By Jesus Aguado
Living is something that is always done on the surface. It is the skin that rubs against the world, the one that deciphers it and tells it to the rest of what we are. To live is to put the skin at stakethink with the skin.
But the skin, which is a mystery and at the same time an instrument of high emotional precision, needs, in order to do its job well, to be periodically charged with energy, recover from the wear and tear of everyday life.
that’s when stroke acquires its full meaning: the caress relaxes, cleans, fills the deposits of the soul, illuminates, humanizes. When we caress or are caressed we are vindicating the skin as the center of existence, as the most beautiful and profound thing in existence.
When the whole body is synchronized, the soul stops suffering
caress is, as lovers and healers know, among other things, set the body clock. Setting the time means: making all parts of the body suddenly give the same time.
Under normal conditions, the head is in one place, the heart in another, the feet are on their own, the back pulls in a different direction: we are, in this society of haste and anguish, fragmented bodies whose pieces often face each other. and that only in a few moments they want a kind of essential unity.
Too many clocks discussing within us what will be the true time of what we are. When caressing, those clocks (the one of work and dreams, the one of reality and desire) sign peace: the body recomposesthe soul stops suffering.
That is why we sigh and narrow our eyes when we are caressed: because the discussion of the clocks stops, because time suddenly stops to wait for us, because thanks to the hands and love that another places on us, worries cease and joy begins.
Skin-deep intelligence
The hands know it, the skin knows it: caress is one of the most important verbs in life. It is what gives her meaning, what heals her, what educates her sensitivity, what turns on the light, what calms her down.
Caressing the soul trusts the body again and the body yearns for a soul again. The caress is an act of affirmation of existence, a vindication of the joy of living. To caress, to be caressed: there is no greater intelligence.
Keep all the good
To caress is to erase from the blackboard the words that are left over (the worn-out, distressing, false words). The gesture looks similar: a hand moving from left to right, diagonally, up and down. The body, the blackboard: that hand leaves them blank again, available, attentive to life’s new proposals.
we pet a cat and begins to purr. we pet a dog and wags its tail vigorously or lies on its back to offer more sensitive surface area for our hands. we caress a horse and lower your head to make it easier for us to do it.
we caress a baby and we notice how it is delivered. we caress a plant or the current of a river or the wind or the sand on a beach and, if we are receptive, if we are connected with nature, we feel that they are the ones who caress us.
To caress is to participate in the essential happiness of everything that existsconnect to the flow of life that goes through every being, however tiny, in the world.
Caressing is an act of love and recognition. There can be nothing more beautiful and necessary. It is the way of telling the other that his body is part of ours and vice versa.
Run away from the caresses that are not born of love
However, there are those who, in order not to feel alone, accept what psychologists call negative caresseswhich are caresses that cross out one, caresses that are born from some black feeling (appropriating the other, hurting him, separating him from others…) before love.
As long as they don’t feel alone, okay, because unwanted loneliness is unbearable torture, but without realizing that denial, erasure, and damage are some of the darkest forms of non-existence.
Are inhuman caresses that should never be accepted because it is better to be alone with the little light that one has left, or with the great shadow that one projects, than to become the ghost of oneself.
From neurons to skin
Caressing is also synonymous with coveting, desiring something strongly: cherish the project of changing lifecherish the idea of having more children.
Abstract caresses, caresses in the air, which refer to those other specific caresses, skin to skin, of which we have spoken before: because to achieve those objectives (change life, have more children, go to another city, say goodbye to work, write a novel…) it is necessary, first, trust that it is the body that makes the decisions by one.
It is, in fact, displacing the decision center for the important issues of life from the head to the body, from the neurons to the skin.
To caress is to approach the otherdare the other, be the other.
To caress is to travel with the hands to the heart of the other. In the course of this journey the skin is recognized as skin, the hair is recognized as hair, the pores are recognized as pores, the fingertips are recognized as fingertips, the back is recognized as back, sex becomes recognized as sex: caressing is awakening the self-knowledge of each fragment of our body.
Self-knowledge, soul: that which is not the body but without which the body would be nothing. By caressing we put soul to the body, we awaken the soul from the body. There can be nothing more necessary or more human.