A spiritual emergency can be wild. This is how to ride the wave by Jules Evans

In 2017, I travelled to the Amazon jungle to take part in an ayahuasca retreat. I hadn’t done psychedelics for 20 years, and that last time I’d had a bad trip which had left me traumatised. Why would I ever want to try psychedelics again? Although I’d healed a lot from that youthful bad experience, I still felt I had healing to do at a deeper level. And I thought that psychedelic therapy, guided by trained facilitators in a safe space, might help me. I chose the retreat centre very carefully, and set off. The retreat was a positive, if sometimes scary experience. By the final day I felt my heart was deeply open and connected to the other participants.

It was when I was back in Iquitos, this noisy, dirty city in Peru, that things started to go wrong. It felt as if my heart froze shut. I was suddenly profoundly disconnected from my surroundings and from other people, to the extent that they seemed unreal. Now all the trauma from my bad trip of 20 years before was flooding back – not on the retreat, as I expected, but after it. I hadn’t expected that at all. It was scary. How long would the disorientation last? Days? Weeks? Years? Forever?

I set off the next day for the Galápagos Islands, where I’d planned to stay for a week. During the two-day journey there, I started to doubt if I was in normal reality. I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else. Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?

These eery feelings intensified over the next couple of days. On the ferry to the Galápagos, I thought I was on Charon’s ferry, crossing the river Styx to the land of the dead. I checked in to a hotel in the Galápagos, and sat on the balcony. Below me, three seals lay on deckchairs, like overweight tourists, and bellowed sickeningly, while little black iguanas waddled grotesquely around them. This isn’t real, I thought. How do I wake up? When I got texts from loved ones, I thought my subconscious was constructing them. I felt profoundly alone in this fake reality.

How do you know if you’re dreaming? It’s an old philosophical conundrum that goes back to René Descartes. He noted that we could be in a dream, or an imaginary universe constructed by an evil demon, and we’d have no way of proving otherwise. Like Descartes, all I knew for sure was that I was conscious.

 A friend back in London realised that I wasn’t well, and suggested, by text, that I should come home. I agreed. I thought I might wake up if I travelled ‘back to London’ in my dream. It took three days and four flights, and all that time, travelling alone in an altered state, I thought I was in a fake reality – I was constructing the plane, the air stewards, the sky with my mind. Somehow, I managed to negotiate it all calmly and arrive back without freaking out or getting locked up. My friend was waiting for me at the airport. It was like the last scene of the film Inception (2010), where the hero meets his family in the airport but isn’t sure if he’s still dreaming. In the end, he decides to go with it. I also decided to go with it, to treat appearances as real.

For Thomas Hobbes, ecstasy was something delusional, to be feared, ridiculed and avoided

For two weeks, my friends took care of me. They made sure I ate properly (I’d forgotten to eat for three days) and helped me cross the road (I still wasn’t sure what was real). It was a scary but also a beautiful time, because my heart was still incredibly open, although my rationality was not functioning very well. After two weeks, I was back in this material reality and life carried on more or less as before.

I was helped, during this temporary ego-meltdown, by the fact that I had studied ecstatic experiences as an academic. I was familiar with the idea of a ‘spiritual emergency’, and it helped me to not freak out.

The term was coined by two psychologists, Stanislav and Christina Grof, in the 1980s, to refer to a messy spiritual experience that, while having some aspects of psychosis, is not indicative of a long-term mental illness. In fact, according to the Grofs, a spiritual emergency can be a transition to greater wholeness and growth.

The idea of a spiritual emergency goes to the heart of a centuries-old argument in Western culture over the nature of ecstatic experiences. On the one hand, Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and psychiatrists such as Henry Maudsley and Jean-Martin Charcot defined ecstasy as something delusional, and probably indicative of mental or neurological illness – something to be feared, ridiculed and avoided. This is still the mainstream opinion in Western culture.

On the other hand, various countercultures – ecstatic Christianity, Romanticism, the psychedelic New Age – defensively insisted that ecstatic experiences are wholly good, meaningful and wonderful. They’re the greatest experience a human can have, and we should seek them out.

