Play - Part II
On attending The Play Is The Thing: The Serious Work of Play, a conference sponsored by The New England Consortium of Artist-Educators and Professionals, Sept 23, 2010 in Brattleboro, VT. For Part I, see the previous post.
Touch
A plain white ball lies in juggler Michael Moschen’s open palm. It does not move.
My sister was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, he says. I did not want to close my hand. So I did this for a long time. And suddenly – this happened.
The ball has come alive.
The First Touch
We begin like that white ball, a little round egg. Continuously dividing, continuously growing,we become aware of. . . something . . . we brush up against it - and recoil! We dance with this boundary, brushing and bouncing away, until something changes. We begin to move toward the touch. Instead of recoiling, we snuggle.
We have formed our first relationships – both with ourselves, and with the one whom we will someday know as Mother.
The Sense of Touch
There are different ways of counting the senses. To the traditional five, some add the sixth sense of intuition. In recent years, researchers have identified nineteen different sensory receptors! (Playing in the Unified Field, Carla Hannaford, p. 54)
But all of these enumerations, from the smallest to the largest, include the sense of touch.
The German philosopher/educator Rudolf Steiner suggested that we have twelve senses. In Steiner’s system, the order of the senses is important. Each sense precedes and, to some extent, creates the next. The very first sense in Steiner’s system is touch. The second sense is, interestingly enough, something he calls simply life. Our life sense is the way we know that we are alive. At the most basic physical level, this sense tells us how to maintain our state of aliveness. We sense that this food might be good and that food might make us feel sick. We sense that walking on the rim of that precipice or putting our hand in the fire might be dangerous. Our life sense is what helps us take care of ourselves.
When Touch Goes Missing
That dance we do with the uterine wall– touch – is the first of many infant reflex movements we will acquire in the course of our development. These first movements are reflexive because they are hard-wired to the most primitive parts of our brains, and, for life, they are what we fall back upon to survive.
Sometimes, even this first reflexive movement is arrested in its development. When the prenatal environment is severely compromised – often by drugs or alcohol ingested by the mother – the impulse to move away from touch remains. These babies, when born, instead of snuggling, cry and cry, and repel the touch that they do not trust to comfort them.
Traumatic response to touch can happen later in the developmental process. I attended a very interesting talk by Dr. Louisa Silva at Reservoir Family Wellness in Acton, MA, about working through touch with children on the autism spectrum. Her current research suggests that one of the defining symptoms of autism is an inability to process touch in the normal way. These children can be either so hypersensitive that even the light pressure of clothing on the body feels painful to them – or they do not feel pain at all, even if they are experiencing severe cuts or burns.
The Touch of Life
It is amazing that a detail painted by a man hundreds of years ago on the ceiling of a small chapel in Italy has become an image that rests in somewhere in most of our minds. It is, of course, Michelangelo’s vision of the hand of God touching the hand of Adam.
In my experience of children on the autism spectrum, I have often felt that the life sense - the simple knowledge that they are alive - is not something that they feel comfortable with. There is, in these children, a confusion and mistrust of the most basic and unconscious principles that we rely upon to function. And in working with all kinds of children, I find the ability to take and give comfort with touch - and to be comfortable accessing the world through touch - to be a touchstone of development.
Thinking back to Steiner's developmental progression of the senses, it makes sense to view touch as a necessary first step. To know we are alive, we must first be able to touch.
The Open Hand
God’s hand and Adam’s hand are both open. So is Michael Moschen’s. The white ball rests, quiet in his palm, a reservoir of limitless potential.
How can we open our hands - and our hearts - to touch? How can we help others in our lives to open their hands and hearts as well?
Coming soon – Open Hands, Open Hearts - reflections on The Hands Supporting Reflex, with practical ways to bring this essential movement into your life, your family, and your classroom.