The First Language of the Body
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
— Margaret Atwood
I’ve just finished reading Sophie Strand’s memoir The Body is a Doorway, and in her essays on living with chronic illness and life beyond healing, I was struck by the way she continues to let the world meet her, the way she is touched by the world around her. In particular, I’ve been contemplating this idea: we come from collision.
We are born from impact
In the beginning we are two separate tributaries of life-material. It is the chiasmic binding of genes from two colliding cells that make us. A meeting of sperm and egg. A drop of water encased in a fatty membrane, and a pinprick of genetic data swimming toward this ocean of becoming. As many sperm become embedded in the cell wall, it is the egg who chooses and invites the one she wants into her enormous space. These two independent cells touch, merge and transform into one single new cell: the zygote. From this single cell, your body created itself.
Collision is encoded into the origins of our world, our universe, our evolution and becoming. It’s said our universe exploded into being with a Big Bang, a force of such enormous propulsion that its energy is eternally expanding in a relentless movement of life. We too, came forth from an explosion of energy and matter and are eternally expanding, changing and growing throughout our lives.
We are made from that first moment of meeting, from interrelationship and co-becoming.
We are made through touch.
We are nothing—we are not possible—without our ecosystem of relations, without the necessary elements that co-weave and create our habitat. We are known through knowing others.
Without the reference points of our wider communal environment, how can we see ourselves, feel ourselves, speak or hear or learn?
Origins of the Body
In naming my business—Body Origins—I sought to find the essence of my work and trust that the imprint of this message would live within the words and send a signal out to the wider world. How could I describe what it is I do in a name?
Craniosacral Therapy theory and practice is incredibly interested in embryology, or in other words: the origin of our bodies.
How are we made?
What forces are present, what intelligence and models are necessary to construct, create and catapult a body into form?
Nobody really knows.
Nobody knows how to make a body. Science has not yet learnt how to recreate the extreme complexity of our multi-organ human system. The body grows itself. The body is grown in relation to another, within another.
In fact, that first initial cell—the zygote—divides itself over the next few days into 64 cells. Of these, 56 become our placenta and only 8 go on to soon become an embryo. From the very beginning, we are more environment than we are human. We are a product of our first habitat, made from a primal intelligent momentum to support life.
What we do know is this: we are not possible without contact, without input from something or someone. We were made from others, and we continue to be made by the world we live in. We are constantly influenced, subject to our circumstances—for better or worse.
Touch is the First Language
In Craniosacral Therapy, touch is our most important skill.
Yes, you can learn how to touch well.
To touch with knowledge: We study the body anatomy in-depth so each system feels met, recognised and deeply acknowledged when it’s held.
To touch with sensitivity: We do not intrude. We hold a wide, spacious perceptual field so the body feels safe to unravel its story.
To touch with love: The body responds to frequency. It knows immediately when there’s expectation, pressure or judgement. In our work, we meet the body with absolute acceptance.
When something or someone feels seen, it opens and shows more of itself.
The body constantly wants to communicate.
But we don’t always have the means to hear what it’s trying to say. A Craniosacral Therapist is trained and skilled in ‘hearing’ the body through the hands. Our hands are incredibly sensitive and able to perceive nuanced movement, vibration and signals.
The hands and fingertips are highly specialized sensory tools. Our hands are like antennae, receiving copious amounts of information from the environment and sending it back through our peripheral nervous system to the brain. There are an astounding 17,000 touch receptors and free nerve endings in the palm, more still in each fingertip. These receptors pick up sensations of pressure, movement and vibration.
Touch is a powerful doorway into the secret hallways of the body.
When we are children, we learn through touch. We experience the world with our hands before we ever learn to speak. We arrive on the day we are born and we are held. Our first language is touch. So when the body is held again in this way, it communicates in a language older than words, and as Margaret Atwood says, it starts to tell the truth.
Rebirthing
Often in sessions, people experience what we could call a ‘rebirthing’. The body, when given the unbounded time and space to communicate and express, returns to its moment of emergence and enacts the movement patterns, emotional tone, psychological state, exertion and compression that may have occurred at birth.
For some, birth is traumatic and complicated. These compressive forces can stay trapped in the system and affect the way we move, think, feel and how open we are to change. In the treatment room, the body has a rare opportunity to resolve and even restory these birth imprints.
I believe rebirthing is also a profound resource. The body returns to its origins in order to inform and educate our ‘adult’ cells of who we really are. What lives in these origins is our inherent and unending potential to create and recreate ourselves.
We are made of cells, and our cells are constantly dying and rebirthing, recycling and regenerating. In every moment our cells are saying yes to life, to impact, to collision and extinction.
Let us not journey back to the beginning to contact an idea of perfection and healing, the untouched ‘I’ that was perfect before life happened to us. Let us return to our moment of inception, the first moment of touch we came from, and recognise the sacred order and chaos that ensued: the feeding ground, the placenta of nourishment, the bacteria and protein and hormones and nerve endings that all oscillate and dance a great weaving pattern through the world and through our bodies.
Let us touch our very nature and in so doing, touch life again.
