Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Compassionate Intention to Help
From a calm, centered state, hold a focused, sincere intention of care and comfort toward another person (or yourself) — letting that caring attention shape how you show up and act.
Compassionate Intention in 5 lines: Start centered and calm. Bring the person to mind and form a sincere, gentle intent to help and comfort them. Hold that caring focus steadily — let it show in unhurried, kind, attentive presence (and gentle touch if welcome). Turn it inward as self-compassion when you need it. Remember: the comfort is from caring attention and presence, not from sending energy.
What it is
After centering, the Therapeutic Touch practitioner — in the method co-developed by Dolores Krieger and Dora Kunz — holds a focused, sincere intention to help and comfort the person in front of them.
Krieger treats this caring intent as the steady through-line of the whole session: a quiet, compassionate focus on the other person’s wellbeing that you keep in mind while you act. Stated plainly: the transferable, honest version of this practice is directed compassionate attention — deliberately adopting a calm, warm, caring stance toward another person (or toward yourself).
It is not a way of beaming energy into someone. The value is in the intention and the calming, caring presence it creates, which genuinely affect how you behave and how the other person feels (see Why It Works and empirical status).
The Method
Drawn faithfully from Krieger’s framing in The Therapeutic Touch:
- Begin centered. Start from the calm, present state of centering. The intention is held from that quiet baseline.
- Form a clear intent to help. Bring to mind the person you want to help and form a simple, sincere intention — to comfort, to ease, to be of genuine help to this person.
- Let the intent be compassionate, not forceful. The stance is caring and open, not strenuous willing. Krieger frames it as a gentle, focused wish for the person’s wellbeing.
- Hold it steadily. Keep that caring focus as a quiet undercurrent throughout — Krieger emphasises maintaining the centered, intentional state for the whole interaction, not just at the start.
- Let it shape presence and (optional) touch. Allow the intention to show up in how you are with the person: unhurried, attentive, kind — and, if touch is appropriate and welcome, in a calm, gentle, reassuring contact.
- Toward yourself. The same can be turned inward: from a centered state, hold a steady, kind intention of care and comfort toward yourself, as a self-compassion practice. (This is a faithful summary of the intentional stance as taught, not a reproduction of copyrighted training material.)
Source & Lineage
Krieger codified TT in The Therapeutic Touch (1979), placing centering first and compassionate intent to help as the orientation carried through the assessment, “unruffling,” and balancing phases.
The idea that a sincere, focused intention to help matters echoes much older contemplative and caregiving traditions (loving-kindness/compassion practices; the caring core of nursing). What is distinctive — and contested — in Krieger is the further claim that this intention acts on a patient’s energy field.
Read honestly, this practice belongs with the directed-compassion / caring-presence family rather than with literal energy transmission.
Common refinements
Straining to “send” something. Drop the transmission idea; relax into caring attention and presence. Forcing adds tension and adds nothing real.
- Skipping centering. The intention is only as steady as the calm it rests on — center first.
- Treating it as distance healing. Holding kind thoughts about someone far away may comfort you; there is no evidence it acts on them. Don’t make claims about effects on the other person.
- Letting warmth replace competence. Caring intention complements good care; it never substitutes for skill, diagnosis, or treatment.