NURSE'S TOUCH
“Every woman is a Nurse.”Florence Nightingale
From White
Caps: The Story of Nursing by Victor Robinson,
1946.
TO THE NURSE You were a slave in Homer s time, and washing the feet of a wandering beggar who sat in the hall of Odysseus, you were the first to recognize the returned master by his scars when his own wife doubted.... In the harbor of Corinth on the Saronic gulf, where stood the pagan temple to Aphrodite, you were a Christian deaconess visiting the afflicted.... You were a cloistered nun in the Hotel- Dieu of Paris, walking for centuries through endless corridors, serving countless patients for Christ’s sake.... You were a king’s daughter, and were married to a king by Anselm in Westminster Abbey, but you put a hair shirt on your queenly body and lovingly hissed the feet of lepers and dried their wounds with your hair and built a hospital for their comfort.... You were a Beguine of Flanders, and became known for your skillful ways with the sick…. You were a Daughter of St. Camillus, perishing with your Order when you went to the final plague in Barcelona.... You were a Sister of Charity of Vincent de Paul, all France was your hospital, and then your white cornettes were seen abroad.... You were a pauper in London town, heavy and filthy and drunken, and in the absence of other employment you became an asylum nurse, but as you could not read, you asked the lunatics to decipher the labels on the medicine bottles.... In the lost abyss of Scutari, you were the Lady-with-the-Lamp, and with the background of a vast cemetery for statistics your pity and your passion created Modern Nursing.... You were a modern girl, and you became a trained nurse for Humanity’s sake…. An the zero hour of Democracy, you landed with the American troops, and giving sulfa drugs and plasma under fire, you died on the beachhead of Anzio.... You were a graduate of Lincoln Hospital, for your sin was colored, and in the European Theatre of Operations you cared tenderly for German prisoners of war.... You were an Hadassah nurse in Palestine, and refugee Jews from Poland and families of Arabs from the desert came to you for relief.... You served at Bataan, where you had little to give the soldiers except a smile, and when the Japanese bombers blew your hospital to pieces you escaped by Clipper to Australia…. Now the war is over, and peace has come again, but Mother Earth, sick and hungry and tired, awaits your healing hands….  Dolores Krieger, a nurse, was the co-founder along with the clairvoyant Dora Kunz, of the evidence-based healing modality called Therapeutic Touch. From Therapeutic
Touch by Dolores Krieger, 1979.
Therapeutic Touch is noticeably useful for two things: It elicits a rather profound, generalized relaxation response in the healee, and it is very good at relieving pain. It may come as a surprise that healing is not mentioned, since that is ostensibly a major purpose of Therapeutic Touch. However, as you yourself will find out once you get into the practice of Therapeutic Touch, in almost every case there comes a moment when it must be acknowledged that it is the patient who heals himself. The transfer of energy from the person playing the role of healer is most usually little more than a booster until the patient’s own recuperative system takes over. At best, the healer accelerates the healing process. You will find, however, that the range of circumstances under which Therapeutic Touch can be helpful is very large. To give you an idea of how Therapeutic Touch works, I will describe several cases which occurred to students like yourself during the past few months. I am sure you can relate to Susan’s experience. Susan and Robert had recently had their first baby, a boy. They had divided up the necessary chores so that Susan found that she was able to resume classes at the university. One of the courses she took was taught by me and included information on Therapeutic Touch as one of the modes of human field interaction. Robert, a tough-minded engineer, was skeptical when Susan told him about the course, and he told her frankly he thought she was wasting her money. The baby grew and started to teethe. One night the baby woke up crying in pain. It happened to be Robert’s turn to get up and try to soothe the child, and so he walked the baby, cuddled it, and sang to it. But it was all to no avail. The baby let its feelings be known in a continued high-pitched wail. Finally, Susan could stand it no longer. She got out of bed and took the child from Robert, saying, “Let me show you something I learned about Therapeutic Touch today.” She moved her hands in a manner we’ve come to call “unruffling the field,” in which it is thought that what feels like a congestion in the body energies can be swept out of a person’s field with a motion away from the surface of the body. After this motion had been made several times, one frequently feels a normal energetic flow quite rapidly replace the static build-up. With the conclusion of the motion, the baby suddenly stopped crying, gave his mother a wide-eyed gaze as if amazed, laid his head on her shoulder, and immediately fell asleep. Robert, who was looking on intently, opened his mouth and closed it twice, shook his head, and sat down hard. The next week, after leaving the child with a baby sitter, a radiant Susan turned up at class with Robert at her elbow.  Elena
Avila was a nurse and counselor, teacher and
curandera.
