Like many people in the early 1970s, trauma forced me to question what life meant to me. My particular trauma at 27 was staying with two young children after the death of my first husband, David. This was during a time of expanding consciousness when events like the Vietnam War, the shooting of students in Kent State who rebelled against it, birth control and the sexual revolution that led to the flower children and the loves, they got us going. Many people began to test the waters of what we could experience: drugs, sex, and rock n ‘roll. After David’s death, I broke my protective shell and went looking for my own answers because what I knew no longer made sense; I became a seeker. I knew that I would remarry and wanted to marry an educated man, someone who liked to travel, was a domestic and although I did not put it as a requirement at the time, he was spiritually inclined.

I put Bill. He was a meditator, also a widower, had a young son close to the age of my two children, and due to his trauma after the death of his first wife, he opened up to alternative approaches to dealing with stress. He had taken the meditation and introduced it to me. I was captivated by meditation once I learned it and wanted to learn more, so I enrolled in a yoga teacher training course at the Yoga Center Toronto, where the old school of yoga teaching still existed, honoring the ancient philosophy of yoga. and instructing according to this philosophy. In those days, there was no Hot Yoga, Power Yoga or Yoga for weight loss. The philosophy of Hatha Yoga, Pranayamas, Meditation and Yoga was taught.

WORKING AT POINT OF PRESSURE AND MAGICAL RESULTS
One of my teachers, Jay Bixby was his name, he came up to me after his class and said, “Stay after class, Danielle; I want to show you some healing techniques.” At that point I was lucky enough to have menstrual cramps and Jay proceeded to work on my pressure point. He pressed along my collarbone area, his thumb went down on either side of my spine, hit points in my hip area, did spinal pressure point work on my thumbs and feet, and to my surprise my cramps disappeared. I could feel this stream of energy enter my abdominal area and dissipate the cramps. I thought, “Wow, this is better than taking a Midol pill.”

I shared this experience with Bill and we decided that I would take my first pressure point course: Vita Flex from Stanley Burroughs’s book “Healing for the Age of Enlightenment.” It was 1977 and Mr. Burroughs had long existed as a pioneer in the field of healing arts. He was way ahead of his time and had been arrested for “curing” people who threatened the medical model, but that didn’t stop him from spreading the word. His book included the famous Master Cleanse Diet, yoga poses (designed by Jay Bixby), the color therapy I love, and his wonderful Vita Flex pressure point methodologies. This is my all-time favorite book and when I find copies of it, I pick them up and pass them on to the students when they take my Advanced Lower Leg or Upper Body Circulation workshops, which include a few points Vita Flex.

Around the time I took Vita Flex, Bill’s son had been diagnosed with a curvature in his spine. We were instructed to take him to Sunny Brook Hospital for X-rays, where the femur was shown to improperly fit into the hip socket, pushing the hip outward and ending with a curved spine and 1.5 leg. cm shorter than the other. They asked us to come back in three months to see how he was doing.

I took my stepson to the Vita Flex master and asked him if he could lengthen his legs. (He was really joking because he didn’t think it was possible.) He said, “Yes, indeed, there is a point of elongation of the leg in the area of ​​the collarbone.” The teacher taught me what to do and I performed this two-minute ritual every morning before sending the children to school. I only pressed on the clavicle area, the thumb went down on both sides of his spine and I did the spine areas on the thumbs and feet. The teacher had said that it would probably take about three months to normalize the leg.

That was all I did and then we took him back to Sunny Brook as requested to get X-rays one more time and to our amazement he was completely normalized! Well, you can imagine that we were very, very impressed with this result and totally delighted for our son, as he was only ten years old and now he could continue life with a better skeletal system.

ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
That got us hooked on the healing arts and I think I took all the courses that came to town in those days. Wonderful courses with Dr. Bernard Jensen on Whole Foods and Iridology, Dr. Alzner’s Deep Muscle Reflexology, Werner Erhard’s Training Seminar known as EST, which was very disruptive in those days, and although I loved the Vita Flex method, I continued with getting certified by the Canadian Reflexology Association in the early 1980s and becoming a teacher shortly after that.

