Therapeutic Touch
Blends With
Quantum Mechanics
In researching Therapeutic Touch I found Crystal Hawk’s website. I was fascinated by what she had to say and asked her if she would like to write about it on my site. She sent me this article that she previously had published. It is longer then what I would normally have on my site but it is so full of good information I wanted to share it with you. Especially since she combines it with Quantum Mechanics.
The Door to a Healing Life Style: Therapeutic Touch and the New Physics
By Crystal Hawk, MEd
Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a simple mode of healing, an updated version of an age-
Therapeutic Touch entered my life in 1980. I was a psychotherapist with a flourishing
private practice. I worked primarily with families and groups and I specialized in
helping people deal with the process of separation and divorce. It was heavy work.
People involved with separation are vulnerable and often angry. Intense feelings
erupt all around them and these feelings were spilling over me. I wasn’t feeling
well physically. I decided to give myself a total rest from both professional responsibilities
and professional training. I wanted to re-
And I did. For part of the year I explored California and while there I attended
a Conference called “Love, Touch and the Spirit of Healing” where I first heard the
words “Therapeutic Touch”. AT that conference, two nurses reported on their experiences
using this non-
During this time, I kept hearing referrals to “facts” from the New Physics: we’re all interconnected, energy and mass are the same thing, everything is really moving energy. I was curious but skeptical. When I returned to Toronto I enrolled in a University of Toronto course in Quantum Mechanics (that’s the New Physics) taught without the math component. From the very first class my beliefs about what the universe was like lay shattered around me. The nature of the universe was certainly not what I had been taught and what I had taken for granted.
Quantum Mechanics turned out to be the most exciting subject I had ever studied.
In each class my mind opened to new thoughts, possibilities and questions. I was
shocked and angered to learn that the principles of Quantum Mechanics had been formally
accepted by most physicists before I was born. That meant that during my entire life,
almost everything that I had been taught by teachers, books and so-
I began to understand that we live in a world in a world constrained by shared cultural beliefs, by what's comfortable and manageable for the majority with no requirement that these beliefs be accurate representations of what really is. And I began to understand that we had also built a model of health and illness on an outmoded conceptual model of how the universe behaves and one which was fundamentally flawed. Science, instead of a fixed, proven body of knowledge surfaced as a groups of theories, accepted as useful in explaining phenomena and almost as changeable as the wind.
Scientific “facts” are often theories, and theories are accepted by the scientific
community when they are useful in explaining phenomena. In a light-
That was a lot for me to take in. I experienced shakiness and insecurity -
He went on to explain that at one time all people accepted the fact that the world
was flat. After Copernicus developed a new model which described the earth as a sphere
revolving around the sun, many people continued to live on a flat world, scoffing
at the new conceptions. But, Rogers went on to say, the open-
The following example will demonstrate some basic principles of Newtonian physics and contrast them with Quantum Mechanics. If I throw a tennis ball to you, you can judge by the arc it takes where your hands should be to catch it. The ball moves through the air continuously from one point of the arc to the other, and you can judge the location by the velocity, and can see that my throwing causes the movement to begin.
This simple act embodies three basic Newtonian principles: continuity, causality
and locality. Continuity -
In the subatomic world of the New Physics, which is also our world, none of this holds true! It is not that the subatomic world belongs only to the physicist in a laboratory or classroom. It is also our everyday world if we choose to tap into it. We merely have to allow our mind to open to that perception. Lawrence LeShan calls this “clairvoyant reality” and it is this “door” I open for myself when meditating of healing.
The subatomic world which we can’t “see” is alive and dynamic. Rapidly moving particles
compose everything we see, touch, stand in or upon, drive and taste; indeed, our
very beings. To catch a glimpse of this world, imagine that an ordinary orange could
be blown up to the size of our entire earth. Then each atom of that orange would
be the size of a cherry. In other words, the size of a cherry is to the earth as
an orange atom is to an orange. That’s how small the atoms are in the world of Quantum
Mechanics! Now, if you take that little cherry-
When dealing with these tiny particles there is no continuity. They seem to leap about in packets of energy, in quantum leaps here and there, at the blink of an eye. There is no locality. Subatomic particles move so fast we have to interfere with their movement to know their location, so we can never know both location and velocity at the same time. There is no causality. Subatomic particles seem to be able to be created out of nothing, to appear and disappear mysteriously.
I found the universe to be richer and more mysteriously complex than any of my dreams. It’s living science fiction! The new science is interested in process; it studies wholes, sees these wholes as interconnected, has a place for creativity and newness, raises consciousness to an important place, deals with reciprocal interaction, probabilities and tendencies. It’s dynamic and relational. Carl Rogers, when addressing the Eastern Regional Conference of AHP in May 1983 said, “To have the notion that the universe is interconnected in this mysterious and exciting way is one of the things that will change our whole concept of how we go about our living.”
Understanding that experts of the world have no definite answers, so I don’t need definite answers for myself or anyone else, has helped me become comfortable with the many paradoxes of nature, it’s given me permission to stop looking for certainly and to start moving with my own flow, and to acknowledge my own impact on interactions.
I understand that beliefs help us organize our world. Now I see that they also act as filters for our senses and color our perception in a “Catch 22" way. We become caught in the limits of our own belief systems. Our perceptions, beliefs and values are intermingled and enmeshed together as our private or personal model or paradigm of the universe. If any of those change, the others must also change,. If we begin to see things differently, then our values, both personal and global, begin to change.
