The bliss of the foot massage
A small letter on a small specific bodywork modality — the dedicated foot massage — and on why this most overlooked of bodywork practices has earned a small permanent place in my month.
Dear reader,
Once a month, on a Wednesday evening, I take a small tram across the city to a small studio near the harbour where the practitioner specialises in foot massage. The session is sixty minutes. The cost is fifty-five euros. The practitioner is a Thai-trained reflexologist who has been working out of the same small space for about eleven years, and the small evening appointment with him has, in the four years I have been seeing him, become one of the small reliable structures of the month.
Foot massage is, in my opinion, the most overlooked of bodywork modalities. The full body massage is, of course, more obviously useful — the larger surface area, the deeper muscles, the more comprehensive attention. But the feet, which carry the weight of the body for most of the waking hours of a life, almost never receive any dedicated attention, and the hour spent on them once a month produces a small specific kind of bliss that the full body massage cannot quite reproduce.
What the hour contains
The first ten minutes is a warm foot bath — about thirty-eight degrees, with a small amount of Epsom salts and a few drops of lavender. The feet, after the bath, are warm and the skin is soft. The next forty-five minutes is the slow, attentive, deeply specific work of the foot massage itself. Every small bone of the foot. Every small muscle. The arches, the heels, the small spaces between the toes, the small specific reflex points that the practitioner has, over years, mapped onto the rest of the body.
The last five minutes is the small slow re-entry. The feet are wrapped in a warm towel. I sit for a moment with my eyes closed, letting the body integrate what the hour has done. Then I put my socks and shoes back on and walk to the tram in a small different version of my body than the one that had arrived an hour earlier.
What dedicated foot work does
Several things. The feet themselves, having been worked on, feel different for the next two or three days — lighter, more supple, more willing. The body above the feet, however, also feels different, in a way that the wellness literature on reflexology has tried to explain and that I do not need to fully understand to know is real. The small organs of the abdomen seem to function slightly better. The breath drops slightly. The whole body, over the next several days, runs at a slightly better baseline.
I am, in general, skeptical of reflexology's larger claims. I am, also, no longer skeptical that the dedicated hour of foot work produces effects that propagate beyond the feet themselves. The mechanism may be reflexology. It may be the simple parasympathetic effect of an hour of sustained gentle attention on a part of the body that almost never gets sustained gentle attention. The cause matters less to me than the result.
What I would recommend
If you have not had a dedicated foot massage in some time, look for a small studio in your area that does this specifically. The cost is usually less than a full body massage. The duration is usually an hour or so. The cumulative effect, across years of monthly sessions, has been, in my own experience, one of the small disproportionately rewarding investments in bodywork that I have made.
Until next month,
M.