much more that would save so many lives, it would’ve invested so much more in our nervous system and the crisis we’re in today. Today as we speak, the mainstream public is now admitting more, generally speaking that the American man is in a crisis and has been for a long time. They don’t dare to say “the Black man might be in crisis.” That’s kind of been a narrative we’ve been speaking to.

But, we’re admitting that all men in America are now struggling and they have all these soft ideas, but no one’s admitting that we invested and are still investing in the crisis called the male crisis today. We’ve invested billions of dollars into it. And so it’s no surprise that our nervous systems no longer handle the level of social media and everything else has come to head that has allowed us, we’re collapsing as a population in America- it’s not serving us, even though this is the narrative. So I just want to name that there’s finally some admission now- that this investment is wrong and it’s not useful and we’re not quite backstepping completely because we don’t understand the exact problem. I will say, that the touch program and the homophobia, I have to help people understand early on that this has been well invested, well shaped, early before we even had a nervous system or even knew what was happening, we were being taught to “stop crying,” to “hold your emotions,” to “stop getting hugs from your mother,” to “stop getting hugs from your father,” to “punching is acceptable, do it this kind of way.”

And the visuals we see from music videos, to video games, to mainstream culture. We’ve got all these inundations that none of it was a video game that encouraged platonic touch, or tenderness, or emotional intelligence. That’s never what’s cultivated in our day-to-day hours and hours and hours and hours of that. So in the context of just understanding the shaping of the male mind, generally speaking and the shaping of the Black male mind, there is a place where we have to acknowledge the big money that has been put into the shaping of us not noticing what this film, this conversation, and this podcast is helping us to say, to slow down and notice it.
We all feel it in our bodies. Everyone seems like, “ah, yeah, I’m uncomfortable” even if they disagree, they’re always like, “I don’t dig what you’re doing, Aaron. It makes me uncomfortable” because they’re feeling the idea of what it might look like to even open the door for themselves. So I just want to name that even folks that don’t even agree that we should be looking at this can also feel that discomfort. Oftentimes they feel uncomfortable, because they can feel that we’re touching on a nerve. They all quietly go back and go, “I could use a little more touch in my life. I could use a little more.” Right? So I hear these- I’ve had hundreds of conversations at this point with individuals, post conversations, post film screenings. I just want to name that as we talk about these worlds, I want us to know that these worlds have been funded and that every time you watch this film, you listen to this podcast, you spread this word, you go to your home and you have a conversation with your family or your friends that you are deinvesting quietly.

But yet, I think importantly, deinvesting in a well-funded machine that we’re admitting is causing extreme harm to everyone. But we’re noticing that men as a whole, and if you understand, if white men are struggling in America, you can only imagine what other folks that are talking about oppression under that narrative of Black men, queer folks, trans folks are suffering under. We all need to be tracking it, but I just want to name that we’re finally admitting this machine we invested in is not serving us. That the NFL is not the emotional intelligent baseline that’s going to support our ability to really show up and be our full selves with each other and to be mentally stable and grounded. So that’s the world we’re up against, but that’s kind of the birthplace of dark and tenders. Having that awareness of what discomfort we bring into the space when not filming screen. It’s only 18 minutes and 50 seconds, but I tell you to look at the faces of men for the first time and they watch this film, the discomfort level gets pretty steep. And the film is a well done film, but it’s still hitting only the surface of the levels in which this work can really move into the body. But it’s a very beautiful surface and it feels interrupted because it’s so rare to see.

Shay Yeah, it is so rare to see. And it’s also, you can see the realization that the men are having as you take them basically through this retreat experience where they’re beginning to explore platonic touch with other men, and you see how all the things that start to arise. Because it’s not only the pieces that relate to being in a body of African descent, but again, there’s a layering that’s foundational. But then there’s this other layering. One of the men that’s interviewed, there’s this element of some degree of inappropriate touch from his mother that occurred. And so, then that gets layered in. And then there’s all these awarenesses that begin to build as they gain insight and understanding of their lived experience around what level of touch feels good. So there’s a part in the film where you’re actually tucking each other in with a blanket.

