Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
Therapeutic-Touch Centering
Before doing anything else, quiet the body, mind, and emotions with breath and a steady inward focus, so that you act from a calm, gathered, present state rather than a scattered one.
Centering in 5 lines: Stop and turn inward. Let your breath slow and settle. Let body, mind, and emotions go quiet. Gather your full attention into the present and onto your intent to help. Act from that calm, present state — and keep returning to it. (This grounding step is the real, evidence-friendly core of Therapeutic Touch.)
What it is
Centering is the first phase of Therapeutic Touch (TT), the method co-developed by nurse Dolores Krieger and Theosophist Dora Kunz in the early 1970s.
Before a practitioner does anything else, they pause to quiet the body, mind, and emotions and bring themselves to a calm, gathered, fully present state. Krieger describes it as becoming inwardly still and “centered” — and she stresses that the practitioner should remain centered throughout the whole session.
Stated plainly: stripped of the surrounding energy-field framework, centering is a short, ordinary grounding and relaxation practice — slow breathing plus steady inward attention. That is the part of TT that is genuinely useful and that anyone can use, regardless of what they believe about “energy.” (The later TT claims about sensing a field are a separate matter — see Why It Works and empirical status.)
The Method
As Krieger presents it in The Therapeutic Touch, centering goes roughly:
- Stop and turn inward. Set aside outward busyness. Take a moment to deliberately shift from “doing” to a quiet, receptive readiness.
- Let the breath slow and settle. Breathe easily and a little more slowly than usual; let the breath be the anchor that quiets the body.
- Quiet body, mind, and emotions. Allow physical tension, mental chatter, and emotional agitation to settle, the way a stirred-up pond clears when left still. Krieger frames centering as keeping body, mind, and emotions “quiet” and focused.
- Gather attention into the present. Bring your attention fully to here and now and to a simple, steady inward focus — Krieger casts this as a brief meditative act, focusing on the intent to help the person in front of you.
- Stay centered. Hold this calm, present state as the baseline you act from, returning to it whenever you notice yourself getting pulled out of it. (This is a faithful summary of the centering step as taught, not a reproduction of copyrighted training material.)
Source & Lineage
Krieger, a professor of nursing at New York University, built TT out of years of research, clinical practice, and teaching, codifying it in The Therapeutic Touch: How to Use Your Hands to Help or to Heal (1979).
The centering step she places first draws on contemplative and meditative traditions — she explicitly framed TT as a secular adaptation of the “laying on of hands,” and centering as a meditative preparation. As a standalone calm-presence practice it sits naturally beside the grounding and stillness practices elsewhere in this library; what is distinctive in Krieger is making this quieting the mandatory first move before any helping action.
Common refinements
Rushing past it. The whole point is to not skip the pause. Even 30–60 seconds changes your state.
- Forcing the mind blank. You are settling, not fighting your thoughts. Let agitation subside on its own, like a pond clearing.
- Centering once and forgetting. Krieger stresses staying centered — gently return to the calm baseline whenever you drift.
- Confusing the calm with proof of “energy.” The felt steadiness is what a relaxed, attentive nervous system produces; it is not evidence of an energy field.