Both these positions are a bit simplistic. Ecstatic experiences can be both beautiful and meaningful, and also terrifying and bewildering. Ecstasy is a moment where you go beyond your ordinary ego and ordinary sense of reality, and shift into a more subliminal or trance mode of thinking. That means you can tap into subliminal potentialities of healing and inspiration, see the world afresh, feel connected to all things. But it can also be profoundly disorientating, especially in a culture that has lost touch with its words, maps, rituals and guides for such experiences. You might encounter repressed trauma, you might get stuck in unusual or frankly delusional beliefs, you might feel such a surge of energy that you can’t sleep for days or weeks. Ecstasy can be messy.

Hence the Grofs, and others in a field called ‘transpersonal psychology’, tried to find a middle ground, introducing the term ‘spiritual emergency’ for a messy shift to greater wholeness. Christian mysticism also speaks of ‘dark nights of the soul’, and it’s noticeable that many mystics had difficult experiences sometimes lasting for months or years.

Often these episodes were triggered by psychedelics or intense spiritual practice, but they could also be triggered by bereavement or political crises

Often these episode

I had some familiarity with the concept of spiritual emergencies through my academic research into ecstatic experiences, and it really helped me. It gave me faith that the experience would pass, that I should trust my soul and my friends, and practise the Stoic and Buddhist wisdom I’ve learned over the past two decades. And I was OK. I came back from the underworld.

Following that experience, I started to meet others who’d had similar meltdowns. I worked with the psychiatrist Tim Read to gather stories together and look for patterns. What we discovered was that spiritual emergencies happen quite often, and are very little discussed. People told us they’d never publicly discussed their experiences, although they considered them deeply meaningful. Often these episodes were triggered by psychedelics or intense spiritual practice, but they could also happen spontaneously, or be triggered by bereavement or political crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are similarities in the phenomenology of the experiences (ie, what they’re like). There’s a shift into an intense altered state of consciousness, in which time slows down, the inner world of dreams and outer world of ordinary reality blur, and mythical and archetypal thinking start to spill out. Events and objects feel charged with a numinous significance. People might decide they are divine, or that they have an apocalyptic mission. They might feel themselves dissolve, that they are at one with all things, and this loss of separateness can be beautiful and utterly terrifying. Or they might feel – as I did – that they have died, passed over into the spirit world. In a way, they have – the usual ego has disappeared. But it’s a temporary ego-death, usually.

In this raw state, the person is acutely sensitive to the judgments of others, and many report bruising encounters with experts – spiritual or psychiatric – who often fail to understand or sympathise with what the person is going through, and its simultaneous beauty and horror.

What helps? Set, setting and integration. First, the setting. People’s minds settle down when they’re in a peaceful, supportive and nonjudgmental setting. Human connection and love help return the mind from its flight into transcendence, so that it settles back into ordinary reality.

Second, the mindset. As the Stoics insisted, our context for events defines how we feel about them. It’s important to have a frame of meaning and growth on messy experiences, rather than the customary psychiatric frame where psychotic episodes are meaningless symptoms of neurological disease. Also helpful is the idea, found in most wisdom traditions, that ‘this too shall pass’. In addition, I found basic breathing exercises helpful for riding the waves of anxiety. The occasional diazepam also helped. I tried to practise kindness to myself, accepting what was arising without attachment or aversion. And I tried to practise humility – keeping grounded, not taking myself too seriously, laughing at the weirdness with my friends.

‘The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight’

Finally, integration. My own experience wasn’t very traumatic – I think it was more the resolution of old trauma – but, for many people, spiritual emergencies are traumatic, and take a good few months or years to integrate. It can be helpful to find a therapist, or a supportive community such as the Spiritual Crisis Network or the International Spiritual Emergence Network.

As weird as it sounds, I look back on my own experience fondly. I am none the worse for it, and it gave me an insight into unusual states of consciousness and the artificiality of the everyday self. I still sometimes feel our ordinary reality is a dream, but it’s a collective dream, not a solitary one. My experience also gave me confidence that wisdom practices still ‘work’ in these unusual states – perhaps Tibetan Buddhists are right, and these practices also work in the afterlife.

The Grofs wanted to distinguish ‘spiritual emergency’ from ordinary psychosis. I don’t think there’s necessarily a hard border between mysticism and psychosis, more of a continuum. As the comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell said, ‘the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight’.

The term ‘spiritual emergency’ is not perfect – the Grofs insisted that such experiences always lead to better outcomes, to greater wholeness. But life is ambiguous, and mystical or unusual experiences are particularly ambiguous. We don’t have to rush to stamp them as ‘totally good’ or ‘totally bad’.

