These words from David Whyte’s book: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words seem especially relevant in our fast-paced world of electronic communication and impersonalization of contact between individuals. I hope you this reading as meaningful as I do. As humans, we NEED touch to thrive on all levels – it’s as basic a necessity as food and water.
TOUCH is what we desire in one form or another, even if we find it through being alone, through the agency of silence or through the felt need to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass on the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of another’s hand; even the gentle first touch of an understand which, until now, we were formally afraid to hold.
Whether we touch only what we see or the mystery of what lies beneath the veil of what we see, we are made for unending meeting and exchange, while having to hold a coherent mind and body, physically or imaginatively, which in turn can be found and touched itself. We are something for the world to run up against and rub up against: through the trials of love, through pain, through happiness, through our simple everyday movement through the world.
And the world touches us in many ways, some of which are violations of the body or our hopes for safety: through natural disaster, through heartbreak, through illness, through death itself. . . Being alive in the world means being found by that world and sometimes touched to the core in ways we would rather not experience. Growing with our bodies, all of us find ourselves at one time violated or wounded by this world in difficult ways, and still we live and breathe in this touchable, sensual world, and, through trauma, through grief, through recovery, we heal in order to be touched again in the right way, as the physical consecration of a mutual, trusted invitation.
To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
If you need to heal, to decrease a sense of aloneness and anxiety, to feel balanced, to connect more easily to other human beings, to have more hope and joy in your life, consider coming in for a Healing Touch session. You can schedule an appointment by e-mailing mandalaht@gmail.com or phoning 360-683-3819.
Mandala Healing Touch 