The Psychology of Touch

Beings in union love each other, touch each other,
 need each other, heal each other.
We are here on earth to touch each other physically,
 as well as spiritually, emotionally and mentally.   

     The field where intimacy, love and sex all come together is in the world of touch. Touch is such a basic need that people easily forget it or do not see it as a separate distinct essential need. The hunger for touch is a real human need almost as important as food. And just as intimacy can be seen differently from love and sex, though they often combine the two, touch also is an activity in itself and can be a wholly satisfying experience as people who give and receive massage well know.   

Holy Touch, Holy Love, Needed Affection
Our temples United Flowing with The Cosmic Current.
We bathe ourselves in the Holy Well,
Every Remnant of Separation Cast Aside
Our Hearts Open, Our Being Sore
Our Souls Unite. Total Fusion
No Shame
The Garden Reclaimed  

     The most important way we give love to a baby is through touch. For babies, and the rest of us, love is equated deeply with touch. The problem for adults though comes in with the intense association we make between touch and sex. Just like we fear intimacy we fear touch because sexual issues intervene in our consciousness. Clinically, cutaneous deprivation, (the lack of touch) leads to a host of emotional, physical and developmental problems in young and old alike. Research has shown that there are distinct biochemical differences between people who experience touch and those who are severely deprived of it.    

We need to be touched for needs that go untouched
 build up like potential energy ready to wreck havoc in our lives.
Touch is energy and moves energy.  

     At the very heart of sex is our need for touch. The secret connection between touch and sex is crucial to understand for it is here that humanity falls into a ravine of terrible suffering. Touch and sex are different ends of a spectrum; one represents the intensification of the other. Touch moves energy and depending on the type of touch, where the touch, and the motive and intent of the touch, the amount of energy that moves varies. The human body is electric and needs grounding through physical touch. The activity of the billions of nerve cells in the brain and the central and peripheral nerve systems are all highly electric in nature and all have their grounding points in the skin, which is the largest organ of the body. When we touch or are touched we ground some of our surplus energies and this calms the nervous system.  

I would like you to touch me as if you were
feeding me through your hands, as if by your
touch I am nourished and sustained.  Every inch
of me cries out for your touch, yearns to be fed.
                                                             Valerie Ann Worwood  

      We are born with an intense skin hunger. Babies have a deep need for touch and if not forthcoming healthy development is interfered with. Touch is a God given need that we never outgrow and it can be enjoyed for its own sake, not just as a prelude to sex. As adults we have a strong need to hold hands, be held in someone's arms, to hug, receive a nonsexual massage, have our face or arms stroked, be cuddled, caressed, etc. All of these things have actual physiological effects on our biochemical and bio-energetic systems. Brain wave activity is increased resulting in increased alertness for instance. The amount of insulin needed in diabetics is reduced, hormone levels increase and sleep patterns are enhanced. Touch is physically necessary and beneficial to our entire sense of well-being. Through touch multiple neuronal messages are transmitted to our brains stimulating the production of hormones (chemical/emotional energy) that provide physical and emotional good feelings. Simply put, humans thrive on touch. The hunger for touch is a real human need. And though touch is physical, the need provides sustenance and anchoring for our emotional, mental and spiritual selves which all need to feel securely anchored in a world of love. This is totally true for babies and only slightly less so for adults even thought they have gotten used to a world and life of cutaneous deprivation. But does anyone really ever get used to it? Can the consequences of touch deprivation ever be overcome without touch? Though there are spiritual, religious and psychological pathways which ignore the Psychology of Touch and model life without warmth and tenderness, we can safely doubt these life courses and whether they serve the maturation of our beings. The cold clinical no touch fifty-minute hour is an example of this. Perhaps one of the reasons clinical psychology and many forms of therapy are so slow and expensive is that even the most innocent and tender touches are avoided with fear. Many therapists are trained to greatly fear meeting their patients on the streets. And to actually touch them, to hold a hand is equivalent with acts punishable by excommunication from their own ‘professional’ church.  

Sex is intense touch, Sex is energy, and Sex is emotion.
Emotion is chemical energy.   

