I have always been affectionate but I have not always know what to do with that affection. I was raised in the U.S. where touch outside of the family is a tricky path but I was raised but a European father who understood that human touch is natural and necessary.
As it stands, in my forties, I have just come to a fuller comprehension. If I feel moved to fully embrace another person and explore that person through touch, it is not necessarily sexual. That is truth.
I'm in the throes of reading a lovely book, To Love and Be Loved by Sam Keen. The essence is what he terms "mindful love".
(For clarity, Keen's use of the word "love" extends beyond lovers, spouses and family members - incidentally - an idea that came to me just days before opening this book [the beauty of timing].)
Mindful love involves opening oneself to another and having that other open to you so that each may truly know the history, the life, the experience that has created the present individual.
There is love in knowing.
In Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh offers that it is impossible to hate someone I understand. From experience, I also know this to be truth.
To be sincerely empathetic, to be a good lover (one who loves), to understand and to be able to create a relationship (friend, lover) in which there is intimacy, I must know you and you must also know me. Not who you think I am, not who you assume I am from bits of conversations or misunderstandings, but from first hand experience.
In the Nia communities I have experienced, there is a healthy amount of touch. Safe, accepted, seen and supported is what I feel.
All of my life I have "received" from others. I have felt them, sensed them and often I have been inspired or compelled to reach out with touch. With strangers, I had never followed the inspiration until recently and to say it blew me away doesn't even begin to give weight to the effect. Much confusion and pain has followed but I have learned to trust myself. The openness that it required for me to approach this person I did not know and share inspired touch has remained with me. Even in moments when I deeply wanted to shut out I found that I really couldn't. In natural time, the shift resulting from this experience is just now happening.
This particular journey is sprouting from the seeds of what, for years, has been my "quirk". I am intensely sensual, and amusingly tactile - to my kids who, even when they were little had to remind their mother not to touch items on the shelves in stores! It is my desire to touch all surfaces I see - and that includes the people who intrigue me. This is not generally on the list of "socially acceptable behavior". I have said this before: sensual (pertaining to the senses), tactile, somatic, kinesthetic and it looks as if the time has come for me to begin to understand why I was built this way. I am putting the puzzle pieces in place - I now have more of the pieces than I have ever had before.
Being body-centered is wonderful since I teach movement. Being sensual and tactile can be very, very interesting in this world.
"Pertaining to the senses." For me this entails having very little in the way of filters for incoming information. I am hit with everything. Visual stimulus, auditory information, the somatic (temperature of the room, texture of my clothes, itch, and other pain as well as the contact any part of my body may have with another object). Add to that the emotional (mine and others) and mental (the "voice" of my own thoughts) and the processing of all of this). I have devised and have had suggested a variety ways to "shut it out", to "only allow in what is safe" but I'm not built like that. As an ADHD human, I struggle with prioritizing what is constantly streaming in. Without medication my brain cannot differentiate in importance, the test I'm taking from the bird flying across the parking lot or the guy tapping his foot. I don't know how many other ADHD humans experience this. There is medication for my brain, but not for the rest of me.
These discoveries are a continuous journey; a work in progress that I have stopped to acknowledge.
The importance of touch. To touch. To be touched. To be Seen, Heard, Known and Loved. To See, Hear, Know and Love.
Wow...I wish I would've known that about you Catherine! I'm a hugger and a toucher from way back. Perhaps the next time I see you I'll not hesitate to give you a big hug.
ReplyDeleteThe world is a sense-sational place. Sight, smell, hear, taste, touch...and intuition. The touch of magic moments when medicated or not, the brain is not in control. Intuition -- touching the edges of a different world.
Hope to see you soon.
Reading this post makes me think of my 3 daughters...who are all different, of course. The oldest as a nursling would gently stroke my skin while she nursed. And still today as a 7 year old, she can't resist touching my bare skin when she sees it...and she is in heaven when she snuggles. As a newborn, she was literally held for 6 weeks. She would scream the moment she sensed that she was not held.
ReplyDeleteMy third child was/is the same way...she loves to nurse and loves to touch my skin while nursing.
My middle child was never fascinated with skin and never did the stroking thing. In the middle of the night when she would nurse in the bed, she was not content to sleep until I moved her away from my body. So different from the other two children in that respect.
Catherine, it would be interesting for you to know how you were as a baby.
Dana, my son was very much a cuddler - still is - your experience sooo resonates with me. My daughter was less a cuddler as a child, but we're closer now. My father was not affectionate at all, my mother was - I'm a "leaner". I am very, very affectionate; as a mother with my children, as a lover and as a friend.
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