And many of us have an early childhood experience, not all of us, but some of us where we were tucked in by someone. And you can literally see both the visceral somatic response but also the cognitive response and understanding of, I actually didn’t really like it when I was tucked in, because I felt like it was for the other person that was doing the tucking in- not for me. And what would it actually feel like to be tucked in if it was for me? And how would that be different? And so what you start to see there too is this fundamental core narrative that would be taught in the curriculum of touch around the person that you’re serving or touching, what is actually of service to them? What actually does their body want? Not what you want for their body, but what their body wants for itself.

And so, I could actually see in the film how- based on your body of work, you could continue to build a whole educational framework around all the core touch skills that could be taught, that could be taught 100% to men of African descent, but that could also be taught more broadly, right? Because our culture is lacking this in many ways. It’s just much harsher with men of African descent. And so, I started to see the educational curriculum that would be counter to some of the things that you’ve already described in the podcast where we’ve invested literally billions of dollars in a very different narrative. And if we started to invest even millions of dollars in an understanding of that touch-based curriculum, how incredibly different our world would be. And as a person living in a body where I identify as being a female and a woman, there’s also this sense of like, God, if at a young age we taught this things that women tend to face a lot in their lives around things like sexual assault and non-consensual touch, how different would that be if these skill sets were inherently developed from a very early age for all children?

There’s just so many layers to what your work is that I think there’s the profound epicenter that you’re doing for black men, which is pivotal and the epicenter. And then there’s this layering of how it can impact people across so many different domains of society.

Aaron You’re a hundred percent right. I’ve worked with several folks that have some pretty beautiful sex education programs. We’ve worked with consent as a whole, just as a culture of how do we teach consent to Black men in a way that we understand? And oftentimes when I hear people teach consent, first I want to appreciate the consent will. I think it’s a brilliant organizing of consent barriers and boundaries and have worked with the author and many folks that have dealt with that program. And there’s this way that when I hear and have seen it taught mostly in the Northwest of the United States, Washington, Oregon region, but definitely whole west coast of United States that oftentimes is a White bodied person, oftentimes a White female person that says basically they’ll talk about it, but they’re basically like men stop touching women without asking and stop, which is actually important.

But it is a bit of a heartbreak for me because when we researched lynching, White women’s words were oftentimes all that was needed to storm into someone’s home. And it’s still a child, oftentimes a child, a young man out of his home and to hang him and to beat him, to violate his humanity based on her words. And there’s no acknowledgement that every oppressed population native folks, African heritage had have been praying for consent. I’ve been praying, have been praying for consent for a long time, have been asking people we don’t want to get taken from our country. But America has had culture of violating consent just consistently, consistently. And then we get this curriculum and books being written now and we don’t acknowledge that horrific history. In our consent training, we acknowledge that there are people, the global majority, and I say global majority non-White folks in the room that are dealing with very tender parts of ourself in consent.

And so, the “Chronic Untouch” project, the “Dark and Tender” project, the “Tuck and Touch,” we have really slowed down what it might feel like to acknowledge that history and include that history into our consent practice and that there is a natural grief that we have that we have not been able to raise our hand and have consent. And several other brothers have spoke out in some of our trainings about ways they have been violated by White women, but they wouldn’t dare say anything because if they said something, all that person has to say is that he did this to me and it would overwrite their violation and they could wield the Black brute trauma story in America to stop or cover their own tracks. Not always the case, but several folks have been violated when they were in their teenage years by elder folks that the person should have went to jail for, got away scot free because they were a white woman and they were alack male and they were 17 years old and six foot tall and able bodied.

And so, their violation was erased. And so, these kind of nuanced conversations can come to the surface and have light so we can have a much more comprehensive tender conversation about what does it mean to really hold each other in consent and tracking where we get violated, where we could easily get violated, and where we could start to find more balance. We want to hold African-American and every person accountable no matter what their gender or race is. We would see this big erasure, very few conversations are able to even have nuance when it comes to violation, especially to male folks and especially to Black men, folks, Black men, when they’re dealing specifically with White women. But any femme energy is there, but White women are one of the top narratives that their voice can really violate consent easefully on Black bodies. And that kind of imbalance is a dangerous place to look at as normal or under-discussed or looked at. And so, these are the nuances that come to the surface when we start talking about building a touch plan and when do you feel safe to be touched or not touched and why? So that’s something I think we could spend a lot more time on. But prior to me doing this work with “Dark and Tender” and the “Cut Project,” I had never had an in-depth conversation with folks coming forward with folks explaining their experience, so on and so forth.

