How a therapist unlocked my deepest secrets by looking at my FEET
Monday morning and a stranger is examining my bare feet, pressing, squeezing and wiggling my toes as if she is playing an intense game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
What’s more, I appear to be crying. I have no idea why — I was in quite a good mood a few minutes ago.
But that’s what happens when you walk into a room, take off your shoes and socks and let a complete stranger read your emotional and physical history through your feet.
Forget palm reading, the latest fad is foot reading. Eyes might be the window to the soul — but it turns out that the hardened orange skin on the soles of my feet is a window to everything else.
I first heard of Grinberg therapy from a friend who described it as an ‘emotional massage — a kind of physical therapy for psychological problems’.
developed by Israeli reflexologist avi Grinberg in the Eighties, it involves analysing the feet to see what is happening in the rest of the body and using a combination of deep tissue massage, breathing and talking therapy to help people work through emotions, and relieve physical ailments.
you may have heard of reflexology — a healing technique used by ancient Egyptians and the Chinese.
This involves manipulation of pressure points on the feet to relieve physical ailments on the basis that different areas of the foot correspond to an organ in the body.
The Grinberg method is not just reading the state of different organs but looks at a broader picture of a person’s emotional and physical health.
I am sceptical about therapies promising to change your life for £60 an hour. I am not someone who lines up to have my Chakras realigned or swears by the healing powers of Reiki.
But over the past 12 months, I’ve been experiencing ailments that neither a glass or two of wine, nor my GP could help me with.
Last year I wrote my first book. Hours spent at my laptop left my neck and shoulders in agony.
THEn the months of isolation and overwork led to a bout of depression, and I was unable to get out of bed for weeks. I was prescribed antidepressants and, just as I was getting out of my black hole, my dad died in october and I got a virus I couldn’t shake off.
By the start of this year I was emotionally and physically exhausted, sleeping up to 16 hours a day.
It was after a recommendation from a friend — who said the Grinberg method fixed a chronic neck pain — that I found myself at the Light Centre in London, as a therapist examined my feet.
‘I’ve become an expert in reading feet,’ says Rachel Glendinning, who has been a Grinberg practitioner for 13 years. ‘I can tell a lot by the colour of your feet, the temperature, the lines, the kind of skin you have.’
I lay back and waited for her to read my mind — or rather my bunions. ‘Would you say you are an over-thinker?’ she asked me after examining my feet.
I was not impressed by this opener. I’m a writer — of course I think too much. ‘not really,’ I lied. ‘do you find yourself re-playing situations in your head?’
‘Sometimes, but everyone does that, don’t they?’
Undeterred by my guardedness, she continued to ask questions that were so incisive they would have knocked my socks off, were they not already scrunched up in a ball in my handbag.
‘do you find that you get emotional and tired?’ she asks me. ‘yes.’
‘do you find it hard to express yourself?’ ‘yes.’
‘Would you say that you are passive, a people pleaser?’ ‘yes.’
and here was the kicker: ‘you’re a good girl.’
and when she said that it made me shiver. That’s the nickname my friends give me, after years of seeing me run around in circles trying to do everything right. But how on earth can she tell all that by looking at my toes?
‘your feet are full of water and water is connected to emotions. Emotions are good and a part of being human but too many and we can feel overwhelmed. Emotions should flow and part of how they flow is by expressing yourself.
‘The water in your body is stagnant, which means you are not expressing your emotions. That’s what’s draining you. you adapt too much to others. you look confident but you are not.’
I was stunned. She had seen right through me.
The foot analysis is just one part of the treatment. The next stage was ‘body work’ where Rachel presses deep into places of tension on the body, based on what she saw on my feet.
When she started with my shoulders it was pure agony. ‘your chest and shoulders are very contracted,’ she explained. ‘I could see that because the balls of your feet are contracted.’
Then she asked me to exaggerate the contraction in my chest.
‘Can you feel how shallow your breathing is? and how much energy you are using to keep your shoulders tight like that?’ she asked. and I could.
Then she told me to relax and open up my chest. I tried, and then stopped. Just opening up my chest and relaxing my shoulders felt terrifying.
‘If I do that someone will hurt me,’ I found myself saying.
She asked me when I first felt like this — and I remembered being a child, listening to my parents arguing and scrunching myself up into a tight ball. I found myself in tears at the memory.
‘Everything comes from our childhood — we learn patterns and repeat them but they are not useful. and because your breathing is so shallow, it’s no wonder you get tired. oxygen is our main source of energy.’
She poked around in the other areas — including my jaw. I let out a gasp, it was so sore. ‘your jaw is tight as you are always controlling what you are saying.’
It made me see that every body ache I’d had, came from the way I was holding myself — which was based on my emotions — and which tend to revolve around being scared.
I spend most of my days going through life like a rabbit in the headlights, always waiting for the worst to happen and all of that is having a huge effect on my body.
RaCHEL also pointed out that my response to stress is to retreat from the world — but this makes me feel lonely, which leads to depression. The thing I do to protect myself was making me sick, mentally and physically.
With my head spinning from the combination of massage, psychotherapy and foot reading, I felt exhausted and inexplicably sad. When I got home I fell asleep for two hours. after I woke I no longer felt sad but calm and strong.
The main point of this treatment is to teach us how to pay attention to our bodies.
My homework was to notice every time I contracted my shoulders. It made me realise that I spend every day at my computer, hunched over, braced for impact.
I have also realised the extent to which I clench my jaw, each time I notice it, I take a deep breath and try to relax my muscles.
It might sound like a small thing, but I have a feeling that just doing this is going to make a huge difference. and all because a total stranger prodded and poked at my feet.