where Black folks can experience healing and love.
In a world that has forgotten the sacred power of touch, Aaron Johnson walks a different path—one where grief becomes gateway, where silence holds wisdom, and where the village is reclaimed through radical tenderness.
Aaron Johnson is a speaker, facilitator, filmmaker, and touch activist dedicated to restoring Black folks' relationship with tenderness, grief, silence, and platonic touch.
His work is a testament to the power of vulnerability, connection, and the Earth's wisdom in the journey toward healing.
Aaron's journey toward tenderness started with deep loss. In 2010, he lost his father in a tragic accident. As he was trying to process the grief, Aaron recognized that he couldn't cry. Determined to reclaim his emotions, Aaron embarked on a purposeful journey to cry, working with a counselor for a year before finally experiencing his first release.
That breakthrough revealed another absence in Aaron's life—platonic touch. He realized that alongside his grief, he had been conditioned to live without the sacred power of non-sexual physical connection. What started as a personal journey evolved into his life's mission: to create tender nests where Black folx can experience healing and love.
DARK and TENDER
A Film About Coming Home to Touch. Aaron's evocative short film follows ten Black men on a retreat with the CUT Project outside Seattle, WA, documenting their journey into healing through platonic touch and communal care.
CHRONICALLY UNDERTOUCHED (CUT) PROJECT
Challenging Narratives, Offering Alternatives. As the founder of the CUT Project, Aaron facilitates retreats and workshops that challenge societal narratives around Black masculinity, offering an alternative path where softness, grief, and connection are not just allowed but essential.
The Touch Activist Program
Deep Listening, Healing, Interrupting the Black Brute Archetype. The Touch Activist Program is creating a critical mass of practitioners and everyday humans to offer conscious, caring, carnage-informed holding for Black bodies and People of the Global Majority.
Aaron Johnson is a dynamic speaker and facilitator who brings radical tenderness and embodied presence to every stage. With a bold yet grounded approach, he invites audiences to explore platonic connection, emotional honesty, and the unspoken weight of race, masculinity, and healing.
SEEKING TENDERNESS
In this intimate and thought-provoking talk, Aaron explores what it means to be Chronically UnderTouched and how systemic disconnection from platonic touch shapes the emotional lives of Black men. Rooted in his personal healing journey and the documentary "Dark and Tender," Aaron asks audiences to consider how tenderness, grief, and non-sexual touch can become liberatory practices.
Focus Areas
Aaron's speaking topics weave together platonic touch, grief as a sacred process, Earth-building as a return to self, and singing as collective medicine. He creates spaces where truth can rise gently, and transformation can root itself deeply.
ONE-oN-ONE SESSIONS
DEEPLY ATTUNED, GENTLY GUIDED
Aaron offers spacious, embodied sessions for those seeking to reconnect with their emotional landscape, process grief, or explore their relationship to platonic touch. These sessions are designed for individuals ready to meet themselves with tenderness and truth.
GROUP FACILITATION
Containers for collective transformation
Aaron creates containers that center emotional safety, community care, and collective transformation. Through dialogue, somatic practice, and reflective inquiry, participants are invited into honest exploration around race, gender, grief, and intimacy.
WORKSHOPS & RETREATS
Immersive experiences in nature
Aaron's retreats offer multi-day experiences designed to disrupt isolation and restore the power of platonic touch, silence, and communal healing. Set in nature and crafted with intention, these retreats are soft landings for those ready to remember what it feels like to be held—in body, in spirit, and in community.