I used to despise my feet.
From a young age, I was told that they would be an issue that required fixing. That my soles were too flat. That my arches weren’t strong enough. That my ankles would cause me lifelong problems.
As a result, I trodded around with orthopaedic inserts and arch reinforcement padding for much of my youth. I performed pointless proprioception exercises and fought to consciously adjust my foot posture.
So many memories of sympathy, hope, despair, resentment and blame.
I always had an excuse for why I couldn’t move as agilely as others. I’d blame my feet. I saw my funny-looking trotters as the culprit of many felt misfortunes on the playground, athletics track and sports field.
I looked at the perfect arches of my peers with envy and bitterness. And if people commented, even if it was out of care and concern, YOH, that would trigger me. My defences would rise sharply like a castle drawbridge upon rumours of an imminent siege. Armor-mode activated.
To make matters worse, I managed to get a nasty fungal infection in the nails of my ring toes, which turned the two talons into thick, white brittle dinosaur claws. Not only were my feet now terribly useless and funny looking, but they also became disgustingly ugly.
Their appearance filled me with embarrassment and shame. And as a result, I allowed a severely self-conscious victim into my being, which led me to desperately avoid exposing my feet in all sorts of social settings.
I would wear shoes on sandy beaches. I would do yoga and group meditation in socks. I would wear slippers indoors.
And it wasn’t just embarrassment and shame. I would enter into these pro-feet spaces with a quiet resentment. All of which spilt over into the way I showed up and engaged with the world.
As I say… I DESPISED MY FEET!
LIBERATION THROUGH LOVE
It wasn’t until my late twenties that things began to change.
I’ll leave the details of the driving forces behind my personal shift for a future essay. Still, as a result, I started moving into a much more open and self-compassionate space, which led me to bring a lot more attention and care towards my body (including my godforsaken feet!).
Within a few months, the fungal infection that had plagued my two toenails for years had healed. And with time, I slowly moved beyond the fear of exposing my feet to the world.
Exposure started in group yoga and meditation spaces, which in hindsight feels pivotal, as it allowed me to sit with my expectations and fears of judgement and watch the demons quickly wither when they were shown to exist nowhere but the chambers of my fearful imagination—like a scared child being shown there is nothing to be afraid of in the darkness of an unlit room at night.
Sure I still noticed knee-jerk reactions and sympathetic concern arise from others now and then, but they seemed to lose their sting. I watched as the words and reactions appeared to sail right through me as if I were made of a completely different material.
And the more I exposed my bare naked feet to the world, the more comfortable I became with them—a self-reinforcing feedback loop of body and mind.
Slowly, I began to accept my feet. To enjoy my feet. To love them.
And, in that love, all the insecurity, blame, resentment, embarrassment, and shame melted away like a mango ice cream lying in the sun on hot summer’s day. For the first time in my life, I saw the beauty of the fat funny-looking flippers at the bottom of my legs. What a relief that was.
For the longest time, I thought I was protecting my fragile feet from the world by keeping them wrapped in polyester, rubber and leather. As it turns out, the only thing I was protecting was an insecure ego.
FROM FLOORS TO FORESTS
Liberating my feet from their plastic prison cells in comfortable social settings was just the first step, though.
Where else was I protecting my bare feet unnecessarily because of ego, conditioning or old stories I’d been told? I started exploring.
I took my bare feet to the forests and mountains.
In the beginning, this was physically difficult. My feet were fragile, rigid and clumsy, and the bumpy sensations were so foreign that every uneven object underfoot felt like a stake puncturing my sole. I was constantly contracting and clenching. Tensing. Tentative. Each step taken as if I was walking across a minefield.
I also felt slightly insecure socially, walking barefoot outdoors.
Before, I had exposed my feet in social settings where their bareness was accepted, encouraged or even expected. Walking in the mountains and forests was another story. I felt foolish at times. I received confused looks of astonishment. Shaking heads of disapproval. Whispers of “ tree-hugging hippie”.
The judgment was good yoga for me, and because of where I was psychologically, I could move past my attachments to these outward sentiments with relative ease.
What was more surprising was how quickly my feet morphed from being these clumsy objects attached to the ends of my ankles to flexible and highly receptive sensors, which appeared to come alive with a felt intelligence that I didn’t even know existed. They felt more like hands. Two additional hands I never knew I had!
The previous pains of stepping on uneven ground dropped away and were replaced with a heightened sensitivity to pressure, shape and texture.
In addition to a reinterpretation and amplification of my soles’ sensorium, I also noticed a toughening of the skin and a remarkable increase in the overall flexibility and strength of my feet. Increased awareness of foot placement, lightness of touchdown and malleability of posture meant that I became less likely to sustain an injury, which was wonderful given my track record with stumped toes and rolled ankles.
The heightened sensitivity led to other less apparent shifts too.
I felt my core start to wake up, activate and strengthen enough to start taking the reigns from a tired spine that had been barely holding things together for decades. As a result, my balance and posture improved. Every step started involving my entire body.
LISTENING TO THE SOLE
With time I slowly began taking my bare feet on longer and more adventurous expeditions, up mountains and off the trails.
I burnt my toes a few times doing this and quickly realised the point wasn’t to push through unnecessary pain and suffering. There are surfaces that my feet just aren’t ready for, where shoes are useful, and that is okay. To ignore this is plain stupidity and a sign of ego showing its face in another form. In fact, I saw this quite clearly—when I pushed my barefoot walking too far, it was often accompanied by some form of pride or need for social approval that was blocking my ability to listen to the keen intelligence of my soles’ sensorium.
In listening carefully to how my soles responded to the ground, I began trusting the feelings and became comfortable using shoes when the terrain communicated so.
The physiological benefits felt throughout my feet and body were just the tip of the iceberg though.
The real magic came from the subtle shifts in awareness and how I related to myself.
In walking on the prickly forest floor and rocky mountain paths, I had to be fully aware of my bare feet at all times, meaning I was constantly called out of my mind’s cerebral dreamland and into a more embodied and grounded state of being.
I also noticed that I would only slip, stumble, stump my toe or step on sharp rocks when I had been captured by thought. In this way, the ground became my guru. My guide. The missteps became gentle reminders to come back to the present moment. As a result, barefoot walking quite naturally and effortlessly invited me into a space of deep meditation.
Separately, there is also something beautiful, meaningful and spiritual about being barefoot in natural spaces. In the same way that removing footwear is seen as symbolic of respect when entering temples, pagodas, and other places of worship, being barefoot in nature has become sacred to me. A way to feel into my inherent connection to the earth and the divinity that exists in that relationship.
THE BARENESS OF BEING
More intimately, my barefoot journey has become a lesson in opening myself up to the world. I now see the fundamental importance of standing naked, raw and vulnerable in front of my demons. Laying my heart bare for all to see. Knowing that in exposing the bareness of my being, there will be pain, just like my soles when they first made contact with the rocky paths. But out of that pain arises a deeply intuitive intelligence, lightness, awareness and liberation from the self-imposed prison of my fragile, insecure and overly-protective ego.
In some very real sense, my bare soles have become an allegory for the path of my soul. The path of moving beyond fear. Of moving towards love, open-heartedness, strength and tenderness.
This path takes courage. But consider the alternative—a claustrophobic existence of confinement to a carefully crafted cocoon of my mind’s own making. Never truly making contact with the ground of my true nature. Cut off. A heart petrified into numbness and atrophy. A walking zombie, stumbling around with armour so heavy I can hardly hold my head up.
Alive? Not really…
Without bareness, there is no aliveness.
To truly live is to open our hearts up to the world.
To truly live is to become bare.
Take care,
David
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