Cleared for Approach
I’ve done about a half dozen group workshops for people investigating Touch Practice for the first time. Here’s a question for you: what do you think guys generally find to be the most difficult or challenging moment in a workshop?
Obviously, different people might have different answers. But from my perspective as a group leader, there’s one particular moment that many men people find unexpectedly, surprisingly challenging, more so than any other moment.
No, it’s not the first evening when we’re seated in a circle sharing a little bit about ourselves, breaking the ice and getting comfortable with each other. It’s not even that moment of contact when you find yourself with some stranger’s arms wrapped around you; that’s actually surprisingly easy for many people.
Believe it or not, the mystery moment I’m talking about doesn’t involve any physical contact whatsoever. It occurs during what I call the “approach” phase, standing on the mat, facing partner, several feet apart. Eyes can be open or closed, whichever is more comfortable. I ask people to plant their feet in the floor, breathe, and eventually synchronize their breathing with their partner as a way of beginning to make a connection. If comfortable, I invite them to take a step towards each other, but I ask them not get any closer than a foot or so, and to be careful not to touch. The connection we’re working on is energetic, not physical.
A surprising number of men experience that particular moment as the most uncomfortable part of the entire weekend. On occasion, men have actually had to leave the circle and sit down for a moment. Others have to pull away or, interestingly, they push through that moment into actual physical contact, which is much more comfortable. There are men who have no trouble whatsoever jumping into someone’s arms (the way we have an easier time getting into an ice cold pool if we just jump, rather than inch, our way into it.) But these same men who are relatively fearless around hugging notice a pretty significant level of challenge when I ask them to inch into the hug, one very conscious and aware step at a time.
So what’s going on there? Why is it so much harder to stand several feet away from an unknown person and breathe with them, even with your eyes closed, than it is to jump into the arms of a total stranger? What’s happening during the approach phase that makes it so intense?
Well, first, remember last week’s blog? Even at a casual party, we are “broadcasting on all frequencies,” giving off energetic cues of various kinds. While we don’t usually translate them into verbal equivalents, the cues can be incredibly specific, telegraphing intentions like “don’t get too close,” “I’m attracted to you,” “I feel insecure about myself” and even “who do you think you are, so much better than everyone else? Get over it!”
If you face someone and intentionally open yourself up to their energetic broadcast, the amount of information coming at you can be substantial. For people on the autism spectrum or others who are prone to experiencing sensory flooding, it can be downright overwhelming. This is why I always give people the option of closing their eyes when they’re facing each other. For some, it cuts down a bit on the torrent of information.
But there’s another reason why I often work with my eyes closed. Closing my eyes allows me to “see” the person in a different way, to sense the energetics of the person with my body, breathing, hearing, sense of smell, and other senses, rather than relying on visual information which is very susceptible to (mis)interpretation. People will see a partner glance down at his feet, and they will variously interpret that move as “he’s scared,” “he doesn’t like me,” “he’s checking in with his grounding” or “he has athlete’s foot.” Our reaction to visual observation is heavily susceptible to projection and attribution. I often feel like I see my partners more clearly when I have my eyes closed during at least a part of the approach phase.
The exchange of information in the period between “approach” (standing a foot or two apart, facing each other) and “edge contact” (where the edges of the bodies actually touch, such as belly to belly or chest to chest, but before a full hug is engaged) is in many ways the most critical moment of practice. Perhaps 80 percent of what I need to know about how my partner needs to be held is gathered during the first ten minutes of practice.
During a practice, partners are constantly transmitting subtle information about their orientation or intention. Someone who is grieving, or comes to touch out of a sense of being wounded, will present in a completely different way than someone who comes from curiosity or playfulness. We can begin to sense whether partner is cautious or even cynical about what is about to happen, or whether there’s more of a posture of innocence, welcome, or eagerness.
While I try to be very cautious about overthinking or trying to “diagnose” anything (forming an opinion about what’s happening is the exact opposite of being present to it,) I have learned to pay very careful attention to what my senses are telling me. It’s at this point, before there’s much touch, where we can already begin to read and exchange things like “be careful, go slower” or “use a firm touch” or “don’t hold me too tightly.” It is in the first ten minutes that a great deal of trust is built, because reading partner correctly and responding to the “requests” that come in the form of energetic cues builds confidence in both partners.
