IN TOUCH WITH YOUR SKIN

The skin is our biggest sensory organ. Someone calculated that in an adult it measures approximately twenty square feet of surface area if laid out flat, and weighs about nine pounds. We tend to label the skin as the organ of touch even though, as we’ve just seen, we are touched by the world through all our other, in some ways more specialized, sense organs as well.

But what the word “touch” most evokes for us is intimately tied to our skin. This is also true when we use the word “feel” in certain ways. For it is by way of the skin that what we think of as “physical” contact is made and felt, and it is here where the simultaneous bidirectional reciprocity of our contact with the world is most apparent. For we cannot touch something without being touched by it in the very same instant. We cannot be touched without touching. Walking barefoot, our feet kiss the earth with every step, and the earth kisses right back and we feel it. Of course, if we are “out of touch,” we won’t feel it even though the contact is undeniable. And as we know, the best way to be out of touch is for our mind to be distracted or preoccupied—caught up in ruminations, in the stream of thoughts and emotions, in our own self-involvements, as is so often the case, and therefore unavailable for direct experience in any moment. In this digital age, we are at risk for being permanently and perpetually distracted and self-distracting, requiring more presence of mind than ever before to stay in touch with what is most important—hence the increasing importance of mindfulness.

We also know that the skin is intimately tied to our emotions. If we let them, things can get “under our skin.” We blush with embarrassment, are flushed with pride, turn white with fear, pale with grief, green with envy.

For all these reasons and many more, the skin is a magnificent object of meditative attention. Bringing awareness to our skin, we readily sense the air around the body, perhaps for the first time consciously. At first, it may be easier to feel the air touching the skin and our skin touching the air when there is a breeze blowing, but with cultivation, we can sense the air around the body at any time, even when the air is not moving, just by bringing awareness to the envelope of the body. The skin doesn’t actually breathe. Still, it can be useful to sense or imagine it “breathing” across this membrane between our flesh and the rest of the biosphere by intentionally placing our mind on and in our skin. Our awareness can envelop the skin like a glove envelops our hand. Awareness soaks right into skin like water into a sponge. When we are mindful of the sensations in the skin, it can feel like our mind is inhabiting our skin. Mind and skin are not separate, except when the mind goes to sleep. You could even say, with some accuracy, that the skin is an aspect of the mind.

This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. As we shall see, there are a number of different maps of the body in the brain, one set of which is known as the somatosensory homunculus (see The Healing Power of Mindfulness, “Homunculus”). The regions of the somatosensory homunculus correspond to the surface features of the skin. But in the homunculus, the hands and feet and lips and tongue are huge compared to other locations on the skin. This is because of the high concentration of sensory nerve endings in these particular regions, refined sensing elements embedded throughout the thin membrane that is our skin and the tissue below it. So when you put your mind intentionally in your hands or feet, or in your lips, you will feel a vivid panoply of sensation coursing through the skin in these locations.

The skin is a sensory world unto itself. It is never devoid of sensation, even when it doesn’t seem to be touching anything. For it is always touching something by virtue of being an interface. It has its own sensory tone at all times. It is always in touch. The question is, are we? Can we be in touch with our own skin?

You may also feel greater sensation in your hands and feet and lips because of the high enervation of motor neurons in these regions, especially in the hands. The sensory and motor functions go—dare I say it—hand in hand. Sensing your hands from inside, and right out through the skin, you will feel a beauty of form and function that is in no way secondary to any hands carved in marble by Michelangelo. We honor the artistry and aesthetic that “brings stone to life” in part because it reconnects us to our own intrinsic beauty, a beauty that transcends age and everything that has happened to us that may be writ large on and in the body in some way… it touches us. It reminds us that these are our miraculous hands that we so much don’t know, that we so much take for granted, so much use mechanically, that we can ironically be so insensate to. When we perceive so palpably the life in the marble, we are brought back to life ourselves, resuscitated metaphorically and literally. It is another benefit of this unavoidable reciprocity embedded in sensing, in this case taking place at the interface where trafficking occurs between inner and outer worlds across the sturdy yet delicate surfaces of skin and fingers, our thumbs and our palms, the miracle of hands.

You are more beautiful than any one,

And yet your body had a flaw:

Your small hands were not beautiful,

And I am afraid that you will run

And paddle to the wrist

In that mysterious, always brimming lake

Where those that have obeyed the holy law

Paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged

The hands that I have kissed,

For old sake’s sake.

W. B. YEATS, “Broken Dreams”