Naked and Barefoot Walking
Bringing souls work to your feet one step at a time
Barefoot Walking
Sit on the Floor
Drink structured-coherent water
Eat Cleanly, Biodynamically, regeneratively and impeccably 85% of the time
Change your thought pattern, Change your Personality, Change your Life Trajectory
Move, Move, Move.
The Goal of any Wise Practitioner in Healing of the Body is Foundation and return to the Fundamentals to refine, refine, refine..
Like the beginning of any building there is a deep hole dug to make strong for decades a sturdy structure that can withstand the travails of life’s offerings.
We need navigational tools.
Rule One
Foundation is the first Long Term Goal in your A/P
In my earlier writings I spoke of 4 principles. ( see below here)
Basic Principles to Align Your Practice
"A mind in a state of inquiry is capable of learning" There are many ways in which to approach health and healing whether the work you are entails physical therapy, occupational therapy, as a body work/energetic/quantum practitioner, as doctors in TCM, medicine, chiropractic, osteopathy, hom…
Take a Walk Barefoot First.
What?
Bottom of the feet are in contact with the earth.
Wearing Barefoot walking shoes with minimal sole foundation to feel the earth1
How?
Using Pain and discomfort as guide begin gently and patiently. Walking barefoot requires awareness with each step, where, when and how.
If you or your patients are minimally impacted by injury then a good place to begin is
Find a trail, loamy and gentle at first. Maybe a grassy knoll or on the beach.
Start with standing and bringing your attention to your whole foot, ankles, knees, hips and spine. Where is your posture when you stand there.
Deep breath, exhale and drop your four layers of muscles into the ground. Rest here.
Slowly walk one step at a time and notice how your foot contacts the earth, the twigs, dirt, roots, pebbles and rocks. Take your time.
15-30 minutes and put your shoes or sandals back on.
Notice how, now the gait pattern changes. Soreness in the foot and lower leg muscles is common.
Play with it.
Biomechanically, it creates alignment for those who are managing lower chain injuries because the foot will dictates how to stay in alignment. Therefore healing may be hastened.
Grounding some say like a piece of copper into a row of crops to boost their harvest, so would we if we placed ourselves further into the reaches of Mother Earth. Maternal is Holy. Connection is Ground under our feet.
Some say in the research world that shod running vs barefoot running incurs a slight increase in LE injuries. This for the EBM students of the world without the citations. 234
Have you also heard that runners incur less OA than sedentary folks.
Benefits of being Barefoot
Barefoot means increasing proprioceptive facility. The proprioceptors will re-find their youthful faster reaction times and create protective movements up the chain.
Reduced reaction time means improvement in Balance and control. Barefoot means we increase our capacity in RESILIENCE by feeling the Reflexology of the physical minutiae that touches our Sole just so. We react so acutely to the pacinian, meissners corpuscles, ruffini endings and Krause End Bulbs of tacti-cality that give us salience of depth and pressure and reaction to world in an instant.
Those four layers of muscles will get stronger.
The connective tissue will re-aquaint itself with the reason why it is invaginated in our tissue to hold space and define boundary.
A great many maladies will be healed with well guided barefoot walking/running. More on that in a later post
Why?
A Patient Case
45 yo Maggie, a Buxom sandy blonde haired Swede (she calls herself this folks) with Hx of B/L plantar fasciitis, chronic ankle sprains, lateral hip pain and persistent LBP. A self reported insomniac and worry wart. She has three sets of custom orthotics for her various shod (shoes) devices.
“I am an emotional wreck! I have too much on my plate. I know this. I like my job, I hate my boss and my colleagues. I am in debt, I haven’t had sex in over a year and my kids are driving me crazy. My whole body just hurts all the time. I keep busy to forget about the pain! I cannot put my feet down on the floor in the morning without yelping and it feels they feel like 2 x 4’s. Can you help me?”
She immediately became teary eyed. She began rubbing her R foot and grasping her ankle and calf like a form of movement-distraction meditation to stop crying. She continued for a time.
Building Resiliency
We eventually got her on standing/walking on foam, airex mats in sock feet and then barefeet, to the carpet and worked on standing quietly and getting acquainted with the difference between discomfort and injurious painful states. She eventually made her way to her backyard lawn and then into her garden paths.
Later she would email me to let me know that she had been walking 30 minutes on one of her favorite hikes often times getting people to favorably comment on how brave she is to be walking without shoes. “Brave” she mentioned was something she had never heard before, though took it to heart.
Her LBP while still chronic feels better overall, some she feels it is her attitude shift more than anything. She has not used her custom orthotics and feels no need so she brought them back to the orthotist who asked her how she did it. “Barefoot walking.”
Becoming vulnerable and allowing one to be emotionally expressive is the bodies release on a stronghold of long held energetics kept pent up. That kind of pressure is formidable and powerful, for it creates endurance for those patients who say” I have a High Pain Threshold.” translation, “I Suffer greatly.” Like a cylinder the body will tighten to the pressures of unabated daily life.
It is a false narrative for health and once the valve is released through healthy emotional outlets suffering is relieved little by little until there is little of anything to hold onto.
So, we move more freely. More expressively. More Joyously.
In touching the earth we connect.
In connecting we become embodied.
In being embodied we become present in our sensorial world.
We can Pause and be Present.
Connection is key to health.
When we can meet our patients in their story fully and with presence then they themselves will begin to cobble together a pathway to health of their doing. We can be witness and the guard rails for the cultivation of their unique pathways. To hold a safe container.
What I listen for in my day one visits are the patterns of disconnection to self and others.
Our outward appearance to the world is a reflection of our inner state of being.
Persistency in un-wellness in our biology is related to disconnection. Our historical conditioning arrives clearly at the root of whether we feel loved and seen and heard. When we are not, we begin to expense more energy in fearful states of living and work to finding ways to receive what we need in ways that do not honor us. Through this the choices we make will be un-balanced and pose issue with our physical mobility.
If we can connect patients back to nature and that of their rootedness in life then the Foundation Goal will be set for greater things to come. In time of their own measure will the life be owned in full and the struggle for connection may find some respite.
That is Health.
Are You Naked yet?
Take your clothes off and walk around naked.
Stay with me on this one.
We were born this way.
Walking Barefoot is a literal conversion of a metaphor for being naked to the world…at least to the souls of our feet.
Imagine yourself to feel your body bare, wherever, whenever doing your usuals. Wash your dishes, do yoga5 or other movement practices.
You get the idea. We shroud ourselves by the clothes we wear and thus we lose a significant amount of square footage for receptors and sensors to the electromagnetic wave forms of our world through our epidermis. It touches and feels deeply the world we embrace ourselves in.
Our largest organ in our body is also our outermost layer of the Central Nervous System. They are both born within the same ectodermal germ cells.
Persistent pain inhibits the sensorial and sensual natural to the world.
Have fun and enjoy yourselves immensely. Your patients and clients will feel the effects!
Don’t be Shy
Just let your feelings roll on by.
Don’t wear fear or nobody will know you are there.
Just lift your head and let your feelings out instead.
And don’t be shy just let your feelings roll on by.
c stevens
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26130697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6033505/
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/barefoot-running/5.
Simple Yoga progression for Back, Hips and Knees
https://www.jospt.org/doi/pdf/10.2519/jospt.2017.0505