Either way, this sort of experience is happening more and more, as people try psychedelics or pursue intense spiritual practices. Psychedelic practitioners, in their rush to legalise psychedelic therapy, need to be honest about people’s sometimes-messy experiences. So do spiritual or ‘transformational’ communities. We need to upgrade our cultural understanding and support for these experiences.

I hope Western culture can stop defining psychosis as something totally Other to rational civilisation, something frightening, shameful and bad, and instead see that altered states of consciousness are just something that happens to lots of people. They’re neither totally bad nor totally good – it depends on how we process them. The good news is that we can sometimes learn to swim in them, and we can share our experiences with each other.

https://psyche.co/ideas/a-spiritual-emergency-can-be-wild-this-is-how-to-ride-the-wave?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=4898dd4f25-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_10_26_06_42&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-4898dd4f25-71625772

 

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

― Epictetus

A reclaiming of joy by Matt Licata

Usually when we speak about the shadow, we're referring to less desirable experience such as unmet jealousy, rage, selfishness, and shame. Usually, the shadowy underworld is seen as the dark repository for “negative” aspects of ourselves, i.e. our terror of intimacy, unacknowledged narcissism, and unmetabolized anger and deep sadness.

But it is not only negative aspects of self that we disavow, split off from, and project. Many of us have lost the capacity to access and embody more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, empathy, and connectedness. Even the very natural, organic life-giving capacity to rest in more unstructured states of being and play can come to be associated in the nervous system and psyche as unsafe.

Some of us have even disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. I was once working with a man who was suffering from depression. What we discovered during our time together was how unsafe it was for him to express joy, how the experience of simple delight became tangled in his nervous system with danger and the likelihood of incredibly painful rupture with critical attachment figures in his life.

During our sessions, there were times we would become aware of this very simple, childlike, causeless joy coming to the surface as he was speaking about some experience he had, and how inevitably some (subtle) panic or anxiety would co-arise with the aliveness. He would then quickly disembody: change the subject, generate some sort of conflict between us, “leave” the room and go back into a prior conversation or nervously ask a question, or even just close his eyes and start to meditate.

After this happened a few times, we became curious about what was going on and were able to explore it together. Slowly and safely. With no judgment or shame. So that he had the experience of being felt and understood. Repairing those broken circuitries of love, empathy, presence, and warmth.

Being together in this, he was able access previously unconscious thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and bodily sensations, as well as early memories of how his father reacted to his joy and excitement, becoming aggressive and enraged, demanding that he “grow up” and stop acting like “a baby” and embarrassing the family. And how in response to that, his mother shut down and turned away from him to avoid the conflict.

He felt so lost, unseen, unheld, and un-allowed to be who and what he is, a man who longs to know joy and at times is presented with the opportunity to re-embody to the lost pathways of pleasure and elation deep in his psychic and somatic being.

He came to see how he had equated feeling full of life and natural states of delight, interest, play, and spontaneity with being judged and rejected. Over some time, he began to unwind this organization and was able to slowly re-awaken to this spectrum of experience and touch the natural joy he had disconnected from at an earlier time in his life.

While the term has a negative, darkened connotation and imagery, it is not only “negative” experience that we place in the shadow, but any material that has not found a home within the relational field.

To retrieve the lost joyous little boy and girl is an act of love, really, not only for one’s self but for all of life.

Photo by Tabitha Turner

http://alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-reclaiming-of-joy.html

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The need to touch by Laura Crucianelli

The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo?

Touch is the first sense by which we encounter the world, and the final one to leave us as we approach death’s edge. ‘Touch comes before sight, before speech,’ writes Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000). ‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.’ Human foetuses are covered in fine hairs known as lanugo, which appear around 16 weeks of pregnancy. Some researchers believe that these delicate filaments enhance the pleasant sensations of our mother’s amniotic fluid gently washing over our skin, a precursor to the warm and calming feeling that a child, once born, will derive from being hugged.

Touch has always been my favourite sense – a loyal friend, something I can rely on to lift me up when I’m feeling down, or spread joy when I’m on a high. As an Italian living abroad for more than a decade, I often suffered from a kind of touch hunger, which had knock-on consequences for my mood and health more generally. People in northern Europe use social touch much less than people in southern Europe. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that I spent the past few years studying touch as a scientist.

