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 challenge is communication. 

Proximity Or The Absence Of It

When two people stand in proximity to one another, a remarkable process occurs where two hearts align and calibrate with one another. This is the birth of empathy, it happens in the heart and the alignment allows us to truly ‘feel’ each other’s energy field.

The great Covid separation has had a profound effect on how we commune with one another in healing, palpable and meaningful ways. Has this separation driven us further into our unfeeling, psychopathic, intellectual mind?

In a society now preoccupied with boundaries and separation, where natural sensory perception gets replaced with mundane thought process, something in us shifts and we become cold; detached. We develop an inability or unwillingness to stand in the closeness of another and maybe we defer to an overgrown intellect that can find any number of reasoning justifications to behave in what actually looks like a fear based response to human contact.

This pervasive patterning and the seemingly universal undermining of nature based humanity has driven the perfectly natural process of empathy (my ability to feel your energy and you mine) out of the heart and into the intellect, thus reducing it to a left brain egocentric cognitive process.

Back to today and this morning I wake up with an inner prompt to relearn what I know about the Autonomic Nervous System and this led me to the elegant simplicity of hugging!

Hugging supports our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical well being. It requires no planning, diarising or thinking about. It is a natural, healing, empathic, bonding process. Here are the big benefits - don’t overthink it!  

Hugging releases into the bloodstream:

• Oxytocin - the bonding hormone 
• Serotonin - the happy hormone 
• Dopamine - the pleasure hormone - in a way that is natural rather than addictive.
• Hugging lowers cortisol levels, reducing anxiety and heart rate.
• The ‘deep squeeze’ hug supports the vagus nerve and sends a signal of safety and connectedness to the autonomic nervous system, reducing the fight/flight response.
• Hugging has been found to have a calming effect in both neuro-typical and neuro-atypical individuals.
• Hugging requires no words, no expectations and no attachment to outcome. It’s about letting the body take over and ignite cellular intelligence rather than cognitive, man made cleverness.

I love a good hug myself, a hug where I can disappear, get out of my mind and just surrender into the beingness and connectedness of that moment.

I send you all a wish that your Christmas be filled with magical hugs, remembering also that hugs come in many different shapes and sizes!! 

Merry Christmas Everyone. xx

References:

Autonomic Nervous System(s): https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23273-autonomic-nervous-system

The Vagus Nerve: Master of Our Parasympathetic Nervous System: https://www.pranaceawellness.com/post/the-vagus-nerve-master-of-our-parasympathetic-nervous-system