Loving Touch
When my beloved Zen teacher, Katherine Thanas, passed away twelve years ago, I booked a session with energy healer Hilary Nichols to help me process my grief over this significant loss. After guiding me into a deeply relaxed state, Hilary asked me to think about Katherine and identify a quality of hers that I loved and wanted to always remember by fostering it within myself. Katherine’s hands instantly came to mind—hands that touched everything with full attention and gentle reverence.
While Katherine gave talks or led ceremonies, my eyes were often glued to her hands. Katherine’s acute awareness of whatever she was touching was tangible—the fabric of her robe as she adjusted its folds, the stick of incense as she carefully placed it in a small dish of sand, the page of a book as she turned it. When Katherine drank tea, she always paused to hold the cup in between her two hands, taking in its texture, weight and warmth before slowly lifting it to her lips. Back all those years ago, while I was relentlessly rushing through my life at hyperspeed, Katherine’s hands embodied a deep wisdom beyond what words could convey.
Katherine Thanas
When I discovered a mindfulness exercise called “Loving Touch” in Dr. Jan Chozen Bays’ book, How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness, I immediately thought about Katherine. This practice of using a loving touch with everything, including inanimate objects, brought me right back to that session with Hilary, and I felt extremely grateful for the reminder.
A few months ago, in a post called “Our Miraculous Hands,” I shared two of the 53 wonderful exercises Dr. Bays’ book offers, both also hand-focused. I was happily surprised by how many people reached out to tell me how helpful those practices proved to be, and the enthusiastic feedback confirmed what an especially powerful portal to presence our hands can be.
Practicing loving touch has been quite revolutionary for me. Not only does it give my exceedingly busy mind something very specific to focus on that makes being present and mindful much easier, when my intention is to touch with love, I must immediately slow down. You can’t rush love. Love blossoms with time and attention—tuning in, appreciating, and savoring. It also feels so wonderful and deeply nourishing. When I am practicing loving touch, simple actions like prepping vegetables, putting on moisturizer, or petting my dogs become truly glorious experiences.
Below is an excerpted summary of Jan Chozen Bays’ beautiful “Loving Touch” exercise that includes some of her insights on this topic. I hope you find it as lovely and beneficial as I do!
The Exercise:
Use loving hands and a loving touch, even with inanimate objects.
Reminding Yourself:
Put something unusual on a finger of your dominant hand. Some possibilities include a different ring, a Band-Aid, a dot of nail polish on one nail, or a small mark made with a colored pen. Each time you notice the marker, remember to use loving hands, loving touch.
Discoveries:
When we do this practice, we soon become aware of when we or others are not using loving hands. We notice how groceries are thrown into the shopping cart, luggage is hurled onto a conveyor belt at the airport, and silverware is tossed into a bin…
As a medical student, I worked with a number of surgeons who were known for their “surgical temperament.” If any difficulty arose during an operation, they would act like two-year-olds, throwing expensive instruments and cursing at nurses. I noticed that one surgeon was different. He remained calm under stress, but more importantly, he handled the tissue of each unconscious patient as if it were precious. I resolved that if I needed surgery, I would insist he do it.
As we do this practice, mindfulness of loving touch expands to include awareness not just of how we touch things, but awareness also of how we are touched. This includes not just how we are touched by human hands, but also how we are touched by our clothing, the wind, the food and drink in our mouth, the floor under our feet, and many other things.
We know how to use loving hands and touch. We touch babies, faithful dogs, crying children, and lovers with tenderness and care. Why don’t we use loving touch all the time? This is the essential question of mindfulness. Why can’t I live like this all the time? Once we discover how much richer our life is when we are more present, why do we fall back into our old habits and space out?
Deeper lessons:
We are being touched all the time, but we are largely unaware of it. Touch usually only enters our awareness when it is uncomfortable (a rock in my sandal) or associated with intense desire (when she or he kisses me for the first time). When we begin to open our awareness to all the touch sensations, both inside and outside of our bodies, we might feel frightened. It can be overwhelming.
Ordinarily we are more aware of using loving touch with people than with objects…In Japan objects are often personified. Many things are honored and treated with loving care, things we would consider inanimate and therefore not deserving of respect, let alone love. Money is handed to cashiers with two hands, tea whisks are given personal names, broken sewing needles are given a funeral and laid to rest in a soft block of tofu, the honorific “o-” is attached to mundane things such as money (o-kane), water (o-mizu), tea (o-cha), and even chopsticks (o-hashi). This may come from the Shinto tradition of honoring the kami or spirits that reside in waterfalls, large trees, and mountains. If water, wood, and stone are seen as holy, then all things that arise from them are also holy.
My Zen teachers taught me, through example, how to handle all things as if they were alive. Zen master Maezumi Roshi opened envelopes, even junk mail, using a letter opener in order to make a clean cut, and removed the contents with careful attention. He became upset when people used their feet to drag meditation cushions around the floor or banged their plates down on the table. “I can feel it in my body,” he once said…Can we imagine the touch-awareness of enlightened beings? How sensitive and how wide might their field of awareness be?
Final Words:
“When you handle rice, water, or anything else, have the affectionate and caring concern of a parent raising a child.”—Zen master Dogen