The reason it’s often easier to just dive in and give a stranger a quick hug without thinking about it is that we don’t deal with a lot of approach information. After all, it’s just a one-size fits all hug; nothing was negotiated; there’s nothing special or unique about this hug. It’s not like it was custom-built for this particular individual; it’s a regular, off-the-rack, all-purpose hug. (And there’s nothing wrong with those!) By all means, give those out.
However, setting up a negotiated, custom-built touch partnership is a much more involved, and much more challenging. It takes time, attention to detail, clarity of the intention you’re sending and real attentiveness to the detail that you’re receiving, through all your senses, both the ones you normally associate as sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, etc.) as well as those you might underestimate (your compassionate heart, your emotional radar, and Eros.) Custom building a hug is a little bit like custom building a suit; the tailor has to have a way to “size up” the client, measuring various things he needs to know to make a suit that will fit him like a natural skin.
I find that Touch Practice is similar in this regard: the way we “size each other up,” the way we measure what is going to fit our partner and feel most natural against their skin, is a subtle, delicate and abstruse matter. We need all of our classic senses, and a few others we don’t use very often, a very sophisticated, multi-level sensory system running from the moment we show up on each other’s radar screens all the way up until we make contact with each other. If the approach is set up well, if things are lined up properly and we’ve been responsive to all of the information available, the landing is a piece of cake.
Take time with the approach; nothing benefits a Touch Practice session more than those few minutes before we actually make contact with each other. Pay really careful attention during the first fifteen minutes, and the rest of the practice will almost take care of itself.
Have thoughts you’d like to share?
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What you’ve shared with us made me ponder quite a bit before my own truth came forth. I noticed that I had no memories of that opening ice breaker session which tells me that I must have been feeling pretty anxious resulting in me not being totally conscious during that time. Fast forward to Saturday morning and the exercise that you’ve focused on as the most difficult and I can understand for myself that it is so because, as one of those who comes to the experience from a wounded place, I was not able to discern clearly enough the intentions of the others in the group the night before. The ability to transition from cautious to eager lies in knowing more intimately what really brings the other men to this experience. Giving other men a deeper sense of what makes this shared experience so important for me can be just as challenging as chosing to enter into the arms of another man. However, if we all meet that original challenge more intimately then the Saturday morning experience could be entered into with the eagerness of someone who, though hurt in the past, could choose to share himself with a very different kind of man.
My truth therefore is build a deeper, more intimate, trust Friday evening and watch caution turn to eagerness the following morning. Looking forward to September!
Dale
Dale, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
So many things to say–but first, I do want to point out that every single group workshop I’ve done has really been a very different animal. Each group is different, and even the menu of activities for each group varies slightly based on the men who are there, so unique experiences are to be expected. Not to add, of course, that each of us, individually, can have very different experiences of the very same event.
My own truth on this is that I never put a lot of effort into trying to figure out the intentions of a partner when we practice, primarily because he may not KNOW what his intentions are, he might lie about them, or he may be internally conflicted and unaware of the conflict. One might consciously be aware of a particular intention, but there may be another “hidden” intention, a buried intention, which might be the exact opposite.
Let me give an example of this many of you can relate to: have you ever tried to do something “helpful” for someone you were feeling angry at, a spouse, a parent, or a boss, and while your conscious intention was to help them, you might also have had a tiny unconscious intention to get back at them, or to give them a little “swat?” Sometimes when people who seem to be trying to help us end up delivering those little swats, it’s because there’s more than one intention present, and we’re not clear about all of them. Perhaps there truly was an intention to be helpful and render assistance. But, equally, there was an intention present to retaliate.
It’s been an amazing journey for me to see how much attention I can devote to my OWN intentions, and how much time and effort it takes to really get clear to them, to really be awake to what it is that I feel and intend when I sit with someone in Touch Practice. It’s not simple, and I’m always finding that intentions towards others are increasingly complex the more I pay attention to them. To own everything of what we intend, both the light and the shadow, is a big job, but it’s great work!
As I write, I’m aware I used the words “attention” and “intention.” The primary root of these words, “ten”, means “to hold.” Attention is holding your focus on something; intention is what we hold inside. Touch Practice is the practice of holding.
One of my favorite phrases in this work is, “it’s ALL practice.” The beauty of creating practice space with each other is that if something doesn’t go so well the first time, we can try it again; if we want to experiment with trying a different approach, we’ve always got a second (or third, or fourth) try at it. Touch Practice is not a performance; it’s a rehearsal, one we get to do over and over again as we get closer to our ideal.
