Four Years of Freedom and a Wine Situation That Got Away From Me
A few weeks ago I had what we in the biz call A Big Night. I was three quarters into a bottle of prosecco, minding my own business, when an unexpected guest arrived on my doorstep with another bottle of wine. And listen. What do you do. You open it. You celebrate the surprise. You have the kind of Thursday night that starts as a quiet one and ends as a story. A lot of wine was consumed. The hangover was real, significant, and entirely deserved.
This was then followed, because I am who I am, by a day of day drinking. In my defence, it was Good Friday, I was celebrating four years of freedom, and that combination is basically a cultural obligation. I did not eat red meat. I feel this matters. I was chaotic but I had principles.
So by Saturday morning I woke up surprisingly clear-headed, which anyone who has ever had a two-day wine situation will tell you is suspicious and not to be trusted. My body had been through it. I knew what I needed. Not water, not toast, not lying on the couch watching something comforting. I needed reflexology.
What Your Feet Know That You Haven’t Told Anyone
I get reflexology every other week. This is not a new or experimental thing for me. It is a ritual, in the same category as my nail appointments and my red light therapy and my general commitment to taking up space with self care in ways that occasionally confuse people who don’t know me. Two weeks ago I had severe inflammation flaring through my body. Reflexology. Feeling sad for no articulable reason? Reflexology. Feeling genuinely great and want to stay that way? Reflexology. It is the answer to a remarkable number of questions.
The principle is this. Every organ, system, and structure in your body has a corresponding pressure point on your feet, hands, and lower legs. When a reflexologist works those points, they’re communicating directly with the connected system. Stimulating circulation. Encouraging drainage. Prompting your body to do the thing it’s been trying to do but hasn’t had the support for. It sounds esoteric until you’re lying there and someone presses a spot on your foot and you feel it somewhere completely unrelated, and then it doesn’t sound esoteric at all. It sounds like your body has been waiting for someone to pay attention.
For me, reflexology has become the thing I reach for when my body is clearly trying to say something and I want to actually listen. Which brings me to Saturday morning, two days into a wine situation, and the most quietly extraordinary reflexology session I have ever had.
She Knew. She Just Knew.
I sank into the big cosy leather chair, reclined, and said nothing about the week. Nothing about the prosecco Friday or the Good Friday freedom celebration or the earache that had woken me up in the night, or the anxiety that had kept me lying there staring at the ceiling for hours after. I said nothing, because sometimes you just want to sit back and let someone else figure it out.
She started working and I noticed, fairly quickly, that she was focusing on areas she doesn’t usually spend much time on. The outsides of my calves. Specific points along my ankles and the soles of my feet that she was pressing with a kind of quiet deliberate intention. So I did what any person with a phone and an information compulsion does. I sat there with my eyes half closed, Googled the pressure points she was working, and tried not to look like I was doing homework during my own treatment.
Kidneys. Liver. Detoxification pathways. Every single point she was prioritising corresponded to the organs that had been working the hardest for the past forty-eight hours. I had told her nothing. She had read it directly from my body, from my feet and my legs, and she had simply gone to work. I stared at nothing in particular and felt something between gratitude and being slightly caught out, which is a very specific emotional combination.
The Ear Thing and the Anxiety Thing
Then she moved to a cluster of points I didn’t immediately recognise and I went back to Google. Pressure points corresponding to the ear. Which was fascinating, because I had been woken the previous night by an earache, specifically the kind that comes from inflammation moving through the body and finding somewhere inconvenient to settle. I hadn’t mentioned it. She hadn’t asked. She had simply found it through my feet and was addressing it, quietly and methodically, the way she addresses everything.
After the ear points she shifted again, and this time I didn’t need to Google it. I knew from the location and from the way my nervous system responded with a slow, almost reluctant release. Anxiety. She was working on the anxiety. The hours of lying awake, the tight chest, the busy brain that wouldn’t let me rest despite being genuinely exhausted. All of that had left a trace on my body that she could read and respond to without a single word from me.
I sat reclined in that big leather chair, the sounds of the Westfield drifting around me, and thought about how extraordinary it is that our bodies hold this much information. That a skilled practitioner can put their hands on your feet and know, with quiet accuracy, what you’ve been through. That you don’t have to explain yourself. That your body has already told the story and someone else is just reading it back to you in the form of care.
The Soft Smile at the End
When the session finished, she did something no reflexologist has ever done to me before. She looked at me with a soft smile and said she hoped I felt better soon. Not the standard pleasant wrap-up. Not the professional warmth of someone closing out a booking. Something genuinely kind. Something that said, I know, and you’re going to be alright.
This woman had spent forty minutes reading the story of my week through my feet, working on my liver and my kidneys and my inflamed ear and my sleepless anxious night, and at the end she sent me off with the kind of warmth that you don’t expect from someone who technically just met your feet. I eased myself out of the chair slowly, the way you do when your body has just been deeply attended to and you’re not quite ready to reintroduce normal speed to the situation.
I walked, quietly and slowly, to get my post-reflexology treat. A grapefruit green tea, no sugar because hydration is essential after a session. And then I walked home. Not quickly. Not with a destination energy. Just gently, in my own body, in the kind of unhurried way that only happens when something has genuinely shifted. My body felt different. Not fixed, because two days of wine is not a thing that gets fixed in forty minutes. But heard. Attended to. Like someone had looked at the full situation and said, right, let’s help.
Why You Should Be Getting It Too
Reflexology is not a luxury. I know it gets filed under treat or indulgence in the same category as a facial or a massage, and while there’s nothing wrong with treating yourself, reducing reflexology to that undersells it significantly. It is maintenance. It is the thing that catches what your body is carrying before it becomes something louder and harder to ignore.
I’ve used it for inflammation, for hormonal chaos, for the kind of low-grade emotional weight that doesn’t have a specific cause but sits in your body regardless. I’ve eased myself out of that leather chair after sessions feeling like something has been untangled, not in a woo way, in a very physical, measurable, my shoulders are in a different position than they were forty minutes ago kind of way. Your body is always communicating. Reflexology is just someone who speaks the language fluently.
Find a good one. Go regularly. Say nothing and see what she finds. And if she ends your session with a soft smile and a genuine hope that you feel better soon, know that your feet have been talking, and you are in very good hands.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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