Oct 13-15, 2006
Therapeutic Touch (TT) is a contemporary interpretation of several ancient healing practices. Based on assumptions that human beings are complex fields of vital energy and that the ability to enhance healing in others is a natural human potential, TT is used to balance and promote the flow of human energies.
While teaching Nursing Science at NYU, Dolores Krieger and her colleague Dora Kunz began groundbreaking experiments that led to the first curriculum on healing in Western history to be officially within a fully accredited university graduate program. In the past 33 years, over 200,000 health professionals have been taught TT internationally.
TT is distinguished from other systems by the therapist’s act of sustained centering; that is, she remains consciously and deeply focused during the act of helping and healing the person who is ill. Sustained centering has a profound effect not only on the patient, but on the therapist, who is forced to examine the nature of his or her own inner life helping the person in need. It’s hard work to initiate and support a conscious process that uses a very different language of human energies than is common in our daily affairs.
The Therapeutic Touch process of healing entails a conscious, effective engagement of the self in the compassionate interest of helping and being fully present to one who is ill or in trauma. It projects a frame of mind that will strongly support a recuperating person with life-affirming verve, vigor, and vitality. Within the first 2 to 4 minutes of the healing session, a profound relaxation response occurs, pain is reliably lessened, and the healing process is significantly accelerated.
The TT techniques can use contact touch; however, very often the healing work is done directly in the human energy field, a few inches from the physical body. The subtle human energy field is uniquely suited as a medium for healing both self and others. It has an inherent pliancy, which lets it expand and contract with great sensitivity to both exterior circumstances and subjective thoughts and feelings. It enables the therapist to reach out to others in compassion. During that healing moment, what is done at one level of consciousness naturally and spontaneously affects the other levels, making the Therapeutic Touch process a personal engagement between the healee and the TT therapist.
In Therapeutic Touch, the drive to fulfill our potential for consciously reuniting with the inner self is fundamental. This act of interiority is one of the most hopeful developments in the entire evolution of human beings. As this quietude deepens during the TT session, there is a sense of peace, an impression of timelessness, and an awareness of profound stillness in both the healee and the TT therapist that enhances the healing act.
This course in transpersonal healing is open to those who have taken an Introductory Therapeutic Touch Workshop or some comparable version of the Krieger-Kunz Method of Therapeutic Touch practice.
Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N., is professor emerita of nursing at New York University and the author of five books on non-invasive healing, including the landmark work Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help and to Heal. Following her pioneering studies into Therapeutic Touch in the 1970s, Dr. Krieger has gone on to teach her innovative methods to more than 200,000 health professionals internationally. Rowe is honored to finally sponsor her profound and amazing work.
“ I feel a sense of stillness, peace, and an inner strength during this time of at-one-ment. I feel loving and accepting of both the healee and myself. I know I am helping her, and I am proud and pleased that I can do so; it feels so right, it makes me certain that this is what I was born to do.”
— a Nurse practicing TT