At the time, doing all of these alternative things wasn’t nearly as close to mainstream as it is today – reflexology, yoga, and vegetarianism were still nonsense and our children’s friends considered us a bit weird. Children would come home from school and I would turn upside down, or be in corpse pose, or squirm like a pretzel. Visiting children used to tell our children that there was never anything normal to eat in this house. We were really post-latent hippies raising new age kids in a very confusing age. We had no road map to follow and we were doing it as we went along. We would have visiting yogis, psychic healers, people from other planets (so they said), walk-ins, tarot card readers, and many wonderful experiences in that home, this is what our children were exposed to, lots, lots of experiences of whole people. alternative life workshops and ideas.

Because our children were exposed to reflexology at a very young age, they often asked to have their feet fixed and were used to thinking about the body traced on the feet. Once, at a doctor’s appointment, the doctor said, “Let me see your stomach,” and my only daughter started taking her shoes off. I had to hold back a few smiles.

We learned more yoga teachings from our spiritual yoga teacher, Dr. Ramamurti Mishra, who was the most charming yogi to be found. We were very fortunate to have been exposed to his teachings on Ayurvedic philosophy and personal doshas (tendencies), yoga chakra healing, and various cleansing practices.

I also continued my education while raising children and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a postgraduate diploma in human resource management. I discovered that he had a keen interest in personality theory and was qualified in the use of the MBTI® (Myers Briggs Type Indicator). I worked for a couple of companies giving workshops on the use of a behavioral model and I got more training in the personality theory of temperament. I was having a blast learning all these wonderful things for self-understanding and healing.

A COMPREHENSIVE HEALING SYSTEM WITHIN THE REACH OF OUR FINGERS
All of these learning experiences led me to put together how to think about ear, hand, and foot reflexology. I realized that with the personality temperament theory (similar to the body-mind system of Ayurveda), we can think of the human instrument as a holistic system consisting of a Mental Side that acts as the Dreamer in us and produces our Ideas; a social side that acts as a catalyst in us and generates our connections; and a physical side that acts as the builder in us providing feedback that helps manifest and consolidate ideas and connections.

Because I was lucky enough to teach all three reflexology courses to the students – Foot, Hand and Ear Reflexology – I asked them what their experiences were and how they felt the three modalities differed. It was from my students that I brought together knowledge of Ayurveda, personality temperaments, and reflexology modalities into a complete system at hand. The benefits expressed by the students fit very well with the principles of Ayurveda and we determined that by doing the ears we felt calm; when we make our hands we feel that our emotions cool down; and when doing the feet we felt that the body was stimulated. I was so excited about how this all came together and tried to translate it into The Well-Tempered Life, a book that summarized my experience with yoga, personality theory, and reflexology.

• If the mental principle is unbalanced, perform auditory reflexology to calm the mind.

• If someone is frustrated, upset, or angry, practice Hand Reflexology to cool down the emotions of the social principle.

• And if someone is tired, lethargic and bored due to too many time constraints and does not have time to rest and repair, do foot reflexology to stimulate the physical principle.

MOTHER NATURE IS THE HEALER
Like many reflexologists, we know that this is powerful work that we are doing and we are delighted when people tell us the impact of our pressure point work on their systems. I always tell my students, “You are not the healer here; your job is to push the buttons. Mother nature is the healer and each person’s body has its own intelligence. It sees fit. Your job is to simply push the buttons. “.

For me, it is better not to label an imbalance in the body, but to think more in the line of the orientation of Traditional Chinese Medicine. View the condition as an imbalance of energy and life to restore balance to the system, back to homeostasis. Either in the mental aspect with worry or anxiety; in the social aspect with frustration or anger; Or be it on the physical side of fatigue and toxins, we must strive for balance and help our clients achieve it with the tools, skills, or knowledge we have to share.

Reflexology, to me, is one of the most valuable tools we can have to help ourselves, our families, and our clients, and I am truly grateful to Jay Bixby, wherever he is, for my first natural healing experience of pressure points. It really helped shape my life. I love sharing, teaching and transmitting information and I love sharing my past and my experience with others.