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In last week’s blog, I mentioned that my left thigh is sometimes ticklish, or otherwise sensitive to touch, because it holds the residue of a traumatic injury to that part of my body from many decades ago. Many people practicing various modalities of touch–massage, Reiki, and so forth–recognize that the tissues of the body hold experience of various kinds, particularly emotions. We get touched, and the touch accesses powerful thoughts, feelings, and very often, memories of other times, stored experiences from the past.

Now those of you familiar with the workings of the human body know that cells last for a finite period of time, and with relatively few exceptions (certain brain cells, for example) virtually every cell in our body gets replaced, multiple times, during our lifetime. Our skin, in particular, gets replaced rather often. By the end of this day you will have shed between 30,000 and 40,000 skin cells. Most of the “dust” around your house consists of dead human skin cells. (I’m sorry if you’re reading this over breakfast, as many of you do, but it’s true.)

The skin I had as a twelve-year-old was completely replaced long ago. In fact, it’s been replaced several hundred times. The left thigh that was touched no longer exists. All of the fat, muscle, and skin cells that made up that part of my body have been replaced numerous times. So what, exactly, is storing the experience? What is it that has held and captured the sensitivity and vulnerability of that thigh?

When I go home and I fall into my parents’ arms, as I still do, I still have the same feeling of safety, security and an exquisitely undeniable sense of being lovable that comes ONLY from being held by my mom and dad, at least only in that particular feeling form. I remember it as a child, and it hasn’t changed, for me.

Now, I am much bigger than I was (and I have new skin, muscles, fat and bone; nothing remains from when I was little.) My parents, ironically, are smaller than they were, but they too are also missing most of their original equipment. Who, exactly, are they holding, when they hold me? And by whom am I being held, if we have completely different bodies than we did when I first got that beautiful sense of being lovable from them? Whose skin is touching whose, and why do our bodies recognize each other if they’re not the same physical bodies?

Yesterday I was working out, and quite by accident I found myself listening to music that was popular during my undergrad years at college, a time of my life when I was in the peak of my athletic body. I felt a sudden surge of power, listening to that music, because it reminded me of what it felt like to be in my 18-to-22 year-old body. More than reminded me: it took me back, somehow, to that body. I actually found myself able to do a few more reps than I am normally able to do with the weights I was using, and the work became easy and light, as though I was adrenalized for a moment.  Now did my physical body actually become 18 again? No, not likely, not possible: but something definitely shifted in listening to that music. It took me back to a different body, but not a different physical body. It shifted me into a different part of what I can only describe as the energetic body.

This is something that is very hard to blog about, because it’s difficult even to describe the energy body in words. The more I talk about it with people the more confused they look; it is something that is much easier to sense, both in ourselves and others, than it is to describe. But learning to sense and read the energy body is absolutely vital to Touch Practice. When I get someone in a hold that causes them to go limp, the way a cat goes limp when it is picked up by the neck in just the right way, it’s because I was able to correctly read the energy body. Same with making a successful frontal approach to hug someone, an approach where they soften and allow themselves to be held rather than tensing up and defending. It all comes from sensing and responding to what’s going on in the energetic body.

The energy body is not the emotional body; it is not “body language;” it doesn’t have a physical or “solid” component to it. It is more like a gravitational or magnetic field, an atmosphere, an electrical field, something fluid and vaporous, which occupies roughly the same space as the physical body, but is not physical. It’s very hard to explain but impossible to miss once you learn how to sense it. 

I almost always work with my eyes closed most of the time when I do Touch Practice with someone, because, for the most part, I don’t need to see their physical body. I need to see their energy body, and it’s easier for me to read that with my eyes closed.

For those of you who have had the sacred privilege of attending to someone at the moment of their death, or for those of you who work around frequent death, for example, hospice workers or therapists, you should be able to confirm some of what I’m about to write. When a person dies, it is not the end of the physical body that we notice. In fact, without the use of machines, heart monitors, stethoscopes and so forth, it is often very difficult to determine exactly when the physical body has ceased to function. That’s not really the significant event when a person dies. The significant event is the disengagement of the energy body. There is a delay between the time the physical body stops functioning and the release of the energy body, and the delay can range from minutes to hours to in some cases days or longer. When the energy body leaves the room it is practically a seismic event.

When I teach people about this I liken it to a horse and a rider. The end of the physical body is like the rider walking out of the room, but the horse hangs around for a while. When the horse is ready and takes off, you can feel it go. What impacts us when a person dies is the disconnection of the energetic body, not the death of the container that held it.

If you look at the stories around Jesus’ death (that there was an earthquake, for example, at the moment of his death, or that his body hung around for a bit and then took off after a few days) these stories, to me, ring true to the characteristic nature of the energy body. It’s the size of a horse, or bigger, not the size of a person. You will feel it leave, and it will be bigger than the person.

There was an old custom among some peoples, long before we consigned death and dying to funeral homes, where, when a person passed away, their body sat in their own home, in the parlor, perhaps, for a period of three days. People sat with the body, often over food and drink, consoling each other, celebrating and mourning the life of the departed, but they stayed with the body for a few days before burying it.

I have heard this custom explained away as the result of people not being sure whether someone had actually died or not. For those who understand the energetic body, that explanation is highly suspect. What people were doing there, I believe, was watching for the departure of the energy body. Old cultures which are more in tune than we are with the mechanics of death recognized that there is a delay between the time the body ceases to function and the time the energetic body leaves the room, and they created space that to happen before they release the person as “gone.”

One of the reasons I discourage people from talking too much, or talking unnecessarily, during Touch Practice, is that it’s harder to sense the energetic body when there’s talking. And if there’s thinking, forget it; it’s not possible. The way we sense another energy body is with our own energy body, and because it’s not an intellectual construct (in my opinion and my experience) and neither verbal, nor visual, nor physical, none of those senses will help us perceive or interact with it. And while what I’m describing might sound impossibly vague and vaporous, I have to say in all seriousness that learning to work with someone else’s energetic body using your own is what Touch Practice is, ultimately, all about. On some level, it’s all that matters. If you can learn how to sense the energy body, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Have a great week.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

Touch Practice is a sacred practice for me, and part of that is keeping confidences sacred. While a name and e-mail address are required to post a comment, feel free to use just your first name, or a pseudonym if you wish. Your e-mail address will never be seen by or shared with anyone. It is used to prevent spam and inappropriate comments from appearing in the blog. I’d really like to hear from you!