on the body

The body is the fundamental surface of experience. Consciousness, woven from the tapestral sinews which hold the skeleton in tensegrity, is the tip of the iceberg, and is in strange-looped interdependence with the body.

It is in the felt sensation of embodiment which our primary evidence of our existence lies. Thus the body is the vessel of the mind; body precedes but is consubstantial with mind.

In wise touch, touch aimed at understanding and soothing the body, in palpating and massaging its tissues, the wisdom of one body can be imparted unto another.

Our first experience of this transference occurs before birth, when our zygote is fertilized and implanted and begins to take up nourishment from the uterine wall of the parent upon contact.

From there, touch continues to define our existence, its primacy as the main medium of human to human contact fundamental by virtue of this opening ritual of our materiality. There is a fundamentally nourishing character to intersubjectively aligned touch that succeeds the first parental contact of zygotic binding.

A handshake concretizing a new acquaintanceship. A hug while shedding tears at a funeral. A kiss binding the flickering quanta of mutual attraction into the certainty of two bodies meeting. Touch is the touchstone of social ritual, more than spoken word.

Touch is perhaps the most relieving mode of contact with another, because it pierces our skull locked haze with reminder of our existence, however impermanent, in this very moment, right now.

To touch another with wisdom and compassion and loving kindness is to very directly transfer what can be simply put as energy to them. To touch another with curiosity and perceptiveness of their anatomy, to palpate and transform their tension into relaxation, is in my eyes the purest form of therapy accessible in this existence.

The somatic is the realm of the emotional; the mental is merely the realm of the linguistic. It is the felt sense of emotion in the body which guides the unfolding of our lives more than the machinations of the mind.

The interdependent interplay of body and mind is not a calculating affair, but an improvised dance, a choreography of an ancient character which binds our immaterial souls to our material existence, allowing the contents to shape the vessel and the vessel to shape the contents in one go.

To intervene in this system, to intercept its signals and reconfigure the harmony of another’s body through wise, compassionate, loving-kind touch, is to give a profound bioenergetic gift.

To serve the tensegrity and easeful embodiment of another is a profound form of benevolence and is fundamentally reciprocal.

Just as water finds its level, bioenergetic harmony is achieved when a practitioner and a client embark on a journey into the depths of stillness. Both return from this odyssey changed, brought into alignment at the interface of hand and skin.