Your body is amazing and is detoxing 365 days a year, completely on its own, through the organs of elimination such as the liver, kidneys, bladder, intestines, lungs and skin. Waste and metabolic by-products of being alive are removed from our body without us needing to think about it, but it is so much better to have an efficient eliminatory processes than have these waste products staying in the body for too long. So how does Reflexology help to remove toxins, as is so often claimed?
For people that are in a sympathetic nervous state (stressed) most of the time, these eliminatory systems slow down and become sluggish. (fight/flight turns off digestive and urinary outputs dramatically). Our nervous systems have barely altered since we were hunter gatherers and therefore we tend to live in this modern world in a very stressed state, by being so far removed from our natural origins and way of living. That’s without even considering acutely stressful situations we all deal with from time to time, as well as chronic low level stress that may be present.
When our body is in a parasympathetic nervous state, elimination is improved (rest/digest) because we have more activity in digestive and urinary systems.
Reflexology = Relaxation = Parasympathetic state = better elimination of ‘waste products’.
Another way reflexology may help is through the founding belief in the reflexology – that each ‘reflex area’ on the foot is a system of nerve endings that correspond to an organ, gland or other part of the body (in the eliminatory system, for example). Reflexology studies (using Functional MRI technology) have shown that when a reflex area is worked, there is increased blood flow in the region of the brain related to the body part the reflex corresponds to.
Reflexology also boosts systems of circulation and can enhance circulation throughout the body. This circulation of course can be described in other ways going back to the very oldest roots of reflexology, being in Chinese medicine, those of “Qi’ and the good flow of life force energy in the whole body.
There are many ways to describe and try to define how it works, an endlessly fascinating topic.
