Barefoot Walking!

For Christmas last year I asked my husband Howard to buy me a pair of barefoot shoes. In November last year I started to notice a lot of videos on my YouTube timeline for barefoot walking and I decided I wanted to try it. For many years I had been walking around the house without shoes. Then lockdown happened and apart from going out for a walk once a day I didn’t really wear shoes inside the house.

Once the lockdowns ended I obviously went back to wearing shoes a lot more. At first I didn’t really think about it but I started to notice that my feet had widened. The shoes I had once worn had become slightly too narrow for my feet. It wasn’t until I started watching the videos did it occur to me that I had actually been building muscle in my feet. Millions of years ago we would have walked the Earth with no shoes on our feet and our feet would have been a lot wider than they are today.

Nowadays our feet are starting to look like shoes. As my feet had started to widen that’s when I decided to buy a pair of barefoot shoes. According to orthopaedic professionals, walking barefoot restores the bodies manner of walking. The structure of a shoes can prevent us from using certain muscle groups in the body. Barefoot walking can help to improve balance, it can also help with pain relief and can lead to improved mechanics in the hips, knees and core.

Our ancestors evolved in close connection with the earth energy. As I mentioned earlier we would walk barefoot and we would sleep on the earth. Our bodies benefitted from the earth healing energy or Qi. I’m not suggesting we do this but I do think that being closer to the earth can have beneficial affects on the body. Today we spend much of our time indoors, in cars and in shoes. As I had been spending a lot of time shoes less inside I decided to take this one step further with barefoot shoes. Honestly no pun intended.

In recent months I have also discovered that walking barefoot can help to massage the soul of the foot. Reflexology is type of massage that involves applying pressure to the feet, hands and ears. It is based on the theory that our body parts are connected to certain organs. There are points on our feet that are connected to certain organs so being closer to the earth will help to massage the feet and those organs too.

Recently it has been found that walking barefoot can also help with inflammation in the body. It is now believe that inflammation causes many health issues we often hear about today. Walking barefoot reduces the white blood cells that cause inflammation and it can increases the red blood cells that help the body with immunity. Therefore walking barefoot has a number of health benefits for everyone but for me it makes me feel more connected to the earth. In my opinion I don’t see anything wrong with that.