The importance of touch —
and what it can repair.
« The touched body is the resonance chamber, the receptacle that produces the information of consciousness. There is no body without information, no transmission without a body. It is the place of exchange between myself and the world, visible and invisible. »
Touch — what happens nowhere else.
What happens during a massage that happens nowhere else? In truth, there is no moment in life where one is not responding to some external demand.
When alone, one may allow oneself a little peace. But whether in a relationship, in professional life, in domestic life, one is always embodying something. Always almost a prisoner of an image, a role expected or to be maintained, an expectation more or less expressed. In these conditions, how can one be conscious of oneself — of who one truly is, at one’s deepest?
By setting down one’s crossbows, one’s armour, by accepting to expose one’s vulnerability — that is, by opening the doors — in a completely safe context, what happens? How does one accept to be touched? Playing on the double meaning of the word « touched » — physically and emotionally.
Concretely, I see women and men pass through who are asking themselves questions about themselves. Questions about their body, their access to their sensuality, their capacity to look at themselves in a mirror. About the place of one part of the body or another within their body image. They are sometimes in difficulty with themselves, in their relationship, in their connections with others. Whether these questions are sexual, sensual, or of a more relational nature — the consciousness of touch not always being in its rightful place.
Abuse — and what it does to the body.
Sometimes we have been the object of abuse, which has cut us off from a part of our body. Abuse that has recomposed our body like a landscape with territories explored, and others unexplored and inaccessible. Isolated.
« It is complicated to follow in the footsteps of others, to take back the flags planted here and there by the invader, and declare this territory virgin once more, on its way toward adventure. I felt like Japan, unable to drive the Jesuits out. Not that they were still there — they had left since the sixteenth century. But because their shadows still hovered over the territory, perhaps preparing the ground for others, for the Americans for instance. Like a hollow to be filled. I was afraid of my potential Americans. A forced terrain becomes a terrain that only isolation can protect. »
This memory is pervasive. It reshuffles the cards when it comes to one’s relationship with oneself and with others. Added on top of everything else, which sometimes, often, invites us toward defence, or conditions us to behave in one way or another.
How then to turn the situation around, and progressively make disappear what has become, by force, a Pavlovian reflex?
Our body is never touched in quietude. As a mother or father might stroke a child’s head to cradle them in calm.
Touch, reparametrised and reconfigured in a calm, safe register, rooted in consent, can repair.
The learning of touch — what we were never taught.
Men and women have never been taught the importance of touch in the absence of intention. We have never been taught to touch — full stop. In our civilisation at least, where everything relating to pleasure quickly takes on a sexual connotation.
And even in touch with sexual intent, few people truly know how. Each of us has arrived in life with a great question mark, which we have tried to fill — through reading, films, or exchanges between friends. In a couple, often little discussion or exchange, held back by the fear of appearing a certain way, and the fear of not knowing how to ask.
Every part of the body can be approached consciously, calmly, quietly. Allowing a connection, a reconnection.
And touch then reveals its full power: throughout our lives, every part of our body has engrammed, stored in the form of memory, sensations. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Sometimes very difficult to live with. Touch allows — sometimes — the reprogramming of these sensations, and a calming. Replacing a negative memory with a positive one.
Access to one's own light.
Didier de Buisseret writes on the spirit of tantric massage with a precision and a rightness that I am glad to share here:
« Tantric massage can be seen as an inner journey. It is an encounter with oneself — not with the person giving the massage, who is only there to guide and accompany along this inner path.
Far more than a technique, tantric massage is above all a quality of loving presence. There is no goal to reach, no outcome or intention — simply to welcome sensations and feelings, to accept being traversed by them.
Tantra holds that the divine is not outside us but within us. That each person carries within themselves a fragment of divinity. Simply becoming aware of this light that shines within — and connecting to it. »
Perhaps this is the essential thing — not a technique, not a protocol, but a quality of presence. Touch as a path of access to what one is, beyond what one believes oneself to be.
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