Reflexology is a deeply relaxing yet powerful therapy applied through the massage of the hands or feet. It has been a mainstay of Chinese Traditional medicine for nearly five thousand years and centres on a belief in “the whole being found in the one” - that the whole body and its systems can be accessed through the hands with hand reflexology and the feet with plantar reflexology.

According to traditional practitioners, the body is interlaced with a series of pathways, or meridians, that convey energy throughout. This flow of energy enables us to maintain balance between our mind, body and spirit, but it is not a fixed, constant state, rather an ever-changing, ever adjusting flow of interdependent qualities. And sometimes this flow can become blocked as negative influences impact upon us. By manipulating the hands and feet, the therapist can access these pathways and remove the blockages, be they short-term feelings of pain or long-term mental and physical tensions which have accrued over time.

Of course, to a modern sensibility these meridians are nothing less than an early mapping of the human nervous system, and the massaging of the hands and feet a manipulation of the dermo-neural receptors – the “nerve endings” – that convey our sense of heat, pressure, tension and pain. Which is why this therapy - which has proved beneficial to millions of people over multiple millennia - continues to have immediate and positive effects.

And while it is primarily a physical therapy, a complement to healing not a cure-all, it was the first to posit a correlation between bodily wellness and mental wellness, a correlation which has had a direct bearing on my dealings with psychological trauma and its physical manifestations.