Hugging Is For Everybody!

About definitions

Please note that I am NOT making a distinction between hugging and embracing. It's true that those two words have a different feel about them, which suggests a difference in meaning - 'hugging' suggesting quick cursory embraces, while 'embracing' suggests much warmer and more lengthy close contact. However, as far as I can see, the two words are really fundamentally interchangeable, for they are referring to the same basic behaviour. As I point out below, hugs / embraces range from lengthy and deeply aware experiences of great beauty and intimacy to compulsively stereotyped manipulative behaviour involving personal power / control agendas (which can involve initiating a seduction or near-rape situation), and also to cold, cursory, and indeed generally more or less ritualized travesties of the real thing. Sadly, the genuine, aware, deeply felt and truly mutual embraces are something of a rarity in the world as a whole.

I have found that some people include in their definition of 'hugging' even just a person putting an arm around another's shoulders while not even looking at the other person. That is not included in the definition that I myself have grown up with, in which a hug or embrace involves full frontal body contact, both people putting their arms around each other. When anyone uses the term 'hugging' for just putting an arm around somebody's shoulders (or something of the sort), that tells me volumes about the impoverished outlook of that person. A huge number of people are conditioned to see real hugging / embracing as being solely part of an erotic or sexual interaction, and thus are unwilling to countenance it outside such situations. Theirs is the loss!

Four hugs a day never made Jack a dull boy!

Harvey Jackins, originator of the emotional healing method called Re-evaluation Counselling*, was a great proselytizer for everybody having "four hugs a day" to keep all manner of 'emotional nasties' at bay and assist us to generally live happy and emotionally healthy lives. While inevitably various people's dark force sourced programming caused them to follow his notion of 'four hugs a day' in a rigid, 'pattern' sort of way that denatured and devalued Harvey's original notion, he was very much on the right lines - though of course he did not mean specifically four hugs per day (he had no belief in 'magic numbers'), but simply that a minimum of something of that order was an important component of a fully healthy and happy life.

* My mention of Re-evaluation Counselling doesn't imply a current recommendation of it. As I recount in in My Own Self Actualization 'Path' - Part 1, I found that Re-evaluation Counselling, while having its good points, has a number of serious problems about it, which render it far from ideal and best dropped in favour of the powerful fast-track methods that I present in Healing and Self Actualization - The Safest and Quickest Way and have been using with really quite dramatic and fully positive effect upon myself.

The giving and receiving of warm, aware physical contact really is a particularly important aspect of our opening up as loving beings and cultivating a balanced emotional state, with all the mental and physical health benefits that the latter brings.

It's the most natural thing in the world for any two people to embrace warmly and affectionately upon meeting and indeed at other times, regardless of gender, and regardless of whether they have met before. This has nothing to do with sex. The popular confusion here is that embracing and other loving physical contact has been associated in many people's minds with sex, so that people are either afraid of such contact or they tend to respond to it (positively or negatively) as though it were an invitation to jump into bed with them, or indeed, in some instances, as the beginning of an attempted rape. In my culture there is still a huge amount of prejudice against man hugging or otherwise being affectionate with man because of this association with sex, with the assumption that it would immediately label the particular men as homosexual (and therefore supposedly abnormal and bad). But even when people do hug, all sorts of patterns take over and reduce the awareness and warmth of the experience, and can transmit negative rather than positive messages.

It is particularly bizarre in our still largely homophobic society that the underlying natural desire of men to be affectionate with each other is rarely manifested except in extreme emotional situations, including when somebody has 'scored', or a team has won, in some 'high octane' competitive sport. Why do those strapping young(ish) footballers in some big match have to have somebody score a goal for their side in order for them to 'go affectionate' with each other (then in a self-consciously public display)?! Crazy! -- That is, their expressions of affection are NOT the crazy thing, as the unaware majority of people believe, but it is the suppression of the footballers' natural love and affection for each other the rest of the time that is crazy!

The same consideration goes to all other life situations. How many people do you see reaching the summit of a mountain and warmly embracing there - the most obviously natural thing to do as a spontaneous celebration and expression of joy when you reach a summit (of pretty well any kind)! But then again, why have to climb to a summit in order to get a hug? Why not have the best of all worlds and be openly affectionate wherever genuinely appropriate in everyday life - AND include some delectable summits in your life too and likewise get the odd hug there as well?

