Staying in Touch

The world of massage is a big tent. There's plenty of seemingly unrelated modalities all jumbled together under one brand. The one commonality that they all do share is touch. So maybe I should write about it.

So in writing about touch let's start at the beginning. For most of our evolutionary history, (at least 200 thousand years, or 10 thousand generations) we lived in bands of about 100 - 150 people. Much of what makes us the human we are, comes from the evolutionary pressures that were placed on us during this time. Any facet of our lives that strays from that reality will have consequences.

In this evolutionary setting, our ability to communicate with each other would be essential to our survival. We would have and need to have a Ph.D. level understanding of how everyone in our tribe operated to maintain group cohesion. We would have to know how and when to approach each other, and when to give space. I don't wish to over-romanticize this as there are plenty of accounts of people living in traditional cultures who have what we may classify as dysfunctional dynamics. That said, by necessity they would have a baseline, level of interpersonal communication that we no longer have the evolutionary pressures to obtain today.

One of the ways we would and still do communicate is by touch. Often touch is used to show affection, We all have experiences of being consoled where somebody holds their hands on us and we feel a change in our energy. However, many things can be communicated through touch which can be either good or bad. We can physically grab someone and stop them from walking off a cliff or into traffic. In those situations, touch can be the fastest way to transmit crucial information concerning danger from one person to another. There are ways that touch can be harmful. People can and unfortunately do, communicate messages of domination through violent touch. Anyone who has ever been hit can attest to the sudden flash of unwanted information giving to them.

However, touch is employed there is a transfer of energy that happens. If we look at this phenomenon under the microscope of science we can see its more than just a subjected experience. To oversimplify quite a bit lets examine our nerve cells or neurons. Physically they are somewhat tree-shaped structures composed of axons and dendrites. Dendrites are the branches of the nerve cell that receive chemical messages or neurotransmitters from the proceeding nerve cell. As the dendrite receives neurotransmitters, it creates an electrical impulse down the trunk shaped axon of the neuron to the root end of the axon is where the axon terminal is. When the axon terminal is electrically stimulated it releases neurotransmitters into the gap or synaptic cleft between neurons where those chemical messengers will be picked up by the dendrites of the next nerve cell in a chain of neural energy.

If we think about this more poetically and less scientifically, this process is happening every time we touch or are touched by someone. When we touch someone we are connecting the nerves at the edges of our skin with nerves that are in another's person's body. To increase our intention or consciousness in our moment of contact we need to engage our nervous system that much more. Surely some information that is encoded in our bioelectrical energy will be transferred through our bodies to whoever we are touching. This points to a mystical truth. That we are all one. That our individual nervous systems connect to form a social nervous system, that manifest some collective consciousness.

It's interesting to ponder that everyone's touch has a slightly different energy. Just as we can tell the signature of someone's voice we feel the subtle differences in everyone's touch, though we may be less conscious of it. If our evolutionary heritage is having 100-150 people who we are close to, are in constant contact with, then would we not on some profound level need to regularly feel that many types of touch to feel safe.

If we are not getting this quantity of qualitative different touches then are we not sending our body messages of deficiencies? What does it mean to be deprived of touch, to an animal that for most of our history could not survive outside our immediate tribe? We talk about losing touch with each other and we talk about losing touch with reality. What happens to us on individual and group levels when we don’t receive tactile information? What happens when we become out of touch?

Anthony Bruni