Shay And just for our listeners who may not be familiar with it, the book you were referencing is “The Art of Receiving and Giving: the Wheel of Consent.” I think that was the book that you were referencing in case anyone wants to understand that. But your point is incredibly well taken and a very important one. There’s another piece that you mentioned there that I think would be good for our listeners to understand, which is what is a “touch plan,” right? Because again, these are ideas that are probably very novel to people that are joining the show today so that you could explain a little bit of what is a “touch plan.”

Aaron Yeah, this is really important. I would say that we probably need two hours to really get all the nuances of it, but let’s give two passes on this and give a sense of what a touch plan is. So we have realized that we need to kind of build somewhat of a practice to realize, oh my goodness, I’m chronically undertouched. We’re not diagnosing that directly, but people can realize, oh my God, I haven’t had platonic touch in 15 years. It’s quite obviously as chronic, as serious as a desire. Now obviously, if I haven’t had touch in the last week, I’m still in a very serious state of undertouched, but oftentimes folks have gone many years. And so, what we’ve learned is that some, not all, but some people that love cuddling are maybe touch practitioners, will hear that someone’s chronically undertouched and say, “oh my goodness, come here. Lemme give you a hug. Let’s cuddle. Let’s go into the cuddle right now. Let’s do it!”

And that’s oftentimes, 90% of the time, the last thing you want to do is just go from being chronically undertouched, to immediately to a cuddle puddle or immediately to a Cut Touch space. There’s a bit of slowing down. I can’t emphasize enough. So the idea of a comprehensive touch plan is the tender on ramp of someone that needs touch, but is terrified to actually receive it and doesn’t know how to enter the place of like “how do I prepare myself for touch plan?” So touch plan breaks down a couple of ways. The first thing, and we have a phrase we say a lot, it says “listening is the first hug.” So one of the things we do with someone that says, “I believe I’m cracking under touch, I want to build a touch plan,” is we have a series of co-listing practices.

So if I’m the touch activist and I sit down with someone that is chronically undertouched, is I say, “before we talk about touch, I want to know your story, your life story. I’m not talking about your touch. Where do you come from? What’s your income? Who is your family? What are the best of your life?” You spend the first hour or two of each session just saying, “I want to see you. I’m not trying to reach for your hand, I just want to hear you.” So layer one of a comfort touch plan is practicing and developing this skillset to share your story and to listen because we can’t really build a comprehensive touch plan on someone that can’t quite listen, have a skillset to actually share. So we try and work on that first. The first thing we do is a co-listing experience build to hear information and share information.

And the important part of that amongst many things in that sharing of listening and sharing your words and hearing words is- it allows us, because oftentimes if you’re chronically undertouched, you’re also chronically under heard and you also are chronically under shared and you haven’t shared. You got to understand some of us that talk about emotions, a lot have vocabulary words and we have language that talk about what we’re feeling in our bodies. But if I’ve gone my entire life or a majority of my life, not speaking comprehensive about how I feel, we have to practice, “how do you feel?” Most of us say “fine,” because that’s the default answer. But then we get used to saying, “oh, I feel tightness in my chest. I want to cry and laugh at the same time, but that’s kind of weird. I oftentimes am sharing really painful stories, but I’m making it into a joke. I didn’t even notice I did that. I mind myself as I’m smiling as I feel like crying. I didn’t even know I smiled a lot, when I told about the most painful parts of my story.”

These are just observations. I’m just, I’m not trying to be anything but observing these common things that arrive when someone for the first time, maybe in their life for the first time in 20 years or the first time in a long time, that they have been just speaking about what is happening inside their body. We’re not trying to give them vocabulary words. They can use whatever words they want but want them to get used to speaking to how they’re actually feeling and how their body is responding. So oftentimes I might ask a question like “after sharing that about your life, whatever story it was, whatever portion of the story it was, how did that make you feel in your body?” And oftentimes the first time that question gets asked, “I don’t know, I’m feeling numb.” That’s a feeling. “I feel a little bit of heat in the back of my neck.”

I said, “Weird. Where does that come from?” “I felt my cheek is twitching. What is that? What’s happening?” All these things are this opposite, being skillful at observing their body and it’s being in an honest, candid way. In a given room we do these workshops. Oftentimes we have 30 folks in the room and two men in the room because not a lot of men show up early on in our work and we’ll ask four or five women, “How do you feel in your body?” And they’re like, “I felt my head was hot and my hands were tingling and my throat felt tight. I felt like the chakra here.” And I went to a young man and we said, “yeah, what’d you feel?”

