Why Touch Is A Super Power That Can Change The World
Touch is definitely a super power in the world. It causes incredible effects and reactions in humans and animals. It communicates, it connects, it teaches and it cannot lie. Words express our emotions but touch makes us literally ‘feel’. It’s real, it’s raw and authentic. Touch has so much depth to it and so many levels of expression.
In essence touch is the stimulation of our nervous system through the skin. This causes a direct input into our brains and governs our emotional and physical activity. It is the basis of our feelings and emotions. It can empower and disempower. Create love or hate. A cuddle can convey understanding, compassion and kindness whereas as slap conveys control, anger, frustration and hurt. Two sides of the same coin which are both equally powerful.
From my work teaching infant massage I believe the power of touch needs to be respected especially when thinking about how we experience it from infancy and throughout childhood. Touch can create an emotional blueprint for connection and relationships for life. Babies that experience touch learn about the world with love and feel reassurance from their parents enabling them to grow with confidence. There have even been cases of premature babies recovering from near death due to skin to skin contact and being held by their parents. Conversely, babies denied touch have literally wasted away, starved of physical contact.
How much touch you receive has a big impact on how physical and open you are with others. If you have received positive nurturing touch and experienced the benefits, you may feel more comfortable to share it with others. If you have not experienced positive touch or touch at all, you may avoid physical connection or use touch in a negative way. These types of behaviour are usually lessons we learn in childhood that then repeat as patterns in adult life.
Touch & It’s Side Kick Love
In it’s greatest capacity, touch is love and love is something very close to my heart, no pun intended. How many songs and poems and stories have been written on love. Countless. Love is all powerful, universal in its meaning and has a profound effect on our body and mind.
So how are love and touch connected. From a biological point of view we can say that love is a heady mix of hormones resulting from connection and touch, which have an effect on our emotional and physical state. Not very romantic I know, but how incredibly clever of our bodies to produce chemicals created by touch which help to secure the future of the human race when we connect. Levels of oxytocin are at their highest in women when they give birth to encourage the bonding process with their babies thus securing the future of the human race. Big stuff!
What is so exciting about this is, if love is created from a set of physical actions and stimulus through touch leading to the release of hormones, that gives us all the power to create love. We have a way to protect ourselves from feelings of stress, anxiety, fear and isolation and a powerful weapon of connection, compassion and transformation. And all it all starts with something we can all do; touch.
Our Super Hero-Oxytocin
So who is the biological cupid, firing his arrow at our hearts when we connect. It is largely down to an amazing hormone called oxytocin which produced in a number of ways but largely from touch and skin to skin contact. This fact means that massage and touch can help to enhance our physical and emotional wellbeing and make us feel more relaxed and connected.
There are so many benefits of touch. On a physical level touch and massage helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system starting a cascade of relaxation responses that help to lower blood pressure, heart rate, support digestion and the immune system amongst other physiology benefits. It boosts circulation which helps the process of metabolism on a cellular level and supplies muscles, organs and bones with what they need to work efficiently. It helps to remove waste products from the body and it can improve the condition of the skin. A powerful support to our physical wellbeing.
As we have seen,on an emotional level massage and touch helps to produce oxytocin which is our “love hormone”. It’s part of the hormonal team that causes the body to relax and re-balance after any stress and anxiety. It is know as the “love hormone” because it promotes feelings of love, connection and nurturing.
Touch is core to our experience as humans. It is a vital part of life. It shapes our emotions. The evidence is clear; humans need touch to survive and also to thrive. But even more than that, I believe touch has the power to create and transform; to enable greater connection which helps to create more empathy and understanding. The power to create love. The best part is we all have the ability to use this super power for the greater good by giving nurturing touch and receiving it in return. Starting with baby massage and skin to skin practices, we can teach the next generation about the power in their fingertips and how to use it to change the world.