Hands As Healers

Hold your hands in front of you. Look at them, or in the dark, just feel them.

These hands. The architecture of them. The twenty-seven bones in each hand, more than in almost any other part of the body, an extravagance of small bones allowing an extravagance of small movements. Forty muscles controlling each hand: some within the hand itself, some in the forearm running tendons down to the fingers like ropes to a ship. The result: the ability to thread a needle, or perform surgery, or play a piano, or hold someone very gently.

Rub the palms together. Slowly. The friction generating warmth. The warmth building between them until the space between the palms becomes noticeably hot. Stop. Hold the palms facing each other, a few centimetres apart. Breathe. There is a quality of sensation in this space between the palms. Warmth, yes. But also something like a density, a pressure, a magnetic quality. This is what the body energy workers call feeling the energy field. Whatever it is, it is perceptible. The palms know something about each other.

Place one warm palm on the other forearm. Simply. No technique. The weight and warmth of the hand resting on the arm. The skin receiving this contact and telling the nervous system: you have been touched by something safe. Something warm. The nervous system responding as it always responds to safe touch: with a reduction in cortisol, a slight activation of the parasympathetic system, the body recognising that comfort is available.

This is why humans reach automatically for a hurt place. The hand going to the stubbed toe, the bumped head, the tight chest. The hand placed on the pain does not remove the pain. It provides the nervous system with competing information: warmth, support, contact. It says: I am here with this. The pain is acknowledged, attended to, not alone.

Place both palms over the chest now. Over the sternum. The warmth of both hands meeting the skin and the bone beneath. The heart is inside, behind this. The lungs on either side. The ribcage receiving your hands' warmth. Breathe into this.

healing touch does not require a practitioner. The hands at the ends of your arms are the hands. Their warmth is real. Their pressure is real. The neurological response to safe touch is real and well-documented. Every parent who has held a child in pain already knew this. Every nurse who has taken a patient's hand already knew this. The knowing does not require the theory.

Move the hands somewhere in your body that has been holding tension today. The back of the neck, perhaps. One hand there, warmth against the muscle. The scalp. Fingertips spreading slightly, the slight pressure of them. The jaw. Both hands on both cheeks, the warmth communicated through the bone.

Your hands know how to do this. They have been doing it without instruction for as long as you have had them.

Trust them. They were given to you for many things. This is one of the oldest.

Let them work. Let the warmth flow where it is needed.

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