     The importance and need for touch cannot be overstated but this is all brought home in the words of Father X, a Catholic Priest convicted and treated for child sexual abuse. “Physical touch was often all that I needed or wanted. Just closeness. My arms around him. But then the sexual need or lust, I am not sure how to explain it, would just kick in, and I would find myself touching and fondling genitals.” “My reaching out to them was not to harm them. I was reaching for affection, for intimacy, reaching out to belong, to have someone who would be my friend.” Obviously this man felt a deep hole in his being, a hunger for touch, closeness and affection that was not being provided to him through normal means. Instead, through desperation, he reached out inappropriately to children to satisfy his emotional needs. He said, “In the seminary there was no opportunity to develop intimacy and no discussion of sexuality.” A man priest cut off from touch, intimacy, information, and love is being set up for a big fall. The hunger for touch is a real human need and those who put people on starvation diets of touch are abusing a being’s real need as well as setting the stage for emotional disturbances, suffering, and possible future cases of child abuse.  

The need for touch is not a sickness; it only becomes a sickness
when we are deprived of normal levels of touch and physical affection.
Abuse comes from the separate space, from the feeling
of loneliness and isolation, and from the desperate space of need.
To touch is to heal but abusive touch is a sickness  for it causes only pain.  

      Seeing sex as energy is one way of defining it. And though it can be stimulated through the mind and imagination it is basically triggered through and by touch. We could also say that non-sexual touch is simply touch and energy exchange happening on lower levels. Emotions are also energy, e-motion means energy in motion. There is a formula that relates touch, emotional need, and sexual energy movement into some kind of mathematical relationship. Sex cannot be separated from its accompanying emotions and from the need for touch and yet we do need to learn the differences.  

Touch is love when the intent is beautiful.
Beautifying the intent is part of the process of
 the beautification of our sexualities.  

      There is no helping the fact that our relationship with sex affects our inclinations toward touch, and visa versa. Perhaps this is one of the most significant relationships we make in our lives for the personal history of touching in each and every life, since birth, has a direct bearing on our personality development, and thus on the type of person we turn into. It is natural to feel something when touched and we could call even low intensity feelings, even in young children, sexual without being too much off the mark. These feelings are essential to a babies as well as our own adult sense of well-being. The intensification of these feelings is what we could call sexual energy. Even babies are capable of feeling intense feelings and thus energy or sex, though because of the ‘special’ connotation and dirty image we have of ‘sex’ we rebel against any association with the word sex and children. Without a mind there to ‘think’ about what sex is, no mind trying to define it, no intellect there to compare it to anything else, its just pure energy. The chemical fires burning in all physical existence sometimes slow, sometimes faster. In the American Cherokee Indian tradition children and even infants were seen as sexual beings meaning there was acknowledgment that they felt intense feelings on physical levels from their earliest years. Without Christian guilt trips to mess up their minds, and without pornographic or fixed ideas that trap and limit sexuality as something that happens between penises and vaginas, these people were able to relax about children’s sexuality. Masturbation or the early attention to these feelings centered on genitals is not repressed by cultures un-fearful of touch and sexuality.  Only when we think there is something wrong or immoral with touch and sexuality do parents make it a problem.  

Destroy the world of touch
 and you destroy the world of love.  

     As children one of the most dramatic emotional and unexplainable putdowns is centered around this “no self-pleasuring” stuff that comes from slapping a child’s hand away from their genitals. Anti masturbation taboos in society are destructive emotionally, mentally and spiritually to the young and creates great upset to the delicate emotional inner worlds of children. Any disturbance around the world of touch will eventually lead to severe disturbances of being later on. The Cherokee avoided much suffering and pain for they were able to integrate their sexual, sensual and spiritual natures into a sense of wholeness that led them to live more balanced lives in tune with themselves, others in their tribe, and with God (which they called The Above Beings) and nature itself.  

