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I had the most extraordinary personal experience with Touch Practice this week.

When I teach Touch Practice to groups, I often work with a co-facilitator, particularly if the group is large. My co-facilitator is a very gifted man, equipped in many ways: he’s compassionate, he has the practices of devotion, attentive listening, observation, and responsible commitment, and he’s also a skilled psychotherapist. We live far from each other geographically, but he’s become quite a close friend, one of those friends where, when we find ourselves in the same place, we pick right up from where we left off. And this week, happily, we found ourselves in the same town for a few days.

Probably no single person on Earth knows my work better than this man does. He’s watched me hold individuals in Touch Practice sessions, and he’s also heard me talk about the work and helped me teach about it. So, it was an interesting and surprising treat when he said to me this week, “I’d like to hold you. I’d like to offer you a Touch Practice session where all you have to do is receive. I’ll fly the plane. I’ll take care of everything.”  So of course, I happily agreed. And I had the fascinating experience, for the first time, of watching Touch Practice, the work I carry and have tried to refine, describe, and develop, practiced by someone else, someone who knows my own work as well as anyone else can.

It was great to have someone else attending to details of setting up the room, making sure the right cushions and padding were in place, choosing music to work to, making sure we had water, and all of the things that I normally do for Touch Practice. A significant amount of energy goes into the set-up; holding someone well entails a certain amount of both mental and physical preparations. It was fun to have that all taken care of so that all I had to do was show up. And even though I know this guy very well and I’m totally comfortable with him, knowing that he was going to lead the session, and not me, gave me a little bit of a nervous feeling. It was more positive than negative, but I had a definite feeling of butterflies or nervous expectation of what was going to happen.

Touch Practice is always informed and flavored by the nature and experience of the person who carries it. All of us might aim at a certain “template” for a Touch Practice session, but inevitably we will find variations and different colors in the way we actually do the work. And it was interesting to notice those variations. For example, the way I describe the process of greeting someone’s body with my hands is usually something like “I’m going to very gently wipe your body down from head to toe,” and I think of it almost like taking a squeegee to a window or taking a towel and drying someone off. In the beginning of my own session, however, I found my partner saying, “ok, I’m going to just say hello to your body,” and taking his hands and touching each place, he actually said, “hello, ears. Hello, shoulders. Hello, belly.” And it was quite beautiful and gentle, the way an adult would say hello to a shy child, gently coaxing him into the room.

I don’t remember when, or how, exactly, I made the transition to what came next, but the next thing I do remember is laughing. I felt this strange, joyous laugh that seemed to come from my belly, not my brain; it came from something I felt rather than something I thought. And then I laughed again, and I started to think, “why am I laughing?” And it was because I had this sense of my legs and butt being big, much bigger, proportionally, than the rest of my body, as though the bottom half of my body was proportional to itself but had no relationship to the top half of my body, which was small. I suddenly had the legs and ass of a grown-up and the upper body of a child. And then I laughed again, and I realized, “oh, I’m little! I’m young!” And then, I realized I wasn’t just feeling little, but very specifically, I was 10. Even more specifically, I was feeling myself in the body I had in September of fourth grade.

I remembered a pair of short pants I wore in September of fourth grade, two pairs, actually, a blue-ish pair of shorts that had red pockets, and a mirror-image reddish pair of shorts with blue pockets. I could feel how disproportionate my body was (my legs grew first, it seems, and with big, strong legs and glutes, I was a killer sprinter and pretty good athlete all the way up to high school, when my upper body started to catch up.) And I noticed now soft my upper body was, soft in the way puppies are. Everything seemed new. Everything seemed unfamiliar, something to be explored, understood. I wasn’t filled with strong opinions about things the way I am in my grown-up body; I wasn’t filled with that sense of “I know” that I carry now. Rather, there was a bigger sense of “show me!”

And I was happy! I was really happy in my 10 year old body. It was new; everything was new. Every day my body seemed to be a different body, and, practically speaking, it was. Different proportions every few months, which leads to that adorable but annoying phase where we are tripping all over ourselves for a bit, like newborn horses learning how to use those long legs. I spent much of my Touch Practice session either giggling or suppressing the urge to giggle. That body is full of curiosity, innocence, playfulness, an impish mischief, the body of a not-too-serious troublemaker.

During my session, my adult consciousness was still around, and once I recognized the emergence of this very specific September-of-fourth-grade me, I had to make some decisions about what to do. What I chose to do was to just fall into that body, from that era, and spend the entire hour playing in my ten year old. I never really lost sight of the adult “me,” but I simply allowed it to move to the side and hang out in the background. I knew at some point I would have to return, and in some way that I never actually stopped being my grown-up self, but I made the decision so spend as much of that hour as fully-immersed in the ten year old as I could.

And I did. I played, I laughed, I got hugged and cuddled and squeezed, just rested for a little bit at the end, and then, as we were about to conclude, the adult in me began to think, “ok, I’m going to have to make a decision as to when to step out of this ten-year-old body and back into my own.” Just then, my partner said, “so, why don’t we have you slowly turn around in a circle, and when you make one complete turn, you’ll be back here in August of 2012.” I never really lost either side of myself; rather, it was more a sense of stepping back and forth from my fully-grown-up self, back into my ten year old, and back again.

Several times during the rest of that day and the next, I noticed that the people I interacted with used the word “impish” or “mischievous” or  “smirking” to describe something they were noticing in me. And that’s no surprise; I think that’s that ten-year-old guy, at least as I remember and feel him inside. I feel invigorated and enlivened and a bit more fully, completely myself. I’m glad to have had a reunion with that ten-year-old guy. He’s one of many essential pieces of myself, and I’m glad to have had a chance to refresh and renew my ties with him.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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