“Nothing really, fine. Good” vocabulary word. Now we might take that same individual and put ’em into an environment and say, “Who won a Super Bowl in the last 10 years? And who was the best quarterback of the last whatever?” And they can go through stats and numbers and break down all the new ones. “Oh man, the best quarterback of that running back or that tight end. If you have a good,” they could break down whole philosophy because they’re practicing it. And you might get someone who’s a not practicing football, oftentimes they’re under explosive sport. They could do “well, I think they throw the ball, they get hit, and then sometimes people get knocked out. I dunno, it’s a violent sport.” You find that where their language gets alive. So I named that not to make fun of the folks that know football, but their emotions, it’s just understanding they’ve had practice working on that part of themselves.

And so, listening, the first part of this conference touch plan is working that muscle. It’s allowing them to get used to speaking emotionally, effectively about what they’re feeling and experiences. That’s one. The second thing- oftentimes is either walking with contact with the earth if that’s available to us. So it could be grass, it could be earth, ideally just normal Earth. If their feet are too sensitive and the ground’s not safe to walk barefoot, to get some kind of way, we can get some clean earth and just have them be in contact with the earth slowly. A conference touch plan includes listening, and that’s a big umbrella. It includes contact with nature. Sometimes we don’t have an access nature. We get a clay ball or a branch or a stone or some type of earth and just ground ourself get used to interacting with Earth.

If it’s a perfect case scenario, maybe you’re on site. At my living space, we have these earth domes that are called cuddle pods that are built specifically for this reason to go inside of a dome where the whole entire structure is built out of cob and earth and it can sit and just energetically get grounded in with the earth as low tech and as common as is, it’s actually one of the most complex and important places for us to do a lot of work. And oftentimes working with Black folks, people that have survived slavery or their ancestors survive slavery. They have to actually reclaim their relationship with earth in a way that some folks might not have to deal with. So there’s something to track there in that labor that is a hold nother conversation. And then the third piece we often do, so we’re listening, we do some kind of earth contact- if not in a cocoon kind of environment in the earth dome- is singing.
Now this might feel like, why are we singing? What is that about? Now, first of all, I can go on for another whole hour and a half about how singing is so important. I don’t mean professional singing. I mean getting used to using your voice to blend with someone else. It could be beatboxing, it could be poetry, but the idea of getting to a singing voice that’s a human right. Has been fundamentally a tender place for us to find the ground. Now we have listened, we’ve grounded with the earth, and we’re still doing all those things, and now we’re singing together. Now mind you, I’d never said yet that we’re touching. I haven’t said we’re touching yet, but then the last thing we would even start to even bring into this point and that experience from listening to ground with the earth can be a period of several weeks or months.

Sometimes we can reduce this over a period of a weekend, but the idea is it could be a while of that happening. We’re building trust, we’re building an environment. And then the first thing we do now far as touch a start to get in close proximity and track how it feels. So we’re not going to touch all the way. We’re going to get close as we feel good. I’m going to get 10 feet from you. “How do you feel?” Five feet from you. “How do you feel?” I’m going to get six inches away from your body and just notice our heat. Don’t touch, just notice it. And then we’ll progressively get to a place of like, “Do you feel comfortable to have a hand touch? Do you feel comfortable to hold hands more than three minutes and listen to each other?” And we put a timer on so we know there’s an end point to it.

That’s really important early on and touch programs that we did. And that touch sometimes can progress pretty early on so that at a singing stage, someone’s like, “I’m totally down to have a full body hug. I’m full down to have a cuddle. I’m fully down to have a handhold as we sing at the same time.” But we let that be guided. But we understand that we’ve already started touching when we were listening to each other. And so, we make sure that we’ve stretched the umbrella. When we talk about a touch plan comprehensively, we start to understand that there’s a big umbrella of what touch is. It’s not just my skin on your skin. It’s important and oftentimes happens, but it’s not required for touch nourishment to start taking place. Oftentimes, the listening is where a lot of intimacy comes because oftentimes we find that our ability to start to speak to consent and to know what consent is based upon our ability to listen and to share our words and we’re feeling.

