Dimensional Touch: Engaging the Fabric of Wholeness

Carol Agneessens, M.Sc., RCSTÆ

The greatest sense in our body is our touch sense. It is probably the chief sense in the processes of sleeping and waking; it gives us our knowledge of depth or thickness and form; we feel, we love and hate, are touchy and are touched, through the touch corpuscles of our skin.¹
J. Lionel Tayler

The Alchemy of Touch: An Introduction

Touch – the “miracle” elixir since the beginning of time! Touch engages the essence of human potential. Over the centuries, compassionate touch has been used as a poultice for the ailing, as the silent bridge between living and dying, for birthing and heartbreak, for warfare and peace. Through physical touch, we come into relationship and contact with another, with our environment, and with the possibility of a transformational exchange. I imagine the goddesses imparting their wisdom of the twinning of heart and hand through the dreams of Asclepius, one of the earliest Greek healers renowned for his often mystical abilities. Even as we hold an awareness of coming into contact with another, touch is happening across the expanse of space.

The beneficial effects of touch have been confirmed through observation and research. Given consistent, kind and soothing contact, infants flourish. These studies highlight the findings of Harry Harlow and his work with rhesus monkeys at his University of Wisconsin lab. Consistent and gentle contact promotes social and cognitive development. A failure to thrive observed among isolation-reared monkeys, as well as adults exhibiting pathological violence, can be traced to sparsely given or non-existent contact. Amazingly, Harlow’s monkeys survived even if their “nurturing other” was in the form of a rug-covered, wire mannequin. Ashely Montague, author of the groundbreaking book Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, enlightened Western culture about the essential life-sustaining and nourishing physiology of touch. Asclepius, Harlow, Montague, and others realized the fundamental need to touch and be touched.

Groundbreaking research in neuroscience is radically shifting our understanding of the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. All of this vitally novel information expands the fundamentals of therapeutic touch. Touch is a perceptual gestalt. It is an invitation to experience a two-way relationship. The practitioner cultivates an awareness of self as he comes into relationship with a client. This subjective exchange between the practitioner and the client challenges the belief that the practitioner is the “doer” or “fixer” who remains untouched in the process, and the feedback loop created between them is a form of communication. This two-way exchange requires that the therapist stay connected with himself even as he “opens” to the client’s system. Perceptual acuity is heightened by a receptive state of mind. The intertwining of the senses (synesthesia) allows the practitioner to “see-feel” and be guided to the quality and depth of contact necessary for this individual at this particular time.

The diversity of my sensory systems, and their spontaneous convergence in the things that I encounter, ensures this inter-penetration or interweaving between my body and other bodies – this magical participation that permits me, at times to feel what others feel. The gestures of another being, the rhythm of its voice, and the stiffness or bounce in its spine, all gradually draw my senses into a unique relation with one another, into a coherent, if shifting, organization. And the more I linger with this other entity, the more coherent the relation becomes, and hence the more completely I find myself face-to-face with another intelligence, another center of experience.
David Abram²

The aware practitioner opens to contact as a two-way sensory exchange which is not a “merging.” This potential for exchange offers a nonverbal yet profound way of coming into relationship with another in a transformational and therapeutic context. This article explores the perceptual and neurobiological underpinnings of a receptive, listening, and omnidimensional touch and offers somatic explorations designed to deepen this inquiry.

There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form. Bending before man is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.
Novalis³

To Touch and Be Touched

Touch is called the mother of all senses.⁴ Before the eyes see or ears hear, touch stirs the embryo. Implantation nestles the fertilized egg into a receptive uterine wall continuing its process of growth and differentiation. From the very beginning, the uterine lacunae nourish the embryonic seed. Within three weeks' time, the primitive node ignites a midline through vibrating protoplasm traversing toward the future brain. Three embryonic⁵ germ layers (ectoderm, endoderm, and mesoderm) unfold carrying the informative mapping, out of which all function and form arises. The outermost layer of the embryo is the skin, which is the largest sensory organ. This tactile system is the earliest function in all living things.

Our skin, as the caparison of flesh, is intimately connected to the brain and its nervous system trailings. In fact, the nervous system, brain, and skin arise from the same germ layer: the ectoderm. The ectoderm covers the general surface of the embryonic body and is the seeding ground for hair, teeth, nails, and the sense organs of smell, taste, hearing, vision and touch. The earlier a function develops, the more fundamental it is likely to be within the organism.

As the science of embryology and pre- and perinatal psychology integrate with neuroscience, an understanding of the practitioner-client dynamic emerges as key in the therapeutic relationship. Central to this relationship dynamic is the kinesthetic awareness that as we touch another, we are also touched by the other. Through the complex neural circuitry inherent in a therapeutic context, transformation of both practitioner and client is possible.

