– David’s article from the Jan. 2011 issue of Austin All-Natural Magazine
live consciously in touch this year…
TOUCH CHANGES EVERYTHING
Have you ever had a meal and afterwards realized you couldn’t really remember tasting it? How about touching? How many times a day do you touch things or people and are unconscious as you do so?
The founder of Chair Massage, David Palmer, says, “Touch is the orphan sense in our culture. It’s the one sense we’ve disowned most, and it’s time for us to reclaim it. It’s the first sense we have in the womb and likely the last sense we experience when we die. Yet, we live in a culture that numbs us from the neck down. When we reclaim that, it will be revolutionary. If we got all the touch we wanted (or needed), 75% of mental health problems would go away tomorrow,” he says. “It would change the individual, it would change their relationships, and it would change the institutions in which they live, work and play.”
Austin’s own world-famous architect, Charles Moore said, “No other sense deals as directly with the three-dimensional world. No other sense carries with it the possibility of altering the environment in the process of perceiving it.” No other sense changes the world as it feels it!
· When we touch our friends, our partners, and our children.
· When we hold a piece of fruit.
· When we practice fundamental rites of daily self-care – washing, eating, and drinking.
· When we touch someone older or ill, suffering from touch deprivation, that touch can change their whole world and everything they’ve been believing.
· Each time our feet touch the ground, their touch telling us so much about this terrain we walk upon.
What if this year every day you felt how extraordinary these touches are? Feel how they sustain you; how they are your most direct and sacred connection with the world. Healthy touch changes our world; it is infinitely enriching, yet it doesn’t cost anything.
The blind French philosopher and revolutionary, Jacques Lusseyran said, “You can not help yourself from loving what you have really felt.”
If you want to add more love to your life and to the world around you, then more consciously touch and feel this world around and within you. Let us take this “orphaned” sense and give it a home.