People greatly underestimate the healing power of human touch.

It has long been documented, especially in cases of “failure to thrive,” that human touch can mean the difference between life and death. In 1915, it was reported that several babies under the age of two died from lack of touch. Nothing else was different except that some felt a physical human connection.

Touch is powerful- just think about the last time you received a good huh. A hug releases endorphins and bonding hormones like oxytocin. Touch conveys a message, and the message is love and reassurance. It says “You are loved, just because you are alive.” Touch implies connection. And connection reminds us that we are not alone. 

Massage therapists offer safe human connection

We need that. We need physical human connection. We need love. It cannot be denied that so many of us are failing to thrive. Mental health professionals have known this for a while, and we saw a huge jump of people seeking therapists of all kinds in 2020 with the Covid pandemic. What became apparent was that we are just barely scraping by. We are hanging on by an awfully thin, precarious thread, threatening to break at any moment.

Mentally, we are exhausted. We are tired and at our wits end with our jobs, our lives, politics, the world at large. We are fed up with the mass shootings, the infringements on our human rights, living in fear and the incessant need to be hyper-vigilant.

Emotionally, we are bloated. We excessively consume news, social media, mindless movies and useless information. We gorge ourselves on too much crappy food, buying things we don’t need, getting ourselves into debt, and perpetuating the cycle of the “American Dream.”

Spiritually, we are disconnected. We are unplugged from the source of our life force energy, from the Earth, from our spirits. We go to church on Sundays, our one and only appointment with God each week. We read from a book written hundreds of years ago to tell us what we should be doing now. But we don’t commune with nature, the physical expression of God. We don’t go within and meditate to listen to our own soul or to hear messages from Spirit. We go on thinking that the answers to our problems lay outside of us, so we go to doctors and therapists and ask them for pills to make all our problems go away.

We medicate, subdue, and suppress our emotions, our feelings, our minds, and our souls, and then we wonder why we are depressed, suicidal, and on the verge of a mental breakdown.

This is why I became a massage therapist in Boise.

 All therapists are healers. I work as a healer, helping others to release their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual stress and pain through the healing power of compassionate touch. I help them to have a brief reprieve from the never ending bombardment of life as a human in these crazy times. We are all on the edge of complete derailment, hurling through this madhouse at high speeds, ready to collide or collapse at any moment.

This is why it is so important, so vital, that we receive loving touch. This is why we need more massage therapists to do the work that we do, and why we must educate others as to why massage is so beneficial. We help those lonely elderly people who don’t get loving touch anymore. We help those married couples who are only going through the motions and duties of life; who lost their love for each other long ago. We help those single or divorced people who haven’t been touched in what seems like forever. We help those who have been abused and violated to receive touch that doesn’t hurt and make them shudder in fear. We help those that are depressed or in pain. We help those who just need a little extra love and care. Why is touch important? Because touch conveys love, and love heals.