Compassionate Touch Therapy

The Key Word is Compassion

This year I have put together a series of continuing education staff development programs for several Rochester area nursing homes and their staff caregivers, on an integrative approach I’ve synthesized for energetic healing called Compassionate Touch Therapy.  What is it, and how can it better help us support and center ourselves and others whom we care for and about?

The word compassion, according to the Tibetan definition, means detached loving.  The Tibetans also say compassion represents the highest emotion we’re capable of experiencing.  To be loving without agenda, expectation, and judgment requires a space of inner detachment, which is not uncaring – it is openness – like the openness of a sacred channel.

The Foundation of Energetic Healing

When we can energetically open ourselves as a channel for universal life force energy, the Source which enlivens and sustains us endlessly, we can, in a hands-on way, transmit this energy fully to wherever we centrally focus our meditative intent.  The synthesis of Compassionate Touch Therapy integratively and holistically combines basic elements of Reiki and Therapeutic Touch with a foundation of energetic healing that I have created within my Centering practice.

The steps involved that I’ve created are both simple and, within the challenges of typical day-to-day life, difficult.  These are centering, building, transmitting, separating, and returning to center.

Five Steps to Completion

Centering is an inner-directed, meditative approach that involves entering your own sacred stillness through allowing your breath to unfold to its deepest, fullest extent in order to let go and let be.  This is how we come to center.

Building is how we position our hands, understood to be transmitters for healing, with our inner-directed spiritual intent from our center, to open as a channel, and allow universal life force energy to fully flow and build.  We are then in full position to transmit.

Transmitting flows from whatever particular position the hands are placed in, with ongoing intent to promote maximum healing responses from a place of letting go and letting be.  This occurs through a light touch, holding the hands in each particular position for as long as one is intuitively moved to do so – generally anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes.

Separating is what I call "the clean break" which occurs when the healer comes to know, from an inner place of heightened awareness, that the treatment is complete, and simply withdraws their hands and focused intent from connected positions, with a sense of blessing and release.  Separating is always fueled by a sense of trust and acceptance of higher outcome.

Returning to center is the final inner-directed act to return, after separating, to one’s own sacred inner center, continuing to experience on the inner planes of consciousness, letting go and letting be.  All healing occurs within a sacred spiritual circle that allows us to fully experience the divine universe of integrative, endless, multidimensional body-mind healing.

A New Definition of Healing

Healing continues, and can be easily reactivated for greater and greater sustaining results with each determined cycle of Compassionate Touch Therapy.  Energy, said Einstein, can be neither created nor destroyed, and, being subtle and in a constant state of motion, can "get through" anything. 

So Compassionate Touch Therapy reaches – touches – beyond – and is without limits in its potential scope.  This is our capability and our highest function as spiritual beings of enlightened consciousness adventuring on the earth plane, transcending even fear and woundedness.  Perhaps that is the real definition of healing.