The Hug Doctor

People need to be touched.

We shake hands, bump shoulders, hug, kiss, and hold hands. We need touching, but we don't get very much - our culture doesn't encourage it.

We hug.

We give hugs for reassurance. Hugs for comfort. Hugs for attachment. Hugs for love. Hugs to make a connection to another human being. Hugs are a natural expression of social creatures.

Hugs come in lots of varieties, none of them wrong. They can be tentative or clinging or tense or reluctant. While there's no such thing as a bad hug, most of us have never known the pleasure of a deep, sensual, melting hug.

A melting hug is warmth and softness and sensuality and comfort. With a little more awareness, a melting hug is a close connection to another person - a connection close enough to feel the breath of life in another. But, at an even higher level of awareness, a melting hug leads to transcendence into another realm where the boundaries between individuals dissolve and earthly concerns evaporate.

Melting hugs come naturally, but not without instruction and practice. Over the course of our lives, we learn to hold ourselves upright and separate and rigid. We maintain our separateness. We practice our rigid individuality so much that we carry it into our hugs. No matter how much love we put into a hug, it won't be sensual while one or both of us holds onto our personal armor.