Liu Wai Sang


Intelligent Reflexology

A System to Continue
The Bipedal Success
With Lesser Stress

Reflexology is a system of applying pressure or massage on the different reflexes of the body in order to improve health. Intelligent Reflexology is a very gentle and soft coordinating work on and of the bodily reflexes, that can promote personal adaptability to unfavourable sudden or daily changes of the external and internal environment. Being bipedal makes the humans the most intelligent creatures on earth but also burdens them with many undesirable side effects. One of these effects is a variety of adverse kinds of stress, which in this case, should be resolved to a certain extent by an optimal intelligent way. Around eight to six millions years ago, the world underwent a drastic environmental change - grassland took the place of forest. A vast number of forest animals including tree apes, being unable to adapt to such a change, disappeared. New species suited to living on grassland started to emerge and multiply.

Recent evidence suggests that two-legged ape-like creatures began to appear in the African savannah about three million years ago. Actually these ape-like creatures were not physically fast and strong enough to dwell safely among other carnivorous animals with far more speed and strength. Fortunately, they could survive well because they could use their front feet as hands to directly obtain or indirectly make the tools to get more food and better defence. That in turn helped them to develop a bigger brain and to eventually evolve to become the human ancestor.

On the other hand, walking upright also has its disadvantages: the anatomy and physiology of the whole body need to remodel to cope with the tremendous increase of vertical stress along the spine and the lower limbs. Now there are only two feet instead of four to carry the weight of the whole body. On top of this, the remaining two feet also need to constantly maintain the dynamic equilibrium of the body so that the upper body, especially the arms and hands, can move and work with more freedom. This means all the reflexes of the body also need to closely follow such a radical change in the way of coordination. This change obviously has a tendency of allowing the reflexes of the feet to play an important role in maintaining the equilibrium of the body. After all, upright walking involves only one foot contacting the ground at one time. This explains why many bipedal patterns of locomotion and activity tend to destabilise and injure the body more than quadrupedal ones.

Fortunately, through millions of years of human development, the feet have become able to store and reflect an enormous amount of evolutionary knowledge and wisdom which, when applied properly, can turn bipedalism into an asset instead of a liability for the equilibrium of the body.

Modern humans have become much more intelligent but less natural than ever before. They clear away more and more parts of their green environment and replace them with concrete jungles and paved plains so they can adopt an easier and more convenient way of living and working. Some of them become so advanced in technological development that they can invent and make use of complicated machines, greatly reducing their physical participation and their effort in manual labour and foot displacement. Such a trend often leads to deprivation of sufficient practice of their external bodily reflexes, especially those of their feet. Instead, they often overexert internally, specifically their cranial and visceral reflexes, producing an imbalanced strain on the body. Those who are unable to find time and ways to avert this, can suffer from severe internal stress. Normally, many kinds of stress, when not too severe, can be alleviated by regularly doing certain modes of bipedal exercise. After all, it is one of the most natural and automatic ways for humans, to convert the excessive tension in their upper body downwards, by means of gravity, into useful potential or kinetic energy - if they can take enough part in bipedal activity. However, many modern humans cannot gain adequate reduction in their stress level even if they work very hard. This deficit can be due to many reasons. Two main reasons are detailed below.

Firstly, modern humans mostly take part in bipedal activity with their shoes on and on level ground, instead of on bare feet and on uneven paths in the countryside. Even with their shoes off, they are often unable to reclaim the proper use of the intrinsic muscles of their feet after a long period or tradition of constantly wearing shoes. Should they fail to use in a proper way these intrinsic muscles, a group of small muscles that work only on joints of the foot, then they will also fail to make the full use of the inherited bipedal evolutionary knowledge and wisdom from their distant ancestors, to deal more effectively with daily stress.

Secondly, many modes of modern humans bipedal exercise are not sufficiently directed towards their feet, unknowingly diverting too much of their exercise towards their hands. Also do they tend to include too many competitive elements instead of pure relaxation in their bipedal activity. Again, these trends are not so effective in dealing with daily stress. For the above reasons, a Foot School is set up so as to improve the efficiency of dealing with daily stress by means of a series of specially designed programmes of bipedal exercise. This series of programmes was finally formulated after many evaluative, trial and selective processes of the various ancient and modern patterns of bipedal activity. As a result, this carefully formulated series consists of many practical patterns, mostly derived from or inspired by the most reliable old and present ones. This series can greatly promote the intelligence of the reflexes of the feet in coordinating or balancing off the overstraining of the reflexes of the rest of the body in the most relaxing way.

This Foot School is also realistic in keeping touch with current trends of bipedal activity. Seeing that most people do not like to take off their shoes when exercising, all the programs designated to activate the intrinsic muscles of the feet still work even with shoes on, provided the shoes are wide enough not to cause too much inhibition to the movements of the toes. Anyway, the programmes of this Foot School are especially suitable for working people from different walks of life. This is because working people mostly work with their shoes on and many suffer from stress, and one of the most important goals of this Foot School is to succeed in educating participants to be able to timely use the reflexes of the feet to intelligently initiate relaxation of the whole body during work.

download the Foot Education flyer
Introductory evening
Thursday October 19, 2006 19:00

The enlargement of the brain, especially the neocortex, allows humans to use their hands to make skilful movements. Although the human hand has a shape quite similar to that of other apes, it has a very flexible thumb which can carry out much more dexterous grip in comparison. It is also due to the fine and precise gripping capacity of the human hand that it can carry out complex healing work like reflexology.

