Touch opens us, heals us, and ultimately brings a profound peace. We often think of touch as an external sensation, but we can feel touch internally too. Some of the most powerful touches we experience are those we feel within, and likewise are the unplanned and unrehearsed touches. When moments arrive unannounced we discover the need to be open to life through the vulnerability of being open and being touched. This vulnerability allows us to be changed by our experience and enter into our humanness. When we meditate we go inside our bodies and can scan ourselves from within. What we discover can be the feeling of physical sensations, and in a deeper state can mean feeling the divinity within us. One literally becomes a ‘new man’ under the touch of grace – and this transformation may well be the object of an experience bordering on true mysticism...Thomas Merton

connecting breath and movement becomes a divine prayer, an easing in and cultivation of the unmasked heart….safe, vast and translucent to mystery…..it’s as if we are composing a flower instead of growing one…..this shift is miraculous, fleeting and shadowy…..

Why does the spontaneous relationship of myself to my body–and therefore of all of me to the present moment disappear with childhood? This is what interests me most. And how is it that my awareness, my kinesthetic sensation of my own body, brings me into the present moment again, able to participate in a more complete way of life? Yet the importance of the body in the act of presence is seldom acknowledged. I once was shocked when one of my seriously esoteric friends, who had spent much of her life working to arrive at what she thought of as higher spiritual levels, told me to ‘treat the body like a wound.’ What kind of relationship would result from such an attitude?…..Patty de Llosa

underneath the passionate wind

One day in summer
when everything
has already been more than enough
the wild beds start
exploding open along the berm
of the sea; day after day
you sit near them; day after day
the honey keeps on coming
in the red cups and the bees
like amber drops roll
in the petals: there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to bear.

…..Mary Oliver