Lately, though, touch has been going through a ‘prohibition era’: it’s been a rough time for this most important of the senses. The 2020 pandemic served to make touch the ultimate taboo, next to coughing and sneezing in public. While people suffering from COVID-19 can lose the sense of smell and taste, touch is the sense that has been diminished for almost all of us, test-positive or not, symptomatic or not, hospitalised or not. Touch is the sense that has paid the highest price.

But if physical distance is what protects us, it’s also what stands in the way of care and nurturance. Looking after another human being almost inevitably involves touching them – from the very basic needs of bathing, dressing, lifting, assisting and medical treatment (usually referred to as instrumental touch), to the more affective tactile exchanges that aim to communicate, provide comfort and offer support (defined as expressive touch). Research in osteopathy and manual therapy, where practitioners have been working closely with neuroscientists on affective touch, suggests that the beneficial effect of massage therapy goes well beyond the actual manoeuvre performed by the therapist. Rather, there is something special simply in the act of resting one’s hands on the skin of the client. There is no care, there is no cure, without touch.

The present touch drought arrived after a period in which people were already growing more afraid of touching one another. Technology has enabled this distance, as social networking sites have become the primary source of social interaction for children and adolescents. A recent survey showed that 95 per cent of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45 per cent say that they are online ‘almost constantly’.

Another reason for touch-scepticism is the growing global awareness of how touch is a weapon that men use to impose their power over women. The #MeToo movement exposed how women are expected to acquiesce to inappropriate touch as the cost of gaining access to certain kinds of opportunities. Meanwhile, doctors, nurses, teachers and salespeople are all guided against being too ‘hands-on’. Yet studies suggest that touch actually improves the quality of our encounters with any of these professionals, and makes us evaluate the experience more positively. For example, we are likely to give a more generous tip to a waiter who absently touches our shoulder when taking the order than to those who keep their distance.

What’s unique about touch, when set against the other senses, is its mutuality. While we can look without being looked back at, we can’t touch without being touched in return. During the pandemic, nurses and doctors have talked about how this unique characteristic of touch helped them communicate with patients. When they couldn’t talk, smile or be seen properly because of their protective equipment, medical professionals could always rely on a pat on the shoulder, holding a hand or squeezing an arm to reassure patients and let them know that they were not alone. In a pandemic where touch is a proven vector, paradoxically it’s also a part of the cure. Touch really is the ultimate tool for social connection, and the good news is that we were born fully accessorised to make the most of it.

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In the 1990s, there was a wave of research demonstrating the shocking consequences of touch deprivation on human development. Several studies showed that children from Romanian orphanages, who were barely touched in the first years of life, had cognitive and behavioural deficits later on, as well as significant differences in brain development. In adulthood, people with reduced social contact have a higher risk of dying earlier compared with people with strong social relationships. Touch is especially important as we age: for instance, gentle touch has been shown to increase the amount of food intake in a group of institutionalised elderly adults. Even when we can’t see, hear or speak as we used to, we can almost always rely on touch to explore the world around us, to communicate with others, and to allow them to communicate with us.

Science is now beginning to provide an account of why touch matters so much. Touch on the skin can reduce heartrate, blood pressure and cortisol levels – all factors related to stress – in both adults and babies. It facilitates the release of oxytocin, a hormone that provides sensations of calm, relaxation and being at peace with the world. Every time we hug a friend or snuggle a pet, oxytocin is released in our body, giving us that feel-good sensation. In this way, oxytocin appears to reinforce our motivation to seek and maintain contact with others, which assists in the development of humans’ socially oriented brains. Oxytocin also plays a vital role in the relationship we have with ourselves.

In our lab, we recently showed that oxytocin might promote processes of multisensory integration, the so called ‘glue of the senses’ – the way the world typically presents itself to us as a coherent picture, rather than as multiple distinct streams of sense data. Multisensory integration, in turn, is at the root of our sense of body ownership, the feeling that most take for granted, that our body is ours. For our studies, we invited people to the lab, and induced the Rubber Hand Illusion, a well-established set-up where participants look at a lifelike rubber hand being touched while their own hand, hidden out of view, is touched at the same time. After a minute or so of synchronous tactile stimulation, the vast majority of participants experience the illusion that the rubber hand is their own hand, that they embody the rubber hand. We found that applying the tactile stimulation at slow, caress-like velocities enhances the illusion of embodying the rubber hand. Furthermore, we also found that giving participants one dose of intranasal oxytocin before the illusion enhanced the experience, compared with a placebo. In other words, affective touch and oxytocin might boost the process that keeps us grounded to a physical body.