     Actually this obsession many have with masturbation and children creates the ‘inappropriate” connection between touch and sex. Trouble starts easily when children’s sexuality (need for touch) is controlled by parents’ paranoia and fear that gets expressed as “Don’t touch yourself!” or “That’s dirty.” If a parent feels that it is disgusting they will not be able to help themselves and some sense of that will spill into the more innocent consciousness of the children. As the children grow a little older the negative conditioning continues with statements like, “Good girls do not let boys touch them.” This is almost as common and as bad as, “Big boys don’t cry.” This association between sex and touch is imprinted onto the young basically imprisoning the wonderful world of touch in sex. This means that for many people touch has to lead to sex or when touched it means sex, or worse, the only way to obtain the warmth and tenderness and affection that any being needs is through sex.      

I would like you to touch me as if your hands were
 healing hands, radiating love energy with every stroke. 
Feel the energy penetrating through skin, through flesh,
 entering into the cells of my body.
                                                                          Valerie Ann Worwood  

     Somewhere between birth and adulthood we develop touch barriers that can be harmful to our well-being. Sex is a very vulnerable time, with lots of holding, touching, kissing and connecting. How much you were touched, tickled, and played with as an infant has an influence on how we feel about being touched and being affectionate in the process of making love. Some people have so much fear and embarrassment about sexuality, that they are afraid to show or receive affection from their partners in public. Everything that happened to us in our infancy, every touch received, not received, every reaction we felt to our bodies and how others related to our bodies is stored somewhere in our unconscious minds. We have stored experiences of our first touch, bonding with our mothers and fathers, feeding, toilet training, holding, and nurturing, that are all triggered off when we are confronted with intimate experiences. Most often these are not specific memories that we call up but this conditioning still effects how we feel and react in similar situations.  

     Some people have so little experience of touch that it actually threatens their state of health and well-being. The most worrisome aspect relates to self-examination for health reasons, i.e., women need to check their breasts for cancer and men need to check for lumps that could indicate testicular cancer. There are people who have never touched themselves sexually, have never masturbated and from them we can hear, "Lying there touching myself? I couldn't!" How could such an innocent activity become something that is totally avoided? The connection between sex and touch—any touch—is made early on by many people. Touch can be associated with guilt and sex so early in life that it becomes cemented deeply into the foundation of the developing personality. This imprisoning of touch, within the context of sex, means that touch becomes a lead-in to it and so some forms of touch, like sensual touch, is avoided because sex needs to be avoided. This creates a basic pleasure avoidance syndrome that is hard to overcome. What is really being avoided unconsciously are the feelings of guilt and the conditioned ugliness or nasty feelings of hurt that were impregnated on our vulnerable being so long ago. One of the consequences of relating touch too much to sex is that many women, who need affection and demonstrative warmth from their spouses, refrain from touching their partners because it will be interpreted as a sexual advance. 

     Even though many doctors do not want to admit it, the birthing experience itself is important. At birth, a baby is vulnerable and naked, and has never before been touched by human hands. If the touching is rough, or if the baby is treated as an object when she/he is cleaned or touched, they may decide deeply on a feeling level that touching doesn't feel good, or it hurts. How a baby is touched is an important factor in how it will like to be touched sexually as an adult. 

     Sex brings us to the most vulnerable issues of life and to our very roots, which often come from birth, and the earliest periods of life. The bonding period between mother, father and baby is an important time and how our parents themselves relate to sexuality, and thus touch, is important in our early development. This is when we are patterned into feeling separate or feeling connected to other human beings. The less we are touched the more separate we end up feeling. Some people, who are too deprived of touch, which helps us feel connected to others, only feel this connection when the touch is highly electric meaning sexual.  

It's amazing that we have so much going on in the first two years
of our lives that we don't consciously remember. These first two years
are very important conditioning years for our sexuality and sensuality.
These decisions are about being a sexual being, experiencing pleasure;
feeling that pleasure is innocent; receiving what you want, how and when you want it;
being touched and how that feels;   feeling safe and connected to another human being.                                                                                                        Rhonda Levand  

      We without hesitation hold a baby, stroke a cat, but often avoid touching other adult persons. Love needs physical expression, yet we fear it so we sit in loneliness and physical isolation, too uptight to share in the beauty of physical communication. Physical affection is very important for wholesome touching puts us more in touch with the more beautiful parts of ourselves. Yet surveys have shown that overwhelmingly most people do not touch as much as they would like, especially with the opposite sex, even when no other sexual activity is desired. We often cover up our need for intimacy and touch by activities, sports, TV, work, church, or by using food, drugs, alcohol, or sex for only selfish physical pleasure.  

