Reflections on the Art of Therapeutic Touch

By Maria Arrington, with poetry by Tama Recker. BookLocker, 2019. 278 pages. $18.95/paperback; $9.99/eBook.

Maria Arrington is a teacher of Therapeutic Touch, a modality of healing that uses universal energy for restoration. The practitioner assesses “the energy fields surrounding the body of the recipient” and makes decisions guided by the “universal healing field.” This source of direction works with the practitioner’s “inner self” or “timeless self.”

I learned about Arrington’s new book from an article she wrote in Western Friend, and the direct quotes I use are from the article, not the book.

Arrington writes from a practitioner’s viewpoint, and also from the perspective of a long career in healthcare. (She practiced nursing for a long time.) She also brings the maturity of a long time spent contemplating from a Quaker perspective. Therapeutic Touch is a complement to medicine, it is true, but it relies on the universal healing field, a concept like the ancient Buddhist image of Indra’s net. This is a system that not only connects everyone and everything but transmits energy through itself to where it is needed.

In Arrington’s practice, guidance from the universal healing field becomes available to her when she is centered and able to be guided. She refers to those she helps as “healing partners,” rather than “patients” or “clients,” and this seems to recognize the net-ness (as in Indra’s net) of our participation in life itself. It’s tapping into what is already there that helps a person to heal, seen as restoring the “balance, symmetry, and flow” of an individual’s energy fields, which gives “relaxation, change in their perception of pain, faster healing.” To do this, practitioners rely on “the compassion and awareness that [they] bring to the session.”

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