How was your Valentine week-end? Love-filled? Everything you were hoping for? OR sad and disappointing?? If your expectations were far from being met you are not alone!!! So many women told me the same thing. Even if they are in relationships they confided they felt disconnected. It can feel so lonely when you desperately want deeply bonded connection and it’s not happening.

So today I want to share with you the key to a love life full of passion and soul-to-soul connection. It’s powerful. It’s sacred. It opens the gateway to intimacy.

Wanna know what it is…?

It’s actually quite simple…

TOUCH….absolutely key to feeling connected. It engages the senses God gave us for our emotional and physical well-being and pleasure, and is a powerful way to express what we cannot say. Yet still, we are a touch-starved society.

Don’t get me wrong; women love to hear the words, “I love you”, but touching launches relationships into intimacy by directly accessing the emotional self. Words are processed in the thinking part of the brain, while touch is processed by the emotional centers.

Endorphins, released by touching your lover or your own beautiful body, flow through the body creating a sense of caring and pleasure while calming daily stress.

A worldwide study done in the 1960s monitored the number of touches couples shared at coffeehouses around the world. The results reveal the drastic cultural differences we apply to skin-on-skin contact. Puerto Ricans got the prize-touching 180 times an hour, while Americans adhered to a strict diet touching only twice within an hour.

Thus began some serious research on the importance of touch, leading to the discovery that the amount of skin-to-skin contact in our lives plays a crucial role in our happiness and vitality. The act of touching influences our ability to form close relationships with other people, to deal with stress and pain, and even to fight off disease. The hunger for touch may manifest as depression, anxiety, irritability, boredom, pain, moodiness as well as make you feel isolated, separate and lonely.

So many women complain that their relationships lack intimacy-much of it arguably because of our touch barriers. We are born with an intense hunger for contact. The emotional development of babies depends on tons of touching and as adults we have a strong need to be held in someone’s arms, to hold hands, to be cuddled and caressed. Yet, most people don’t touch as often as they would like-afraid of being rejected as being needy or vulnerable, they cover their need for intimacy with work, activities, TV, food, drugs and alcohol.

If you want intimacy, it’s time to break the touch barriers! And the first step to developing a successful, intimate relationship with your partner is to first build intimacy with yourself. Exploring every inch of your body will help you get to know what you like and what makes you feel good. Once you’ve got this down, you can reach out to your partner with confidence to create the closeness you crave.

With all these fantastic reasons to bring touch into relationships let’s take a look at 7 ways you can incorporate touch into your life.

1. Kissing: A 20-second kiss will raise his testosterone levels and make you feel closer.
2. Moisturize head-to-toe: Applying lotion to your body guarantees that all of your skin will be touched and rubbed. For an added calming effect, use an aromatherapy lotion scented with lavender.
3. Yoga: This popular fitness trend offers many of the benefits of touch because the poses involve rubbing limb against limb. Some Iyengar yoga classes also include a partnered practice-a great way to get your RDA of touching.
4. Hugging: Full-body hugging increases closeness, connection and safety.
5. Massage: The shoulders, hands and feet create an emotional release when touched. New York-based sex therapist Mildred Witkin suggests couples should practice touching in a way that is not explicitly sexual to keep intimacy and playfulness alive.
6. Two to Tango: Dance classes are a great way to meet new people, and have your hand and waist held all evening long. Contact your local YMCA or dance studio for schedules.
7. Back Rubs: Studies show that a daily back rub drastically reduces anxiety and creates positive changes in attitude.

Whether you are in a relationship or not, take the time to nurture yourself or your partner with some loving touch – it’s your gateway to intimacy, providing a powerful, solid message of care, support, acknowledgment, and love.