So that’s a short lens. So each one of those bullet points has its own kind of double click. And there’s a whole list of practices from how we use our voice and nature, how do we use our voice and listening, how we use our voice and co-listing and holding hands. But that’s the kind of bullet points of practice that I think people can start with of that’s past one of what it looks like to build a comprehensive touch plan. Those are the elements that are commonly in place. There’s variations and some exceptions to the rules, but that’s the sketch that a lot of our activists are trained in.

Shay Yeah, that’s a very good description. And I know globally also dance and movement is often another practice because essentially the touch plan you’re describing, it’s also a healing plan. It’s a way of how do we reconnect to that which has been broken in a sense- through trauma, through racism, through the way our culture has prioritized what it has prioritized and also not paid attention to. And so, a part of how as a species, we get back to a fundamental sense of connection is to use the fundamentals, which are our voice, our bodies, the earth movement, and then really listening to one another at every level. And what’s interesting, because I work in a community where we work with a lot of individuals who are born with differences in terms of sensory capacity. Maybe they were born with a genetic condition that makes their hearing or their vision a little bit different in the way that it functions.

And what you learn immediately from working with individuals like that for many years, you see that there is a sensitivity very often that’s heightened, that can feel touch from 20 feet away. So this idea of touch, we sometimes place it as touching of the skin, but it really is so much more than that. And so, that’s why I think your understanding of listening as a form of touch is critically important because touch itself really does start from a place of listening. You would never want to get close to someone’s skin without first hearing what their needs are. And in a lot of the work that we do through integrative touch, you’re hearing that not only verbally but non-verbally. So a lot of what we’ve had to develop in terms of our touch plan skills or skillset is non-verbal communication. Listening around what form of touch is appropriate, if any. And inclusive in that plan is sometimes that means giving somebody 30 feet of space so that they can finally feel like, oh, you’re not in my bubble. You’re too close to me if you’re closer than that, because sensitivity is more refined.

So it’s fascinating how even the notion of touch itself, we’ve somehow tended in our world to localize it around skin to skin contact. However, those of us who are studying touch or have taken on this type of work at a deeper level have come to understand that it’s fundamentally about listening and then respecting nonverbal cues and communication and doing all these other things before you ever even consider getting to physical skin to skin touch. It’s interesting.

Yeah. So I am grateful that we had a chance to touch a little bit on the touch plan. Because how fun would that be if all of us had a touch plan in our lives, if all of us had an understanding of, wait, “when was the last time I received platonic touch and what did that look like? And do I feel that I’m chronically undertouched? And what are some of the other parts of the story that are contributing to that?” And you’ve named some of those already today. The history of racism, the history of slavery, the history of lynching, of all these things that have then contributed to certain people being much more chronically undertouched than others and having a lot more violent narratives that are woven into their lives. And as you think about what are we educating our children towards, if you think about violent video games, which has become the norm, particularly for young males, more so. We’re educating them in that narrative, we’re educating them in that story. And so much of what you’re talking about in your work is when we create these stories, and we give them power, and we invest in them, and we give them money, and we back them through our financial economic system with tremendous financial means, they get built up in a certain way. And I feel like part of what you’re doing is trying to deconstruct that and build a whole different story, like a completely different window in to how we could be teaching something very fundamental in a completely different way. And I know you’re working on another film too that you’re going to be releasing. It sounds like in some ways it’s a continuation of this body of work. But I just wanted to give you an opportunity if there’s anything in the continuation of your body of work that you wanted to add for our listeners.

Aaron Yeah, the second film is I think, really important because the first film gives us a sense of my story and what it looks like to do this for the first time. And even though there are some people for the first time in the second film, the second film has some folks that ran the first film taking next steps, taking bigger risks. The first film covered the primary workshop was about three days. And the second film, we were able to cover eight days of being together on the Big Island of Hawaii, which gave us just way more of a landscape of time to not only bond with each other, but to start this practice of building a fellowship and being connected with each other as we do this process. So we didn’t have to rush. I mean, really, we had Friday night, Saturday, and part of Sunday, and the workshop was kind of over on that first film, which was plenty for the group.

That was enough. There was plenty enough. But eight days allows you to really unplug from the culture around you and really bond with folks and push the levels of the work and for the work to drop deeper in the body and also having some time in between. So fathers have been working with each other and on their own life design, so coming back a lot more resourced, a lot more skilled. So we’re not starting at the level of, “I think I can hold your hand.” We’re going, “Hey, let’s go deeper and work on this a little more tenderly.” And we had just that much more combination of practice. But the second film really also shares a little bit of technique- like, “This is how we did it.” You can see me facilitate two individuals that have never touched before in a period of- I mean, the film cuts it down to maybe a minute and a half- but it really gives you a sense of how the carefulness of in the check-in and just what it looks like in action.