We all want the same love, intimacy, close body contact,
 feeling of nurturing and warmth of another.  

     Touch is a form of sensuality, the wholesome enjoyment of the body’s senses. The universal intelligence gave us our senses and the ability to enjoy them and feel pleasure through them for health reasons and for the benefit of our emotional and physical well-being. Sexuality, intense touch, offers even greater pleasure with enhanced effect especially if it is accompanied by love. Sex should be pleasure sharing at its best when it flows without obstruction and with love. But so strong is the need for touch and intimacy (desperation) that many get obsessed to sex (without love) for there is still an intense short term effect (with loveless sex) that makes up, seemingly, for the lack of love, intimacy and tender touch we often have to face in normal daily family life.  

I would like you to touch me as if your hand were a feather,
 lightly caressing the edge of my being.
 I would like you to touch me as if you were erasing the outer me,
allowing me to reveal my inner self to you.
I would like you to touch me as if
 your hands were sponges, soaking up
 the essence of my being.
                                            Rhonda Levand  

     Touch is an activity in itself, and is wholly satisfying, healing and a necessary life experience. Touch does not need to lead to sex and it helps all of us to realize that. Touch in the form of massage, affection, hugs, cuddles and plain pure tenderness diffuses emotional tension. It grounds the entire system and touches our souls. When a person has not been touched in a long while a simple and tender touch can send a person into a flood of tears for the heart feels the release of tension abruptly. It is sad that, so distorted with fear are our minds that parents cut off their own physical intimacy with their children for fear of feeling sexual feelings. This fear cuts off love as well as tender physical intimacy. Emotionally and sexually mature people are not afraid to feel and even if that means feeling some energy flowing through the first chakra (genitals) while a child sits or plays on our laps, that does not mean we have to pull away or freak out. People who are used to feelings in general can accept the feelings and let them pass through like a wave washing up on a beach. Leaving our minds out of it, with all the guilt trips programmed into it, energy can be relaxed into and let go. To be accidentally and innocently stimulated is no big deal, it does not mean anything, and for sure it does not mean we are going to abuse ourselves or our children with incestual activities. To some people tender demonstrative love between a parents and children is judged as incestuous and it is for this reason that these same people do not touch their own children. Love, intimacy and touch combines and translates into sex for many people and for this reason too many beings get deprived of the basic levels of touch that they need for healthy emotional development. All of this unconsciously sets the stage for child abuse of the emotional and sexual type.  

I would like you to touch me as if you were
feeding me through your hands, as if by your touch I am nourished and sustained.
Every inch of me cries out for your touch, yearns to be fed.                                                                        
                                                                            Rhonda Levand

     There are so many things that create obstructions, especially when the underlying philosophy of sex is bad. The following might surprise some: “I am 18 and unable to experience any pleasure from another  person touching me. When I was about seven a woman came to our school and told us about "the bad touch." She said that it felt "yucky" to have someone touch you intimately. That never happened to me, but I   was always afraid someone might do that and the fear has never gone away.” It is highly ironic that even in sexual education settings that such things can happen. Ironic to find that the long-term effect of such programs is the opposite of what is intended.  

     Many people come out of childhood with some negative conditioning against intimacy, love, sex and touch. Some people like this young man above is pretty conscious of the source of his negative conditioning. Others too remember dramatic episodes like rape or incest and other overt types of abuse so they have some sense of the cause of their emotional and mental anguish. Others are not so fortunate and have blocked out all memory and as such have no clue to what is at the bottom of their depressions or inability to relate to intimacy and touch in healthy ways. Few people are really consciously aware of how society and their church might have conditioned them subtly and negatively over long periods of time. And almost no one would remember a mother or father slapping their hands away at age two.  

