Healing Hugs and Somatic Process
It's no secret that hugging supports our mental, emotional and physical well being. It is one of the easiest things to do and can also be one of the most difficult in these days of techno/infection isolation. I was chatting recently with a scientist friend of mine. We were exploring how empathy is quickly becoming psychopathy in a divergent, re-engineered social environment. Social isolation seemed to be a primary catalyst for a palpable absence of empathy between human beings and giving rise to an alarming increase in superficiality and narcissism. I discussed with him an article I’d read years ago about how empathy actually begins in the heart as part of a naturally occurring response to humanity. It isn’t about any intentional thought process, it is transcendent of the cognitive mind and requires only proximity, eye contact and silence to fully experience. In later years I would use this process when working with groups and the military suffering with PTSD whose greatest challen...