Touch is the first sense to develop, and is mediated by the skin, our largest organ. We are one of the few mammals to be born so premature in the trajectory of our development. Our motor system isn’t fully developed, we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t regulate our own temperature beyond a certain threshold – all of which means that we rely on others to survive. As a child, being cared for depends primarily on tactile contact and ‘being held’. Any basic activity involves touch, such as changing nappies, having a bath, being fed, sleeping and, of course, cuddling. Even after we make it through the first few months of life, social tactile interactions are crucial for our development. For example, postnatal depression is known to have negative consequences for infants, but maternal touch can also have a protective effect. So encouraging tactile interactions between mothers with depression and their babies can reduce negative outcomes for the children later on in life. Importantly, the benefit is reciprocal: skin-to-skin contact between infant and parent increases the levels of oxytocin in mothers, fathers and infants, providing a feel-good sensation, promoting the development of a healthy relationship, and enhancing synchrony in parent-infant interactions.

Slow, caress-like touch was more likely to communicate love, even when delivered by a stranger

Many neuroscientists and psychologists believe that we have a dedicated system just for the perception of social – affective – touch distinct from the one that we use to touch objects. This system seems to be able to selectively recognise caress-like touch; this is then processed in the insula, a brain area connected to maintaining our sense of self and an awareness of our body. Slow, caress-like touch is not only important for our survival, but also for our cognitive and social development: for example, it can influence the way we learn to identify and recognise other people from early in life. In a study of four-month-old infants, when parents provided gentle stroking, children were able to learn to identify a previously seen face better than those who experienced non-tactile stimulation. It seems that slow, social touch might act as a cue to pay particular attention to social stimuli, such as faces.

What’s particularly important in infancy and childhood is not only the amount of touch we receive, but also its nature and quality. In a recent study, my colleagues and I showed that infants as young as 12 months are able to detect the way that their mothers touch them during daily activities, such as during play time or while sharing a book together. In our study, the mothers didn’t know that we were interested in touch, which allowed us to have a real insight into their spontaneous interactions. Importantly, we found that mothers’ ability to understand their infants’ needs translated into a kind of tactile language: for example, those mothers who were less aligned or responsive to their babies also tended to use more rough and restrictive touch. Infants also tended to reciprocate, in that they were more likely to use aggressive touch towards their mothers if this was the way that they were touched.

It’s not an exaggeration to talk of touch as a kind of language – one that we learn, like spoken language, through social interactions with our loved ones, from the earliest stages of our life. We use touch every day to communicate our emotions, and to tell someone that we are scared, happy, in love, sad, sexually aroused and much more. In turn, we are pretty good at reading other people’s intentions and emotions based on the way that they touch us. In a recent study, we invited people to the lab and asked them to detect the emotions and intentions that the experimenter was trying to convey to them via touch. The touch was delivered at different velocities: slower, as the touch typically occurring between parents and babies, or between lovers; or faster, a type of touch more common between strangers. We found that slow, caress-like touch was more likely to communicate love, even when the touch was delivered by a stranger. In contrast, participants didn’t attribute any special meaning or emotions to touch delivered at fast velocities. Interestingly, in the case of brain damage involving the insula, people have difficulties in perceiving affective touch, as well as disturbances in the sense of body ownership. This suggests the existence of a specialised pathway that arrives from the skin to a specific part of the brain.

We exchange tactile gestures as communicative tokens not only to build social bonds, but to establish power relationships. In professional Western contexts, people typically apply a certain amount of pressure in a handshake when meeting someone for the first time. A handshake stands as a proxy for competence and confidence; we feel the other person touching us, and ask ourselves: ‘Do I trust them enough to offer them a job?’ or ‘Should I let them babysit my kids?’ One study showed how a firm handshake was a key indicator of success in a job interview, perhaps because the handshake is the very first way that we close the physical gap between us and the other. The handshake is also used to seal an agreement, with the force of a signature or contract. The danger and vulnerability that’s intrinsic to touch is part of what allows it to serve this socially binding function; indeed, it’s believed that the handshake arose as a way of ensuring that the two people involved weren’t holding weapons.

