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Areas › Your body › Touch and bodywork
It does two jobs in one go: gentle wide contact takes some edge off the pain, and it brings a person out of guarded alertness into being able to talk. Someone who uses it at the start often begins using it at home too, which is where it does most of its work. Offer it as an opening ritual rather than a rescue technique.
'Take my shirt and lay it over my father's face' (Quran 12:93). Yusuf's first move towards a suffering man is something soft laid on the skin, before any conversation happens.
يوسف
ٱذۡهَبُواْ بِقَمِيصِي هَٰذَا فَأَلۡقُوهُ عَلَىٰ وَجۡهِ أَبِي يَأۡتِ بَصِيرࣰ ا وَأۡتُونِي بِأَهۡلِكُمۡ أَجۡمَعِينَ
Take my shirt and lay it over my father’s face: he will recover his sight. Then bring your whole family back to me.’
Qur’an 12:93read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of C fibre mediated touch describes how slow gentle stroking of hairy skin activates a distinct class of nerve fibres that feed into the brain's map of the body's condition rather than into touch discrimination. Pace and gentleness are doing the work, not accuracy of route. It is a mechanism review rather than a trial of this sequence in people with chronic pain.
Björnsdotter M, Morrison I, Olausson H. (2010). Feeling good: on the role of C fiber mediated touch in interoception.. Experimental brain research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Broad slow touch quiets the pain a little and settles the person at the same time, so one action does both.
Finish by letting your eyes travel slowly from one side to the other a few times, open or closed, then bring them back to the middle and notice how you are.
Not all of this is a matter of how you say you feel. Breathing, exercise and hands on work shift things that can be measured from outside: heart rhythm, stress hormones, muscle tone.
Do not put a clock on any of this. Stay with each position until your body asks for a deeper breath or produces a yawn, then move on.