Do your feet ever ask for attention, perhaps because they hurt? Have you ever had an injury to your feet or ankle joint? Do you ever suffer from stiffness in your feet or ankles?
Feet have been called our subjects. If they hurt regularly, they become jammers instead. As a result, you tend to start depriving them. As you use them less, your feet weaken and stiffen, creating a vicious cycle.
Your feet consist of many different bones that work together in all movement functions, such as standing, walking, running, and jumping. If these bone connections, the small foot joints, become rigid, other joints easily become overloaded.
In my practice, I regularly encounter people with completely rigid feet. They hadn’t realized their feet were so stiff. By showing them how it can feel—with more flexibility and liveliness—it brings a kind of renewed perception in those feet.
Extra Attention to your feet
Besides life events like a sprained ankle or a broken bone, there are other reasons why feet might need some extra attention:
- Your feet are usually in shoes. If you now direct your attention to your feet, can you play with weight, play with touch surfaces, feel the ground with your feet even in your shoes? Usually, you only feel your feet when shoes pinch them, but then you feel them due to pain. There is also another feeling, the presence of your feet, feeling your toes, your heels. It’s being aware of the communication between the sensors in your feet and your brain, which otherwise is more unconscious.
- The ground you walk on is generally flat, so there are fewer stimuli to pass on to your brain.
- Your feet are farthest from your brain, and the nerve pathways to them are the longest in your body. This impacts the clarity of feeling your feet. It requires extra attention.
- Many of the energy channels in your body used by acupuncturists end in your feet. How freely does that energy flow through you?
When your brain receives always the same stimuli—like when your feet are shielded by your shoes and/or you walk on flat terrain—your brain pays less attention. It’s as if it falls asleep. Something new is needed to activate, awaken, and alert your brain.
Barefoot Paths
The Chinese have known these things for centuries. Go to a park in any city in China, and you’ll find thousands of pebbles in beautiful patterns. People take off their shoes and walk over the pebbles to achieve better health. It activates blood circulation, the sensors in the skin, and lets energy flow freely through the various energy channels.
Today, you can find these ‘barefoot paths’ in various places in the Netherlands too. Usually, there are different materials to walk over with your bare feet. These barefoot paths have variety of stimuli via:
- Different hardnesses, like stones or wood chips.
- Different textures, like fine gravel or larger pebbles.
- Different temperatures, such as the temperature difference between wood, sand, and stone.
All these different stimuli awaken and alert your feet, providing you with a better sense of balance. Walking on forest paths, through autumn leaves, and on the beach have similar beneficial effects.
Activating your feet at Home
At home, you can activate your feet by standing on something unusual: a soft ball, a hard ball, a marble, a ball of wool, or a pair of socks in a ball. You stand attentively with a part of your foot on the object for a while, wait until your foot accepts the new situation, and then stand normally on the floor again. This gives a very different feeling. You can repeatedly stand on it with a different part of your foot, requiring new adjustments each time. If you start with the same foot each time, the difference in balance between your feet can slowly become greater. And that also helps stimulate the brain. They become fully active when you let them feel differences.
Do you have ideas on how to stimulate your feet and make them more consciously present? Do you walk at home in shoes, or also in socks or barefoot? What would your barefoot path look like? What does your feet need?
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