Too often we underestimate the power of a
touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the
smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
--Leo Buscaglia
Touch As Nutrition by John Tuite
--by Kindness
Blog, syndicated from kindnessblog.com,
Mar 03, 2015
Touch could properly be regarded as a form of nutrition.
We
mistakenly think that touch occurs on the periphery of our self, a skin thing.
But truthfully each surface stimulus travels far into the most hidden interior
landscapes of our self, traversing long nerve cells right through the buried
spinal core to enter and gather in the deep folds of our brain. It’s not by
accident that our skin and brain each are generated from a single ectodermic
substance, cascading outwards and inwards as we grow in the womb, because right
at the very root and origin of us, we are built to connect the inner and outer
worlds.
The
necessity of nurturing touch is very clear when we are at our youngest. Without
it, young children wither and even die, though they are provided with food and
medicine.
Slightly
older children typically find ways to build a huge, varied diet of touch into
their lives. From, at the rough end of the spectrum, tumbling unexpectedly onto
their parents’ shoulders, rolling on the floor with siblings, wrestling with
friends, to cuddling, sitting on knees, being carried, stroked and gently
soothed at the other. Children actively shape their sense of self, not just
mentally, but with their hands, elbows and knees, their bellies and mouths,
inside the frequency, textures and intensities of this constant, rich field of
contact.
(This
is why non-nurturing, violent or invasive touch can be so devastating for a
child, because it does harm right in the deep heartland of a child’s emerging
identity.)
As we grow up we exchange this banquet of physical contact, all that
rough and tumbling rolling around for…. Well, often for very little.
For
most of us, growing up coincides with a reduction in the range and quality of
our tactile life. Our diet of nurturing physical contact thins out, narrows
down. Ask yourself how your tactile day went today?
In
fact, if we do assign a nutritional value to touch, it is clear that many,
perhaps most adults, regardless of whether they are alone or in partnership,
suffer from significant degrees of starvation in this arena. While some adults
participate in contact sports or practices, seek out massage or physical
therapies, most do not. While some adults have relationships that offer them a
range of healthy touch, most relationships do not. Instead, we have a state of
widespread tactile famine, a malnourishment that is so entrenched as normal we
cannot even see that it exists.
We
participate in this under-nourishing of the body in many ways. The abundance of
touching we once offered to others, for example, soon becomes rationed out,
reserved for appropriate moments with appropriate people. Unlike the sometimes
chaotic, improvised and spontaneous interactions of children at play, almost all
of these moments, a handshake, a friendly hug, a pat on a colleague’s back, are
highly stereotyped too, habitual and fairly unconscious exchanges of brief
physical contact. Most of these moments also require a highly muted
intensity...
Equally,
our ascension into adulthood is often accompanied by the acquisition of goods
and services that reduce the tactile shock of the world on our system.
Comfortable furniture, convenient transport over smooth highways, and clothes
and shoes that protect us from bumps or holes in the land or temperature: all
conspire to soothe and dull the senses, especially touch. We are not numb, but
we have arranged the world to induce a kind of torpor compared to what we could
experience.
Touch
cannot be talked about in polite society. No index of well being seems to have
measured it. But sometimes the absence of touch is acknowledged by proxy.
Loneliness is one of its stand ins. Loneliness has many dimensions, but the
absence of being held, stroked, touched is surely one of its most painful
characteristics. The UK has a particular crisis here, coming 26th out of 28
European countries in a survey of who has neighbours or friends to turn to.
According to the Campaign to End Loneliness, lacking social
connections has the equivalent on health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
The
loneliness which blights the last years of so many elderly people in our culture
is based just as much on a physical deprivation as an emotional one. Two fifths of
elderly people report that the television is their main company. And we know
that loneliness can kill just as assuredly at this end of life as physical
isolation killed at the beginning end. Solitary elderly people are almost 50%
more likely to die early than those who have family, friends or community.
We
could talk about poverty of touch just as validly as poverty of wealth, and
although this is not confined to this area, frequently the two go together. Walk
around a poor estate, and along with cramped and frayed housing, you will see
many people, perhaps adults more than children, for whom reliable and consistent
nurturing touch is but a memory, a yearning, perhaps an inflamed wounding,
rather than a daily sustaining occurrence.
I
am sure that for some people turning to aggression and physical violence is an
ill judged act of substitution, motivated by a desperate need for the deep,
meaningful contact that is missing. The shoving, grappling and hitting provide a
perverse reminder, a tragic hint of the intense physical significance we all
depend on for our sense of mattering in the world.
Individually and collectively, we need to recover a world that will
nurture us, build a society that will sustain rather than erode us. Social and
economic policies that prioritize real human need are priorities. But part of
this task will also be to regenerate the possibilities of healthy nurturing
touch in our lives and in our culture.
There
are many reasons to think this is possible, because a good half of the work here
is to simply pay attention to our already existing tactile experience, and to
edge it forward just a little. As we pick up the mug of tea, we notice the
weight and shape, the particular balance between strength and delicacy the
porcelain has achieved, the contrast between the experience of the fingers and
the experience of the lips. We can ignore the signs, step off the path and walk
on the bumpy grass, among the trees, trail a hand across its trunk. We can once
more hold our partner’s hand with some portion of the attention we brought to
the miraculous first time we felt those fingers wrap around ours.
Key
in the front door at the end of a stressful day, we can appreciate the ability
of children to restore us. Because they plunge us back into a universe of
sensation and tactile experience. They climb on us, tumble over our head or
shoulder, jump on our backs, elbow us and knee us and rough us gloriously up.
They break through the crust we have carefully built around our nervous system.
They speak to us at a level we have forgotten about, but thirst for: the
elemental dimension of physical contact.
This
article originally appeared in Kindness Blog, a sharing media featuring
kindness in all its varied forms. This blog publishes images, videos,
real-life-stories, personal reflections, quotes and other various media which
all have one special thing in common...Kindness. The article is reprinted here
with permission. The author, John Tuite, founded The Centre for Embodied
Wisdom and Clearcircle. He now
works as a leadership and life coach, and consultant
Be The Change: Give someone you love a hug
today!