When embracing with men I find that 'normal' male patterns involve a lot of physical tension that pulls them back and communicates 'Look, I'm hugging you but I don't want you to imagine that I really mean it'! As often as not, the man will hold himself half-sideways to try to avoid or minimize front-to-front contact - perhaps partly through fear of getting or revealing an erection. Another common male hugging pattern I experience is the very hearty approach, which may be half-sideways or full-frontal, but involves a show of a sort of enthusiastic hand movement at the back - often a hearty patting, with the head also usually thrust well forward past mine to avoid warm face-against-face contact; such hugs are usually very brief, with much muscular tension, and the overall message is 'Ah, that's better; I've been seen to have done my duty and got that out of the way now!'. In such cases having the hug is remarkably like having had a good crap, with nothing really uplifting about it - except that if the other person is a sensitive and deeply aware individual like myself, that person would feel a frustration and unsatisfactoriness about the hug, and it wouldn't at all feel as satisfying as having a crap! Indeed it would tend to be an experience of rejection and loneliness.

Women's hugging patterns that I experience are typically submissive gestures, often involving stereotyped placing of the arms and hands in a manner that suggests a submissive role. Or another one, as horrendous as it is common, is the 'hug' that involves the woman holding the poor man more or less at a distance with very tense arms, and just giving a little peck of a kiss on the lips. That is an absolute abomination - a complete ritualization of physical contact that denies just about any possibility of communicating warmth and affection.

I have very occasionally over the last several years had the most extraordinary experiences from hugs with certain very 'open' and aware people, to the point that it has become clear that with more or less total openness and awareness in both parties even a one-off hug between strangers who may never meet again is actually a major love experience that has a great life-affirming and healing effect. That isn't as outlandish as it sounds, for unrestricted hugging generally comes much more naturally to very 'open' and aware people (especially no-soul incarnations) who aren't hamstrung by social convention. This is the sort of thing that is routinely missed out on by almost everybody because of their attachment to the notion of exclusive relationships, and the bizarre notion that there's something 'wrong' (implying connotations of promiscuous sex) about hugging somebody who you haven't met before.

So, to help clarify the picture, from my own experience let's put down here a rough model of how we can bring the missing elements into embracing.

• There is a real need to totally accept and learn to enjoy full frontal body contact. Anything less, and you're running away from the issue and are communicating one agenda or another, and not genuine love at all.
  

  If you're male, take heart that the world won't come to an end if you get an erection. Insecurity feelings are commonly a trigger for that to happen. It doesn't mean you have to do anything about it, such as jumping into bed together - and in any case it will almost certainly stop happening once you've got used to such open, aware embracing, and the old insecurity feelings are not being restimulated so much.

  As noted further below, allowing yourself to laugh helps clear the embarrassment and other tensions by grounding your emotional energy and taking your attention out of the little feedback loop that was causing the erection. In many cases it is actually greatly helpful to - shock horror! - be honest and admit that you're getting that erection! If you do so laughingly, you're most unlikely to freak the other person, whereas if you try to hide it, the person (a) would have an unsatisfactory experience out of the hug and (b) would have an uncomfortable feeling that there was "something going on for him", and quite possibly assume that - surprise, surprise! - you were getting an erection and trying to hide the fact. Hiding things never makes for real loving contact of any kind.
  

  I can't remember significantly getting an erection myself while hugging anyone, even though the prospect of hugging certain men would get me really 'hot and horny', but I'm quite clear that if I did, depending on my 'reading' of the particular person, my response would be to continue 'straight' with the embrace, but to laughingly come out with something like "Oops! My one-eyed trouser-snake [or 'little thing' or 'little willie'] has just woken up - how embarrassing!", and to have a good laugh about it there and then - most likely setting the other person off laughing too, releasing some of their own tensions about such happenings and liking me all the more for helping them feel freer about that. I'm not quite sure how the Archbishop of Canterbury would respond in that situation with me, but then I don't seriously expect that that would happen with him even if I ever did meet him and try him out for all his supposed (and highly postured) 'love of God' with a warm hug!

