You don’t have to fly to Rome to marvel at incredible architecture. One of the most sophisticated engineering masterpieces you’ll encounter is already attached to your leg.
Each foot contains 26 bones, 33 joints, three arches, and more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments. All absorbing force, helping you balance, communicating with your brain, and adapting to the ground beneath you.
In this final episode of our anatomy series, we’re giving your feet the attention they deserve.
In this episode:
🔹 How the three arches work together like a suspension bridge to support, absorb force, and adapt with every step
🔹 Why your feet are sensory organs and how they influence the entire kinetic chain above them
🔹 The barefoot vs. supportive shoe debate, why plantar fasciitis is so common, and why there isn’t one right answer for every foot
🔹 Yoga cues for Tadasana, Warrior poses, Tree, Triangle, and more that help students feel and strengthen their feet
Your feet have carried you through life this entire time. Give them some love.
✅ If this episode makes you think, I want to understand the body this way, come study with us inside Uplifted → https://www.brettlarkin.com/online-yoga-teacher-training/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=200ytt
FREE Practice: Easy Yoga for Your Feet and Ankles (15-min) Simple Light Stretching For Runners
Relevant Blog: Pada Bandha: Your #1 Secret to Happy Feet
Relevant to Today’s Episode:
📚 Healing with Somatic Yoga Book
✅ 200-hour Online Yoga Teacher Training
🎧 Also Listen to:
#444 – Spine Anatomy: Do You Understand the System Holding Your Practice Together?
#445 – Diaphragm Anatomy: Do You Understand the Muscle Powering Every Breath?
© 2026 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
Your feet are doing way more than holding you up. They are shock absorbers, sensory organs, balance systems, and one of the most complicated pieces of architecture in your entire body. In this episode, we’re going to actually meet the anatomy of your feet, the 26 bones, 33 joints, three arches, and over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments working beneath you 24-7.
We’ll talk about barefoot versus supportive shoes, why plantar fascitis becomes so common as we age, and then bring all of this onto the yoga mat. I’ll give you specific alignment tips, teaching cues, and foot explorations that you can use either in your own practice or steal for your next yoga class that you have to teach.
Once you understand what your feet are actually doing down there, you’re never going to experience or cue Tadasana the same way again. Let’s get started.
anatomy of the foot (02:04)
This past summer I went on a trip to Rome with my family, and we were walking through the city and just marveling at the architecture, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, these ancient Roman arches, the aqueducts, engineering that survived nearly 2,000 years. And it made me realize we’re fascinated by architecture. We travel across the world to admire it, but one of the greatest.
Engineering masterpieces you’ll ever encounter is attached to the bottom of your leg.
You don’t have to fly to Italy to find incredible architecture. You literally just have to look down. And the funny thing is, most of us never really meet our feet. We’re not interested. We think our feet are just kind of dirty or gross. If we’re getting a pedicure, we’re looking at a magazine. If we’re buying shoes, we’re focused on the shoes, we’re stuffing the feet, getting them hidden. And today I really want us to meet our feet, for you to meet your foot.
Because most of us think of the foot as just one thing. And it’s actually this incredibly sophisticated structure. So I’m gonna start by trying to wow you with a couple facts. Here is what each foot contains, okay? Keep in mind you have two of them.
So each foot has 26 bones. This is so many bones. This is more than one quarter of all the bones in your body. So over 25% of your skeleton is in your foot. It has 33 joints. Okay, 33 joints. And more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments that are working together in your foot. So over a quarter of your skeleton is devoted just to your two feet.
Now, as much as I’d love to think you could take your shoes off and do like a foot tour with me right now, I know you might be walking, you know you might be driving. So just picture your foot right now, okay? Just imagine your foot, and we’ll go through some of the anatomy together. So your heel, your heel is the foundation. This is the first point of contact during a typical walking gait. So your heel is designed to absorb enormous amounts of force. Your heel is a hero.
Then we have your big toe, which is the superstar. So don’t underestimate it. And later we’re gonna understand your big toe is one of the reasons your whole foot works, your whole arch works. And then on the opposite side we have the little toe, which is often forgotten, yet it’s really important for lateral balance. so the little toe deserves a lot more credit than it gets.
