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Barefoot Walking: The Four Disciplines
Barefoot Mick of the Barefoot Academy discusses The Four Disciplines that are used to teach the principles of barefoot walking and re-connection to the Earth: Movement, Endurance, Strength and Balance.
Date: 6/19/2005 12:09:58 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 2978 times "Walking in the city is a wonderful and painful experience. It is part of following our feet out of the shoes, out of the city, and back into the touching of the natural surface areas. But we need to take what we learn of rooting our feet into the natural places again, awakening our natural walk, and then taking these roots back into the city, and working them back into our community.
It is useful to remember that the mountain will not come to you; must go to the mountain, touch it, and then carry the teachings from this touch.
We have also found for so many that returning back into the city is a way of exposing the bias and hate that this culture has for the body and the wild. Just go for a walk in some book store, or shopping area, and watch the reactions of others. There is a triggering of body memory.
Over the winter we had gone into San Luis Obispo to do some research in Barnes and Noble, and the manager had asked us to leave because of health code regulations. We informed him that there are no such health code regulations in the country about going barefoot. After discussing it for a while, he went off and checked, and came back informing us we were right.
There is such a deep bias and conditioning about our loss of touch, and there is not one among us that does not have the genetic memory waiting to make contact.
Try to find another animal on the planet that wears shoes. Then take this another step further. Try to find an animal that steps off and walks on the earth by landing on the heel first. We can find none, and among those cultures in our species that go barefoot, they walk ball-to-heel, and not heel-to-ball.
Try studying your walk up hill and down hill barefoot, or try to step into an uneven surface.
Our first work shop is spent on using four physical disciplines to develop and awaken the natural walk, and overcome what has become the normal walk (cultural shoe walk) for so many.
The four disciplines that we use are movement, endurance, strength and balance.
When we confine something from its natural connection and growth, what is being confined is the movement, the motion. If you do not move, you do not touch; there is no tactile stimulation to create your body perception. So we use many of the movement disciplines to awaken the movement back into the feet.
I learned up in a cave how to dance with my shadow. So in our work shops we use either the camp fire, or the solar fire, find our shadow and dance to it with no cultural music in the beginning. We just explore moving slow, moving fast and then with rhythm or beat. We find our movement, our own music inside of us.
Any dancer or martial artist will tell you that movement of the feet is fundamental.
In the city walls we prepare our feet for escape from confinement, by taking them out of shoes, and learning to move and dance with the fire. The element of fire is a teacher, and it manifests in us as motion, movement, motivation. We call this movement in us desire.
When we build a fire, we need to put coals on the fire for fuel. Our desire is the same. For "fuel", we put goals on our desire.
In the beginning of awakening the feet from confinement, it becomes necessary to learn how to build your desire, your fire, to learn how to bring the motion, the movement back into your feet.
Fires burn slow and they burn fast, they can rage and burn out of control, or become so low and weak, that all your movement, your motivation is lost.
The discipline of dance is a practice that helps develop this fire, and movement back into the feet.
Your feet have been in confinement, and have lost their motion, their movement.
There are many dance studios, many different kinds of dance to draw upon, in order to awaken this physical element of fire in us. However, the practitioner needs to remember to find their own rhythm, their own relationship to motion. We share many skills and knowledge in our workshops that are useful in awakening this movement in the feet.
The true teachers of this motion of movement is in the forest, beaches, and natural surface areas for they are the tenders of their own fire. These places need to be explored by each person, and as each person explores and develops their own rhythms and ways of tending their desire, they share them back with the tribe.
An example of our approach is like this: I went into the city and studied High Land Dancing for a while, in my bare feet. They wanted me to wear shoes, and I told them I would get some, but never did. I just did what I was taught in my bare feet, which is the original way this dancing was done.
I then took what I learned from these wonderful people who were practicing dance inside a "cage" in the city, and I took it back out into the mountain. I built a small circle of stones, and stood in the center of this circle naked, and allowed the solar fire to heat my body, and I danced what they had showed me. I spent all day dancing with no outside music. I moved with my shadow. I kept this up from sun rise to sunset. I danced through the thoughts that tried to get me to stop. I was there to learn from the fire.
