During my first five years living in The Netherlands, once I had detoxed from Stanford and years of protest, I thrived turning my attention to my body, building strength, building skills, bringing a new outlook to my life.
Any chance I got to participate in a gathering or class or happening inspired on the Human Potential Movement -- beginning to spread its wings in the late 60's and early 70's -- I would jump aboard. And one of the first things I discovered is that a good deal of (my) psychic power can at will be channeled through my hands.
I attribute my awareness and facility of "listening" and responding to what I "hear" through my hands to this fortuitous coming together of time and place in my life. I arrived straight from Stanford primed to learn with my eager young mind like a sponge. So for the year that I worked as correcting editor at the medical magazine, I was a whiz, even though I was just beginning to become fluent in Dutch and often felt like a kid when trying to communicate entirely in my new tongue, even though just about everyone I met in Amsterdam was perfectly fluent in English. The editing was in English. Easy peasy.
I was admitted to the Theaterschool with Mime as my major. To be a mime one needs to explore and challenge and train every single part of one's body. So all my intellectual smarts got brought over the stile of academia to the pasture of "intelligence du pied" and every other kind of body smarts.
At the same time, I was immediately challenged to go up against the negative self-image I'd developed through those five years of P.E. classes lead by mean, homophobic men. Falling in love with my own body and its/my ability to learn with every muscle, every square centimeter of skin, responding to music and ideas and a partner.
Early on I got an opportunity to study with a practitioner of Breath Therapy, first developed by Ilse Middendorf. I shall devote another post to describe this subtle and spirited approach. The more I practiced as therapist and got clear feedback in our practice group about my subjects' responses to my laying on of hands, the more I experienced how powerful our hands can be in encouraging profoundly vivid explorations by the subject of his or her hidden pain and pleasure places. While the breathing of the subject is central in this approach, how the therapist uses her or his hands to guide and encourage the patient to attend to the subconscious can be subtle yet incredibly powerful.
In all the following practices I studied, both in arts education and in the world of therapy, the importance of including conscious moments of true contact through touch became vivid and of prime importance. One learns this as one practices, giving and receiving. Give this to someone you love this very week!
Starting with ourselves, the more we learn about soothing, invigorating, listening and focusing with our sense of touch, the more we'll purr.