Honouring the feet yoga practice (total 36 minutes)

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is…to walk on earth

Thich Nhat Hanh, The miracle of mindfulness

Let’s express this miracle in feet. How could the flexible flat foot with a sideways big toe that could grip a branch, start to become the sculpted arch that lets us walk on earth, in less than one hundred and twenty-six thousand generations?

When weight goes through the centre of the arch, it is expressed as compression through all its elements, stopped from collapsing sideways by buttresses in stone, or the elastic tension forces of fascia and muscles in our feet. Forces absorbed, weight carried.

As with all proper miracles, problem-solving is involved. Loaves and fishes for all would bemuse diners digesting killer meal-deals. And as with most problems, definition depends on perspective. Fourteen million years ago, when tropical forests covered much of Africa, a switch occurred and temperatures zig-zagged downwards. The stately drift of land masses, interacting with the fault lines of the earth’s crust, configured to allow Antartica to grow its ice, changing oceanic currents to their cool setting. Vast areas of tropical forests gave way to seasonal woodland and Savannah, and our fruit eating, branch-swinging ancestors had to adapt to eating tough leaves, grasses and digging out roots when no fruits were available.

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

Tao te ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell.

And if you must move on the ground to find food, with a long upright body adapted to using arms above and feet below to move along branches, then putting one foot in front of another is one of your limited options. Who were the sculptors who shortened and thickened toes, who eventually made the big toe face forward, who grew and angled foot bones into an arch, who meshed the soft tissues to support the arch? Some of them were the fearsome creatures of our deepest imagination; giant sabre-toothed cats, hyenas, leopards, crocodiles and even infant-snatching eagles, leaving their signatures on australopithecine fossilised bones. Find yourself slowest, on the edge of the group at the wrong time and place, and you are prey. But being upright gives you an odd advantage in the heat; less of you is exposed to the sun, and if you evolve copious sweat glands and fur becomes fine body hair, you have a cooling system that your predators lack. Climb the trees with your strong arms for safety at dusk, night and dawn, and walk in search of food in the heat of the day, when the sabre-tooth sleeps. And being in a group, able to throw rocks and look out for each other, means you’re no push-over, however comically slow. Hunger and want shared the chisel – if your bones and soft tissues made you more efficient as a walker, you were more likely to raise your children to adulthood. In a population of around 50,000, an average of just a few hundred individual walking-related survival stories in each generation, is enough to sculpt a human-looking foot over hundreds of thousands of years. And without helping each other to carry children, no longer able to cling to fur on our backs, without sharing food, we would not be; compassion from our feet upwards.

The soft overcomes the hard.The slow overcomes the fast.

Tao te ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell.

These meek, food-gathering ancestors did not yet inherit the earth – one of their descendant species, Homo erectus, did, in a most unlikely manner, turning weaknesses into strengths without the services of a sports coach. That foot that had to stiffened up for walking maintained some of its subtle arboreal flexibility, allowing endurance running, especially on uneven terrain, for hunting. That story stars that much maligned body part, our bottoms, celebrated in next term’s practice and blogosophy… Come celebrate the miracle of your feet with me!

Sources:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206671/the-story-of-the-human-body-by-daniel-e-lieberman/

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/first-steps-jeremy-desilva?variant=40089113755682

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0210123817300087