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BODYWORK
- THE SEVEN DIMENSIONS OF TOUCH - PART ONE
Table of Contents
A former editor of Massage Therapy Journal and co-founder and core
faculty member of the Lauterstein-Conway Massage School in Austin,
Texas, David Lauterstein introduces a two-part
article on conscious touch. We found his thoughts on the aesthetic
dimension of touch and breaking the spell of any particular bodywork
modality worship to be most refreshing. We believe his insights
will be of benefit to many readers, whether they are professionally
engaged in the bodywork arena or not.
The Renaissance, they say, took place in the 15th and 16th centuries.
We are, however, under-going another renaissance today, one of perhaps
equal or greater importance. This renaissance was predicted by the
futurist John Naisbitt in his book Megatrends.
Naisbitt spoke of the coming world as one of High Tech and High
Touch. High Tech and its spell-binding world of virtual reality
is well documented. However, the rise of High Touch and its corresponding
commitment to the heightened experience of actual reality is just
as significant. The renaissance of seeing and hearing has given
way to a renaissance of touch. The most vast of senses as well as
the earliest to develop, touch is currently the repository of one
of the most remarkable developments of our age; it is quite possibly
at the leading edge of our current cultural evolution.
There has been a proliferation of touch therapies in the last 20
years, and it is not any particular method that is singularly powerful
– Feldenkrais, Swedish massage, Zero Balancing, Reiki, Craniosacral
Therapy, etc – but each constitutes a realm pointing us back
to the source of our power: ourselves, and the life force we embody.
For, setting aside the claims of the various therapeutic brands,
what is most powerful here is the tender power of touch – to
touch the truth of our aliveness, to restore our sense of what is
good, to rise and praise with touch the beauty that is human being.
Touch connects us with all this. Touch is the medium of actual reality.
Touch wakes us up from the mass-marketed but illusory world of happiness
through virtual reality and the accumulation of goods; the kind
of happiness that takes no inner work.
The hunger for the real in a culture of alienation is the greatest
hunger of all. Being in touch is a fundamental way to satisfy this
hunger. How is it that touch acquires this power? How can we empower
it to help in our struggle for a world that values and cultivates
real life? How can we assure the continued growth and cultural influence
of the high art and science of touch?
My experience in teaching, giving and receiving bodywork has led
to the realisation that there are actually seven dimensions to touch.
These seven dimensions are both objective and subjective, structural
and energetic. They form the common elemental substrate to all body
therapies. More importantly the seven dimensions of touch can help
everyone share in the power inherent in our connecting with each
other. They point us in the direction which will hopefully assure
the continued flowering of touch as perhaps the most redemptive
aspect of world culture today.
Contact – the first dimension
In geometric terms a point is one dimensional. An ideal laying-on
of a hand creates an illuminated experience of a single sacred dimension,
the wondrous experience of being a living place. Like the first
application of paint to canvas, the first note of a song, or the
first step onto a celestial body, there is something miraculous
about form emerging from the void, imagination becoming reality,
of something emanating out of nothing. When we truly touch, it is
an archetypal experience similar to the feeling evoked by Michaelangelo’s
painting of God and Adam about to touch. In the touch of a mother
and child is embedded the love that will heal.
In just this simple touch, after the long odyssey of the human race,
after aeons of evolution, we meet each other on this common conscious
living ground.
To optimise the co-creative meeting of humanity, we must make room
in our educational system for an imaginative and exact experiential
study of anatomy and physiology. Plato said that education should
begin with the study of gymnastics and poetry. Self-exploration
and expression through movement and word are indeed fundamental
to the education of the soul. I want our educa-tion to include not
just the Apollonian learning about reality through mere ‘facts’
but also the Dionysian learning about nature directly through experience.
For our body is the largest, indeed the only, direct experience
we have of natural law. As the founder of Swedish massage, Pehr
Henrik Ling, said, ‘We consider the organs of the body not
as lifeless masses, but as the living active instruments of the
soul’.
When we have a compassionate understanding of and feeling for the
structures and functions of our bodies, even in our everyday encounters
with each other, we are far more likely to evoke the incredible
effect of feeling illuminated by the simplest touch. We can so much
more appreciate the miracle of meeting. The natural lyricism of
human movement, the sensual experience of being alive and belonging
on this earth, and the miracle of meeting each other – these
are fundamental to sanity.
