“The one you are touching is touching you… Two-way touch informs outside, reforms inside”       – Jack Blackburn

Some simple facts about touch: We think about touch as a one-way experience most of the time.
In fact, when we use touch therapeutically, we divide touch into touch given and touch received.

But the truth is, we have touch sensors distributed throughout our bodies; outside and inside.

And touch sensors are always two-way and the information we are receiving tells us much about how our touch is being received.

We not only feel tonus; we feel temperature, tissue response, autonomic engagement, and consciousness. And in fact we can change our own tissue responses in most parts of our bodies, by engaging with them tactilely.

Does this mean by interacting with them by touching that body part on the skin surface?

Well, yes, and we do that continually with different parts when we feel aberrant sensations like pain, stiffness, numbness, and autonomic arousal.

Sometimes we’re using pressure, manipulation, sometimes gentle soothing strokings.

But what about when we go inside our own body using a felt sense of touch, and filling and emptying with breath, with internal touch, expending and emptying using our connective tissue, and searching for a vocabulary that comes closer and closer until it resonates directly with what we’re feeling?

In those cases, the various subsystems of our bodies change in response.

One of the earliest discoveries of yoga, was that we are able to change our physically reality by interacting with our body systems from within.
Variations on the same techniques are taught to meditators, for creating deeper penetration and conscious awareness of this mystery of life in a body.

In paralysis and other conditions of limitation, we can use touch responses that trigger new-found awareness and abilities to express.