•

I started using the phrase “touch starvation” in my practice somewhere around 2013.

I was noticing that the women coming to me were increasingly showing all the signs of being under-touched:

Frustration, sadness, exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed….

It wasn’t necessarily the pleasure of touch they were suddenly seeking from me (although of course there was that), but more of a kind of…

….deliverance through touch.

Touch as a balm,

touch as a cooling agent.

The fires of modern life are ever-present and always challenging for sure, but there was something else I was seeing:

Instead of being passionate and fully engaged in life, too many women seemed hollowed out by it.

They would arrive at my door and speak confessionally of feeling…

muted,

listless,

and often empty,

despite having full and interesting lives.

The stories were alarmingly similar in both tenor and candour.

Over and over, I would hear some variation on the same complaint:

“I don’t get touched enough.”

*

Most women have plenty of opportunities to get touched.

By their friends, by their children, by their intimate partners.

But this was different.

It was more like a cultural ache that I was hearing in a thousand different voices.

Women often do everything for everyone else, at their own expense.

To be touched more,

carefully and sensually,

seems luxuriant,

a secret to carry for a rainy day.

Not at the top of their list, but a quiet whisper to the universe:

“Please world, let me be touched more.”

I hear it in the emails beforehand,

in the anticipation texts,

then in the room,

and after,

in the appraisals of the touch.

There is a cyclone of un-touchedness in the world now.

It touches down on my table

and weeps for recognition.

*

With these exhortations in my head,

I begin to work on yet another hungry soul,

doing two or three hours of immersive touch,

trying to trace the contours of this touch starvation.

The work I do is quiet, meditative, and often emotional.

There can be crying jags,

soft weeping,

and giddy laughter

all in the same session,

as a woman is returned to the fullness of her senses

and some emotional depth.

Very often she will emerge from my treatment room as literally…

a different human.

Brightened,

ebullient,

and gently softened.

Her face might look three dimensional again.

*

For many of these women the touch is literally ecstatic (“out of the normal”)

in which they are refilling their body and spirit…

…like a well that has long ago run dry.

*

Simply put,

I am trying to bridge the gap between what the culture demands of women,

and what their bodies quietly require.

This two hour transformation is always dramatic to me.

But what it isn’t…

is shocking.

The culture has been cycling into deep touch starvation for about a decade now.

I see the effects every day

*

We now live on our phones.

We pour more and more energy into screens,

experience more and more….

through a screen.

If you consider our flight in human history and how we evolved,

this is quite insane.

We have developed our bodies and the integrity of our senses in concert with nature for tens of thousands of years. (For a superb and dreamy explanation of this, read David Abram’s astonishing book The Spell of The Sensuous).

In just one generation,

we have collapsed more and more of our daily experience of the world into a screen.

There have been countless documentaries and commentary about what this does to our brains,

but very little about what it does to our bodies,

and to the integrity of our senses.

To me,

it is devastating in just about 100 ways.

*

Digital life creates what I like to call the “middle emotions”,

in which we never fly too high or too low. 

We never really stop and feel something for very long,

as our phones are always barking at us like a child never satisfied.

We jump to each notification, afraid of missing something,

and also, maybe…

afraid of aloneness,

of silence,

and of contemplation.

*

Our emoji living cannot capture the depth of emotions we have inside of us,

so we live in the digital middle,

gazing at our screens like zombies,

knowing maybe that we can’t really get to the promised land of life’s possibility from our phones.

You can’t get there from here,

our souls seem to whisper to us.

Instead, we just keep pulling the slot machine of our devices and doing the infinite scroll.

Our minds pulse while our bodies go silent.

Gazing at screens all day,

our eyes dissect things,

judge things.

Social media amplifies this tenfold.

Our bodies then throw symptoms back at us,

calling for a return to balance between body and mind.

No wonder we are so unhappy with our bodies,

as they ache and cry out to be brought back into the digital equation.

*

The most dominant emotion in the digital age seems to be

judgement.

Of what’s on our screens,

of each other,

and then perhaps most dangerously,

of ourselves

and our potential in the world.

Inhaling judgement all day from your phone is poisonous to your well being.

Science shows that when woman are not touched enough, their body image suffers.

Add in the toxicity of online judgement, and you have a cocktail effect.

Too much digital exposure damages us emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

*

Our sense of touch,

on the other hand,

is not judgmental,

but relational.

Touch reaches across this boundary and says “we are both human.”

It bridges the gap between you and I,

materially,

in the body.

Touch also silences inner criticism,

and generates lovely acceptance of the incredible sensory magic that is in our bodies.

Research on healthy touch always reaches one firm conclusion about its effects:

it creates trust and connectedness,

two of the most valuable and elusive emotions in the age of screens.