• An aware embrace excludes any of the old stereotype dominant-submissive gestures and signals that are so ingrained in most cultures. If you are significantly taller than your hugging partner, you can bend your legs as far as is appropriate and practical, to bring you down to approximately the same level physically. As well as being much more satisfying for both parties this way, doing this helps minimize any dominant-submissive role-play messages (especially between man and woman) which all too often try and creep into embraces.

• Putting your arms both above or both below your partner's arms can play into dominant-submissive role-play patterns. Therefore it's more helpful usually to put one arm over and the other one under; it sends out much healthier messages. And of course, if the taller person has lowered himself to equalize (or at least minimize the difference between) heights, then there would be no problem about this suggestion. However, to always put your arms in one particular 'correct' way would be to actually ritualize your hugging, bringing in a rigidity, so the placement of arms that I'm suggesting as 'best' is actually best not chosen every single time, but rather, as just one's most common mode of hugging, with overall a fair amount of flexibility about the details of arm placement on any particular occasion.
  

  If you are distinctly tall, most likely you've developed particularly strongly a habit of drooping your upper back and neck in a vain attempt to bring you down towards other people's height. That is extremely unhealthy and harmful anyway, and you can use the Alexander Technique to get yourself back on course (and improve your life in many other important ways too), healthily standing your full height and virtually never drooping. Hugs can never be really satisfactory with or for a person who is drooping in that way, whether or not (s)he is particularly tall. That is where knee-bending comes in to lower yourself while keeping upright. If there is too much height difference for that to be a comfortable arrangement, then actually standing at different heights to compensate to some extent for the personal height difference would be a great thing to do for hugging, if it can simply be arranged at the time.

  Otherwise the only way for two people with a really significant height difference to hug really well and healthily would be to do so lying down - but of course for most people that would then 'push buttons' with regard to expectations of sexual activity. A bit of a problem there!

• In a really genuine, 'meant' hug you allow and enjoy the experience of the side of your face against that of your hugging partner. In other words, you learn not to thrust your head over your partner's shoulder. It may seem to be a show of intensity of feeling to do the latter, but it's still denying you and the other person the aware body contact that is part of the greater experience and communication of aware affection. Beware of any urge to make movements against your partner's face, and, if you want to do that, ask yourself why you want to. Most likely it's a hankering after sexual stimulation that's creeping in, in which case it's a signal that your awareness is getting sneakily clouded by your old compulsions.
  

  Although I say the latter as an important caution, actually I don't really mean that you've got to keep your face keep stony-still against the other person's. Not at all. It's really a matter of getting yourself aware of all the sneaky little agendas that tend to creep in and get you making movements that are part of a manipulative agenda rather than simply being spontaneously joyful and awarely appreciative of the other person.

• The odd kiss is great too, again regardless of gender (yes, I mean that!) - but watch out! Unless you know the person you're embracing very well it may communicate the wrong things! I keep it only for the occasional individual with whom I have a considerable mutual understanding. Again, too, you need to get aware of any manipulative agenda that you might be running in seeking to kiss the other person. With such things running, considerable caution is needed - but even then it doesn't necessarily mean that one mustn't kiss at all.
  

  Unfortunately, the kissing that comes most immediately to most people - that between men and women - is mostly of the unhelpful kind that is best largely withheld. It tends to be very much reinforcing gender stereotype interactions and is little or nothing to do with genuine love. It also very widely tends to get used as a (very poor) substitute for really warm and deeply aware embraces. I'd be inclined not to kiss until I'd got my hugging really in order - that is, my hugs are regularly really warm and aware, with absolutely holding off and no premature withdrawing.

• In a really effective and positive embrace you place your arms and hands round the other person positively but without gripping or grasping. Your hands reach horizontally as far round the person's back as they can go in a relaxed way. One thing they do NOT do is point up vertically, towards the other person's shoulders, with your elbows thus acutely bent. That is an extremely common distortion of an embrace, usually done by women as part of their submissive posturing, and it considerably obstructs the healthy and harmonious energy resonance between the two embracing people. That is never a healthy way to embrace.
  

