AMBASSADORS OF TOUCH

"Knowing where I begin and end"

- To introduce the idea and the experience of human energy fields - starting with our individual or personal organisms, and then how they overlap and interact with the bigger picture.

- To identify the signature feeling of clear boundary or interface, and thereby awareness of its loss, compromise or absence. This alone is a useful tool for any practitioner in any contact or health profession, where it can be of critical importance to understand how energetic changes can happen very fast when people are connected through touch.

- To learn to orientate ourselves optimally through embodied attention - a form of mindfulness, and thereby be able to choose or modify our state of 'defined-ness' or integrity, according to circumstance, necessity or inclination.

- To become more flexible in our responses by recognizing when we are poorly positioned or situated for the task in hand, or conversely when we are excessive or overwhelming to our intended audience in some unconscious way.

- To become familiar with habit patterns of over-investment or projection, leading to depletion and exhaustion, that are often woven into the fabric of our existence by assumed, inherited or imposed expectations about how and who we should be.

Not knowing where you begin and end.

It may be obvious; but if we do not have awareness of the extent or confines of our beings - our physical/energetic boundaries - much of the effect we have on the people we interact with, and sometimes those nearby, will be unconscious, unintended and involuntary - a sort of accidental by-product. We can learn to change that by becoming a bit more informed - especially if we consciously reorganize ourselves to be more sensorily alert to the messages of our body-mind radar.

To safely steer a ship, you need not only to know the size and shape of your vessel's structure, but you must also be aware of the water displacement it causes - of wake and bow-wave behaviour. Knowledge of the seabed, currents, weather and hazards , as well as the commonly agreed conventions for navigation, are also essential. In many ways, the absence of any education on human energy fields, or indeed the acceptance of the idea that we have one, means that we are often bumbling through our daily world without using our navigation lights or signalling vocabulary as it were.

Even when we are in the apparently medium-less atmosphere of air - and leaving aside for now exactly how you define or measure it - we all have an energy field in , through and around our physical structure and this is part of our overall displacement in our surroundings : That we have an energy field is partly due to electro-magnetic properties of the flow of gravity through bone, as well as others generated by movement, locomotion, fluid circulation, nerve conduction and bio/chemico/physico processes at a cell level.

These multiple energetics combine into single integrated function/performance in quite fascinating and still mysterious ways - the sum is greater than the parts - and the way a person is seen and heard, can lose or command attention, varies enormously from person to person: Unawareness of such interpersonal energy dynamics can compromise relationships ,therapeutic or otherwise, which is a pity - and unnecessary - for which reason I have developed the current program.

"I would dearly love to see an awareness of energy boundaries and their behaviour incorporated into standard training throughout the health professions - and beyond."

(Mayor & Micozzi - Energy Medicine East & West - Elsevier 2011)