From Woman
Who Glows in the Dark by Elena Avila, 1999.
All curanderos have specific tools that they prefer, even though they may use many, depending upon what works best for them. The sobadora uses massage as her tool. Why do we need touch? Because all human beings require intimate contact. It has become popular for nursing schools today to offer courses in healing touch so that their graduates can know how to relax and soothe their patients when they are in pain, or when they just need reassurance. Curanderos use massage not only to relax the body and the muscles, but to touch the soul, to draw forth and begin to heal emotional and physical pain. They use it help treat diseases such as empacho [digestive blockage] and susto [soul loss]. In my practice, I have found that we all have a universal need to be touched. When a client is frightened and anxious, I often have her lie down on my massage table. I use massage as a tool to help relieve her anxiety before I go any further with her. When working with the elderly, I always use massage, because the elderly in Western culture are almost always starved for touch. We can see something of the dynamics behind massage––healing touch given by hands that love––in this story told to me by my Aztec teacher, Ehekateotl, who first learned massage from his mother. When Ehe was five years old, he liked to run out barefoot into the rain and get wet. This led to a chronic throat condition that eventually developed into rheumatic fever, which resulted in a physical weakness in his body from the waist down. His mother was able to heal him using a massage technique called apapaxtli tlawayotl maihpahtli that had been taught to her by Ehe’s father. “The blessed hands of my mother massaged my body from head to feet, touching the joints and tendons, muscles and bones, and she moved my entire body, causing me great pain. When I cried because my body was in great pain, she continued, giving me this treatment three times a day for three months until I could walk again. Western medical doctors told my parents that I would never walk, and now the most powerful part of my physical body is my legs, thanks to the care of my mother and the science of my father. “I was massaged so often that I learned the therapy. But, in reality, it is not my hands that are working, but the extension of my mother’s hands and the knowledge of my father. The technique is called, in Nahuatl, apapaxtli – in Spanish, apapachar – which commonly means ‘expression of love,’ but from really means ‘to soften.’ Tlawayotl means ‘what is generated from the heart of the people,’ and maihpahtli signifies ‘the hands that heal.’ So the complete idea is ‘to soften what the heart of the people generate with the hands that heal.’” For me, massage is a healing and diagnostic tool, as well as a way of helping my clients open up and tell me their stories more fully. On one occasion, I was visited by a man who told me that he was suffering from the ill effects of the envidia of his relatives who were living in Mexico. I was by no means the whole story, but I was having difficulty eliciting more information from this man, who, though very poor and very ill with a bronchial infection, was too proud to admit to his physical and emotional weakness. I decided to see if I could get further information on his problems by first helping him to relax his physical and emotional defenses through massage. Since he had just come from work and was still dressed in his work clothes, he apologized about not being as clean as he thought he should be, but I reassured him. I took off his works shoes and began to massage his feet, reaching, in this way, into all parts of his body, relaxing him and comforting a body that was starved for touch since his wife had left him recently. As I worked, he began to open up more and more, telling me parts of his story, until I was finally able to discover what was really troubling him. Massage is not just the skillful physical manipulations of muscles to relieve pain and stress, but, in the hands of a curandero who understands the emotional, spiritual and intuitive elements of massage, it can become a tool for further opening into the psyche. A curandero who gives the loving touch of massage feels no repulsion toward a body of any size, weight or age–– all are equally sacred as temples of the spirit. Traditionally, curanderos passed down this knowledge lovingly from parent to child. This passing down of knowledge through the family and apprentices is something that has been broken in modern times as indigenous peoples have been forced to assimilate into Western culture, but it is my hope that we will begin to reclaim this way of teaching so that the knowledge of a lifetime of healing may not be lost. That is why I have taken on the training at this time in my life. I once wrote about what receiving this kind of knowledge meant to me: “You sent me your seed through generations of ancestral grandmothers, and that seed is embedded in the womb of my forever soul.” |
The Great Physician
Love Heals
“Even as there is only one nature, one life, one health,
there is, only one disease, one remedy, one healing.”
Mesmer
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