• If you feel compelled to make hand movements, really you want to ask yourself why you're doing that. Is it to comfort yourself? Is it to try and avoid feeling or communicating real warmth? Is it to try and stimulate your partner sexually or to close down his/her awareness? In general, though not always, such hand movements are out of place in ordinary embraces, in that most of them get in the way of the peaceful and relaxed loving energy resonance between oneself and the other person. Instead of such movements, the really helpful thing to do is to let your hands rest positively but gently on your partner's back, and become aware of what you can feel there - such as muscular tensions, particular heat production, small movements, heartbeats, the depth, speed and regularity of breathing, and so forth. They all help tell you what's going on for that person, even if you can't put it into words or concepts. The more you are aware of that person, in every little detail, the more you experience your and that person's love in a beautiful sort of resonance.
  

  However, as with movements of one's face against the other person's, I don't mean that in every hug we necessarily need to keep our hands fully still. The important thing is that, if movements are made, they be made awarely. They would generally be more appropriate with people who know each other well and are clear in their aware intent to extend the expressiveness of the hug in a loving way - but still without sexual / erotic implications unless there were a clear understanding between the two that eroticism was appropriate then.

• When you're hugging optimally you are aware of your own tensions, and send little internal messages to parts of your body to 'soften' and let go of them. Most of us carry much tension in the neck and between the shoulder blades, which pulls the shoulder blades towards each other and detracts from the warmth and awareness of an embrace. Imagine your back and shoulders letting out and broadening, becoming free and loose, so that you are becoming more outgoing and with less sense of holding back in your embrace.

• Your state of mind is important, for it will communicate itself to the other person whether you want it to or not, both in the way you are hugging physically and in the communication through energy interactions in your overlapping 'energy fields'. A lightness and sense of giving warmth joyfully to your partner (but without trying to make anything happen) is most appropriate. Typically other feelings come in too, so that you may feel "I want you so much", "You are mine", or maybe "I'm so lonely or rejected the rest of the time...", or you simply feel very serious about it, and so on. If you don't rise above such feelings and restore that light, joyful, 'open' sense of giving warmth, you are no longer giving much aware affection and instead have become bogged down in your old emotional issues and perceived but illusory 'needs', no matter how wonderful it may feel subjectively. You are then at least to some extent drawing parasitically from that person's non-physical aspects and emotional energy, and (s)he may well respond by similarly getting locked into patterns of old feelings, so that the typical interplay of patterned and unaware behaviour of 'normal' people becomes established, and the very concept of a genuine healthily loving and aware embrace, free of manipulative agendas, has then gone right out of the window.

• One great - and I mean GREAT - way of avoiding or stepping out of interfering feelings when hugging, is to recognise and observe those feelings as though from outside, and to allow yourself to chuckle at them; even to laugh openly. That indeed is why I've so very often laughed a bit when I hugged someone - because I was aware of odd little wisps of old loneliness feelings all coming up, and was allowing them to release and dissolve in the laughter, so that my loving awareness could be maintained. Often this caused the other person to laugh a bit too, because the same thing was happening there and I'd given him or her the much needed cue to start releasing the interfering feelings. I can remember the occasional fantastic hugging experiences where I and the other person were holding each other as we both laughed our guts out. What tremendous joy and positive energy!

  And - men, please note! - as already noted, this approach also releases fear and embarrassment over getting an erection, and can quickly cause any erection to go.

• If the other person seeks to let go earlier than you would, it's best to respect his/her wish and let go yourself, never mind how much you'd like to hold on for longer. If you do that you are showing respect for where the other person is at. This is an essential part of aware embracing. In some cases failure to show this consideration can cause the other person to feel quite threatened and make the hug into a real negative experience. This may not apply so strictly, however, between people who already have a deep understanding between each other, as there may be some specific very loving reason for encouraging the partner to maintain the embrace - such as to facilitate emotional release. But then again, if you do that, is it really through deep awareness and insight, or are you then running a control agenda upon the other person? Unfortunately, if you are doing the latter you may well be unaware of the fact, and, if challenged on that, would very likely defend your actions without really deep self scrutiny.