     Touch can be a communication of love and is a most powerful way to communicate empathy, friendship, approval, affirmation and love to another. Our inner spirits can nurture and share with each other most powerfully through caring touch and so it is important to teach this in sexual education which is really touch education. If someone is to teach about the dangers of sex and sexual abuse they had better balance that with teaching the full truth of its beauty. Signs of affection may be considered inappropriate for fear of sexuality and because of negative conditioning about what touch is. So great is this fear today, because of the last decade or two of child abuse scandals in places like day care centers, that real warmth and affection have been cut off between child care workers and teaches and the children that need their love. The damage being done to the present generation of children cannot really be estimated though we can see the damage from generations gone past which lived under a veil of secrecy and ignorance about all such matters. It is important to learn that there are many forms of wholesome touch like hugs and cuddles and neither have to end in sex. Yes there are also concerns for health issues, protection from unwanted children etc. that are important to impart to children but the love of touch should be number one on the list. Sexual education should be about educating our children to the wonderful world of touch and as such overemphasis on the sexual aspects of touch are narrow and forlorn.  

     Touch does not have to end with sex even when it is sensual. We do not have to make love when we touch. We do not have to be married to touch. Selfish touch is different from the pleasure of wanted touch. Lust is the selfish gratification of a person’s sex drive for his or her own physical pleasure. Lust is very different from mutual pleasure sharing in sexuality or non-sexual sensuality through touch.  

More people in the world are starving
 for love and affection than for food.  

     Most modern cultures today sport cultures full of immature sexual attitudes, which are due to repressive religious attitudes and society teaching us to be ashamed of our bodies and sexuality. These teachings, societies and religions are creating the hunger and desperate need found in so many people. Women need to be taught to shed ingrained embarrassment and concealment of their physical selves, and come instead to find pride and comfort in their natural sensuality. And men need to understand that there are levels of love and touch which have nothing to do with sex. The path of sexual beautification is partially a process of becoming more and more sensitive to ourselves and our needs for touch. To the extent that we are sex negative, meaning that we are afraid of our sexualities and need for touch, the greater will be our spiritual problem and crisis.  

I would like you to touch me as if I were a rare jewel, precious and valuable.
                                                                                         Rhonda Levand  

     Defining sex as intense touch is helpful for lovemaking can make up for long periods of time when we go untouched. A session of passionate love makes up for a lot of non-touching during the rest of the week and that is one of the reasons many people look forward or want it so much. “A session of passionate love once a weeks keeps a woman's reproductive system in tip-top condition,” explains Dr. Winnifred Cutler, director of the Athena Institute for Women's Wellness Research in Pennsylvania. In a study of 700 women, those who had sex at least once a week were found to have twice the levels of estrogen as those who had sex less than once a week. And women approaching menopause who still enjoyed sex weekly experienced fewer hot flashes than those who had sex less often.  

I would like you to touch me as if you were blind,
knowing that you love me, but unable to see me.
Touch my face, my breasts, my belly, my toes...
learn what I "look" like, imagine me in your
mind as your hands explore my shape.

                                                             Rhonda Levand  

     Somewhere the question has been asked, “Are you interested in the kind of person who is focused on sex?” Now if that means, “Are you interested in the kind of person who is selfish and lustful and only wants to use your body as an object” it is easy to say no. Now lets ask, “Are you interested in the kind of person who is focused in touch? On intimacy, tenderness and affection?” Someone who would answer no to this should have their head examined for to live without these qualities of being, or to marry and live with someone who is cold on these levels is surely a trying experience.  

     Sexual touch is a special category of touch and is appropriate subject knowledge for teenagers and adults. Touch is very sensitive to the thought form behind it, to our motive. If that motive is selfish and our thoughts abusive, that will get transmitted through our touch as an unwholesome feeling received by the person touched, and this children should be taught of, and adolescents and adults should be wholly familiar with. When something feels wrong it is wrong and we need to know how to react swiftly when it comes to the world of touch for we can be hurt very quickly by inappropriate hands touching us.  