If we would include in our early and adult education, discussion
of the benefits of human connection, of touch as healing, and of
the energy of relationship, we could begin to consciously organise
our psychophysical reality. For most of us, our education in emotions,
for example, is random. Our emotional skill acquisition is basically
the same as our movement skills acquisition. Ida Rolf, Rolfing’s
founder, noted that in our society when a child first walks across
the room, if he or she succeeds in making it across without major
injury we consider it a success! She observes that we take virtually
no responsibility or pleasure in helping children move in an efficient
and beautiful manner. Therefore, their movements and their structures
become ‘randomly’ organised. In our society, there is
virtually no education about how to organise our emotions, mind,
or spirit. Not surprisingly, we live in a society strikingly random
in its psychic organisation!
We will still be living in this pre-history of conscious humanity
until we include in our education exploration of how emotions, thoughts,
and spirit are organised in the human. This will include a knowledge
of some of the major theories of energy anatomy – the various
models as elaborated in Chinese Medicine, the chakras and nadis
of Indian cosmology, and the energy theories of Western psychotherapeutic
pioneers such as Wilhelm Reich. These can contribute to an energy
literacy without which our touching, the ways we connect, may be
experienced as merely mechanical. These are part of the precious,
often unclaimed, energetic heritage of world culture.
Let us note the relevance of this first dimension to people who
utilise touch within their profession. The first dimension of touch
brings long overdue attention to ‘psychomechanics’. In
massage trainings, for example, students are sometimes introduced
to ‘bio-mechanics’. However, rarely addressed is the issue
– how shall we organise our thoughts, feelings, and spirit
as we touch? To organise the psychic as well as the physical self,
we need to notice that healthy, mindful touching partakes of the
same spirit as meditation. In most forms of meditation, we centre
our awareness on something – a mantra, a breath, a prayer.
In this way awareness shifts from being random in its organisation
to having a ‘home base’ to which we can return. In mindful
touch, the first dimension provides precisely this centre. Our home
base is the literal meeting place of two persons’ structure
and energy. In Deep Massage and Zero Balancing, this meeting place
is called ‘interface’.
For health practitioners, when touching consciously, as in meditation,
there are moments when the attention will naturally wander to an
anatomical insight or to the relevance of a certain feeling. Yet
we return again and again to interface, to the place where we meet.
And certainly we periodically bring our awareness to our body movements,
to the animal grace and balance that feels good to both parties.
Then we return our awareness, our energy, to interface. And we access
the spiritual realm, the sense that we are equal and, in some important
way, one, so that our interface includes the spirit as part of the
content of our meeting. As we circulate our awareness, through our
emotions, body, mind and spirit, we come to dwell with more and
more clarity, more strength and more fullness of being together
in this place where we miraculously meet.
For all of us, the conscious experience of the first dimension of
touch can open a new world of being together. In the words of psychotherapist
Steve Gilligan: ‘The thing that brings human value back to
experience is the touching of it with human presence.’
Movement – the second dimension
We experience the second dimension of touch when we are touched
and then ‘moved’ in body and soul by another. In the simplest
sense this is a geometrical fact...
MORE INFORMATION
Order a copy of Kindred Spirit magazine issue
41 for the complete article (the majority) in it's original
format, plus all the other unique features in that issue.
•David Lauterstein is the founder of Deep Massage a meta-approach
to touch therapy. It is built upon the recognition that affecting
someone deeply is much more than a matter of pressure. Using the
seven dimensions of touch, the Deep Massage therapist learns techniques
which are grounded both in anatomy and energy. By the therapist
being fully present, the client’s opportunity for transformation
is dramatically heightened.
•David also practises Structural Bodywork and Zero Balancing and
is the author of Putting the Soul Back in the Body: A Manual of
Imaginative Anatomy for Massage Therapists. •More information from:
The Lauterstein-Conway Massage School, 4701-B Burnet Road, Austin,
Texas 78756 Tel: 512 374 9222 Fax 512 374 9812.
•The next issue will feature Part Two of the ‘The Seven Dimensions
of Touch’ and will explore the dimensions of Verticality, Heart,
Empathy and Alchemy.
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