The Pope washes the feet of Muslim refugees, a beautiful message for today's world.
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| Pope Francis washes the feet of 12 young offenders at a detention centre in Rome |
If you want deeper understanding of the body during yoga, and of your body in daily everyday motions of life by extension, study the importance of the feet. How well are we appreciating all the weight that they hold up, all the balancing, all the weight they carry?
Look at your toes; wiggle them. Those two middle toes after the big toe are connected to the eyes. The little ones on the side, they are connected to the ears. This ain't no revelation I had -- it's what I read in a cool book that reprinted ancient ritual symbols of the bottoms of the feet. In one diagram, various hills and valleys of the foot were marked with a six-pointed star, a swastika (a symbol from the ancient world before Hitler abused it), a temple. In a foot reflexology diagram, we see how each part of the foot connects to an organ or part of the spine. The author of this modern compilation of ancient and new wisdom Yoga of the Subtle Body, Tias Little, also gives you exercises to feel how to spread the webbing between your toes, and how to appreciate the different arches in your feet, the different sides of the heel, and how to properly stand in mountain pose, for example: by engaging the lift in the arch, by pressing into the four corners of the foot - and he tells you where those four corners are - you can engage pada bandha (click on link for more on the bandhas).
This chapter on the feet does good: It's like becoming more aware of your blessed feet as you read, wanted to give them more attention and exercise in your next yoga session. You read that your toes are like the roots of a lotus flower or a tree that sip up the water, and somewhere higher in your foot is where the stream of chi energy that you're taking in becomes like a river, then gushing to knees to be redistributed via nadis to the various organs and parts of your whole entire body. Prana everywhere. The feet are how we ground ourselves to the earth, its magnetic vibe - it's basically how we stand stable. In activating them, we activate a whole current of energy, as Little says that they, along with the hands, are antennas of energy. |
| Tadasana, or samasthiti |
Zen master Dogen, founder of the Soto school of Japanese Buddhism in 1240, wrote that mountains are "the bones and marrow of the Buddha ancestors" and the "realm where all buddhas practice."
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| Zen master Dogen |
The feet. Mounds of hills and crevices, like another planet, storing the connections of our body to pressure points on our feet. Pressure points that Eastern arts know better than Westerners. But it's available, out there to pay for if you want. If I knew that any local acupuncturist was the best, knowing what the ancients knew, I'd go to him for sure. And even if he knows some...Then, this blew my mind: "The feet help orient to a sacred axis through the temple of the body a pillar of self-organizing radiant vitality, revered in hatha yoga as the primary pathway for the movement of the deepest life-force (kundalini) Contemporary physiological renderings of this central axis involve the spine, spinal cord, and brain-that is, the central nervous system-yet we can imagine the central axis beginning in the inner foot." (29). A pillar of self-organizing radiant vitality, so perfectly said. I stopped and reread that a few times over my morning tea yesterday at Daylight Donuts (where you heard the old guys catcalling each other as they walked in and saw the whole group: "Rocky babyyyyyy!").
Our body has a pillar to conduct energy for our very life, breath, vitality - thus PRANA, what we work so hard for, and need to relax into and make time for, in yoga. That it why it is so important to take care of the spine and not lose flexibility. Vitality. That is why we breathe, and do yoga, and let the pose serve the breath, and let the breath help us extend along our axials... we are preserving and honoring our vitality, connecting to it, hoping to have some leftover connection and light to give to others who we meet with a smile, or peaceful nod. Recognition that we are all a body and soul, a breath.
So amazing. The feet.
Now I know why my Ballet teachers would say "Lift those arches!" and study our arches to see who had the highest one in class. Pulling up the arch, not letting it collapse, affects the gait and alignment and centering (or off-centering) of our whole body. Its amazing, when we really look at the interconnectedness of the body. And by extension, of the world.