In other words, my subjective state as practitioner guides my work. In an empathic exchange, the feeling-sense that flows through me informs me of the state of the individual I am working with. It is literally impossible to keep the “other” out. I am touched as I touch.

Daniel Siegel, M.D., author and neuroscience researcher, describes the importance of “contingent” communication. Contingent communication between infant and primary caregiver fulfills the universal need to have our signals perceived by another and responded to in a meaningful way.⁶ However, our need for meaningful contact does not stop at infancy or childhood. Take a moment to consider that in order to make contact that is meaningful to a client’s system, a practitioner opens herself to receiving the nonverbal somatic signals from her client. As the practitioner listens through her hands and heart to this somatic communication, her touch informs the client’s system that he/she is truly being listened to. Historically, touch is considered to be one directional – I touch you and you feel better. Contacting with awareness is a two-way communication whether it is through words or through the receptive hearing of the “heart within our hands.”

We are well enough aware that some skill, some ability, usually predominates in the character of each human being. This leads necessarily to one-sided thinking. Since man knows the world only through himself, and thus has the naïve arrogance to believe that the world is constructed by him and for his sake, it follows that he puts his special skills in the foreground, while seeking to reject those he lacks, to banish them from his totality. As a correction, he needs to develop all the manifestations of human character – sensuality and reason, imagination and common sense – into a coherent whole, no matter which quality predominates in him. If he fails to do so, he will labor under painful limitations, without ever understanding why he has so many stubborn enemies, why even he meets himself as an enemy.
Goethe⁷

The Embryonic Connection: Heart, Hands, and Brain

Through the mysterious unfolding of the embryo, arm buds emerge by day twenty-four. The “flippers” initially surround the developing embryonic heart, like guardian protectors of a temple. The limb buds emerge from a primordial and fertile ground just lateral to the developing heart. Curiously, the developing brain is also growing and expanding nearby. (Keep in mind that we are speaking of the dynamic growth of something roughly the size of a garden pea.)

Ectoderm, the precursor of nerve tissue, and mesoderm, the precursor of heart, blood, and bone, “grow” the embryonic limb buds. Eventually these buds differentiate into fingers, hands, arm bones, tissues, and joints with remarkable sensory potential and nervous tissue refinement. The circulatory system, with its miles of vessels, weaves through the arms like nourishing roots transporting blood-rich oxygen or removing waste. As these vessels flow through embryonic arms, a bridling effect occurs. The rapidly enlarging brain pulls on the vessels below. Consequently, the reigning-in of the slower growing circulatory system forms the elbow joint within the embryonic arm.

Together, heart, hand, and brain form a collaborative potential capable of perceiving the subtleties of the intelligence we touch. As these portals of communication open, listening to and receiving the informational flow of the body, the edges of perceptual knowing expand. By cultivating the sensory experience of the “heart within my hand” or the “vision within my touch,” one broadens the vocabulary that is spoken between oneself and another. The informational flow transmitted by patterns, images, textures, stillness, and movement inform and expand this nonverbal conversation between self and other. The science of embryology and the neurobiology of relationship inform our ability to listen and respond to the information streaming from the intelligent systems of our clients.

Perceptual Inquiry: The “Heart Within Your Hand”

Try this exercise. With a partner, sit comfortably side by side. Take a baseline read by contacting your partner’s thigh in a familiar way, perhaps with the mindset of a one-way exchange or in preparation to do work. Now, take your hand away and spend a moment sensing your heart within the cellular makeup of your hand before once again placing your hand on your partner’s thigh. Next, invite the huge electromagnetic field of your heart⁹ to become a feeling-sense within your own kinesphere. Enjoy the body sense of this field expanding through the room, allow a feeling sense of your hands to be the intelligent antennae of your expansive heart field. Take time to share with your partner sensations, perceptions, images, intuitions, etc. that may have been catalyzed by this exploration.

The Art of Dialogue

Recall a time when you felt listened to by a friend. What were the qualities of that conversation? Did the feeling-sense of yourself, your situation, or your friend shift as you experienced yourself being heard? Neuroscience research informs us that infants thrive when their communication is understood and responded to in an appropriate manner.¹⁰ Unfortunately, it is rare that we experience being heard by someone who is not judging, interpreting, intending, wanting to change something, or busy doing any number of activities while “listening” to us. It is rare that our words, the tonal quality of our voice, and the feeling sense of our expression are received in their fullest. When we come into touch-contact with the intention of “hearing” an individual, our hands transmit a different quality of engagement. This is communication. It is dialogue as real, "contact-full" and receptive as any verbal exchange. Touch is dialogue between practitioner and client in which the felt-sense of welcoming receptivity is the baseline of communication.

