Reflexology is immensely important to support women through menopause; here's how!

Watch as Yvonne Lockhart, Reflexology Tutor at the Cotswold Academy talks us through the adaptions that can be made to our reflexology routines to support our clients through the many and varied symptoms associated with the menopause.

For this demonstration we will be starting with the warmup techniques, then moving into the respiratory system and into the endocrine system. Once we have covered the endocrine system we will move onto the linking techniques.

The linking techniques are how we can take the individual symptoms, such as brain fog, and we can engage that in the reflexology treatment with these incredible balancing techniques. To skip straight to the linking techniques simply go to 12minutes in the video tutorial. 

You may be new to reflexology or be experienced and just looking for something a little more specific around supporting women through menopause.

So lets just take some time to think about the menopause for our clients. Whether our clients are in perimenopause, going through menopause or are post menopausal then it is hormones that are leading the body through a different stage of life. These hormones will fluctuate and can be very erratic and what we are aiming to achieve through reflexology is to balance and smooth the release of those hormones. We can’t stop the process obviously, but we can help to balance the person and help regulate the hormones so it’s not such a bumpy ride!

Support is really important for any woman going through the menopause. The journey is also going to be different for every person. So reflexology can be a vital support for women going through this change in their lives. They may be holding different tensions and anxieties, hormones may be fluctuating in varying areas, we have the more common ones like hot flushes, frustration anger anxiety, tiredness, and brain fog. You also have the fact that your skin won’t be supported as well as you get a drop in collagen. So your client could have all these things going on with their body and it’s all a natural process and we want to make it a slightly more smooth ride whilst providing a space where they feel supported, heard and promotes relaxation for them.

What we are sharing here are some techniques to help keep the hormones balanced and then also follow up with some techniques for linking. If you haven’t done linking before it’s a really powerful balancing technique. When you are doing the linking for menopause the focus is on the endocrine system but using the endocrine system to link with other parts of the body, whether that be muscular, skeletal, sleep, acne, muscular tension, headaches, brain fog, even digestive issues. Menopause is something that can affect the body as a whole. So for each point what the reflexology will do is balance it and support and give more energy, help to calm the parasympathetic nervous system which is a huge part of reflexology. Then what your client will receive is a much calmer state of mind, calmer body. So when the body is organising these hormones it has a much calmer space and when our bodies are more relaxed and have better wellbeing all of our structures and systems are going to work more harmoniously with hormones able to communicate better.

With these changes don’t feel you have to change the way you work; your routine remains the same. You will do your usual warm up system, work through the respiratory system, endocrine system, skeletal system, muscular system, digestive system. Then at the end you will refocus any points that have shown up. The difference here is that we are going to keep going back to the endocrine system between each other system. Alternatively, if you usually work from the top of the foot down the foot in each of those stages where you’ve got your transverse zones, each time you’ve worked one of those zones go back and you’re going to repeat the endocrine system. This will mean you are covering the endocrine system 5 to 8 times giving it a real focus for menopausal clients.