Touch Will Save Us

touch one another, touch yourself, be touched: this is how we survive

wild women’s temple captured by Zara Marsh

I started this post sitting at my kitchen table while the twins did their Sunday morning thing, their brother and father away for the day. As I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked at the photo on our altar of a dog we are hoping to soon foster (a story for another time) and thought how much I long to stroke and snuggle her generous, furry white shepherdess neck, I felt it was time to share what I know and practice each day about touch and its power to heal us.

Days being present with the children have since rolled past, and I pick it back up in growing need of the balm that it explores…

Last year as part of my energy medicine training, I journeyed in circle to meet with the crystal skulls (something huge to lean into and research if you have not already), and - in short - I was shown a vision of the end of humanity at the hand of technology. There was violence, war, descent, dissolution. Sorrow. Immediately after, I was shown the few survivors and the action that saved them: physical togetherness. I asked desperately what can we do? and received the instruction: touch one another, gather. Don’t lose that human language and need. Hug, heart to heart, meet, be in the flesh, stay in the flesh, hold hands, circle, touch. Much more happened and was shown, but this is what is relevant here.

Touch is as essential to human survival as the air we breathe. A newborn without it will die. We crave it in so many forms, this language of our nervous systems; yet our culture has done much to complicate our relationship to it. Just as touch can be bliss and healing, it can be extreme pain and harm - and no one knows this better than the receptive and vulnerable feminine. But we are neuroplastic beings, able to rewire and reimgaine even the deepest-set pathways and imprints. The magic happens when we are offered the right conditions in which to restore right relationship to touch. There are many ways to create those conditons, and I have seen and drank from this nectar time and time again within the sanctuary of Women’s Temple and my experience with Chameli Gad and Awakening Women over the years. In a safe and tightly-held, trauma-informed female container, going beyond the language of words and the thinking mind and sympathetic vs. parasympathetic - something biological being put into motion - we experience respectful feminine touch as unconditional presence and love from the other. Love that is real, love that stays, love that offers itself just as we are. Anxious or avoidant, we can lean in to this pillar of compassion and human connection and bring healing to the places inside us that past experiences have exiled and frozen. It is profound beyond words - a consciousness far above (or perhaps buried deep beneath) the limitations of language - and in its repetition and consistency as a practice, can radically transform our relationship to body, intimacy, self and other.

Touch supports us beautifully in integrating healing work into our bodies and our awareness - in fact one could argue it is an essential piece for this integration and one that is missing in so many therapeutic and holistic modalities. Devoted to it without reservation, in our circle we have described it as life support, life changing, life affirming: these can only come close to the embodied experience, which exquisitely deepens over time, held by familiarity and trust and memory. And we are not special or advanced to practice this: we simply pick up and guard the flame we have been handed because we know deep within that it is good and right. And safely held. As we retrieve respectful touch, we are retrieving an aspect of our true nature - as humans but particularly as the tactile feminine - that has long been buried as the patriarchy pitted us against one another, fetishising and at the same time demonising the female vessel.

Alongside this, my journey on the path of tantra long ago affirmed to me the importance of healthy self-touch, and of its power to restore a good relationship with our own bodies as women maturing across the thresholds of Maiden, Mother, Maga and Crone. Opening to receive, to honour the miracle of this body in this moment, even to thank it for all it has carried out for us today: this is such a vital stance and ritual if we are to remain in connection (and in love) with the deeper, more ancient, animal intelligence of our bodies in an age where the thinking mind is too often set upon the throne. Ultimately, what retrieving the language of touch can bring us to is deeper pleasure and bliss: what stories do you hold that paint you as unworthy of receiving this? They may have been trying until now to keep you safe - but now is a brand new moment.

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In the vision I was shown, the power of humans surviving in circle was immense. A deep remembering felt in my bones - a truth we have always known; an ancestral memory we all carry. The primal connection, coregulation and human capacity for love that in-the-flesh contact afford us are in clear danger as the digital world engulfs yet more of our lives. And yet: touch is a sense and a capacity we all possess, and in this very moment we are each able to restore a healthy relationship to it ourselves. Pausing to breathe, find the earth and feel the body, meeting ourselves through feeling ourselves: this is a sweet first step. Instead of asking, what do I think? inquire: how does it feel? Get fluent again in the language of touch: it is not lost, but has been taken hostage. Where does my body want touch? What feels good and how can I receive it? How do I create the safety I need to do that? What boundaries do I need to put in place to open myself up to more human contact?

Touch your vessel, touch your beloveds, touch your children, touch your more-than-human family. Show up for life in the flesh and continue to gather. Lean into the discomfort of connection: it is but a thin veil of separation, for deep down we all remember the time when we were never separate.

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