Between 1985-1991, David Bohm, a leading quantum physicist and thinker, wrote about the impact of true dialogue. With a little modification, we can take his description of suspension and apply it to a practitioner’s awareness of coming into contact, even before physical touch is made. Even the movement toward making contact is a form of touch and elicits responsiveness in both practitioner and client. This is touch and stirs the neuroreceptors below conscious awareness.

Suspension is a pause from thought, impulses, judgments, etc. and lies at the heart of Bohm’s discourses on the dynamic of dialogue. He writes that suspension is not easily grasped because it is both unfamiliar and subtle.¹¹ Our brains are designed to make judgment, discernments, discriminating choices, etc. It is not that this activity ceases; it is just that we begin to be mindful of that neurological tendency and suspend engagement with it in a moment(s) in time.

Perceptual Inquiry: The Art of Coming into Relationship

Have your partner stand across from you, at least ten to fifteen feet away. Then, hold a thought about her as you walk toward her. When does your partner sense you entering into her system? Have your partner describe her response.

Now begin again and take a moment to settle within yourself and sense your back and the space behind you. Settle into a felt sensation of your own back support. Notice any judgments that arise; just notice them and, without attempting to eliminate the judgment, name that impulse. Now begin to move toward your friend. What is your experience? What is her experience?

Reciprocal Touch

How does the client-practitioner dynamic shift if I allow myself “to be touched” by the individual I am touching? What happens to your “sense-abilities” if you open to the inherent intelligence of a living dynamic system? Habitual patterns of working, thinking, and perceiving chain us to familiar guideposts. “Sense-uality” dulls and your perceiving kinesphere shrinks. Suddenly a dynamic system becomes one that is thick, dense and seemingly unresponsive. If you are able to suspend your agenda (even for ten minutes) and allow yourself the time to settle with the intention of coming into a reciprocal contact with another, a doorway of potential opens. Taking the necessary time to come into relationship with another through touch delivers a qualitatively different contact and relational dynamic.

Perceptual Inquiry: Cultivating a Receptive Touch

With a partner, sit comfortably side by side. There are four parts to this inquiry. Feel free to share your experiences after each part.

1. Place one hand on your partner’s thigh with a firm and directive contact. Evaluate the texture or quality of your partner’s thigh muscle. After a minute or two, take your hand away.

2. With the intention of not doing or evaluating, but just making contact, place the palmer surface of your hand again on your partner’s thigh. Give yourself the time to settle and notice the felt-sense of coming into contact with your partner, sense the “all of her" and not just the site you are touching. Allow more of your attention to be with the back of your hand, not only with the palmar contact. Take time to settle into the sensation of this contact. Each time you feel yourself pulled to the palmer surface of your hand, sense the back of your hand.

3. Perceive the back of your hand extending toward the walls of your room, while sensing your feet on the floor; expand a sense of your kinesphere to include your back and/or the space behind you. Establish a connection with a tree, animal, or something alive in nature outside of the room. Let the back surface of your hand be in contact with that place, element, plant, or animal. Cultivating a feeling-sense of this connection is essential. Be sure to cultivate a body sense of this connection to nature around you. You are embedded in the space. This is not a concept but an alive and dynamic reality.

4. Notice if it’s easier to register feedback from your partner’s system when the palm surface of your intention is not crowding her and when there is literally more “space” for her to move or express into. Let your hand be imprinted by her system. What anatomical structures, images, physical sensations, or information from the client’s system inform your hand and your knowing?

Touching the Matrix: Automatic Shifting

What does it take “to be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception”?¹² How do we open to a spacious contact, touching the whole rather than a part? How can we cultivate our touch to perceive the whole and simultaneously listen to the specific? How do we cultivate our touch to receive contact rather than only give input?

Perceptual Inquiry: Omnidimensional Touch

Sit beside your partner as he lies supine on a comfortable table. Take the time you need to settle into relationship with your partner, waiting for a horizontal-like stillness to arise. You might imagine the ocean on a calm day. When you are moved to make contact, place one hand beneath your partner’s knee, and the other beneath the shoulder. Relax the backs of your hands into the table and let them sense the sheet they are resting into. You are not looking or palpating for anything. You are waiting for your contact to be received. It may take a little time for your partner’s system to begin to respond. Allow the back of your hand to yield into the support of the table and energetically extend toward the floor or even beneath the floor. Allow your hand to be more than bones and tissues. Expand the dimension of your hand beyond your skin. Your hand is more than anatomy. It is a sensing, dynamic, and integrated organ of perception.