Then you might have heard yoga teachers or other people talk about the ball of your foot. And the ball of your foot is the padded area just behind the toes.
So this is where a lot of your weight is transferring and you’re feeling it before you push off during walking to move forward.
Now let’s talk about the arches because this is where everything gets really cool. People often think your foot just has one arch, but it doesn’t. There’s actually three. so the medial longitudinal arch is the one that everyone kind of tends to know. So that’s the one that’s going from your heel to the inside of your foot.
And then finishing at your big toe. So it’s the tallest arch. So often when someone says, I have high arches, you just look at the arch of someone’s foot, this is the most obvious one. And it’s primarily a shock absorber. Think of this as like the golden gate bridge of your foot. It’s the big one. Then we have the lateral longitudinal arch. So that’s going to run from the heel again all the way up, this time towards the pinky toe.
So it’s on the outside of the foot, it’s a little lower, and it’s more stable. So think of it as like a quieter support beam. And then we have the transverse arch. So the first two arches were kind of going up and down the length of your foot. The transverse arch is running across, across the width of your foot. So think of it as like a rainbow stretching from one side of the foot to the other. And we usually forget about this one, yet it’s constantly helping us distribute pressure. So if you imagine looking at your foot from the front.
The foot isn’t flat, right? It’s gently domed like the roof of an old cathedral. And Roman architects, they understood arches.
Why? Because nature figured them out millions of years earlier.
So your foot isn’t this block, it’s not like this cinder block at the bottom of your body. It’s this incredibly intelligent suspension bridge where the bones are like the towers, The ligaments and the plantar fascia behave like kind of tension cables. And then teeny tiny muscles are constantly adjusting the tension.
So unlike a regular bridge where it gets built and then it’s there, this foot of yours is constantly changing shape, a little bit micro movements here and there as it develops and adapts to your lifestyle.
So to review, inside your foot, you have your bones. That’s the rigid support, right? Kind of the framework. Then you have ligaments. If you’ve done yoga teacher training with me, you know ligaments attach a bone to bone. think of them as like seatbelts, right? Their job is just stability, not enabling movement. And then we have tendons in your foot. Tendons, again, if you’ve done YTT with me, connect what? Muscle to bone. So tendons transmit force. So the muscles pull and then the tendons deliver that pull to the bone.
And then we have the fascia, my favorite, one of the most misunderstood tissues in the body. And imagine the fascia just as like a shrink wrap made of living connective tissues. So the fascia surrounds everything: all the muscles, all the bones, all the nerves, all the organs, everything in your whole body, and of course in your foot as well. It’s connecting everything. So we’ll revisit that again when we talk about plantar fasciitis. Now, there are intrinsic and extrinsic muscles.
when it comes to your foot. So this is pretty easy. Intrinsic, think like in. These intrinsic muscles live entirely inside your foot. So they’re like teeny tiny, they’re precise, they have like a lot of fine motor control and arch support. Um like if you wiggle your toes right now, you know that’s probably gonna be like intrinsic muscles. They’re helping you balance. And then there’s extrinsic muscles that can also
make your foot move that begin way up in your lower leg. So if you like point and flex your foot, you’ll probably feel that that’s coming from your lower leg as well.
And there’s also long tendons traveling down into the foot. So essentially the muscles controlling your foot don’t all live in your foot. That’s gonna be important for later.
Now, another fun fact, which is also why we should not ever, ever underestimate our feet or forget about them, is that our feet are so strong. Your feet experience 1.2 times your body weight with each step during normal walking. And a lot more than that if you’re doing running or you’re doing jumping. So if you weigh 150 pounds, your foot may briefly experience like 180 pounds of force each time you take a step. And a lot of us take 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day.
day. So your feet are doing engineering calculations all day long.
They’re taking on so much for you. And now that we know the architecture, let’s think about like why does this architecture of the three arches exist in the foot? What is this incredible structure actually trying to do for us? So if we look at the foot’s resume, you know, it’s like, why do you exist? What’s your job? Well, the first job is support. And we can think of that in a yoga pose like tidasana. If you stand in tidasana and simply notice.
