Putting a Face to the Feet...
Kriste
Colorado, U.S.A.
As a movement educator/coach primarily for people suffering from significant physical pathologies, I found myself continuously re-educating foot mechanics knowing this was foundational to whole-body biomechanics. I had the fortune of being barefoot 90% of my daily life including work, and realized the foot education would be useless if clients just went back to wearing the restrictive shoes they were accustomed to. The worst were those whose doctors or therapists prescribed orthotics for solvable biomechanical issues -- I recognize there are exceptions in extreme cases -- or wore structured athletic and work shoes because media convinced them of their benefits for monetary profit, regardless that there is no valid third-party science to support claims of benefit. Now, clients willing to experiment with barefoot and minimalist footwear experience transcendent results past the physical into an elevated level of overall emotional and spiritual well-being and health empowerment.
I love my feet. They are strong, adaptable, shock absorbing conduits of life-sustaining Earth energy, allowing my body to fluidly function with dynamic posture in constant communication with the proprioceptive function of the foot. Only recently have I taken up barefoot hiking and wondered what took me so long. After my first hike, every cell in my body was vibrating with joy, feeling more alive than I have in a long time.
Unless it is freezing and/or snow, I walk out of my house and walk or drive barefoot no matter where I’m going. I pack a pair of (backup footwear) if I need to walk-in to an establishment that shuns bare feet. Many people just don’t notice -- or if they do they don’t appear to and obviously don’t care. While barefoot hiking, we hear everything from a loud “barefoot?!” in a tone of complete bewilderment to “wow, you guys are hard-core”. When I am arriving at work, I often hear “here comes barefoot gal”; which is curious and humorous because my coworkers are barefoot while working and so are our clients/patients, but they arrive and leave shod. I am pleased to report a couple of my clients are at least leaving the studio barefoot.
As a member of The Front Range Barefoot Hiking Group in Colorado, an experience fresh in my mind is a recent hike when we scrambled up a large sandstone outcropping. I felt like a gecko, my feet molding into the subtle contours at 20-45º slope angles. I felt more sure-footed than I would have in any shoe or sandal, my foot prints creating effective traction with the porous rock . There was a narrow stream flowing through crevasses that was delightfully cold on our hot feet, and areas where the water was shallowly pooling that harbored an irresistible thin layer of squishy, somewhat slimy moss on the sandstone. There were a couple beginner barefoot hikers with us who claimed they really haven’t been barefoot outside much at all in their adult lives, and we were thrilled they weren’t deterred by mud and slime, trying everything we delightedly stuck our feet into.
The human body is an amazing, adaptable, self-healing structure, when we allow it to be, that nature has evolved over thousands of years. The relatively recent experimenting the past few decades attempting to enhance its abilities or supporting it with manmade aids that were once for a very small population of authentically disabled people has miserably failed, only creating more issues in the long-term even if we experience short-term benefit while ignoring our body-mind’s natural processes. It is time to find the intelligent balance between nature and technology in every aspect of life, including the use of footwear.
Joy & Light,
Kriste
