Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/885423
A Path of Compassion Since her early teens, Krieger has been interested in healing. "I think probably it was very much how your readers come to know their own ability in massage and bodywork. As a child, and as an adolescent in particular, when someone had a problem, my hands would automatically go to the place they hurt. Probably the first person I worked on was my mother, who had problems with her knees. My initial urge to help people came from my hands." And those hands have continued to paint the broad brush of her work ever since. Compassion, which is fundamental to the Therapeutic Touch modality she created, was most likely learned as a child. "I was very sick as a kid and almost died a couple of times." Underweight, bedridden, and often without family by her side, she learned about caring and compassion from those who attended to her during her frequent hospital stays. And it was there that she also found her motivation to be well. "From the hospital window I could see the school kids running around outside; I was determined to run around, too. My motivation was to be like them." And she met her goal. "I turned out to be a pretty good track star, especially in long distance; nobody could ever catch me." "In the Meantime, There Were My Hands …" Krieger once told People magazine, "Touching permeates almost every phase of nursing. I believe in my hands before anything else." Knowing that she wanted to be involved in helping and healing people, Krieger says her original career choice was physical therapy. But, without the money to go to college, Temple University's offer of two years college credit for those who enrolled in the nursing program was how Krieger planned her segue into a physical therapy path. "However, I wasn't into nursing more than six weeks before I realized it was what I really wanted to do." Her new path led her to earn her master's degree and doctorate in nursing and eventually to teach at New York University (NYU) School of Nursing, where she was a professor until her retirement in 1997. It was during this journey that Krieger would cross paths with the woman who would ultimately change her life. Dee and Dora—The Nurse and the Clairvoyant Krieger speaks lovingly of her Therapeutic Touch partner, Dora Kunz, who passed in 1999. "I don't know anybody who wasn't her friend. She was absolutely fascinating." A world traveler, a friend to Nobel Peace Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners, and a person unique unto herself, Kunz became the teacher, and Krieger became the student. Krieger describes her partner as a "world-class clairvoyant, the fifth generation in her family to have the ability, and a woman of tremendous compassion." She met her mentor at a meditation lecture Kunz was holding. Intrigued by the presenter and the material, Krieger pondered how she could determine whether what Kunz was saying was legitimate. "The best way to know was to apply what she's suggesting to my life, and then know how my life changes. It was probably the best way I could learn at that time. So, I became her student." Over time, part of her role as student was to drive Kunz to the various medical conferences and lectures Kunz attended, largely because no one else would ("I was the only one willing to drive her, because she would see things on the road no one else could," Krieger says, making the experience harrowing, to say the least). Krieger says it was at one of these conferences, where Kunz was brought in to explain subtle energy, 76 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k n o v e m b e r / d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7 "Compassion is a power with its own sphere of influence; a realm engaged by fine energy patterns that play out as behaviors, such as aspiration, empathy, and the fulfillment of a need to heal … Compassion is a highly human—and humane—function." Dolores Krieger, keynote address, Therapeutic Touch International Association's Fourth International Congress, April 2017 Dolores Krieger (left) and Dora Kunz, co-developers of Therapeutic Touch, in their earlier years. For more information, go to www.therapeutictouch.org.