Remember that the solar fire sends its energy down into the earth, and this stored solar fire is in the things that we burn. I use small kindling to start the fire. I add my breath, my wind, to increase the flame. This wood was once life, so even in the night fires, when we dance, we are dancing with the solar fire, but it now holds the teaching of a tree.
I dance in this circle of stone in order to learn and touch my own movement that comes from natural contact with the earth. I can develop and practice movements in the insulated walls of the city, but it is not direct teaching. You must go to the mountain; the mountain will not come to you.
We are a species that has a tremendous ability to adapt. When I am dancing to learn my original movement, and how to tend my fire, I am adapting out of the ways of confinement. There is a danger in this capacity to adapt, for I can train this root of motion in the city, in the caged walls, and get comfortable with the confinement, with the practices of domination and domestication, and with the destruction. The further I do my dance away from the direct teaching of the forest, the more I lose touch. Remember there are three things needed by a bipedal animal to make story: These are the path, the walk and the talk. The truth, the touch and the teaching.
There are three levels to our work shops. The first is called the Natural walk, which we share knowledge and skills in the awakening of the four physical roots of touch. The first root I have describe above is the root of motion. The next root that we focus on is the root of Time. This is the meaning of the physical quality of endurance. When we begin to touch a thing, there is the quality of time. The longer that you touch something, the more you come to know it.
Captivity is interested in not only locking up our movements, but our time as well. In the city, we cut ourselves off from the natural touch of things, and our natural time. The city loves to put everyone on the same time, on human-made time, and not pay any attention to the natural time.
In our work shops, we go on walks, natural stepping, and we focus on two kinds of time. The first kind of time is endurance, to develop your own relationship to the place that you are walking. When you walk a path, you are covering distance, and if you think about it for a while, this distance is really nothing but time. Three miles for you is not the same for me. For there are times when the three miles goes so fast for me and there are times when the three miles go so slow. This subjective time, I understand, is verified by all the smart people, the ones that go to college and know science. But some where the subjective time has been dominated by the city time.
There is another time that one comes to know in walking into the mountain, and this is very old time, very, very old time.
When we learn to walk in our natural walk, ball-to-heel, and we do so in natural uneven surface areas, and we do so for some distance, we began to feel, to touch these other two kinds of time. If we are in shoes, or city surface areas, we feel the same surface over and over again, our movement is confined, and this confinement is confirmed by keeping our thoughts focused on the culture time clock.
You can hear so many runners talking about miles, heart beats, distance, quantifying the walk or run. I often seen them along the roads, trying to build endurance. They wear those big white flower pots on their feet, fossil fuel clothing, and tight stressed faces, and they are building their relationship with time.
I use to run this way, until it hurt my feet so badly that I was losing my run. I now run barefoot, in natural paths, and my clothing is very colorful. Sometimes I wear bells, and I smile, and enter into the two natural kinds of time, and I gather the natural winds of the trees and mountains passes. I use these winds to fuel my fire, my desire.
Earlier I was talking about fire building, and needing the wind. The fuel in our fire comes from the food we eat, our organs break all this stuff down. We then apply the wind to this fire, our breath. There are many explorations in Pranic practices to support this, but many of these practices are done while sitting on the ass, a great place for discussion. We are a bipedal animal that is escaping from captivity. Our species evolved in movement, so we take the knowledge of prana and get on our feet and take it out into the breath of the trees, and blow on our fire, and build the qualities of gathering wind by using the quest discipline.
We have found this in our walk: the word is always in the wind. No wind, no word. We journey with the quest words, the wind words, which are what, when, where, why, who etc. It is in the wind that we journey, and gather our knowledge, our explorations, and then feed these into our fire. It is how we find the goals to put on our desire, like finding coals to put on the fire.
In our workshops, we share this knowledge and skills in the root of endurance, or wind. We explore on our walks the relationship with our original time and talk.
The third root that we are concerned with is the development of stone to hold our fire, a place to direct our wind. Stone is our teacher in this area. As we use the element of fire to awaken our root of motion, and as we use the root of wind to awaken our time and word, we use the discipline of stone to develop our strength, to alter our gravitational field, to learn to embrace from our core and to detach as well.
