Chi for Two® Mindful Touch

Written by Dee Wagner, with Mukti Jarvis, Certified Chi for Two Embodiment Coach, long-time EFT therapist, and Nonviolent Communications Educator and Mediator.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, creator of Body-Mind Centering® says:  Touch is more than our placing our hands on someone. It involves awareness, consciousness, attention, and intention. It also involves how we initiate touch. With brain-initiated touch, the brain directs the hands. With embodied touch, we listen receptively and cellularly, and on a level more immediate than the brain.

Pictured in photo are Ateeka and Barry Contee. Ateeka is a certified Chi for Two Embodiment Coach and long-time IMAGO couples therapist. Barry and Ateeka lead therapeutic weekends for couples.

Photo © Barry Contee

In Chi for Two® - The Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship, we invite embodied awareness of the difference between touch in relationships where there is ideally power equality, such as the lover dance, versus ones where there is a built-in power differential, such as those that replicate the infant/caregiver dance.

• Relationships that replicate infant/parent dances are ones like bodyworkers with clients, teachers with students and Chi for Two Embodiment Coaches with clients. 

• Relationships where there is ideally power equality are siblings, friends, colleagues, and lovers.

Both types of touch involve awareness, consciousness, attention, and intention. Head-brain knowledge helps us to awaken Belly-brain awareness of the important difference between embodied touch in the lover dance and the embodied touch of somatic therapists with clients. Both can stir unfinished infant/parent interactions,.

Chi for Two offers a CE training for bodyworkers called Who's on the Table? Bodyworkers gain awareness of how massage therapy and other professional healing touch can replicate the ideal touch of parents with infants, re-patterning nervous system functioning. 

Chi for Two offers Embodiment Coaching for lovers to develop consciousness of the spiritually powerful, sensually sexual touch that is possible when we recognize how all two-person relationships can stir infant hunger. Lovers can catch the infant urges that stir in their lover dance and instead of directing those infant urges toward their partners, they can bring those urges to their Embodiment Coach. 

Infant needs for touch stir nervous system functioning designed for imminent danger. The healthy touch of lovers carries the sense of the fragility of life plus the knowledge that when a lover is lost, death is not imminent.

The powerful awareness that we may only have this moment, can bring deep gratitude for the moment. This deep gratitude creates an expansive sexual arousal that has the timeless quality sought in tantric sexual practice. 

Mukti works out of Australia, seeing couples from all over the world virtually.