Tag: #touch

Check your connectedness

Image by Tú Anh from Pixabay

A new year offers an opportunity to reflect and take stock of life.  Cultivating an attitude of learning from experience makes that reflection an opportunity for growth and transformation.  Its not so much what you did but what you understand and work with, how you give it meaning and how you integrate it into you life.  In practical terms the aim is to open yourself to connections to your body and the energy that flows from it, to your gut and heart, your feelings and emotions, your mind ideas, beliefs and narratives, and your soul, your connection beyond your physical self.

In this article by Jan Day, she explored one of the most important ways people connect with each other is through touch.  It’s crucial to our sense of wellbeing, and many have experienced that loss during the pandemic.  Even a small touch can affect the way we feel and act positively. 

Physical touch also impacts our care and compassion for others.  Many people reported during the pandemic that they felt much less connected when they were kept away from others.  Getting back in touch, literally, is worth spending some time on now.  Whether we’re selecting fruit from the market, stroking a pet, walking in the woods or being intimate with a partner, it can provide a balance of energies of the body, heart and mind and you can feel the sense of being alive. 

Before we can fully reconnect with others, we need to reconnect with ourselves.  Day offered an exercise to focus on your relationship with your own body by breathing slowing as you use your hands to soothe and stroke yourself as you are cradling your arms around yourself.  Sounds a bit weird but Day said as you notice what you are feeling, opening and closing your eyes, notice any thoughts that arise and how you felt afterwards.

Once you’re ready to reconnect with others its worth thinking about how touch plays a part in relationships.  Giving and receiving touch in turns with others (probably safest to try this with your partner first) may be easier.  You can voice whether or not you want to be touched or not, but that doesn’t mean you’re bad, untrustworthy or unlikable, just that you don’t have to endure touch you don’t enjoy.

When you’re ready to move on to reconnecting with the power of your mind, Day suggested choosing a situation where you are not getting the outcome you want.  Run through it in your mind or write it down in the present tense and relive what actually happened in your perception.  Don’t worry about whether it was true or not, if you think it happened, it will be affecting you whether it happened that way or not.  Then imagine you can change it so that it happened just the way you wanted it to.  It can be helpful to image and give yourself permission to allow yourself a different experience in your mind.  Make sure you stay connected with your body and your feelings.  Notice what resources you got from reliving it differently.

In connecting with your body, feelings in your gut and heart and the stories you create in your mind, you create capacity for joy, pleasure that will expand and happiness will arise naturally, rather than simply being a goal.

I’m not a particularly touchy, feely sort but I do appreciate a sense of connectedness to those around me. C and I often hold hands on the sofa, link feet in bed, and rub each others’ shoulders as we walk past. I like to hold R tight when I do get the chance to hug her, which isn’t very often. I need to make that feeling last until the next time I get the chance.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever feel comfortable with the whole huggy, kissy thing that some families do but I can appreciate a sense of connection by being in proximity.

If you had to give up one of your senses, which one and why?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I was listening to a podcast recently and one of the questions that briefly touched on was which of the senses you would give up if you had to.

According to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/ if one of the senses is withdrawn e.g. someone who had sight goes blind, the brain doesn’t just learn to use the other senses better, but actually adapts and by rewiring and processes the other senses differently.  A study they cite showed people born deaf use areas of the brain typically used to process sound to process touch and vision instead.  This phenomenon is call cross-modal neuroplasticity. For those who lose their sight it seems the visual cortex is taken over by other senses such as sound and touch to help process language. About 285 million people are visually impaired by other senses usually compensate.

What if we woke up one day without a sense of taste?  Some people have experienced this as a symptom of Covid, and when we get colds or flu we often loose our sense of taste.  Our sense of taste is closely linked to smell with about 80% of our taste sensation provided by the sense of smell, so maybe that’s not such a bad sense to lose.

If we lost the sense of smell we wouldn’t be able to taste food, but would also not be able to smell things that are dangerous, like a gas leak or fire, or a food stuff gone off. 

Can we truly lose the sense of touch?  According to https://insh.world/science/what-if-we-lost-our-senses-one-after-the-other/ we start to lose touch sense as we get older but nerve damage or medical conditions can contribute.  If we lost this sense we wouldn’t be able to feel the touch of a loved one, or have any sense of harming our body, but it would also mean that we wouldn’t be able to walk properly without a sense of touching the ground.

What if you lost all senses?  Total sensory deprivation would cause hallucinations so it would be like forever being in a dream state and have a detrimental impact on psychological health. 

As a bell ringer, losing hearing would be difficult, but not impossible as we can use the visual clues of where to place the bell.  There are blind ringers who have a “sense” of where the rope falls and when to catch it.  If bell ringers lost touch it would make physically ringing a bell difficult as we all worry, particularly when we first learn to ring, about letting go of the tail end. Losing a sense of taste wouldn’t be an issue, and losing the sense of smell may be beneficial in some places where there is inadequate ventilation!

I think of all the sense to lose taste is probably the easiest one to live with if I had to, although I do like food.  What about you?