Because I’m not trying to be a gatekeeper of this information, I would hope that this gets to people. So it’s a little bit more of a demo. Now, we will be releasing in the near future, an online course that gets only stuck in the fundamentals and less out of the kind of narrative a film container and give a lot more of this demos. But until that comes out, this is a great way to get a bigger narrative, but also get a little bit of like, “Oh, there’s a little bit of practice there that we flexed.” But I think what’s important- if you see the first film and the second film- is progress. And I think there’s a way that I compare touch activism as a whole if I can, to folks that are doing rehab work that might someone have a major spinal injury or major nerve damage and they get inside of the rehab, they can barely move their hand.

It’s an inch- and the person that’s working with them celebrates because they realize that moving their hand an inch was a major achievement for their body, for their brain, and for their healing. And eventually that person might get full functionality out of that full hand or part of their body that’s been injured. But there’s a way that the person that’s able bodied and not trained in rehab behavior or the nervous system might not be impressed by the finger twitching or the hand barely moving because they don’t understand what’s happening. I think in touch activism is very similar, that oftentimes you might see someone go, “Oh, that’s pretty cool,” but if you realize what that individual had to overcome to reach their handout- to be in that room to show up with a person that was maybe trans or queer or it’s another cis straight black man, which also could be his own thing for them to be there and to reach with ours, sometimes years of work, but to someone that’s not understanding they’re tracking the trauma of the chronically undertouched, might not be impressed.

They have cuddle parties all the time in their house. They don’t understand how much more work it takes for certain identities to have a similar experience. So that awareness, I think is a little more apparent in the second film- that there’s achievements. For me, I’m hand pumping, “Oh my goodness, can you believe right from one film to another?” and maybe someone else like, “Oh, I think I see something happening in there.” I think it’s important. Maybe if you ever want to check up on say what the progress is, you just Google it. Just try and google what you see. “Oh, I’m going to Google two Black men, one’s trans, one’s, a cis straight Black man, holding hands and listening to each other.” Just Google that in there and see how many times how videos pop up on Google of watching what you just watched for ease for that 25 minutes. And then you’ll find that there’s crickets. And that’s something major- of the things we can find online, that we can’t find these images that we’re seeing in this film very commonly. So that’s a part of the little litmus test of what you’re looking at. And I hope there’s a day where it becomes normalized, it becomes as unimpressive as other things that are mainstream right now. But unfortunately, the footage in both films are still very much underrepresented in our culture.

Shay And there’s another piece that I’ve heard you talk about previously that I just want to get in the conversation. I think it’s important. And that’s around poverty, right? Even to have the time is expensive when you’re living in poverty and to have that time to even do a retreat, right? You talked about how your first one was three days, this one was eight next, the one in Hawaii in the film that you’re currently working on. So it’s important to just name that there’s an expense to even being able to have the ability to take the time to do something like this- is not available to everyone. And so, just naming clearly, out loud that there’s a privilege even to participation in many cases, unless we build some kind of a model where we’re funding people to be able to sustain their lives, and then you’re working perhaps with their employer to be able to- there’s a lot of layers of challenge around how to realistically implement this for people also that are living at the level of poverty or that are of a very limited means. So I just want to give you a chance to speak to that piece, to whatever degree it feels important in this moment.

Aaron I appreciate that. This is actually, I hate to say it’s one of the most important parts, but it actually is the work itself feels radical and important. And in essence for all, it’s the purposes. This is the early stages of the work. We’re eight years in and two, three years public facing- and that’s class. I think there’s something when we talk about oppression, we talk about the nuances of healing- and it is scary how finances and money can be a very noticeable difference of someone receiving support or not. And so, we did our best in the curation of these members of this first workshop, inviting a diverse population. So we had folks in the room that were highly educated that had maybe a portfolio or a retirement of two, $3 million in retirement. And we had Black men in the room that weren’t sure where they’re going to stay- shelter insecure in a sense of life.