• If you're (more or less) strangers of opposite gender, in most situations it's greatly helpful for the woman to be allowed to initiate a hug - though it's not as though there is some 'Divine' rule or law about this. For the man to do so can be very threatening or at least controlling, because of the dominant-submissive patterns that are liable to be triggered. Or if the man considers that he must take an initiative, he could in a very gentle and non-pressurizing manner tell the woman that she'd be welcome to a hug if she liked - or something of that ilk, making it clear that it's completely okay if she doesn't want to at the moment or at all.

• In one of her books, Byron Katie (originator of The Work) stresses the importance of being clear about who is being the giver and who the receiver of the hug, because, she claims, there is otherwise a state of confusion between the parties that lessens the effectiveness of the hug for them both, and, according to her, for really effective hugging one person would be the giver and the other the receiver in each hug. She does have a point there, BUT my own 'reading' of the situation suggests that, together with that awareness, a greater flexibility is called for than Katie appears to admit. I think maybe she herself has experienced confusion in hugs that were on broadly equal terms, and so has assumed that such confusion would be the norm in such hugs.

  Actually, a really aware hug that is not hurried can easily be 'one way' for part of the time and 'the other way' for another part of the time, and simply mutually resonating the rest of the time (Byron Katie appeared not to recognise such a wonderful thing as simple mutual loving resonance, with no role-play involved at all). That is a particularly beautiful and healthy way to hug. It does require, however, sufficient awareness on both sides, so that there is an unspoken understanding at each point as to what is happening, so that the would-be receiver actually allows him/herself to receive and isn't trying to give at that point, and then in due course knows when to go into 'giving' mode.
  

  In any case, a simple 'mutually resonating' hug is in itself a beautiful, uplifting and healing experience, and doesn't necessarily have any specific sense of giving or receiving, so it certainly doesn't have to be in any state of confusion at all. I assume that the confusion that Katie experienced was in situations where there was little or no mutual resonance, as can readily happen where the two parties are not a sufficiently good match in 'energy' make-up or neither party has all that much depth of awareness, so that any notion of a mutual loving resonance is meaningless to them. The theoretical 'hugging maximum' experience would be between two no-soul incarnations - though even then to some extent there would be variations from person to person of energy compatibility with any other no-soul incarnation.

• Any hug that isn't a truly uplifting experience for both parties has not worked well and is worth scrutiny to understand why it was like that. How many people have experienced at all a truly uplifting embrace, as distinct from 'just a hug' or the actually problematical 'agenda' hug involving manipulation of your emotions, including maybe getting you wound up sexually?

  Most commonly the answer gained from the scrutiny that I suggest would be that it was a routine or 'auto-pilot' hug. Such 'going through the motions' hugs are mostly a feature of people of limited level of awareness, and are perpetrated least or not at all by no-soul incarnations, for whom many hugs may be unsatisfactory because of lesser awareness of the other person, but who generally would never hug in a routine or seriously unaware way themselves.

• Finally, here is one important point that is extremely widely not recognised. It is actually healthier and more beneficial all round to hug more with people of your own gender than those of the opposite gender. This is because of certain particularly positive aspects of your 'energy' tending to resonate most effectively between yourself and others of the same gender. That doesn't mean that cross-gender (i.e. man-woman) hugs are actually to be avoided, but there is actually a deeply relaxed and healing quality about hugs / embraces with people of one's own gender that is much more difficult to find in man-woman hugs. Also, in man-woman hugs it is generally much more difficult for most people to be deeply relaxed and really aware about it, usually going straight into their unaware gender stereotypic attitudes, including all the dominant-submissive role-play, which typically passes completely unnoticed, especially by the participants, but nonetheless degrades the hugging experience into just a husk of the real thing.

I wanted to find a photo on the Internet of two men hugging in a healthy, aware way, to put on this page. Could I find one, hell! All the supposedly relevant photos that I found (at least in the Google Image Resource) showed pairs of men hugging with definite agendas running, or men just having arms round each others' shoulders and not facing each other at all. While the latter is great in itself, and can be very affectionate and indeed aware to a point, it isn't actually hugging or embracing, except in a very loose sense, and is something that healthy living would include as well as rather than instead of genuine (i.e. full frontal) embraces.