Hands are Portals for Reception and Transmission

September, 2025

Recall how many things you’ve held in your hands in your lifetime: your pet, your groceries, a pen or paintbrush. Or how many surfaces you’ve touched over time: your loved one’s skin, the rippling wet of a river, the rough bark of a giant redwood. Or how you’ve been able to recognize and retrieve a dime from the bottom of your pocket by mere touch, alone.

Summon the images of all the things that you’ve held in your hands – or perhaps let slip through your fingers, either figuratively or literally dropped.

Whether reaching, grasping, or exploring: our hands are most often our first line of encounter with the world. Through them, we enact our emotion, our desire, our protection or constraint. In a simplistic way, we might consider our hands to be as tools for how we manipulate or interact with our environments. But, because we have so many nerve endings in the hands; meridian energy-pathways through the hands; and responsive, fluid-conveying connective tissue weaving through their many tiny bones and joints, as a more energetic experience, our hands are portals of reception and transmission. They amplify and convey the strong felt sense of touch when placed on the body, and the enhanced electromagnetic fields beyond the body’s surface.  

Touch is a primary enlivener, and our hands are the primary conveyor of touch. Our hands are highly sensitive to touch’s various textures: hot or cold, pain or pleasure, pressure or tension. Through sound, movement and focused awareness, we can amplify the more nuanced sensation beneath these categories.  Any time we activate our hands – when we open the sense of touch with touch, sound, or movement – we enhance the electromagnetic fields streaming there. Receptive hands are hands full of awakened awareness. Transmissive hands facilitate connection on or off the body. Once we begin a sense activation in the hands, the sensations can then spread through the entire body for a more global experience of enlivenment.

Try this exploration to increase the sense awareness in your hands:

Begin in Open Attention, sensing whatever sensations are present right now.

Gently and slowly trace the hills and valleys between your fingers and around the edges of your hands with the fingers of your other hand, making the audible sound of OOOO. Gently stroke the back of your hands, and your palms. Now, do the same on the other hand.

Trace spirals at the palm of one hand with a finger from the opposite hand using the THETA BREATH.  Spiral outward for transmission into the field; spiral in the other direction toward the palm for reception.

Bring gentle Wave Motion into the hands with an elongated WHOA WHOA sound.

Move the palms around as if they had eyes on them, gathering information from the immediate environment. You may start to feel the palms begin to activate with enlivened sensation.

Slowly, bring your palms together, feeling an electromagnetic pull that gathers and condenses as they move closer together. Play with that magnetic feel, allowing it to expand and compress like a ball. What other sensations do you feel in your body?

Gradually and slowly, pull your hands apart and place them away from your body.  Play with bringing them ever-closer to your skin – recognizing the longing to touch between hand and cheek, or hand and shoulder. Feel what sensations arise in both the hand and the cheek once they meet. What is their conversation back and forth? Do this anywhere else on the body – sense the transmission and reception.

Now, bring the palms together to rest in your lap and feel how a circuit of sensation may amplify within, running through the heart area, as well.

These are alive and aware hands.

As a final thought, recognize and contrast how many times we hold a different sort of world in our hands via our phones. It’s a powerful electronic device that has its own system of transmission and reception that overlays the native receptivity of our hands. Try, in the coming days, to bring awareness and balance to this distinction.

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