I am sitting on a sandy beach but there is a wide strip of stones between me and the sea.
My feet complain every time I go in and out of the water. I am trying to make myself lighter when I walk through by making odd shapes with my body and excessively using my facial muscles. All in vain.
I have been buying barefoot shoes for years now and I walk with actual bare feet at every opportunity. Still, the surfaces I am used to are completely flat – the pavement, the wooden floor. Sometimes there’s the woodland path or the walk up the mountain.
Nothing compares to a stony strip though. My feet are designed to walk this way but I am losing the capability because I am not using it. We all are.
With time the small joints in our feet (33 of them in each foot!) get rusty, the muscles get bored and all the connective tissues become sticky. We may start to feel our feet like solid blocks rather than finely tuned complex structures. We may also lose some of our ability to sense with our feet and some of our balance too.
So, face the stony strip and make good use of it. And if it so happens that you don’t have one at your disposal at all times, you may want to consider joining me in my online or in-person yoga classes in which we work on our balance and we mobilise, strengthen and ultimately make better use of the feet so that we can keep them fully functional and happy for longer.
