A Life-enabling Touch

There has been so much to think about this week. There was that story about a Buddhist couple, male monk and female teacher, who made a vow never to stray farther than 15 feet from one another, sharing a home, a life, a bed, while remaining celibate.

Another article told of a Purity Ball in Colorado Springs where fathers brought their daughters as dates. In a break between dances, each father read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”

Two different religious traditions—with representatives of each lamenting the state of partner relationships in our culture, and finding solutions by blaming sex. In both stories, the strategy to better intimacy is pure mind over body: “we,” as higher minds, must learn to control our physical desire so that we can attain a “higher purpose.”

What is it about sex?

A glance through some of the Christian literature on abstinence lays out scientific, moral, and religious reasons for postponing sex until marriage. We must protect ourselves from: sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, impoverished relationships, and broken hearts. We must prove to our partner and our selves our ability to resist temptation and control our physical desire. We should save ourselves to give to the life partner we hope one day to have. We do it (or not) for God. For the Buddhists, this form of spiritual discipline offers a path to achieving freedom from attachment to their wills, their desires, their anger, and hence their suffering.

What do we learn from these cases? We learn that an unruly desire for sex is the cause of our psychological and social ills, our failed relationships and our unhappy selves. It is what we must learn to guard ourselves against.

While these two examples may seem extreme, the attitudes towards sex they represent are not. For there is no sense here that our desire might have anything to teach us--except how to control it. There is no sense that there might be wisdom in our desire, guiding us in how to love. And this view is all too common--even among those who urge a free and casual hook up play.
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The verdict among scientists is stronger every day: touch is an essential, enabling dimension of human life. It has been known for a while that infants born prematurely fare far better with a pair of arms to hold them. New measuring techniques in neuroscience are now enabling researchers to document the effects of sensual touch on the brain—on how it develops, how it learns, how it responds to stress. (See the Blakeslees recent book.)

The results have been clear. Not only is sensual touch on par with good nutrition as necessary for “normal, healthy brain development” (184); it remains significant in adults as a predictor of the brain’s ability to endure pain, respond to stress, learn new tasks, and bond with other human beings. Experiments have demonstrated that the more “viscerally aware” a person is, the “more emotionally attuned” (181). The greater our sensory awareness of the movement of our own bodies, the more able we will be to move with others, to empathize and to connect.

As the Blakselees put it: “Sensations from your skin and body… are your mind’s true foundation” (12). Based on the touch that we give and that we receive, we form “body maps” in our brain that guide us as we sense and respond, perceive and reason, or choose to love.

Further, it is clear that the chemical coordinates of the touch that enable us to grow strong, think clearly, and relate empathically with our fellow humans are the same as those triggered by sex—orgasm in particular. The same hormones and neurotransmitters are present in similar brain regions when we hug, hold, nurture, nurse, or arouse. It is a difference of degree.
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So what is it? Is the touch of a sexual encounter a wayward sin or an enabling grace? Is our desire a threat to our long term health and happiness in relationship? Or does our desire provide the enabling condition of those relationships in the first place?

The questions mislead. They presume, once again, that “desire for sex” is a thing in us that we must figure out how to manage, for better or for worse. The fact is that our desire can be one or the other. The implication: it isn’t either. It can become one or the other, and it does so as we learn, as we touch, as we move, as we create and become patterns of sensation and response.

In this sense, our desire for sex represents a potential for giving and receiving a life enabling touch. As a potential it is one that we can learn to unfold in ourselves, or not.

Still, we won’t figure out what that potential is if we sense and respond to our desires as if they were physical urges to manage. What makes us think that, after proving our love by not having sex, we can flip a switch and suddenly prove our love by having sex? Or what makes us think that, after engaging in casual sex, we can simply flip a switch and make life long passionate love? Both cases assume that love--free from and unbiased by sexual desire--will guarantee that the sex--which simply is--is good. Mind over body.

If our desire for sex is a desire for a life enabling touch, then neither delaying our desires nor indulging our every whim will help us learn what those desires have to teach us about love.

Rather, we need to figure out how to find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire. It is a wisdom that is providing us with the motivation and direction we need in order to learn how to give and receive a life enabling touch.

Next week: Finding that wisdom.