Here on the sidewalks of New York, it’s artful combat. You’re constantly being brushed, bumped, touched, pushed, and pulled. Not to mention the bag lady here on the Upper West Side who comes directly for your crotch and cackles afterward. (I do not take this personally.) The instinctive response to all of this is to recoil, to armor one’s self against invasive contact, and who knows how much we suffer because of it?

Soon, we find ourselves in the offices of touch professionals and we hear diagnoses that come to us as no surprise. Your cranial muscles, your shoulder, your neck muscles, your legs are insanely tight, and work begins to remedy that situation. It is need-based, remedial, and sometimes delicious.

There is another touch that wants nothing of you, that is not knead based, a friend’s touch upon your arm, dissolving rancor, awakening your breathing, and connecting you to the other. It is the gold standard of touch, the touch of non-doing.

Here in North America, in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America, there are groups of professionals whose lives are devoted to the touch of non-doing, requiring nothing of you but your being there. Its touch does not proceed from what you lack, but from an invitation to live in the gesture of expansion, of inspiration.  Come to a professional whose work is the art, the technique of touch. Come then, have a lesson in the Alexander Technique. You may never be the same.