I like it when pieces of a puzzle begin to fall into place. My ponderings of late (see
Have You Hugged Your Rabbit Today? and
Let There Be Light) have prompted me to go exploring, and in doing so I keep stumbling over things that make me go “Aha!” I love the sense of finding new pieces of the puzzle, new discoveries that help to (in my mind, at least) unify all of the separate realities I live in.

Today I got to start a course in Quantum Touch. That’s “quantum” as in “subatomic” and “touch” as in – well, hugging rabbits.

The explanation for why this works so well was comfortingly scientific. I’ll attempt to reproduce it for you, in case you were looking for something new to ponder about.

There is a vibrational energy that runs throughout everything that exists. Subatomic particles vibrate, atoms vibrate, sound waves vibrate, you and I vibrate, galaxies vibrate. The whole universe vibrates. We’ve lived in this buzzing, humming energy field all our lives, so we tend not to notice it much; but the world is alive with energy.

When two things vibrate at the same frequency, they resonate. If you play a note on a piano, and a guitar is nearby (assuming that, unlike mine, the two are actually in tune), the string on the guitar that corresponds to the note you played will begin to vibrate. Resonance. The vibrations of the two systems reach out to each other and join together. Energy is transferred and combined and the result is a strengthening of the vibration. This is a real thing. Soldiers learned long ago not to march in cadence across bridges, because if the bridge begins to resonate to the vibration of their footsteps, things tend to get a bit messy.

Two systems vibrating at slightly different frequencies will tend to adjust so that they are both at the same frequency – one goes up, or the other goes down, or they meet somewhere in the middle. Once at the same frequency, they can combine their vibrational energies into a stronger resonant system.

Along the same lines, there is a phenomenon known to science called “entrainment” wherein oscillating things in proximity to one another tend to adjust themselves to oscillate in phase with each other. A room full of clocks with pendulums all swinging out of phase will gradually begin to align themselves, until soon all of the pendulums are swinging in unison. Women who live in a college dorm or a house with other women discover that their menstrual cycles will entrain. Heart muscle cells, even if they are from different hearts, if placed in the same laboratory dish will begin to beat in unison. Fireflies in the same swarm will flash their lights in unison.

Our life force is part of the vibrational energy of the universe. Our bodies are amazing; we are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made.” Every cell of us contains the entire pattern of us. Each cell knows how to replicate itself, how to do the jobs it is assigned in keeping us alive and functioning and healthy. Our hearts beat, our lungs take in oxygen, our stomachs digest food, our blood circulates, transporting each substance to where it needs to go. All of this happens without us even having to think about it. When we are bruised or cut or a foreign organism invades, self-healing and protective mechanisms automatically go into action to fix the problem. Our immune systems are even able to remember how specific infections were overcome, so they can be fought off more quickly the next time they appear.

Illness, disease, injury — these cause a disturbance in our patterns. The resonating vibrational energies within us get disrupted, things get out of phase. Which brings us to an intriguing explanation of why touch is so utterly important to us, so important that babies who are not touched simply waste away and die.

When we are touched, we are brought into contact with another person’s vibration. Our bodies respond at a subatomic level, adjusting our vibrational frequency to match that of the person touching us. Resonance. Energy is transferred, and joined together, and the resonant system vibrates with greater strength than the two individual systems alone.

I like the idea, incidentally, that this vibrational energy, this life force within us, is love.

So suppose we were to begin to pay attention to the vibrational energy that is all around us and in us. Just because we’ve become so accustomed to it that we’ve tuned it out doesn’t mean that we can’t tune it back in. I have chronic tinnitus in my right ear. It’s been there for so long that I rarely notice it any more, unless I am in a really quiet place. Most of the time I have to consciously stop and think about it, to actually focus my attention on that ear and listen, to see if it’s still there.

Suppose we could stop and listen for a while, and learn to feel the energy in us and around us, and to focus it with intent on someone else’s body, so that their cells could take advantage of the resulting resonance, drawing the energy they need to bring their own vibrations back into phase and thus heal a problem they were unable to overcome alone. It just makes so much sense. We need each other. We need to be touched. It’s not just psychological. It’s a real, basic, physical need that reaches all the way down to the atoms we are made of.

No wonder a mother’s loving touch on a fevered forehead feels so soothing, the hug of a loved one so comforting. We actually draw healing strength from them. It’s not just our imagination that it feels better — it really DOES feel better.

A woman with a chronic illness once reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, knowing that if she could just have that much contact with him she could be healed. Jesus, surrounded on all sides by the press of bodies in the crowd around him, stopped, turned, and asked “Who touched me?” His disciples were mystified. People were jostling him from every direction, and he wanted to know who had touched him? But he knew. He told them he had felt healing energy flow out from him.

I felt it today. I felt it flow out of me, and I felt it flow into me from others. I even found to my surprise that just lightly touching another person’s back, I could feel the places where their pain was. I once was blind, but now I see — that’s how it feels. What an amazing world we live in!