The language of touch also affects the way that we relate to ourselves and our bodies across the lifespan, with profound impacts on our psychological wellbeing. In another set of studies, we investigated the way in which people with anorexia nervosa perceive caress-like touch as compared with healthy people. Anorexia nervosa is a severe eating disorder characterised by a distorted sense of one’s own body, but it can also lead to a reduction in social interactions. We wanted to understand whether the fact that sufferers report finding less pleasure in social interaction might be related to the disorder. Across two studies, we found that people with anorexia perceived slow touch delivered with a soft brush on their forearm to be less pleasant, compared with healthy participants. Importantly, we found the same pattern of results in people who have recovered from anorexia nervosa. This suggests that this reduced capacity to take pleasure in touch might be more of a stable characteristic rather than a temporary status, related to the severe malnutrition that we observe in anorexia nervosa. This finding, along with other studies, suggest that there is definitely a close link between social touch and mental health. Throughout our lives, we need touch to flourish.

So, what happens to our tactile fluency when we make touch taboo? At the times in our lives that we are most fragile, we need touch more than ever. From everything we know about social touch, it needs to be promoted, not inhibited. We need the nuance to recognise its perils, but avoiding touch entirely would be a disaster. The pandemic has given us a glimpse of what life would look like without touch. The fear of the other, of contamination, of touch has allowed many of us to realise how much we miss those spontaneous hugs, handshakes and taps on the shoulder. Physical distancing leaves invisible scars on our skin. Tellingly, most people mention ‘hugging my loved ones’ as one of the first things they want to do once the pandemic is over.

Touch is so vital that even the language of digital communication is saturated with touch metaphors. We ‘keep in touch’, and acknowledge that we are ‘touched by your kind gesture’. Some researchers have suggested that technology could enhance our physical connection with others, prompting new kinds of interpersonal tactile connections via hug blankets, kissing screens and caressing devices. For example, a project based at University College London is exploring how digital practices such as ‘Likes’ and emojis – signals that communicate emotional states and social feedback – could extend to the remote manipulation of textures and materials. Two people at a distance could each have a device that detects and transmits tactile feedback: for example, my sensor could become warm and soft when my partner on the other side of the world is available and wants to let me feel their presence, or conversely, it could turn cold and rough if my partner needs my presence.

Nothing can compare with the magic of a physically intimate moment with someone

There’s a lot of potential for these devices, especially for touch-deprived people such as the elderly, people who live alone, or children in orphanages. Consider that 15 per cent of people worldwide live alone, often far away from loved ones, and that statistics are suggesting that more and more people die alone, too. What a difference it would make to have the possibility of being physically close, even when far apart.

However, these devices should be complementary to the power of a skin-to-skin tactile exchange, rather than a substitute for it. Nothing can compare with the magic of a physically intimate moment with someone, in which touch is often accompanied by a cascade of other sensory signals such as smell, sound and body temperature. Touch is physically and temporally proximal, in that it means ‘we are close to each other and we are here now, together’. Unlike other senses that can be digitalised, such as seeing someone’s face and talking to them over Zoom, touch requires you to be in the same place, at the same time, with another human being. A digitalised version of touch would be missing this rich sharing of a specific moment in space and time, allowing a more limited experience of what a hug could provide. If I could potentially pause or retract from someone sending me a digital caress, that aspect of touch in which we ‘feel along with another person’ would fail.

In the current environment, is the idea of a ‘renaissance of touch’ just for the brave and the foolish? I don’t believe so, and scientific evidence speaks loud and clear. We lose a lot by depriving ourselves of touch. We deprive ourselves of one of the most sophisticated languages we speak; we lose opportunities to build new relationships; we might even weaken existing ones. Through deteriorating social relationships, we also detach from ourselves. The need for people to be able to touch one another should be a priority in defining the post-pandemic ‘new normal’. A better world is often just a hug away. As a scientist, but also as a fellow human, I claim the right to touch, and to dream of a reality where no one will be touchless.

To read more about the body and emotions, visit Aeon’s sister site, Psyche, a new digital magazine that illuminates the human condition through three prisms: mental health; the perennial question of ‘how to live’; and the artistic and transcendent facets of life.

https://aeon.co/essays/touch-is-a-language-we-cannot-afford-to-forget?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8647da6e0e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_10_26_01_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-8647da6e0e-69453549