There is great benefit to grounding yourself by taking off your shoes and socks, and walking on the bare earth like you were born to! You instantly feel more connected to your environment, and this helps add to the extra agility that the bare foot naturally provides.
Why barefoot dancing?
If you’re at a festival and there is a soft medium on the dancefloor! Mud, sand, grass and even some kinds of woodchips are ok, but they are not that pleasant to dance on for everyone, give it a try, but have your shoes handy in case the floor doesn’t agree with your level of foot toughness.
Lets talk about levelling up your bare foot game.
If you’re new to going barefoot, don’t worry, when you see those ravers comfortably running along the gravel path to the dancefloor-they haven’t had horseshoes installed, and weren’t born with their hard earned leather soles. If you want the leathery feet that will let you trek along most surfaces without a problem you must practice.
Here are some things that I have learned about bare foot life – I have been living it religiously since 2006. In fact, this reporter actually spent almost the entire years of 2006 to 2009 not wearing shoes, except to get into clubs. Even whilst living in the city-barefoot on K-rd was a terrible idea in retrospect!
1st steps
At the beginning you will be wearing your shoes when traveling to and from the dancefloor. When you see a gravel surface, remove your shoes, SLOWLY, and prepare to walk
along the gravel path, carpark, wherever gravel may be really.
The trick is to relax your feet against the gravel, only do this in the daytime as you are learning, that way you can see which way the gravel is angled and prepare yourself, the less tension in your feet the easier it will be.
Do this for as long as you can, and put your shoes back on for the walk to the dancefloor. If the surface looks friendly to feet, remove shoes, your body will guide you the rest of the way through the dancefloor, rhythm moving through the earth and directly infusing you, bass line to skin contact is ideal for communing with the musical spirit that everyone is there to connect with. Now, comes the important part-Repeat previous step until you
Keep your shoes on at night, you never know what’s going to be in your path Carry a torch, worst case scenario, you cannot find your shoes/forgot where you left them, having
a torch will help avoid most serious obstacles, probably not things like prickles though, having a
bag pile, next to a sigil – see making a sigil in the next issue, can solve the “finding your stuff after
a big night of dancing” problem we’ve all faced one time or another.
Aftercare
Now you’ve had your bare foot fun, and probably earned some calluses, and bruises along the way, time to give your feet some love run a 50C foot bath, throw some Epsom salts in (do not buy Epsom salts from any fancy store selling them as bath salts, you can buy a 25 kg bag at your local farm supply shop for under 20 dollars),
PRO TIP
add some essential oils, I like peppermint, mandarin, ylang ylang, and lavender-experiment with what you like, also a few kawa kawa leaves in there and use them to rub any sore or hurt spots on your feet, get some pumice and give your new calluses a good scrub, you don’t want them to build up too
thick as they can start to crack and become very painful, I speak from experience.
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