You’ll see that your foot actually isn’t trying to become rigid. It’s constantly receiving weight, absorbing force, r returning energy, and your arches are gently like compressing and rebounding. And you might notice that you’re kind of like adjusting over your foot, even as you try to stand still, right? Still in quotes. So your foot isn’t a a brick. It’s not that cinder block. Think of it as like a spring.
So one of the nice things that you can do in Tadasana or anytime you’re standing and just want to f give your feet some love is think about the tripod foot, the three contact points that your foot has with the ground. So that would be the center of your heel, the base of the big toe, and the base of the little toe. And we want all of those to have pressure down into the ground. And so in yoga, mountain pose is a great place to feel all three and sort of notice is one section of the foot collapsing? Like
Outside or forward or back, where does your body kind of sway or go? And that leads into job two that your foot has, which is balance. So we talked about support. Well, what about balance? If you lifted a leg up just in your mind’s eye or visualized tree pose, tree pose isn’t teaching your foot how to balance, it’s revealing whether your foot already knows how to. Those tiny intrinsic muscles, once we take one foot off the floor, have to do a lot more.
micro adjustments and there’s thousands of these micro adjustments happening every second and they’re happening whether you’re aware of them or not, which is really cool. It’s not like we lift our leg for tree pose and then think, okay foot, do your thing, right? It’s like our foot just naturally starts kind of like different muscles are moving and we’re swaying a little bit.
So the next time you do tree pose, I want you to really notice how much your feet are talking to your brain.
And this leads into your foot’s third job, which is navigation. They’re not passive. the sole of the foot, the whole foot, but especially the sole of the foot, is a sensory organ. It’s packed with mechanoreceptors, and these receptors are detecting pressure, vibration, stretch, texture, position, and then it’s giving those updates constantly to your brain. And so it’s like your feet are the Google maps of your
nervous system or of your brain, not literally, but like functionally. They’re they’re constantly saying to the rest of your body, Here’s where we are. We’re leaning. There’s gravel. The floor is sloping. Um we’re about to lose balance. We’re about to step down a step. So there’s gonna be extra pressure.
Think about when you’re even without your foot on the ground. Maybe you’re in Warrior Three and your back leg is lifted and you’re gonna transition back into crescent lunge, but you have this kind of idea of where your foot should land in space, right? This is how incredible the foot is. It’s like even when it’s not getting feedback from the Earth, it has this sort of Google Maps capacity in it.
So your foot doesn’t just touch the different surfaces that it’s on, like a yoga mat or grass or
a hardwood floor compared to a tile floor, your foot’s actually listening to that surface. And that leads into its fourth job, which is communication, right?
Everything travels upward from the foot to the ankle, from the ankle to the tibia, from the tibia to the knee.
From the knee to the femur, from the femur to the hip, from the hip to the pelvis, from the pelvis to the spine.
That is a massive kinetic chain. And while we can look at skeletons in yoga or anatomy, we need to remember that your body doesn’t actually experience all the things I just named as separate body parts. Your body experiences everything as one kinetic chain, one continuous conversation.
And the body is constantly redistributing forces.
So what’s going on with your feet doesn’t stop in your ankle or your knee. It’s going all the way up. In fact, I was having a myofascial release session last night where we were finding a lot of intric interesting connections between my sit bones and the very bottom of my foot, as well as the very bottom of my foot through the sit bone off the lower two vertebra in my low back.
So your foot is the silent hero. It has all these jobs. How do we actually take care of this bridge, of this amazingly remarkable bridge at the bottom of your leg?
This is really important to explore because modern life basically broke our relationship with our feet. We’re born when we’re little with very curious feet. Um, toddlers, they’re spreading their toes, they’re gripping, they’re climbing, they’re squatting, trying to figure out how to balance. Maybe they’re barefoot more often in their house or they’re walking on grass, they’re uneven ground. But for most of us, when we grow up, our feet get stuffed into shoes, often even from infancy.