     Our hands can also literally act as extensions of our heart. With our heart and hands working together we can reach directly into another person’s being through the surface of their skin. We can touch someone very deeply and when we do we are touched equally. The laws of giving and receiving work perfectly in the world of touch.  

     People who are trained in giving massage learn to put their consciousness into their hands for we can communicate our being to another through touch. The quality of our awareness makes all the difference and touching with good intent raises our consciousness for it is a sweet gift to give to another. When we touch with love we do not concentrate so much on what we are doing. Instead we concentrate on the feeling of the contact, the feeling of our hands interacting with another’s body. Our focus on our hands and on the feelings instead of the activity of doing or the particular body part we are touching changes the whole quality of touch. When we do body work, massaging the whole body, we hunt around for knots and hard sinewy bits of tissue. When we forget about technique and just make love to these tension spots, without worry or care as to the outcome, we enter the magic of touch. We enter the field of healing for when we put our full heart into our hands they become healing hands. Touch can be healing and this is an entirely different world from touch as excitement. In really good massage we forget about how to do things and concentrate on what we are touching and how that feels. When we really focus our entire attention in this way we even forget about the person we are touching, concentrating instead on the movements of our own body, on our breath, internal states of relaxation or tension, and on the ‘interior’ of the body under our searching hands. We can feel inside of them better when we are tuned deeply to our own internal state.  

     The secret is that the more we work this way the more the person under our hands seems to relax. Our touch can become an extension of our consciousness and if we can relax deeply into ourselves that gets translated into our hands and touch. When we really hit the magic of massage both they and we loose all sense of time and enter a state of bodiless eternity. Relaxation breeds relaxation, love and touch together breed healing. We can communicate our best selves through touch! 

     Lovemaking is obviously a good time to touch each other for this is often the only time when we are completely naked and have our entire naked skin available, ready and willing to be touched. Sexual touch tends to gravitate to the well known erogenous zones like the neck, ears, shoulders, back, breasts, nipples, thighs, buttocks, the genitals, hips and sides of the body. How we touch means everything. When we are too lustful we loose touch with the more delicate and sensuous aspects of touch. For many touch is simply a form of foreplay that leads to the main event, meaning that mind gets ahead of the heart, concentrating too much on the goal of intercourse and eventual orgasm. Those who are looking and paying too much attention to the end, to a goal loose much of the potential joy and pleasure of simple touch.  

     When we touch with the “intent” to stimulate and excite we are adding our thoughts and desires into our touch and play. This shows how we can literally infuse touch with the power of thought. Sensuality is usually a prelude to hotter sexuality. When we feel sensual or touch sensually we begin to ignite energies that build when we persist with our touch. The fires of sexuality grow slowly in some and more quickly in others but we can encourage this growth with our touch. When we pay attention we can feel our lover’s body responding under our hands and if we pay attention to their appreciation for it, and our own feeling response to that, we have beautiful sexuality in the making.  

     One of the most important places in the universe of sexuality and love are the woman’s breasts. A woman’s breasts are important for both her and her man for they offer the key between love, vulnerability and the building of sexual currents. The breasts are not sex objects, they are love objects and they open wide the doors to both men and women’s sexualities. One of the keys to finding love in sex is to bring our highest consciousness to the breasts and the heart center they represent. Located directly between the breasts is acupuncture point CV 17 which is the very center of the heart chakra or cardiac center. The openness and closedness of our hearts has a direct bearing on what is happening in this energy center and in the surrounding tissues up to and including the breasts.  

     Though society and men love to treat the breasts as sexual objects this does not change the fact that women yearn to have their breasts touched with love and understanding. Women relate to love as something different than men do. For them it has more to do with emotion and security, the chakra function that centers on the breasts. Complicating and multiplying the emotions around the breasts is the fact that the breast for all, who were fed from them at birth, represents our primordial need for warmth and nourishment. In the beginning was the breast, and it was as big and as broad as the whole wide world. Bottle fed babies miss out on a great thing and pay the price in emotional, feeling and touch terms. But in the beginning the breasts are at the center of life and only slowly do we expand out from there.  

