"Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me!"

So spaketh Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I second that emotion, although I didn't always, oh dear no. For the full story, follow me now on a... strange journey.

It began in utter innocence.  As a child I touched freely.  I especially recall how my sister and I were so free with touching each other.  We slept in the same bed.  We had kick fights, we snuggled, we butted butt against butt in communal slumber.  We took baths together.  Throughout childhood, we were physically close.

I think I have a lot to be grateful for in that experience, because otherwise my family was not wildly affectionate, and so such closeness between my sister and I gave me a good background for the future.

In high school, I hugged my friends.  I was a hugger.  Sexually, I began my first adventures in high school, but I found them too overpowering at the time, and I pulled back as much as I reached out.  I was often confused about sex and about touch.  I retreated, and for quite awhile I resisted even hugging.  I felt someone must prove themselves to be totally safe and unthreatening in any way before they would be allowed to get close enough to touch me.

Well, needless to say, I was rather lonely!  Eventually I poked my head out of the sand and looked around.  Men, I decided, were certainly unsafe and threatening, so I would stick with women.  Women, I was sure, were incapable of ever hurting anyone.

My first major relationship was with a woman.  It began with intense passion but soon turned cold.  She was as adamant as I was about not being hurt, damn it.  And so we were both very careful with each other.  Sex disappeared, and then touch itself disappeared, to my dismay, but what could be done about that?  We weren't going to get hurt, damn it!

And yet, I had never felt so hurt.  Hmm.  I began to see that there was a large price to pay for being so stingy.  Was  there, I wondered, a better way to avoid feeling pain than simply avoiding feeling people?  And what about men?  Could I let them touch me again?  Was I brave enough to toss aside whatever it is was that seemed to scare me?

Sure!  As soon as I left that relationship, I had a strong impulse to learn massage, and with a massage certificate, I was suddenly in contact with an abundance of bodies wanting me to touch them.  They were naked too.  Many of them were men.  Glorioso heaven!

Whatever I'd been afraid of was going to just have to get out of the way now, I decided.  I reached out my hands, and I began to touch...

And touch I did.  I discovered I was an excellent toucher, which means that my hands know how to listen and how to respond to what they hear.  I found out that I preferred to give erotic massages, and in the course of all this touching, I discovered a Few Big Things.

One Big Thing is that touch is easy, especially if you have one little skill under your belt.  That is the ability to say no.  The more I said no to what I didn't want, the more confidence I had that this was all just going to feel good.  This led almost magically to me letting myself be touched back in all kinds of perfectly great ways.  My shyness dwindled away and away and away.

The funny part of that is that by saying no, I ended up saying yes to all kinds of things that I wouldn't have before.  My growing confidence allowed me to satisfy my curiousity in many ways, and to grow and reach past my comfort level into the unknown.

Another Big Thing I discovered is that touch is easy for both giver and receiver.  Back when I began this touch odyssey, I thought there was way more effort involved, and so I worked at it too hard.  I had to consciously slack off and relax, and as I did so, my touching got much better, as did my experience as a touchee.

Touch should never be work.  This was important for me to see in a sexual context especially.  Oh, I might expend a bit of energy, or a lot, wheee, but that's not the same thing.  Even when giving a massage to someone who is "just lying there," I have honed and honed my technique until there is scarcely one little iota of what might feel like work.  Giving and receiving are two sides of the same thing, which is pleaure, in a nutshell.  Wherever you are in the loop, letting go and enjoying yourself is the best part, and your partner feels better the better you feel, and you feel better the better your partner feels, and so on and so on.

It's like petting a cat.  Who is enjoying it more?

And when the cat is done, it says, with a shake of its very clear body language, that's enough now, thank you, and it gets up and walks away.  Let it.  The cat's ability to say no, just like yours or your partners', is part of what it's all about.

Another Big Thing I discovered was that touch can be a doorway to different planes of perception.  Certain massage techniques can induce altered states of consciousness.   Touch creates energy fields that can be pretty intense.  Just think of your first kiss with the hottest person you ever met.

And not only in regular human interaction are these energy fields intense.  Awhile back I was resting my hand on one of my rocks.  (In my last column I talked about my fondness for rocks.)  I wasn't thinking about the rock at this moment.  I was just chatting casually with my husband.  I lifted my hand, and swoosh, I felt a huge burning in the palm of my hand.  It was so hot that I cried out!

Not hot in pain, just in energy.  I felt like my palm was on fire with energy.  A very cool sensation, if I might put it that way.  I've since had it happen again, although not as strongly, and only with my left hand.

Me and that rock, we commune.  I touched it, and it touched me back!

And last night, as if in anticipation of this column being finished up, I felt a hand brush mine very quickly just after my husband had climbed on top of my naked self and was teasing me into full-fledged lust.  There wasn't anyone near my hand.  It was just invisible air up there.  Who, then, touched me?

I gotta say, at the time, I didn't care.  But today, I wonder.  I have often felt a being sitting on the ceiling over our bed watching us.  It gets a kick out of us.  It likes our energy.  I think of it as our mascot, and in fact a rock I brought home from the beach reminds me a lot of what I imagine this being looks like.

Maybe it broke through the barrier to the physical plane for a second to touch me.  Who knows?  The journey is, after all, strange...