health

fionabeth13

Reflexology Reflections

Feet in the North Sea at Herne Bay last week (the sea was about 30cm away and lapping, freezing, over my toes).

It will be fifteen years this summer since I completed my reflexology training. I studied in London, and travelled up for weekend training sessions to Covent Garden. The training took a year, and during the week, when I wasn’t at my day job as a school secretary, or doing mum things, I’d study the anatomy and physiology book we had to complete, and practice sections of the treatment on willing friends and family.

I came to reflexology looking for greater wellbeing for myself and for a close relative. We had both been dealing with indifferent health, and some major complications, for some time. A friend had offered me a few treatments and I found them incredibly effective. My migraines reduced in severity and my overall levels of energy increased.

Over the years I have been fortunate to share this therapy with people at all stages of life, those seeking relief from stressful workloads, living with chronic illness, undergoing treatment for cancer and seeking help with fertility.

The reflexology treatment itself is gentle, non-invasive and seems to bring the benefits of many complementary therapies, such as reduced stress and improved sleep. For some people having treatment on their feet is not comfortable or appropriate, and in these cases treatment can be carried out on their hands instead.

I have often wondered at the impact reflexology seems to have. But this isn’t some kind of magic. When people begin to make time for their own health, whether that is booking a reflexology or reiki treatment, or beginning to listen to their body’s wisdom, or making positive changes in lifestyle, then a healing journey begins.

Tomorrow I start a new chapter in my hometown, I have a cosy room to work from in the centre of town, and I’m looking forward to sharing the gift of reflexology (and reiki) with people in this area. I’m excited to see how these therapies can support people here on their journeys to greater wellbeing.

fionabeth13

Stopping and Resting

I have been reconnecting to mindfulness practise in the past few weeks. I’m a student of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and his teachings have, over the past seven years or so, literally saved my life.

But last year I got myself into a pickle. I really, really wanted to dive into belonging to the community of Plum Village

I had studied with their courses in the UK for several years, joined a sangha (online, because travelling can be a challenge) and begun a regular practise of mindful breathing and walking.

But I needed that extra thing, to belong, to receive the Five Mindfulness Trainings, to become One of Us.

Maybe this has its roots in a lifelong feeling of being Other, or outside, maybe in not being allowed to join the popular kids’ games at school, maybe in my astrology or neurodiversity or any one of a hundred other psychological gifts that makes up the unique brain of a human creature.

Whatever it was, the deep desire, the heartfelt aspiration, had been with me for a number of years. I prepared as best I could, I booked onto a retreat where the ceremony to receive the trainings would be offered. I bought appropriate luggage for a somewhat disabled person to carry on a long-ish solo journey. I planned the travel.

In the week before the retreat my symptoms started to flare. I ignored them. I was going. This was my moment. But, as anyone living with long-term health needs knows, when the body knows, it knows.

By the day of the retreat I was really not feeling my best, I could not walk effectively, and was lost as to how I would make a journey of several hundred miles by train, with luggage, alone, to participate. In that moment of fear and loss I sent my apologies. I was angry that my body had (again) “let me down”. I felt that there had been insurmountable obstacles to my participating and belonging, and I was hurt and sad. The hurt and sadness was so deep I stopped my practise, maybe this was just not for me, and it was time to let go.

I don’t know how many times this has to happen before I really listen. I have a sense that Thay would smile at me, and very gently remind me that I was too attached to the idea of the Mindfulness Trainings. That standing up in a ceremony is not what makes a practitioner. What makes a practitioner is, well, practise. That the journey is just that, a journey, not a destination. That we practise every moment we are alive, not just in retreats or sanghas or even on our cushion.

So I am beginning again, smiling at my own rules which tie me in knots (or is that nots) and ever so gently breathing into the gift of stopping and resting.

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in, breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

Breathing in, I allow my body to stop, breathing out I allow my mind to rest.