They weren’t sure- their economics were really tight. And I was aware of these things. I was intentionally trying to track the diversity in economics and education, but that felt important in the context- that I wanted to feel as a facilitator and as an organizer of the amount of labor it takes to make this work accessible. And I think there is a way that from this beginning stage of this work that we can be class aware. The challenge is that also puts a lot of labor on me and the organization to find funds other places because as much as people love this work, no one’s saying, I’ll host 10 black men in my space for free. They’ll charge you for it, even at this capital will charge and it makes sense.

And the planes won’t fly people places for free because they’re doing good work. So all these costs are real.

And then you said something really important- most jobs don’t give you more than a week to two weeks a year to be on vacation or something. That’s why we had a weekend workshop. We want to have a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday so that we only miss a little bit of work, but we had to track some people- we tracked how much they would miss in work and how we could compensate that. Some people, we covered flights so they could make sure they didn’t have to worry about flights being in the way because it was a big deal. And I think that’s something we’re constantly trying to track in this work is- how do we have practitioners that are highly skilled and have a lot of capacity and can show up in a variety of places, but they aren’t charging premium prices to the participants that they’re being paid another way as well.

I think there is a risk that the “Dark and Tender” project could only serve affluent, highly educated, and privileged individuals, even African heritage the same and just erase anyone that has any serious barriers- previously incarcerated, can’t access their income the same way that someone else could. There’s something I would like to figure out, and -I’m continuing to figure out- to make sure that we are class conscious and that we’re able to invest in a way that we make sure we don’t get stuck in the rut of privilege only receiving radical care. And I say that is because the brothers that- including myself- that birth this whole concept, not as we know it today, I mean obviously touch is the thing that humans have done since we existed, but this current brand of “Dark and Tender” and tracking is by poor Black men. So for it to not serve poor Black men and folks that are otherwise oppressed will be a disservice to the genesis of this.

I appreciate Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey and whoever- wealthy, I mean, I’m picking on the famous ones right now- but they could have easily birthed some version of this and funded it in eight ways I couldn’t have thought of. But somehow, we haven’t arrived there. That’s not where their funds have arrived yet. Maybe we can call ’em and talk to ’em about it sometime soon. But the idea is that it is formed and thought up by poor black folks- including myself- in Phelan, California, in Southern California. A little desert town has one stoplight. It wasn’t sexy city of Los Angeles, it wasn’t Vegas. It was Phelan that this practice that as we know it today, was born. And so, I just want to honor that. I don’t want it to get lost, but I think just beyond that honoring piece, any good work has to be class conscious.

Otherwise, I feel like it can end up being another form of oppression on folks that really need the service. Now, I would hate for this program to evolve to that. So I try and go on a record on a regular basis that we’re continuously not perfect at it- but continuously being aware that we’re in a wealthy country and that resource oftentimes defines how much humanity is being seen and not seen. I don’t want to participate in that blindly or not blindly, but part in not being able to track that level of capitalism, oppression that we try and be very conscious of in the “Dark and Tender” ecosystem and the chronically undertouched practice.

Shay And I can name too, through our work with Integrative Touch, 75% of the people we serve are on scholarship That is financially incredibly challenging- to figure out how to make that happen- incredibly challenging. So I want to name that in order to do what you’re describing, to be utterly class sensitive, class aware, class informed, class forward in your approach. It takes so much effort and energy because we’re facing a very similar dynamic in the work that we do, and we’re committed to it. That’s why 75% of the people that we serve are on scholarship. But I’m telling you- it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and I’m a bright, capable person. And it’s because our whole system is designed in an opposite way. And so, you’re trying to unravel a whole economic system and develop a whole new subterranean economic model that has never existed before.

And it is hugely challenging. So I think that it’s worth putting all of this into language- to say that when you develop these kind of innovative models, like what you’re working on, it takes multiple layers of investment, right? Because you’re breaking down and in a way dismantling multiple systems. It’s not enough to just dismantle one. You’re having to work through multiple systems and create new paradigms, new design models, and then somehow get that to fit and be placed within the context of our existing system to some degree- because you still need the airplane to bring you the person. And so, it is quite the challenge. So I just am applauding the effort that I recognize that that requires because it’s extensive. It is extensive. Well, before we close, I want to just give you a couple of opportunities. One is through the lens of your work- I want to give you an opportunity to define or describe how you see what healing is.

How would you define or describe what healing is based on the work that you are doing?

