I continue to notice my growing experience of being connected to other things and beings. It is a connection that I experience in a number of ways. One of the most previously-neglected connections I am discovering is the sense of touch.
I am discovering what was at one time my principal connection with the outside world. I am becoming aware of a sense that served me so well on the day I was born, but has faded to the sidelines.
The simple experience of touch has become for me an important threshold of being connected. I sit on the soft mattress of my bed, my feet touch the ripples of the rug, I feel a slight chill in the air. Soon I will feel the touch of food in my mouth, the brush of leaves against my body, the arm of a friend. They are all ways I am accustomed to feel the connection with my world.
I remember how I entered the practice of meditation by first experiencing the feeling of movement and sensation in my hands and body. My meditation practice continues to rely on the feel of air going in and out of my body, the rising and fall of my body, the open palms of my hands. The sense of touch is my threshold for entry into the world of the absolute.
Touch goes quickly beyond the sense perception. The awareness I experience is so much more than the feeling of softness, warmth or position. I am aware in a much deeper way that easily moves me into the absolute. I have a sense awareness, but I feel a connection that rushes past the boundaries of my skin and muscle. I feel with my whole body, my whole presence. The touch awareness rushes over and through me.
The leaves of plants are no longer “out there” but are part of me. I am part of the plant. A hug is an awareness that connects me with someone in more ways than a simple perception of senses. Holding a rock in my hand becomes an experience of transformation. The rock becomes in that moment part of my presence. I become part of the presence of the rock.
I regret that my culture urges us to walk around with “do not touch” signs on our foreheads. The space occupied by humans is off limits for touching and restricted to special permission and invitations cautiously given.
We restrict touching to persons with whom we have a special arrangement or understanding. We pay people to touch out bodies and call it massage therapy. We reach out to professional touchers, starved as we are for touching.
When my two sons were young, they were allowed to touch anything in my garden with one finger. In fact, they were encouraged to touch anything they wanted. The urge to touch is strong in children, and I invite all children who enter my garden to touch anything “with one finger.”
This urge to become connected is suppressed as we grow older and become more part of a cautious social order. Many humans do not know how to habitually touch with reverence and awareness. I have been threatened and taught to put touch aside. I have had to relearn what it feels like to be aware of my own body and the world around me through the sense of touch.
I am trying to relearn and regain that experience of wonder and awareness that opens through touch. It principally began to grow from inside of me. My unshielding has begun with my opening my heart / mind. The openness to being connected in the world of absolute has been growing inside of me, and it affects the way I touch.
I am slowly beginning to challenge the cultural taboos of connecting by touch. I am not sure how much the world around me is ready to welcome this change. I watch the way that women relate to one another, and that has slowly become a standard for my cultural appropriateness.
Touch and sexuality have been so intermingled that it is often difficult to parse them into different kinds of experiences. Then again, perhaps they are actually so connected that they cannot be totally separated, and that is just the way things are. Sexuality clearly involves other senses, and it just might be part of being closely connected.
Touch is such a strong urge, yet it is perhaps my most restricted and guarded sense. The desire to be connected physically is huge, but it has become pretty much restricted to my experience of warmth or the clothes against my skin.
One one hand, I am becoming much more attentive to the world I experience with sight, smell, hearing and taste. Moreover, I am especially aware that touch is becoming much more of my way of experiencing the world. I want to relearn the way I touched as a child.