a) Grounding
Thanks to the breath, to the awareness of the body here and now, the grounding allows you to be fully present to what is going to happen, to what the therapist is going to feel, to what the client is ready to receive.
You can read a lot of books on meditation and foot reflexology. In both cases, only practice will allow you to experiment and understand in your flesh what being grounded means, or to be really in touch with your sensations, and not with the projection that you have of this. that should be a feeling.
It is like a basic calibration for therapist and client to exchange (whether by speech or touch).
This can go through the posture which, for the reflexologist as for the meditator, consists of being grounded in your pelvis, to be ready to give and to receive. Be welcoming and listening. A listening not only centered on the word but also on physical sensations, emotions, thoughts.
b) Impermanence
Everything changes, everything moves, nothing is fixed, nothing is frozen. Extremely uncomfortable as a thought, but so true.
No need to try to redo, or relive the treatment from the last time, the feeling after the last meditation, it has no interest and above all it will never happen when sometimes the desire is there to regain power or density. of a session, to seize a pleasant moment, to reject an unpleasant moment.
To be with what is, now. Observe the changing side of sensations, emotions.
It’s so simple and so difficult. Nothing to do in particular and yet so many thoughts, automatisms come to get in the way.
c) Rhythm, Tempo, Time
During the treatment but also outside the practice, it is important to respect the client’s rhythm. The time for a process to take place, for the body and the mind to agree to let go.
For the meditator and for the therapist, there is also an incompressible time, necessary to appropriate one’s sensations, to find one’s body, to go down a little more in oneself, to look at the link with others.
d) Welcoming
Accept the pleasant as well as the unpleasant.
A foot reflexology treatment is not only pleasant, areas can hurt and that is part of the experience.
Being connected to your body while giving a treatment or while receiving it is just as important, to allow the body to let go and express itself.
Welcoming sensations allows us to cross them and see what is hidden behind them.
“The therapist’s impulse of compassion and suffering prevents the client from moving. Welcoming the other, “recognizing him” allows him to put words and move”.
P. Malvarosa
e) Awareness
Do we not say that “Awareness is the natural prayer of the soul” (N. Malbranche)?
Awareness allows you to be with yourself and to be with the other, in feelings, in listening and welcoming without trying to appear, to anticipate or to judge.
Awareness to what is happening moment by moment allows the patient to be heard, listened to and even understood, without the need for a response. This allows you to gently deposit what needs to be deposited.
It is not a question of paying attention to one’s thoughts and letting oneself be carried away by them, but of coming back to the body, to bodily sensations, to feel what is happening there, to be in contact with them to give way to the body, to intuition, to feelings.
f) Confidence
Without trust there is nothing. Confidence in your therapist, in your reflexology trainers, in your meditation instructor and in yourself…
Maybe he should have started there, with self-confidence. Meditation and training in foot reflexology have both helped me to explore this rather fragile self-confidence at the start.
Meditation, because I was able to realize this deficiency and its depth. Thanks to meditation, I was also able to welcome violently at first, a lot of violence towards myself, then little by little with kindness.
Training also played a key role. The group and the exchange of words in the group or even in Dance Ritual Therapy allowed me to put my word and therefore to ask myself and my words and little by little to have more confidence in my words and in me.
Daring to put your words/ills in a circle of trust allows you to see the reaction of others, to realize the fears in which I have locked myself up and to deconstruct them little by little.
It takes time… I am still on this path!
g) Be with silence
Meditation training teaches us to be in silence, to be present to the other while being in silence. In particular the 8-week course I did on conscious dialogue which invites you to listen to the other in silence, without chasing them, without giving their opinion. Just be there and listen. It is an extremely difficult exercise to trust what emerges, not to anticipate, to rush the answers that we could make but to be there in listening to the other.
This listening should be the same for me when I am in a reflexology session. It is a very demanding and difficult listening but which leaves all the room to the other. Then, once he has finished his speech, see what emerges in us, in our hands but also in our body and as speech.
The place left to intuition is all the greater.
h) Intuition
Meditation training teaches us to be in silence, to be present to the other while being in silence. In particular the 8-week course I did on conscious dialogue which invites you to listen to the other in silence, without chasing them, without giving their opinion. Just be there and listen. It is an extremely difficult exercise to trust what emerges, not to anticipate, to rush the answers that we could make but to be there in listening to the other.
This listening should be the same for me when I am in a reflexology session. It is a very demanding and difficult listening but which leaves all the room to the other. Then, once he has finished his speech, see what emerges in us, in our hands but also in our body and as speech.
The place left to intuition is all the greater.
These two practices are complementary for me, one allows you to see life with another pair of glasses, the other allows you to free the body from psychic blockage thanks to the complementarity of touch and speech in therapeutic work.