Dale, I’m excited that you’re coming along on the next retreat and look forward to the many contributions you will make to that weekend. See you soon.
Thanks for this discussion. It’s making me think about the importance of containers. All relationships are containers; a common boundary for the people in the container. A family is a container. The container itself is a boundary that defines itself from other containers around it. Within the family container, each person is his/her own container. When boundaries within are blurred or violated, the boundary of the larger container becomes weakened or threatened. I think that the touch practice hug is an ‘encounter’ ‘Hug’ is a handy label, but what we do in the hugging practice is encounter, listen and play with our personal boundaries. Men are not used to this, gay or non gay. In some ways, I think gay culture has unconciously embraced the stereotype belief that everyone has eventually has sex with everyone. So coming into a conscious encounter is a boundary challenge in terms of discerning intention within self and other. And non gay men who just want to touch and be touched or held for a few precious moments by another man beyond a “bro-hug” are just out of luck.
Tony, I think you’ve got this exactly right, and it’s a particularly important point you make that hugging is only one technique that can be used in Touch Practice. As you say, Touch Practice is not hugging. Touch Practice is a negotiated structure, a relational container, or as you call it, an “encounter.” That word works too. Particularly in the 70’s and 80’s, when people were exploring different ways of “how we can be together” or what happens during different conditions of being together, the groups they formed to run those experiments were called “encounter groups.” So it’s a fitting term.
As an example of the non-necessity of any hugging being involved, I have done Touch Practice where I stood, back to back with someone, and then sat, back to back, breathing together, for less than a half hour. Fully clothed including shoes. That was our Touch Practice. I have also done a structured Touch Practice with someone where our exercise was to go for a walk together, in the woods, holding hands. He had never held hands publicly with another man and asked if he could try that out with me to see how it feels. Neither of those experiences were any less profound than full body contact. What’s profound is to be able to respond to each other and custom-build containers, or in your word, encounters. We build what’s needed. The act of asking the question, “OK, so what NEEDS to be built here, and what would I WISH or LIKE to build, and how are those two different or even opposite from each other” is the beginning of awareness around our intentions.
Hey K & T…wow what great responses you two have shared. Let me just add that my original sharing came from the memory of the first man who turned to me and asked if we could pair up for that initial “approach” exercise. I got triggered because he and many of the men were the same body shape and size as my two perpetrators. I knew I wanted to say no and I didn’t. I had a challenging time getting grounded after that and didn’t want to talk about it because I just wanted to be a normal man without this burden. Anyway, this is where my comments came from hoping to get a clearer sense of someone else’s intentions. Intention is the one thing that I can’t fully know as I work as maintaining safety while opening up physically and energetically to another man.
So I guess in September the challenge for me will be to ask the question, ““OK, so what NEEDS to be built here, and what would I WISH or LIKE to build”? It shouldn’t be so hard to share a hug!
Again it’s amazing how exactly this lines up with the vivid pictures that have been in my mind, for years (going on decades, now), of exactly what I wished could have happened in any of the experimental encounters I did make, but didn’t happen. I tried touch and holding, nothing more, but I often wished I could have made it all go slower, more intentional, more communicative. That said, I can see how the standing close/not touching would be uncomfortable, especially when it’s someone you have been “paired” with, coached by a third party…there would be the fear that it would be just too incompatible, too hard to synchronize, and too much energy expenditure happening in that standing, directly facing posture which feels like it could also be preparation for combat or at least for some type of formal ranking procedure.
I just always envisioned “first contact” beginning seated side-by-side, which to me is a casual-friend dynamic, with one’s hand hovering over the other’s arm, yes, at least for a full minute or two before actually touching, in the process of transforming what might normally be a superficial “nudge” into something dizzyingly more profound. That, I could do without anything about it feeling negative, though “comfortable” would hardly describe it either, just as it would hardly describe anything overwhelming but incredibly, pleasantlly invigorating like taking a shower under a waterfall or the light touch that runs up your back and makes your hair stand on end.
Jeremy, I actually like your vision of first contact, and it’s a viable model, perfect for people for whom standing face to face, belly to belly, might be too intense too soon. The idea of being seated side by side and using just one hand/arm as the contact edge, rather than the entire front of the body, is an excellent idea. Touch Practice can take hundreds of forms and shapes; it’s custom built, and we build it to fit the situation. I like your idea a lot and I’m going to remember it as an option! Kevin