We’re usually walking on flat sidewalks or we’re driving places in cars or we’re in office chairs. We’re pretty much always walking on level floors. We’re not doing as much climbing, unless that’s something you’re cultivating. We’re not spending very much time barefoot. We’re exposed to a lot less variability.
So imagine if you were a caveman or cave woman who didn’t really have access to shoes or could make, you know, just very basic shoes, living in the woods, running, hunting, gathering berries, just like how much variability your feet would be exposed to.
Instead, our feet are stuffed in shoes and pretty much only experiencing flat surfaces. So all of those tiny intrinsic muscles we talked about inside your foot, they just don’t get challenged as often. And like any muscle, if they’re never asked to work, what happens? They get weaker. So it’s essentially like, imagine you put your arm in a cast for 40 years and then we’re like, okay, do a bench press, right? Doesn’t make any sense. Your arm could not do that.
So it’s similar with our feet. Like we’ve stuffed them in shoes, aka a cast for the majority of our life. And then someone’s like, you should join the the barefoot foot movement and just stop wearing shoes. So there’s a lot of debates. Um, the Great Foot debate, right? There’s kind of three camps that you may have been aware of, which is camp one is like just do everything barefoot, like throw away your shoes, let your feet strengthen naturally. It’s kind of like go back to being a caveman.
And there is some truth there because minimal footwear is definitely gonna strengthen those intrinsic foot muscles. But obviously transition matters. If your foot’s been in a cast, like super padded shoes, for the majority of your life, you could actually risk a lot of injury if you suddenly switch.
Then there’s a second camp of people who just say, you know what, you want the maximum cushion for your foot. You want those hoka shoes, you want support, you want comfort, pain reduction. And again, this is really important during injury recovery for certain people.
And then I think the third camp of people I’d say are like really into orthotics. So they also want to support the foot forever. And again, sometimes that’s really appropriate, sometimes it’s not necessary. So the goal I think is to look at this holistically and not get too sucked into like any one foot religion. Uh I don’t think it’s barefoot or support. I think it’s asking, like, what does your bridge need? What does your foot need? Does it need more strength? Does it need more mobility?
Does it need temporary support? Does it need less load or more load or more variability? Because we want a foot that is adaptable.
I started doing ballet again after not doing it for many years, and I really noticed like how much it woke up all of these muscles in my feet that I usually don’t use because there’s a lot of pointing and like detailed footwork that I actually really like and I think is fantastic for
me as I age, but I had to ease into it.
The older I get, the more I notice that if I suddenly switch shoes or have a different sneaker brand that maybe has a little less support than I’m used to.
I experience pain and problems more often. So I think we just really want to be paying attention to what’s going on with our feet, especially in like think of it in seasonal transitions too.
If you’re wearing pretty supportive sneakers and then suddenly it’s summer and you just switch to flat sandals or flip flops that have no support, you’re gonna feel that difference. Your foot will be sore.
So now that we understand the architecture, let’s talk a little bit about plantar fascitis and why it’s almost become a rite of passage. and I think yoga is actually one of the best places to rebuild your relationship with your feet.
So rather than thinking like I’m wanna be a barefoot minimalist, maximist cushion or orthotics type of person, I’d bring back some nuance. instead of like does my foot need support or not need support, maybe thinking more about like what does my foot need support doing? Strength, mobility, absorbing load, am I recovering from an injury? Am I adapting to a new activity? Like I mentioned with my ballet.
So I want you to imagine the bottom of your foot right now. And the planter fascia is this thick band of connective tissue running alongside the sole of the foot from the heel towards the toes. So it’s helping support that longitudinal arch that we uh mentioned earlier.
So it’s a band of connective tissue from the heels to the toes. And so if your foot is a suspension bridge, the plantar fascia is like one of the most important major tension cables. And fascia is not muscle. It doesn’t contract like your biceps. It’s connective tissue that helps transmit and resist forces, but it’s not a muscle.
So plantar fasciitis is pain around either the bottom or inside of the heel. It’s often really noticeable when you take those first few steps after getting out of bed or after sitting for a long time.