     Today even women tend to get lost from the vulnerability of their breasts. Women tend to rebel against touch by insensitive hands that have no empathy behind them, but all to often they allow them to be treated roughly or ignored. Most often when a man touches a woman’s breast he operates from his own desire toward the goal or fruition of sexual contact. With his mind on getting into the vagina he overlooks relating to the breasts themselves as warm love handles he can touch with the expression of all his love. How we make love to the breasts makes a big difference in the world of sexual touch for they offer the point where sex energy can meet love energy. By bringing more love into our sexual caresses, healing hands merging with sensual touch, converging on the symbol of fertility, the breasts, home of warmth and nurturance, the objects that have captured the eyes and hearts of artists and lovers throughout human history, we can enter and realize the deepest ecstasy of touch.  

    Healing with the hands brings us to the most beautiful aspect of touch. Though we can always touch with healing hands that is not always our intent. But when we tune our consciousness to healing, we can do wonderful things with our hands. Massage, for example, is both a healing and relaxing anti stress type of touch we give and all who have received one love its beneficial effects. The quality of massage has much more to do with the quality of the practitioner’s consciousness than on the particular technique they are using. How much they are able to get out of their minds and into their hands and into the feeling of your body is mission critical for a good massage. The more they are able to relax internally the deeper the relaxation transmitted and received through the massage.  

The most beautiful forms of touch possible
 are actually healing techniques. 

     There are other healing approaches that take us into the subtle and most beautiful realms of touch. Healing and health systems like Reiki and Polarity are what used to be called “Laying on of the Hands.” These approaches basically have us touch a person without any movement at all of the hands. There is no pressure applied, no technique, just the pure application of touch. Though each system gives different instructions to the minds that study them, the end technique is basically the same. You simply put your warm hands on certain areas of the body and just hold them there.  

     Reiki is probably the most popular now and it is effective enough to get the attention of some medical people and hospitals that understand that it can help their patients through some trying moments. If we define touch as love we can easily see why. Love is healing and loving touch is super healing. When we touch with love and the highest inner intensions, which are taught by these healing systems, such good energy is transmitted that the hands themselves do not have to move physically. Something is passed on and through the hands and often what happens is very beautiful. Though each system explains to the mind what is happening, and how to make it happen, here in The Psychology of Touch we are looking at the common denominator. We are looking at touch. In the case of healing our hands become the conduit of not only our good intentions but on the actual vibration of our being.  

     We can explain the healing aspects of our hands in several ways. Perhaps simply our love comes through the warmth of them. Or the laws of harmonic resonance take over and there is an actual transmission of vibration. Like old grandfather clocks together on a wall, if you swing them all in different directions and come back to the room a little later, one will find them all swinging together in resonance. Somehow their rhythms get communicated without touching each other. With touch the transmission is more direct, and as such, powerful.  

     And that, in the final analysis is what touch is all about. It is a transmission from one person to another and it always communicates something. We have concentrated on the most positive and beneficial aspects of touch and it is with a heavy heart that we need to talk much in this book about hurtful touch in the form of rape and child sexual abuse. Humans have frequently touched each other with violence in their hearts and cold separation in their minds. Murder, wife beating, war and torture have always been the worst expressions of touch, though in modern times we kill and conduct war from a distance. The Marriage of Souls comes to us as a dream of heaven knowing that we are living on a planet where men and women are accustomed to living in hell. Hell is a strong word but the victims of all of the above know of what I speak.  

     The fact that our sexualities sit on center stage in the world of touch is no accident and the fact that much violence in history is sexual also should come as no surprise. It is no coincidence that that the violence wrought by the Nazi on the Jews was often sexual. Rape and child sexual abuse are no accidents of society either for they are almost the rule, not the exception. When you look at the child abuse statistics this statement is surely rammed home. It is nothing less than one of the greatest sadness’ of life, a great tragedy that happens everyday, every minute in fact somewhere on the globe. 

