Waking Up the Hands

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” —Carl Jung

Your hands are made to take in information, and they are very good at it. You squeeze the avocado to see if it’s ripe. You reach into your bag and feel around for the keys. My friend the motorcycle racer tells me he feels the texture of the road through the handlebars. We take in that information constantly. Wonderfully, we can enjoy that data as it comes in, so the sensation becomes pleasurable.

We are born with this ability but tend to unlearn it as we grow up. This lesson reclaims it. This lesson changes how you experience your hands. Your hands stop working and become a source of pleasure to you. This is pleasure that is not about anything or anyone, and this ability is the foundation for everything we’re doing here. As we’ll be seeing, it also turns out to be the foundation for sensuality, generosity, and integrity.

Finding the click takes time, from thirty seconds to thirty minutes to a few weeks. It doesn’t matter how long it takes; give it all the time it needs. What we are waking up is the connection between the sensory nerves in the hands and the pleasure centers in the brain. This nerve cell starts talking to this brain cell. Something shifts, and it feels different. This connection is the highway we’re going to be driving on, so we have to build it first. Later, you’ll come back and drive on this highway when touching each other.

The lesson is extremely simple, and the hardest part may be taking it seriously enough to do it. There are a few small details that make it harder to find, so the instructions are exact and thorough. For some, it’s fairly straightforward. For many, it’s a little odd, and for some, it’s difficult.

-Excerpt from "The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent" by Betty Martin