Touching a woman, we find ourselves in her world. There are the memories, signs, scarves and archives of her whole life in her body. We feel them bodily, therefore convincingly. If you give yourself time and let yourself notice, the shades and tones will change, the feeling of your own body and the space around will also change. Your reality will be colored and complemented by the reality of the other person.

It’s touching to look at children’s photos. A similar feeling arises in touch: nagging, sincere, unknown, multidimensional. We touch the child inside the adult. The childhood impressions are the most significant, they are most clearly imprinted in the body. There is a lot of sun and air, there is a vibrating world with colors that have no names yet. There are shaggy bumblebees, attracting smells, friendly monsters, dreams that are with us forever, there are trees, flowers and stones as alive as we are.

There are people with the shell of maturity on children’s body. It comprises introjected “musts”, of beliefs, iron character, from life against own will. And you hug the armor, press your cheek against the helmet. Someone, if he feels safe, can take off his carapace, someone has grown together with it forever. Sometimes you feel violence and fear in someone’s body. But at least you can touch it, you can smooth, warm, dissolve their pain.

Touching is like listening or reading, this is a story, these are pages of a book. Like a book, touch includes imagination, triggers fantasies, enlivens projections. We learn more about ourselves than about others.

You can not only touch, you can move together. The difference is greater than between the description of water and the mug of water you drink. Moving together is to hear, read and see. Memories, signs, archives become fluid, alive. In touch, if you give yourself time, you can immerse yourself infinitely deeply, but movement gives the brightness, variability and reality of the other that does not fit in our fantasies. It is difficult to accept that for another person, to contact with me, with my body, is a similar deep experience. The other enters my world, is colored by me. Moving together, we create our joint reality, more colorful and multidimensional than two separate ones.

Igor Zabuta, psychotherapist, tango-teacher; http://izabuta.com/en/