The Healing Touch of Life and Love
by F Nicholas Sutherland MA, M Litt, PhD, FCP
Our greatest gift is life and our most precious achievement is love. Yet it is just here that lies a significant paradox. While our search is for happiness and love the experience of life is often difficult, sometimes harsh, even cruel at times. Theses experiences create feelings of loneliness, sadness and sap our vitality causing us to withdraw within ourselves, with the potential of threatening our will to live. The reality is that we cannot prevent these painful experiences, they are part of what we have to bear as part of the experience of living; the growing pains of development to maturity. If we have never felt deep pain within ourselves we can never really understand or empathise with the pain of another.
While we have a right to be angry, to stand up for ourselves, and express our authentic feelings; to allow them to become harmful by becoming a chip on one's shoulder, or by developing an angry attitude to life is harmful and can be lethal to the achievement of the very vitality of life and the experience of love that we so deeply need and seek.
We become more alive when we are able to affirm others, because then they are able in return to affirm us. If we want more love then we must become more loving. Such an attitude comes not from the need or desire to manipulate or control others in order to get what we want. Rather it comes from a genuine interest and authentic appreciation of another, a caring love that springs from the heart of love.
To be a loving person it is necessary to be in touch with oneself, one's feelings, and able to make contact with others. Expressing divine love (agape) can take many forms. Often a look, a gesture, a word or just a smile is all that is needed. This creates a good feeling, of recognising another, an expression of goodwill, and affirming a person's worth. With a greeting, the contact of a handshake, a hug, an embrace, one makes contact with another enabling it to become an authentic meeting, a recognition of the worth, dignity and acceptance of a person, giving a feeling of being alive. Communication through touch is the means of making contact, a genuine meeting, an experience of healing. The healing touch is the giving of life and love.
Powered by 
