Touch Palception

Explore Each Sensation

Close your eyes, massage your hands, and explore every inch. Give yourself a moment to actually feel everything you touch.

Many people move through life without ever taking a second to smell the flowers. Slow down, take a breath, breathe, and focus on each sweet sensation.

Touch Awareness

Feel around, and use your intuition to massage with curiosity. Investigate your fingers, joints, palm, wrist, and forearm.

Do more than just touch. Feel, explore, and think about how everything feels. Describe it. Articulating how you feel enhances your mind-body connection and opens the door to more delightful sensations.

Every square inch of the body has a near-infinite number of sensations. It is a musical instrument that can play many songs, so create your own beautiful ballad!

What Did You Feel?

When you explored your hand, did you notice that the sensation of touch wasn’t merely pleasure or pain?

What other types of sensations did you notice? Talk about how they felt. If you don’t know a word that describes a sensation, make one up!

In every second is a snapshot of infinite beauty and awe, and the closer you look at something, the more you will see.

Sensory Awareness

Palception

Each area of the body that we touch, no matter how minute, can create a different sensation. In massage, we want to provide a robust sensory experience. Every movement, angle, and slight adjustment can create a different feeling.

To illustrate this point, I want you to place your finger downward so that the tip is pressed against a hard surface. Focus on how your fingertip feels.

Keep your finger tip in the same position while changing the angle of your finger. Do you notice how the sensation at the tip of your finger changes? If you were touching someone else, their sensory experience would change as well.

This is an example of palception, a word I use that combines palpation and perception to describe this specific type of sensory experience.

• Palception: The therapist’s heightened sensory awareness and perception during active palpation or massage. It encompasses the nuanced feedback from varying pressures, tissue textures, angles, and movements felt through the hands, combined with conscious attunement to how these actions influence the client’s sensory experience and therapeutic outcomes.