Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian
Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian penned an article entitled “Why some people are touchy-feeling, while others hate it” that ran on LiveMint.com. Subramanian recently published a book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch.
I start at a place that’s highly personal for me: my fear of touching other people.
At the beginning of ‘Western Massage 1’, my teacher, Al Turner, a wiry man with glittering eyes who used to be a professional dancer, asks us to line up. He bends his knees, sinks his weight into his heels and sashays from side to side, a movement he calls “horse dance” and asks us to follow along. This is the kind of large, sweeping motion we’ll use when we’re giving a massage, he says. It gets us to engage our whole bodies, including the strong muscles of our legs and our core, so we make fluid strokes and protect the smaller, more fragile bones in our fingers when we’re massaging. Read more.