Recently, neuroscientists have discovered a group of neurons located in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain that have a reflective property. These nerve cells are called mirror neurons, not because they activate when a goal action is carried out, but because they activate in the same pattern when watching others perform the same task. For instance, whether a person grasps an object or just watches another person perform the same action, a certain number of mirror neurons will activate equally. Furthermore, this mirror neurons system can still maintain the same activity of a complete event should half or the last part of the performance being watched, be obscured. The existence of an effective mirror neurons system greatly contributes to the development of a sophisticated system of mind matching for the humans. With the system of mind matching, a human can learn to read the mind of another and become empathic. An empathic human can easily understand and aptly respond to the intentional action or gestures of another, and hence can also learn from the others by means of imitation. It is also through this empathic quality that a human can easily learn to develop a natural intelligence for healing oneself and others. The success of the bipedal story depends on the existence of many systems of human intelligence. Conversely, there will be a downfall or plenty of deficits to this successful story if there is a lack of good and lasting balance and coordination of the many systems, either on an individual or on a holistic level.

There are three main systems of human intelligence: emotional, rational and reflective. Whenever there is an excess or deficiency and disorder in the application of intelligence within one system that cannot be adjusted early enough, stress will not only arise within this one system, but it can also pass over to another system or the rest. The more severe the stress and the more systems are under stress, the more difficult to adjust. For instance, overuse of mental intelligence like working and concentrating too long on the computer, can not only give stress to the mind, but also stress to the reflexes of the neck, back, hands and feet, so that finally even the reflexes of these parts of the body will succumb by losing the natural intelligent power to heal themselves.

Healing, especially healing the others, requires empathic intelligence. All kinds of healing involve the activity of empathic intelligence, and the first engagement of such activity is the activation of the mirror neurons system. Empathic intelligence is both a reflective and kind property of the humans that often functions very spontaneously and naturally. Generally, the higher the empathic intelligence, the better is the healing result, especially healing by means of reflexology, which deals with reflective care.

Reflexology has been discovered and practiced for more than two thousand years, yet most reflexologists, even the present ones, concentrate their work on the feet and not so often on the hands, ears, face and other areas of the body. According to the AcuTouch School, there are many other reflexes systems which can be approached with equal ease and effectiveness. The systems of the foot, hand and face are called the general reflexes systems by the AcuTouch School and those of the area around the nose, eye and ear are called the special reflexes systems. Since all the intentional actions involve to a certain extent all the reflexes systems of the body through the mirror neurons system, this latter system can also be called (by the AcuTouch School) the stem reflective system or reflective neurons system beside empathic neurons system. In this respect, the most important part of the work of reflexology adopted by the AcuTouch School is to revive and improve the reflective intelligence of all the reflexes systems with the mirror neurons system as the main organising centre. This work can be done effectively on any area of the body, not just the foot, as long as the activated reflective information can reach the mirror neurons system and feed back and forth accordingly to the rest of all the reflexes systems.

It is no wonder that the reflexology course presented by the AcuTouch School is called Touch Reflexology. The 'Touch' here is actually an abbreviation for In Touch. It is so called not only because the effectiveness of this work is known to depend on its soft and gentle way of touching the reflexes, instead of applying very strong pressure like most current schools of reflexology, but also because the work places empathy in its first place. Very often, a soft and gentle contact, a light touch on the reflexes, with deep understanding, can always produce a far better reflective result than a strong and sharp contact, a hard press.

On the whole, Touch Reflexology can be said to be revolutionary on many fronts. The following are some of them:

  1. The work thrives on empathy and sensitive and sensible touch - often only just a few grammes of force is sufficient.
  2. Many new reflective points and areas discovered by the AcuTouch School are included in this work.
  3. Since the work is done through gentle touch instead of strong pressure, it is privileged to obtain a permit to contact a much wider range of reflexes including those that are currently considered to be sensitive.
  4. The work follows an Integrated Reflexes System developed by the AcuTouch School. In this system, the mirror neurons system is the centre for initial organisation of all the different systems of reflexes.
  5. Any touch can only be counted as real Reflexological Touch if it can secure an effect which is not local but is far enough to reach the rest of the Integrated Reflexes System through the mirror neurons and the motor-sensory system.
  6. The work places great emphasis on improving and regulating the balance and coordination of the intelligence of the different systems of reflexes in order to build up a stronger Integrated Reflexes System with a higher level of intelligence for healing its own and other systems.
  7. To recover the hidden intelligence within each system of reflexes and to further promote it, the method of touch varies according to the anatomy and physiology of that system. For instance, the touch on the foot is more static, the touch on the hand is more dynamic and the touch on the face is more expressive.
  8. Constant practice of Touch Reflexology not only can improve generally the level of intelligence as well as the creativity, but specifically especially the capacity to deal with and to eliminate excessive stress, that arises within the various systems of reflexes and also without, like the mental and emotional systems.

Download the Introductory Course of Touch Reflexology flyer here.