And the name plantar fasciitis may might make you think like, okay, this is this fascia, this band of connective tissue is inflamed and that’s the whole problem. But the story’s actually a lot usually more complicated.
Especially as we grow older. for many people, plantar fasciitis hits around middle age.
And it’s sort of like this perfect storm.
As you get older, you have years of repetitive loading, you know, walking the same way, maybe with a gait that’s not the the healthiest or most optimal for your body. Maybe you’re changing your activities, you have less ankle mobility as you go grow older. Maybe your foot strength is not as high as it used to be. Maybe you’ve gained some weight and you’re a little heavier. Uh perhaps you have an occupation where you stand a lot or you’re suddenly starting a new exercise program.
But if you’re experiencing pain, you know, pain is information. So it’s really important to get assessed if you think it’s persistent and not do anything drastic. Don’t be like, I’m gonna throw away all my shoes and just do the barefoot foot movement or I’m just gonna bundle my foot up and have tons of support forever. Get
assessed and then think beyond just the pain to, you know, the whole foot and maybe even up the leg as well.
like calf stretching and exercises for the foot and ankle muscles can be really, really helpful as well. And this is where I think yoga has something beautiful to offer. definitely not because yoga cures plantar fasciitis, it’s it’s incredibly complex. But yoga gives us, you, me, all our students, something that modern life rarely gives us, which is time barefoot. Time moving slowly enough.
To maybe actually listen to our feet, depending what kind of yoga we’re doing. So I really want you to think of yoga as like your foot laboratory. When you step on that yoga mat, you’re barefoot, you’re changing load, you’re balancing. Usually you’re moving from two foot to one foot, even if it’s just in transitions. you’re changing directions, you’re flexing and extending the toes, you’re asking your arch to respond, you’re receiving like
Sensory information from the ground. And if you’re paying attention, your yoga class can really become the place where you finally meet the 26 bones you’ve been standing on your entire life. You get to really feel that. And one of the key principles in uplifted yoga, many of you might know, we go over this in all of our training programs, is teaching and cueing poses from the ground up. So that’s something you can start doing right now, whether you’re a teacher or a practitioner or both.
The foot is the foundation, it informs everything else above it. Remember that kinetic chain we reviewed? The foot, the ankle, the knee, the hip, the pelvis, the spine.
And something I do and lead in a lot of our 200-hour teacher trainings is this really intense tadasana exploration starting with the feet. So coming into tadasana, not having an agenda to fix anything, but just noticing, looking down, and you can cue your students to do this. Are your feet turned out? Are they turned in? Is one a little different from the other? is your weight more in your toes or your heels?
On the inside or the outside of
your foot. So just bringing awareness without even cueing alignment is such a great principle. And then of course you can cue students or yourself to like find the tripod. Come into tadasana and find the tripod. Because I always say tadasana is the blueprint for every other yoga pose. we put our body in all these weird shapes, but we’re always yearning back towards tadasana with the muscles and the bones.
So if you can find that center of the heel, big toe mound, little toe mound, feel all three, not necessarily with equal pressure, but at least like connection. And then lift all 10 toes and notice what happens to the arches of your feet. Notice whether your weight shifts backwards, you know, really spread the toes and then see if you can put them down individually if possible. so that’s something you can cue at the beginning of every class, like every
you do that first tadasana cue, cueing through that, the tripod, lifting all the toes and trying to set them down one at a time. Then another thing I love to cue is the vacuum cleaner cue. So I say, you know, now that you have that connection, you know, pressing down through the big toe, little toe, and the heel, imagine there’s a tiny vacuum cleaner underneath the arch of your foot and that it’s gently sucking up the ground and that’s going to activate you or your students to gently draw the arch of your foot upward.
So the big toe mound stays down, the little toe mound stays down, the heel stays down, and you don’t curl the toes or grip, but you start creating lift. And this is a great theme for yoga in general, right? Is to feel that deep activation.
