Welcome back to The Gist. This week we look at touch, the last of the five senses. Some of our senses can be more easily impacted - we might lose our sight or hearing with age, we might get sick and not be able to smell or taste as well. But touch is the one sense that is very difficult to lose - almost everyone can either touch or be touched throughout their lives.
In his book, Coming to Our Senses, John Kabat-Zinn talks about the importance of touch in human development. It is well documented that babies and children benefit enormously from being cradled, caressed, and playing physically with caregivers or other children. When babies are nursed by their mothers and held close by loving adults, their brains and bodies develop well. Sadly children who face neglect or isolation for prolonged periods without human interaction, can suffer developmental setbacks.
But John points out how touch is important throughout our lives. As adults, we continue to need and want physical affection. Touch is also a way we communicate comfort and familiarity and safety with one another. We generally only get physically close enough to touch those people or animals that we trust.
Touch also plays an important role in healing whether it is helping someone who is physically sick, supporting an aging loved one, or attending to someone who feels mentally or emotionally down. Touch can convey love and reassurance in ways that even sight and sound cannot. Just holding someone's hand when they are down communicates so much and can have deep, profoundly healing biochemical effects.
Equally, touch may create negative feelings if it is unwelcome and inappropriate. It can cause physical pain if we are touched harshly or beaten. Or cause emotional trauma if touch creates feelings of shame and anger, making us want to recoil or defend ourselves in some manner. Just as loving touch can have long term benefits, being touched in unwanted ways, where our bodily sovereignty feels violated, can be very damaging to our human psyche. Such is the power of this particular sense.
Closely related to the sense of touch, is also proprioception which John explains are 'the sense of knowing where the body is’ in space. This means that at any given moment, most of us know where our nose, our hands, our feet are without touching those body parts or without those body parts actively touching anything. Proprioception is so innate that we rarely think about it or acknowledge that it exists, but it plays an important function in operating in the world.
Beyond external touch, John also talks about how our skin and our bodies are in constant interplay with our surroundings, how our bodies are always moving in air. Unlike swimming in water, we may be unaware of the air most of the time but we are forever immersed in it, and breathing it in and out. Our skin is also our largest organ, protecting us and providing us to an interface to textures and temperatures. We all know the feeling of a soft warm blanket, a cold burst of fresh water, a breeze blowing over us on an autumn walk. Our most sensitive areas - usually our lips, our fingertips and our feet - are constantly sending us information about whether things are safe to touch - too hot, too cold, too rough, too prickly. Our skin is forever changing throughout our years, from tender newborn skin, to fresh youthful skin, to the softer wrinkled skin of our later years - all beautiful in its own ways at each stage.
So this week, let's take a little time out to notice how we touch and are touched by others - our family members, our pets, our plants, even all the inanimate objects we handle throughout the day. Is our touch automatic and thoughtless or intentional and mindful. Are we sensing all the many ways the air, fabrics, and furniture surrounds and interacts with our bodies. The textures and temperatures of daily life that go so easily unnoticed. And perhaps