Remember:

you can get almost anything online these days.

except touch.

*

Touch makes you feel and makes you heal,

but to get touched you have to risk all the feelings.

You can’t sit comfortably behind your screen and hide,

and you must make eye contact before you touch or get touched.

If that thought makes you uncomfortable,

you are probably scared of touch and therefore touch starved.

Those two things usually travel together.

You can only remain a block of frozen ice for so long in this life.

*

So

when I separate a woman from her phone and its constant drumbeat on her nervous system,

I am using touch to melt away all the concepts and concerns that are a product of her present mindset,

in order to get her to…

just feel.

Two hours of quiet touch in a room without expectations or interruptions is extremely powerful.

If life in the digital age is filled with noise and distraction,

this is the meditative and monastic opposite:

space to breath,

space to float,

space to listen.

The person is meant to let go of thinking,

of time,

and of expectations,

and simply bathe in the glory of her senses,

which by the way have been tuned and sharpened in concert with the natural world

for a hundred thousand years.

In fact, our senses reach into the history of all things and all time.

Touch is the daisy chain that connects it all, across lives and epochs.

Increasingly, the phone removes us from touch,

from the fullness of our senses,

and therefore the possibility of this deeper story

*

We are born through and into touch.

It’s our most intimate sense.

But because of that it can also be the most scary.

Our minds can route around what’s icky or scary in our daily lives.

but bad touch can recoil us from being touched for a very long time.

Proper, conscious touch, on the other hand, can literally locate our deepest aches

and show us where we belong,

without questioning or doubt.

This clarity can make us weep and wash away so much confusing pain.

I’ve seen it, again and again,

like a spin cycle,

in my work.

I myself came from the pain of being untouched,

touched improperly,

so I know how far the woman who come to see me have travelled for renewal.

*

The difference between conscious touch and unconscious touch is…

everything.

A rich subject for another day, perhaps.

Increasingly, though, because of our addiction to screens,

there’s a world of people not touched at all.

This is unleashing all kinds of problems: personal, societal, and even spiritual.

Now not everyone needs a lot of touch, but without some regular touch,

we eventually lose connection with what is true and what is real.

We can function, but the lights aren’t really on.

It’s a matter of degree for each person,

but cumulatively, loss of touch is disorienting us.

Because we are experiencing more and more of the physical world with a screen in between,

we are altering our senses and confusing our nervous systems.

We have difficulty distinguishing from the trivial and the meaningful in digital life.

Touch returns us to the ground,

to the soil and to the soul,

and to the greater story our senses transcribe for us

with…each…sensation.

*

Our bodies bring us these gifts, but also an obligation:

You are human. You are not machine.

Our screens never put proper boundaries on us in this way.

Our bodies remind us of the passage of time, and our mortality.

Our phones give us the illusion that life will go on forever.

There’s always another notification waiting, another shiny Insta post to scroll.

This is what happens when we favour the mind over the body,

which is what the phone does:

we start to inhabit distractions and delusions

that prevent us from feeling the passage of time,

and acting accordingly.

In short,

screen life keeps interrupting our destiny.

*

We get used to living in this digital middle,

where there are no great leaps into the unknown,

no grand love affairs,

no huge gulps of life.

We become less and less wild,

more machine like.

We made our devices, and now they’re making us.

In my work I am quietly urging a woman to leave the concepts of her mind,

and return to the wildness of her body.

In fact, I am after the wildest part of a woman, 

the one undomesticated by her phone, 

by the current culture,

by the shallow waters of social media.  

I want to see the person hidden from view, 

too scared to dance, 

too scared to be, 

because of the wall of disapproval that lives on her phone,

and in the culture now.

*

A person deeply touched is urged into a beautiful wildness, 

where there is infinite possibilities for creative life.

*

To sum up:

Touch starvation is the shadow thrown by our addiction to phones and social media.

We cannot handle the amount of trivia and novelty our phones and modern life are generating.

We feed our minds all day while our bodies starve.

This imbalance manifests in symptoms as callbacks: sadness, anxiety, depression, and even anger.

These feelings are then stoked, monetized, and worsened by the shallows of social media.

Touch cools the fires,

softens us,

and makes us less judgmental.

About ourselves and each other.

It returns us to the full width of our senses,

to the proper balance between body and mind,

to direct contact,

physical energy,

and soulful connection.

Touch is often tricky and complicated to navigate

because it is so incredibly emotional,

but we must risk getting touched,

and even reanimate our physical world with a culture of touch,

if we want to remain truly human.

Over the past decade in my work,

I’ve seen what touch can do,

and it’s

miraculous.

And you can’t get to the miraculous on your phone…

*

I’ve heard the quiet voices of women as they pass through my hands,

and I can tell you,

first hand,

We remove touch from our lives at our peril.