Touch is the silent language of connection. It is a bridge between two separate bodies, universes, energy fields. It is a vehicle of transmission—of giving and receiving energy.
What is contained in the invisible transmission of touch is a diverse combination of intentions, emotions, and desires, including love, forgiveness, listening, and myriad other qualities. As a language, it has the ability to transmit both conscious and unconscious reality from one person to another without having to be translated by the rational mind. A touch can have within it a mixture of messages—tenderness, impatience, neediness, fear, excitement.
The body doesn’t lie; therefore, touch as a therapeutic modality is always based in energetic truth, and that truth can be felt and sensed even when words may say otherwise.   
 Skillful touch has within it a “listening” capacity that can open and heal wounded aspects of the body-mind. Skillful touch is intentional and has in it the frequency or vibratory quality of unconditional regard—which, at its root, is a quality of love.   
Skilled touch is a mindful inquiry—a curious attending to what is beneath the surface of another person’s skin. This quality of compassion gives a subtle message to the person being touched that it is safe to exist, to be alive in this moment, to receive, to relax, and to open. Within such a container exists a “linking up” or unspoken cooperation between healer and the one receiving healing. It is this quality of being in it together that facilitates a deep trust and, therefore, access for healing. This access comes from the awareness that we are held—literally and energetically. We belong and are not alone in the world.   
Touch is our first language. Prior to even being born, we are influenced and formed through our touch connection with our mother and her energetic body and environment. We imbibe her “field of being” into the very cells of our own forming body-mind consciousness. Her energetic being informs our mapping and growth patterns. Ideally, a mother-to-be should be protected—held in a sacred and loving vibratory field while new life is forming within her. This is often not what we experience, but there is hope that as our culture expands in consciousness, we will better understand the potency and reality of consciousness and energy, and how that can inform and transform matter.  
Another aspect of our sense of touch is that when honed, it can be an access point to “hearing” with our intuitive minds. In my own experience as a healer, and as my skills have matured over many years in this arena, information comes through my hands, through the modality of touch, on a variety of levels and in a variety of ways. Some of these are imagery (energetic pictures), tones, colors, symbols, sounds and words, phrases, and simply “knowing.” Through inquiry into these messengers, I am able to decode what the client’s inner healer is trying to tell me—what their subconscious wants me to know and wants them to know—perhaps in a new way that can be used by them to heal some aspect of their suffering or disease. When the intention is to facilitate healing and the client is truly in alignment with that intent, as opposed to “wanting to want to heal,” the innate healing intelligence of life itself seems to guide what is revealed, and miraculously it comes in the exact symbology, language, and quantity that is digestible or useful to that person at that moment in their journey.  
Touch is innately healing to us as human beings. It is a primal way that we know we belong. Skillful touch can encourage trust and softening. It can get into armored places in us and open doors, which may be closed or locked. It is also most efficient at transmitting complex data, energy, and qualitative information.  
Conscious, skilled touch can open inner pathways and dimensions in the psyche that may be unavailable any other way. It can access historic information and energy. Through touch, we can then “love back into being” parts of us that may have vacated the premises, so to speak, or that may be shut down or closed off in feeling. Loving touch is always therapeutic and has the potential to nourish our bodies and souls, heal our wounds, and call back our spirits.   
In the most basic way, skillful, loving touch repatterns our nervous systems and encourages our wholeness by silently saying, “It’s OK—you are safe, you are held, you belong and have a right to exist, because, in fact … here you are!”

Amrit Rai is both a visual artist and an energy medicine and touch specialist. She lives and works in Mill Valley, California. For more information about her, visit www.amritrai.com and www.amritraiart.com.