Another Sermonette from the Hugmeister

My name is Joshua Bagby, and I am an unapologetic hugger.

I think the world would be a hugely different and far better place if we made hugging more of a priority. It may be a priority in our own individual lives or it may be a priority on a more global scale.

By hugging here I mean lengthy embraces for the soul. One minute. Two minutes if you can stand the pleasure. Three minutes if you’re a bold adventurer. This is not motivated by sex or seduction, but rather it’s embracing given to each other as healing for the mess our world is in.

The way I see the world, we’re all suffering from some pretty serious delusions—yes delusions—created by our cultural conditioning. We’re wildly afraid to touch each other, physically and metaphorically.

Some of us are afraid to embrace for more surface, conscious, easily retrievable reasons. Not wanting to encourage sexual feelings probably leads the pack. Similarly, we don’t want to have to explain what we’re doing hugging someone else, especially if that person is sexually attractive and we’re married to someone who’s jealous.

To many minds, freely hugging people is one short step away from promiscuity. A hugging group would look to many like a swing party or an orgy at the Playboy mansion, so hands off and bodies isolated is the way to go.

Some of us don’t like to touch each other because we don’t want to endure sensually unpleasant sensations like foul odors or rough handling. A close competitor is that we don’t want to host someone else’s germs. One easy way to see where you fit in all this is to stand in a post office or grocery store line and envision yourself hugging each person you see. Does it make you want to throw up?

If you happen to be a Christian, be mindful that Jesus loves everybody equally, including the people who make you want to throw up. (All right, I am no biblical scholar, so I am just interpreting my vision of what I hear. Jesus loves everybody.)

Some reasons for not wanting to freely hug, I think, are less poised on the surface. Hugging brings us up close and personal with people, and our culture teaches us more and more to fear thy neighbor. The nightly news is a perpetual orgy of reasons why we should distrust just about everyone on the planet. So are the tabloid talk shows. We’re paying a high price for our scary infotainment, the least of which is high cable or satellite TV bills. We’re losing our minds.

A similar reason for fear of intimacy, I believe, is our own inner terror that we’re all a bunch of walking phonies. I’ve posed before that I don’t think many of us could do our jobs if we had to be truthful. So many jobs depend on deceit, cheating, manipulating. Our livelihood depends on shucking and jiving. It’s the system. So at some level we all know that if we hold another person in our arms, that person is that much closer to our core truths. We’re great at manipulating from a distance and not so great at close range. (This is one reason why people returning from near-death experiences and life reviews have such a hard time re-entering society. They know that every time they tell lies, it only hurts them. Liars who have not had an NDE and a life review do not know this.)

It actually becomes convenient to keep intimacy at bay by staying out of touch with people. It becomes convenient to hide behind the story that hugging causes unbridled lust for sex because if you believe that you don’t have to deal with fear of intimacy.

More and more we’re finding out that men and women alike harbor awful memories of having been abused in many different ways. Just thinking of my acquaintances, stories come to mind of childhood sex abuse, childhood and teenage rape, satanic torture, religious torture, parental brutality both mental and physical, severe rejection and abandonment, painful sexual identity struggles, abusive relationships as adults, to name just a few.

In a somewhat ironic way, encountering a loving atmosphere and exceptionally positive sensuality like long, warm embraces often opens up memory channels to this stored-up, unreleased pain. It is not uncommon for me to be hugging someone and that person bursts into tears. The exquisite beauty of being stroked and held, especially in a safe, private atmosphere, often releases emotions trapped in the past. I honor these times even though the person I am embracing may feel embarrassed or humiliated for sobbing.

Here’s the sunny side: When those of us motivated to be more in touch find creative ways to make that happen, it’s a huge blessing. Since extended hugging is not something our tabloid TV, fear-mongering, junkfood culture feels motivated to promote, we have to do it on an individual basis. We create our own hugging circles, whether it’s just two people or a gathering of more courageous, affectionate souls.

Lengthy embraces are about the consciousness you hold when your arms are wrapped around someone. Since this is not about sex or romance, it doesn’t matter if you’re holding a man or a woman, a young person or an old person. It’s about holding the body of an indwelling spirit who is on a journey of life just like you.

To send your love to this person in your arms is to send your compassion and empathy for all that person has bee through, is going through, and will go through. Hug this person as you would like to be hugged.

I like to fill my consciousness with beautiful visions. Usually I don’t create them. I just close my eyes and there they appear—colors, patterns, various hypnogogic photographs, cerebral animations. I don’t know exactly what I am tapping into, but it’s wonderful.

Every situation is unique. Embracing a stranger will be different from hugging a best friend. If you’ve developed a trusting relationship, you can combine embracing with words of encouragement, affirmations, love. If you are intimate about sharing troubles, you can use hug time to plant some positive suggestions for healing and success. Meanwhile, the person who is a stranger to your ego mind is probably not a stranger to your soul, so why not be generous with your love?

I leave you with the words of a stranger (to me) who left these words on my blog entry entitled The Gift of Presence on Sex and the Light.

I'm surprised that there aren't more comments on this - what you are writing here really speaks to me. I was doing a search on non-sexual intimacy via google, expecting to find nothing geared towards just what I had on my mind, yet, when I added "energy exchange" to my query, it narrowed the results down to only one page: this blog.

Over the past 15 months or so I have become involved with a small spiritual group that, amongst other things, recognizes and encourages things very akin to the "2-minute hug" that you refer to. In the past I often would refer to psychological problems in terms of a "Hug Deficit," due to my own knowledge of just how good it feels to be touched, especially when there is no sexual stress attached to the act. Our culture promotes a terrible body shame that makes a lot of people experience great pain. This comes from the inevitable conflict that arises when they want to touch and be touched, and are conditioned to always associate this with sex, and also are conditioned to dislike promiscuity in all its forms.

Is it wrong for me to attend small gathers of like-minded and otherwise normal, healthy, effective people with mutual hugs, touches, and cuddles as the main thing on my mind? The overall message that this group has is a spiritual one. I am more or less a secularist, and while I do not subscribe to consensus reality, it still took me a long time to decide that my reasons for liking these people were okay. Maybe I'm way off base here, but I could not resist saying something. I am SO GLAD to read of this seemingly simple, yet powerful idea from an entirely different source.