I only lightly touched her upper arm. It was but a random gesture of communication. But it had the awareness of her presence that shot through me and seemed to penetrate all of her. If this is the stirring of eroticism, then I say “bring it on.”
This intense experience of someone’s presence is what I feel when I welcome people coming into a meeting of my Sangha. It could be anything from a light, gestured touch or a warm hug. I sometimes wonder what it is about touch that is so powerful, and for some so terrifying.
The apparent physicality of my world is something I know and experience primarily by touch. Other senses are useful, but not nearly as penetrating as touch. Touching a rock or a plant opens an opportunity of awareness no other sense experience can match or adequately describe.
The sensory intimacy of physical touch is a ready invitation to a deep sensory awareness. Touch allows me to easily move to a reflective awareness, an absorption with the touched object. The awareness that comes through touch seems so basic and fundamental.
More than other senses, touch allows me to approximately occupy the same temporal space as another. It invites a oneness and absorption that no other sense can quite match.
As I move through each day, touch seems so fundamental to my intimate experience of my world. And yet I am puzzled that I have not found much confirmation of this experience in the teachings of the dharma. Touching my cup of tea is an object of my concentration and focus. It instantly takes me from the strictly physical contact experience to one of reflection on the presence of the cup of tea. The cup of tea and I are joined, mostly because of the sense of touch.
Feeling the movement of air through nostrils is such a common focus of methods of deep meditation. Why not also focus on what it is like to touch another’s arm, their hand, the small of their back? For me, it invites the same deep awareness as caressing the warmth and firmness of my tea cup.
Touching another person in this way creates an even deeper awareness because I am touching a sentient being, a being capable of a reciprocal act of deep awareness.
When I sit on a bus and am pressed up against an individual sitting next to me, I am aware of them in a deeper, more intense manner than if I only listen to them or look at them. Touch may not always be a welcome path of mutual awareness. However, when it is present, it offers a wide avenue of awareness.