You might notice that your fingers begin to extend beyond their tips. The kinesthetic sense may be that your hands are contacting surfaces and spaces far from where you could physically touch. Just notice this happening without trying to control, change, enlarge or alter in anyway what is beginning to move through your hands.

When this touch dynamic appears, it arises of its own volition. It cannot be willed or directed. You might notice that your hands automatically begin to perceive the whole of the individual. It is as if the client’s entire system is being held in the expanse of your hands. Notice the quality of contact. You might begin to notice a quality of stillness permeating the room as the spaciousness within your hands touches not only your partner but an expanse of the matrix you are both held within.

A Summary

Sensing the dimensionality and complexity of living systems requires that the practitioner “get out of her own way.” Our hands and our bodies interface with complex, self-organizing and intelligent systems in every session. We glimpse this inherent intelligence when we invite receptive and responsive touch. Think of your body as an activity of perceiving. As I cultivate a perceptual attitude of receptivity, I am touched by the world and individuals I come into relationship with. If I can learn to patiently listen first, instead of imposing an idea (true or not) about what I might imagine the other's system needs, I might be able to hear-see-feel the nonverbal communications his body intelligence speaks. My perceptual body can begin to understand the subtle voice of the world and individuals around me. If I can offer the spaciousness of my touch and the stillness of presence, the health and wholeness of a client’s system begins to arise. It is then that I touch the implicit drive in all living nature to actualize.

This quality of listening cannot be willed; it can only be welcomed when a shift into dialogue arises in the session. A guiding parameter would be that you meet your client with receptivity and openness, allowing for this kind of connection to emerge. Another guiding kinesthetic parameter is that of settling deeply into the support of your body, pelvis, legs, and feet, thereby inviting the sensate experience of ground to meet you. Sit with the supporting attitude of your perceptual body – a soft and wide vision, an orientation through your hearing or smell to the space of your room, and your breath easy and relaxed. The potential is to sense, touch, and perceive the depth of the interconnecting continuum of life emerging from absolute nothingness to the arising animation in the density of matter. This is a transformational key to healing for both practitioner and client. We are embedded in a matrix of wholeness. We are embedded in our environment. We are in relationship to all that surrounds us. Cultivating a receptive perceptual attitude challenges the beliefs that have structured our worldviews about health, wholeness and healing.

The finest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead.
Albert Einstein¹³

The multidimensional nature of the human body is ever unfolding before us, with all life forms in intelligent, self-organizing, and self-sustaining patterns of expression. Each life form, ignited at conception, traverses through this continuum in wholeness. Unleashed from the tethered beliefs about what a body is and is not, these portals of perception offer the potential of expanding the dimensions of our own awareness, embodiment, and wisdom every time we touch and allow ourselves to be touched.

Endnotes:

^1. Tayler, J. Lionel, The Stages of Human Life. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1921, pg. 157.

^2. Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books,1996, pg. 127.

^3. Novalis, 1771, quoted in Thomas Carlyle’s Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. II. London: Chapman and Hall Limited, 1890.

^4. Montagu, Ashley, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper & Rowe, 1971.

^5. Embryo refers to the first eight weeks after conception.

^6. Seigel, Daniel, M.D., The Neurobiology of We, Disc 1. Sounds True Audio Learning Course, 2008.

^7. Goethe quoted in Stephen H. Buhner's The Secret Teachings of Plants. Rochester, VT: Bear & Co., 2004, pg. 226.

^8. Larsen, William J., Human Embryology, 2nd edition. New York: Churchill-Livingstone, 1997, pg. 311.

^9. Buhner, Stephen H., "The Heart as an Organ of Perception." Spirituality and Health, March/April 2006, pp. 38-43. [“…The EMF of the heart is 5000 times greater than the brain's and can be detected by sensitive scientific instruments up to 10' away.” (pg. 40)]

^10. Seigel, op cit.

^11. Bohm, David, “Why Dialogue?”, pg. 5 in David Bohm, Donald Factor, and Peter Garrett's address "Dialogue: A Proposal,1991. Bohm Dialogue or Bohmian Dialogue aims to allow participants to examine their preconceptions, prejudices, and patterns of thought. Bohm Dialogue was developed by Bohm, Factor and Garrett starting in 1983, with Bohm publishing a series of papers between 1985 and 1991.

¹². Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper and Row, 1954. “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”

^13. Einstein, Albert, taken from a greeting card entitled "Silbury Hill." Phenomenal Card Company, July 1997.

Contact Carol Agneessens at carol@biodynamicschool.com for more information.