Aaron Yeah, I think healing is one part, access to freedom of choice. I think it’s very hard to heal if choice is smothered in the body- choosing to rest, choosing to slow down and ask questions about your reality, choosing to have access to your mind and a culture that’s trying to constantly steal our attention outside of our consent. Healing is also about refining the practice of being tender and vulnerable with other humans. We can heal in nature; we can heal with good sunlight- but there’s something still really critical and healing about being able to be safely with another human being where I think we’re genetically organized that way. But there’s a way that I find that is healing. And I think healing is also, persistence is something that is over time. It’s not a one act of things. Our bodies are constantly being born and dying all at the same time.

And healing is that too. It’s being born and kind of a circle of our own life. And I think if we could acknowledge that in the healing process, that feels really, really valuable. And I would say healing also is continuously to reach, to fight to scratch, to whatever you have to do to get access to earth, to touch it, to notice it, to appreciate it. That to me is a nest of healing. And I’ll close and say that healing to me is also being able to build a practice of every healing in our lens of touch that we have access to our singing voice. I feel like the singing piece is kind of like dancing, but singing I think lands even more accessible and more essential. And I can get a lot of dancers like “No, Aaron, it’s the same!” and it is in some ways, but there’s something about singing though, that I can sing to a baby hours after they’re born out of the body. They’re dancing in some ways with their movement. The singing is that piece. And I think as far as touch, the singing voice and the voice is I think, deeply underrated in our healing practices. And for us, it feels a staple, a foundation to that. So those are the nests that I would create around healing.

Shay That’s great. Well, I’ll just give you the floor. If there’s anything else that we did not have a chance to include in the conversation today that feels important to you, I’ll open it up for anything else that you’d like to add.

Aaron I just want to speak to the parents. I just want to honor- if you are a parent and you are raising another human being, if you’re uncle, a neighbor, but you have influence, a teacher, all those folks that have the gift of shaping the minds and hearts and nervous systems of our future generations- to just encourage you to examine the questions that might say, “What can I notice that is building behaviors that are making touch more difficult?” and to stay very creative in your process, but not surrender. And I say parents because touch in public schools in the United States is impossible- but in families we can really build practices for everybody. But I just feel like parents sometimes are already overworked and oftentimes stressed around the process of raising a child in a digital era. But I just want to say to the parents, I just want to encourage you to hold your children, sing to your children and keep doing that all the way through adolescence to teenage years, to young adult years that we keep a touch plan in place.

And that’s complicated and it’s nuanced- but I just want to encourage parents to stay in that vein because I think that’s one of the things I always say. I’ll oftentimes fly across the country for a small group of folks when it comes to parents, when parents are gathering and think about young folks, I do what I can to be there for them, help them to think with them, to brainstorm what it means to build a comprehensive touch plan as a parent in a household. And I just want to encourage them to follow their instincts- to continue to not normalize violence and not normalize distance to be in their home to whatever cultural, racial, economic background- you can normalize, tender touch, and singing as a fundamental part of the human that you’re raising or tending to. I think it’ll be critical to maintain that usually it’s pretty good until five or four and we’re like, oh, we don’t need to sing with them anymore.

But I just want to encourage past those young years, to make it a part of culture. And I would recommend all voices. I don’t say that anyone can’t sing- and other people are like, “Aaron, I can’t.” But I just want to name that the human singing is a human right and that we all can work on that. And so, that’s easier than some- but I just want to encourage that I’m your biggest cheerleader. I’m going to be doing a deep dive in research and practice and collaborations to help make that even more accessible. But in the meantime, I just want you to know that this is something I’m invested in with you all, but I just want to name, I appreciate you all, you’re shaping the world we live in, and I just want to honor that labor you’re doing. So that’s my closeout and shout out to all the parents.

Shay Beautiful. That’s a well-deserved shout out and close out. So I just really want to acknowledge and appreciate the work that you’re doing for everyone listening. I think seeing the film “Dark and Tender,” it is revolutionary, it really is. And I think you’ve touched on something that hopefully will strike a deep nerve and cord and already is, because it is something that is so overlooked, and the fact that you’re exposing it and bringing it forward and saying, “See, this thing that we’ve been intentionally ignoring, like pay attention,” is really meaningful and valuable work. So I just want to thank you so much for what you do.

Aaron Thank you so much for having me. Look forward to hearing from your audiences as we’re able to.

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