It is the muscles in our body that gather us together. The feet need to be able to grip into the touch of the earth. It is the grounding of the energies of movement, and time. We use natural stone and learn to grip deeper into the core of our pelvis extending this part of touch into the embrace of the earth.
The fourth root that we concern ourselves with in awakening our feet, is the root balance. To stand up, to make posture. The water has been our teacher in this area.
Balance has two extremes: it goes from the ice, the glaciers, to the mist or cloud, and what is in between is the river, the flow. We learn to embrace the glaciers and the ice, and learn the postures of rigidness and hardness. And we learn to be flexible, to align, to find the middle place, the flow. Yoga is a useful area for training in posture or balance, but has become confined to cage walls, studios. This is a great place to learn how to align and adjust, to get the feel of the flow. But remember where you are touching.
The knowledge and skills in balance is needed for the feet. Yet remember the touch, so that you take what you learn in the studio from yoga, or dance, or treadmills, or strength, out into the natural touch of the mountain, or forest, or wilderness, and perform the practices there.
I have trained with the ice and glaciers for some time, growing this root of balance, for confinement made my touch of the cold and the heat very weak.
The trees, for us, are our teachers of posture now. During our training with the trees, we have come to realize that tree pose was a way of the ascetics talking around the fire. They had learned many other postures by going into the tree. The trees are the teachers, not the humans. We only share the teaching from them, then we take the postures back up into the trees.
It very interesting to me to read about the wild man Buddha, who was not a Buddhist. There is so much written and said about him. When I look at his walk, it is the tree that gave him the teaching, and he received this teaching by sitting under the tree and touching; then truth was revealed.
These are the four roots that we practice. The root of motion, time, gravity and alignment, and these four roots are physical qualities that have atrophied in our channel chakras, the feet. These four physical qualities, of movement, endurance, strength and balance, can be developed and grown by using the disciplines of dance, questing, grounding and posturing. But the requirement is that these practices need to be done in the natural areas sooner or later, or they will not grow.
My brother is a man who knows how to grow things and watch things grow. He sees the feet, these roots of so many of our people, root bound. What we do to plants we do to ourselves. We are not all that complicated.
We have gathered together three work shops. The first one is what we call The Natural Walk, and this is where the four physical qualities are explored, cultivated and integrated into your walk, overcoming the old damaging walk, the first steps out of shoes.
The next level of workshop we call The Forest Walk. We follow the feet back out into the forest, and connect these physical roots back into contact with the forest. In these sessions, we go into deeper practices in these four areas, solo shadow dancing with the fire, questing with the wind, embracing into the stone, and posturing with the trees etc. We also share wild craft walking skills.
The third set of practices evolves into the Earth Walk, and goes into a very deep rooting of the wilderness into our soles (souls).
Our walk involves not only following our feet back into the earth in order to heal the pain in our bodies, but following our feet back into the community as well.
I remember Deena (Metzger, of Dare')saying that three things need to be healed: the body, the community and the land. We are interested in following our feet to build tribe as well.
For me, it is important to know that my body wisdom, my total being, has arisen from millions of years of the evolution of nature and nurturing, and it has been only in the last ten thousand years that the walk of domestication and domination has over taken the walk of many in our species.
So many of those that step out of confinement find this common theme: step back into the natural growth of your body, into the earth, and the wound, the pain of separation, is healed.
May your naked soles go strong while touching the earth!
Mick and Sam"
Barefoot Mick and Sunshine Sam do not have a website. Please contact them via e-mail at: BarefootAcademy@aol.com
See my other blogs on Mick and Sam, barefoot walking, and reconnecting to Mother Earth through the soles of our feet:
"Wildman Barefoot Buddha" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=17
"Deer Animal Totem": http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=20
"Walking Like a Deer" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=18
"Earth Shoes" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=19
"Barefoot Walkin' Blues" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=22
"Earth Heals Pain" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=4
"Barefoot Story" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=5
"Re-connecting with Earth" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=6
"Warrior Woman of the Shield" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=57
"Barefoot Practice" http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=33
For more about Deena Metzger, author, poet, healer, go to her website: http://www.deenametzger.com/
For more about Dare', a spiritual community that gathers monthly in Topanga Canyon, California, go to: http://www.deenametzger.com/dare/dare.html
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