Local Hug Clinics, instructions to start your own; How to be a better hugger

If you're like me, you want to be a better hugger. Keen observers of hugging often note how poorly many of us hug: too brief, too rushed, awkward posture, hugging only from the shoulders up, etc. At this rate, very few of us are getting to "four hugs a day," the established healthy minimum.

I've often wondered about the phenomena of lousy hugging. It's another situation where many people are aware dysfunctional behavior but a safe place and effective language to talk about it are both lacking. Therefore, therapeutic directions to improve our hugging behavior escapes us.

I was talking with a healer friend, Sherwood Duane about this. We discussed the obvious categories of density in the human body: blood, muscles and bones. In a really good hug you take in all the benefits on all three levels: blood, muscles and bones.

Sherwood points out only those parts of us believing they are lovable are capable of taking in the benefits of a healthy hug. Feeling worthy of receiving the benefits of hugging is the prerequisite for taking in a hug fully.

This suggests local Hug Clinics where people observe healthy hug behavior, both non-sexual and sexual, keeping clothes on. Go for the spiritual Oneness in a Hug Clinic. Attendees will handle the sexual part outside of class.

This scenario strongly suggests a male-female facilitating team who can model healthy hugging and can talk about both sexual and non-sexual hugs.

Some of the cognitive portion of a Hug Clinic has to educate people to the idea human energy has four segments, top to bottom. Find a full discussion of this in The New Energy Anatomy book. Most people are hugging each other only from the neck up, in the only places in their body where they feel worthy.

Readers will appreciate a non-sexual full body hug is not possible from only the neck up.

It is possible to assist people to become more aware of where they feel safe in their body to hug and where they do not feel safe to hug. If you open this door, what will rear its head early is deep issues and memories of prior unsafe hugging. Facilitators will have to beggin each clinic with signed confidentiality agreements and carefully plan for how deep each hug clinic will go; because for many attendees, these issues lead to the deepest of waters.

Where you feel safe to hug and where you do not feel safe to hug has value and can be used as an opening to personal-spiritual growing.

Mostly people will need to do what Rumi suggests, you can't go directly at improving a full body hug. What you can go at directly is your blocks and obstacles to the benefits of hugging, up and down your body.

How is Bruce improving his hugging? Well, I have a long way to go. I acknowledge my bones have been harboring "unlovableness," a useful word in Hug Clinics.

Many therapeutic directions can start there: where do I feel unlovable and why? This is what facilitators will be tasked to address and assist people to relax and feel safe with.

Not all healthy hugs are non-sexual. Facilitators will need to convey language to people for discussing BOTH kinds of hugs, how to tell the difference, and to convey permission to ask ahead of time, "Is this going to be a sexual or a non-sexual hug?"

Most of our issues around hugging probably stem from memories where the two kinds of hugs were confused, converged, or otherwise mixed up with confusing or even dangerous outcomes. How to make a Hug Clinic safe for these discussion will be an ongoing task.

The topic of intimacy as into-me-see is also good here. Find a Haling Toolbox article on this also.

Sherwood suggests hugging behavior around newbo
s and infants is the ideal and natural hug situation. The loving we feel for healthy newbo
s is the energetic that a healthy non-sexual physical hug embodies. It's natural to hug a healthy infant; It's good to hug them and tell them, remind them, they are lovable in their 3D physical-material form--and--this love is non-sexual. We all need this.

If you get stuck, give me a call.

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VERBATIM DUPLICATION ENCOURAGED as long as credit is given to HealingToolbox.org & Bruce Dickson