While I was reviewing and reconstructing my person paradigm through exploration of
the new Physics, the book, “Therapeutic Touch” arrived. Therapeutic Touch was first
described by Dr. Dolores Krieger in 1975 as an act of healing or helping that is
akin to the ancient practice of laying-
I read excitedly to the second self-
Dr. Krieger says that when we “do” Therapeutic Touch, we are cooperating with and enhancing the way the universe actually operates. My parallel learning in the New Physics were supporting this idea as being not only possible but probable. Perhaps if I had not been studying Quantum Mechanics I might not have been so ready to accept the energy component of TT . Studying Quantum Mechanics had stretched my “boggle threshold”. This is the point at which I would usually say “I can accept this and this as real, but not THAT”.
Krieger divides Therapeutic Touch into several steps, which I will describe. She refers to the client as healee and the practitioner as healer, so I will also.
Before engaging in a Therapeutic Touch session I take time to center myself. That is, I allow myself to come fully to the here and now, and to enter a calm, alert, open state in which I experience myself as a channel so that energy can pass through me to the healee. This is very similar to a meditative state and Therapeutic Touch is often called a “healing meditation”.
Then, by using my hands as sensors, I assess the energetic field around the healee.
Human energy systems display symmetry and balance. Both of the healee’s shoulders
should “feel” similar, both legs, and so on. During the assessment I look for imbalances.
With practice I can now differentiate areas which feel cooler, more agitated, warmer,
congested or tingling. During the Therapeutic Touch session attempt to clear or re-
I’ve studied with Dr. Krieger and her mentor, Dora Kunz, the past sixteen years. As I learn and share with other Therapeutic Touch practitioners from across the country, the doors in my mind keep opening to deeper levels of this healing lifestyle. I now teach Therapeutic Touch to professional and laypersons and provide private sessions.
Therapeutic Touch is currently being taught as an intrinsic part of the Nursing Program
at NYU. It is the subject of continuing education courses and workshops at universities
through the USA and Canada, and has been a part of inservice programs for nurses
at several hospitals in North America.* Certainly not limited to the nursing profession,
TT has benefited from developing initially within a hospital setting where clinical
record-
For example, a nurse form Northern Ontario who attended one of our TT workshops reported that she was in charge of a surgery patient who had a postoperative complication of internal bleeding. the patient was given one unit of packed cells and a TT session. His haemoglobin rose in percentage points as if he had received two units of packed cells.
A nurse in a Toronto hospital reported that a women with leukemia, on morphine every four hours, was able to postpone her medication for 45 minutes without pain following a Therapeutic Touch session. After four years of acute asthma, a woman was having two attacks monthly; each attack lasted nine days. The patient received TT sessions from a home care nurse and the frequency of her attacks was quickly reduced. Over a four month period, with a total of ten TT sessions, the women’s asthma attacks were eliminated completely.
One Sunday night when a local hospital was short-
I teach Therapeutic Touch in a structured manner. It’s a good learning strategy for all practitioners to have some uniformity of technique and knowledge. But it’s the perceptual framework out of which TT operates that changes our reality.
To accept the model that we live in energetic fields makes us responsible for the thoughts and emotions that we send out into the universe, affecting all around us. People’s fields change with their emotions. Angry emotions can be felt across a room. Some of our clients who live in angry home environments are truly bruised and battered by these angry energies, often becoming seriously ill. Health professionals who are in constant contact with hostility run similar risks with their health. They can learn ways to prevent burnout, exhaustion and frustration as well as experience peace, tranquillity and an enhanced therapeutic effectiveness by becoming aware of the effects of those outgoing energies and learning to control these energetic exchanges. At the same time, the realization that feelings of tranquillity and calmness can be transmitted by the health professional to clients is also helpful to them both.
All human interactions can be viewed from this energetic model. For instance, this issue of Therapy Now features forgiveness, love and laughter. I believe that, energetically, forgiveness clears one of resentful and harmful energies. Forgiveness heals the forgiver and sends out positive energies to the person who acted “harmfully”. Laughter can break up entrenched patterns of the energy field, allowing for the possibility of change, of reconstructing with balance and flow.
Therapeutic Touch principles promote a relationship between client and therapist
which stresses that the client is in the driver’s seat all of the way and that we,
the practitioners, are truly only facilitators! It gives health professionals encouragement
to stand back from clients, allowing them to follow their own life path. Dr. Krieger
reminds us that our bodies have a wisdom of their own, and we, the TT practitioner
, only help people to mobilize their own self-
As health professionals we can also mobilize the self-
For example, when we break into a chronic pain pattern with Therapeutic Touch, we also break into the chronic fear pattern of the recurrence of that pain. Breaking the pain cycle and restoring hope that a client’s life can be different can often help them to change the accompanying emotional pattern. This is a powerful combination which psychotherapists can use to facilitate deep and lasting change.
Dr. Krieger warns that the practice of Therapeutic Touch changes the practitioner. Changes for me have included an increase in my intuition, development of sensitivity and the attraction of synchronicity into my life. My centering and my living with TT principles have added a spiritual quality to my life. It has also helped me be in touch with my body, through validating my sensory experiences. I’ve learned to respect my own sensations, to value what I feel and to act on my own sensory experience. For me It’s been like waking up. Was anyone more jubilant than I when my TT partner and I both felt the same imbalance in the same place in a healee! Years of my own sensory denial fell away!
Connecting in this way to the universe has opened my heart, developing my altruistic feelings and made me more compassionate and accepting of people and of their choices. Viewing clients’ lives as a process, seeing their wholeness and their interconnectedness to others and to their word, confirm for me their ability to choose, to be creative, to change, and affirms my need to stress these abilities in them.
TT needs no outside equipment. I can perform it in my office, at the grocery store,
on the beach, or at a distance. It’s a way of life, a way of offering connections
at a deep and caring level. it’s become my path with a heart. And as an added bonus,
self-
Reiki, Reconnective or Matrix Energetics healing sessions are available by contacting
Mark Smith @ Angelic-