     Sexual purity begins or ends in the human mind and as it is with our sexualities that we touch other people powerfully. Many people cannot get turned on any more through the pleasure of loving touch because they have been touched in unloving ways and the trauma of that often remains for the rest of ones life. The great surge in pornography mirrors the reality that a great many people are finding it very difficult to obtain pleasure and sexual satisfaction at ordinary sensory touch levels. Perverted sex, aggression and violence, where do they all come from? What is their common link? Sigmund Freud, in his famous correspondence with Albert Einstein, argued that aggression was at the root of our very survival as a species and that it was very much linked with repression of the life-force (libido) in us. Obviously we need to stop repressing our sexualities but the end of repression does not mean the beginning of license. Christopher Hills said in The Rise of the Phoenix:

 “A society in which freedom becomes license also loses a centeredness which fosters true integrity and allows weakness and indulgence to pervert our true purpose. In an individual, the thin line between self-acceptance and self-indulgence makes the difference between integrity of character and lack of character. And the same is true in society. The same kinds of rationalizations that come into the mind of an indulgent individual also leads a whole society down the subtle pathways of inner decay, so gradually that the deterioration is hardly noticed. Society pays a high price for this victory of weakness over self-discipline. The price is that our children grow up to think that “anything goes,” that there are no limits.   

     The beautification of our sexualities includes a path that takes us more deeply into the psychology of touch. The beautification of our lives depends on us reaching toward the purification of our touch. To touch purely is an ever-sweet act. And to be touched by such a touch can send us into the clouds where all our worries have no name.  

     So as the old saying goes, “reach out and touch someone.” We would be living in a different world if everyone touched more. Elsewhere in this series it is mused, if only everyone could love just one more person. Some people might translate this all here to lets have more sex as if sex itself might be the final solution to humanities problems. This chapter is suggesting something a little different. It suggests that we pay attention to the quality of our touch, and of course to touch more with this quality. In the context of the entire book it also means to increase the quality and caring of our touch while making love. The following is an exercise for lovers of all ages. It combines all the best aspects of touch within the context of our sexuality without getting sexual. It comes from the work of Valerie Ann Worwood, an author and leader in the field of aromatherapy.  

     “Sensuous touch is an activity in itself and can be a wholly satisfying experience. One might not always want to make love, especially after a long and tiring day, but when ten minutes of sensuous touch takes place, the same relaxing and satisfying feeling overtakes you and you fall into each other's arms, close and at one instead of grumpy and uptight. First it is crucial to allow yourself to accept that touching doesn't have to lead to sex. Just touch each other in the full knowledge that you're going to fall asleep in ten minutes' time. Caress each other gently, not forgetting the face and              head — kiss goodnight and go to sleep. Sweet dreams.”  

     “Three ten-minute touching-only sessions a week would save thousands of marriages and millions of dollars in psychiatrists' and doctors' fees. If you really concentrate and allow your natural energies and senses to be your guide, your loving touch will become a magnificent and surprising tool that can be incorporated into lovemaking. Touch shouldn't be a form of foreplay only, but an ongoing, energy circulating, and stimulating tool, used to fan the fires of passion. If we accept that touch can be a legitimate activity unrelated to sex, then we can really begin to explore its potential. Our society needs to recognize the beneficial effects touch has on the nervous system with the same readiness as it today pops tranquilizers and sleeping pills. Touch is an important human activity in its own right, crucial to our well-being and an absolute delight.” 

     When a couple moves into this kind of touch it is not unusual to feel vulnerable and exposed. And it’s not uncommon for a person to feel close to tears when touched deeply and intimately through sensual touch after a long time without it. Sensual touch that falls ‘slightly’ short of the hotter fires of actual sexuality penetrate to a level of innocence that can open the heart. For most people today sex means a lot of movement, friction and penetration. With sensuality we search for a sensitivity that lies deeper than the superficial sensations of friction no matter how pleasurable that may be. In sensuality we remain in the beginning (of sex) and do not move to the end though we might end up there unexpectedly. A couple who practices remaining in the beginning, and can actually devote many sessions to doing ‘just’ that will bring something to the end that they could hardly dream of. The process of relaxing into our sexualities begins here. Later in this book there is a chapter called The Foundation of Youth that goes deeply into the mystery of a different kind of sexuality through relaxing into it.