You can also say something like, imagine the heel and the base of your big toe are subtly yearning towards each other without actually moving. If people aren’t really getting the vacuum cleaner in the arch, sucking up, analogy, that can be another really nice way to help them feel that same thing.
And you could even do this as a little drill, like imagine your heel and the base of your big toe are subtly moving your yearning towards each other. And then as you exhale, let that go.
So you could do a couple even little reps like that. And then you can feel the foot connecting into the leg. So now that you have your tripod, your lifted arch, my next favorite cue is to in Tadasana, imagine your heels yearning towards one another. Don’t actually move them. Just imagine your heels are moving inward towards your center line. And what you’re gonna feel happen is that your inner ankles, your inner calves, your inner thighs, your pelvic floor, your lower belly.
are all gonna turn on.
And you don’t want to promise everyone that they’ll feel their pelvic floor because that’s gonna be highly variable, depending on what’s going on with their body and their kinetic chain. But you can say something like, see whether you can sense a response traveling upward through the inseam of your leggings towards the pelvic floor.
And then you can cue them to relax everything and feel it again. So if you just start doing like a traditional Hatha yoga or vinyasa yoga class where you need to get people moving and probably hit a lot of other postures and get into sun salutes, you know, maybe you just cue this tadasana foot inner heel all the way up through the leg exploration once. If you’re teaching a class that’s a lot slower paced, or maybe you’re teaching an older population or a more therapeutic class.
You could have them, you know, go through these cues a couple times or have them do reps. Like I said, relax, you know, the inseam of the leg and now activate everything again, going through all the cues again.
I think a lot of times as teachers we feel like, well, this isn’t enough, or it’s not doing enough, or it’s not exercise enough, but actually this is so, so valuable for people.
So, as we start to wrap up, I wanted to do a little bit of a yoga foot FAQ. So these are some of the common questions I hear from students. One is should my feet be together in tadasana? And my answer to this is not necessarily. Like different traditions teach different stances. So feet together may be appropriate and suitable for some, but I think hip width apart can give a lot more stability and room through the pelvis, especially if you’re in a uh female.
gynecoid pelvis or especially if you have a bigger body.
So a great question to ask, especially if you’re doing a private, is like, how can we organize your feet, knees, hips, and pelvis without strain? And then even workshopping with them a little bit? Like, what is that ideal to DACA? people also often ask me, do my feet need to point perfectly straightforward into Dasana? so we don’t need to obsess about geometry because people have different skeletal structures and habitual movement patterns. And what often happens is if the feet are not straight, but you try to force them straight.
It can create torque on the knee.
So we don’t ever want to sacrifice the knee to just make the feet look prettier.
So this is a great place to remind your students that alignment is not a photograph of like perfect feet facing forward. Alignment is a relationship. the foot needs to be relative to the ankle, relative to the knee, relative to the hip, relative to the pelvis in the whole person.
So yearn for feet straightforward, but if that’s not working or causing pain or torquing the knee, it’s completely fine.
We spend a lot of time in our trainings talking about like traditional cues, like heel to arch alignment in warrior poses. So this is another frequently asked question and really important for teachers. So yoga has a lot of like visual rules, traditional visual rules such as front heel, bisex, back arch, or heel to arch alignment. And these these are starting points. They’re not anatomical laws. People differ, hip anatomy differs, femoral tibial.
Portion differs in every single body. So we really want to stop sacrificing stability for like meeting these precise measurements. I’m a big fan of adjusting the stance until the person can ground appropriately, organize the knee in safe alignment in relationship with the hip and the ankle, and most importantly, breathe. Because if we stop breathing, we’re not doing yoga. And feel stable. So there’s a lot more information about that in our trainings. And one of the things I really love.
about our 200 hour training is you see me workshop poses like warrior two and warrior one with you know 30 different bodies. We have a lot of photos of tons of different people like young, old, injuries, lots of just like a diverse student population. And we look at how we would adjust these people based on what we’re seeing in their in their anatomy, in their body from the ground up, rather than just memorizing.
alignment cues like heel to arch.
So if you’re a yoga teacher listening,
Here’s what I really want you to take from this episode. You know, ground down through your feet, that cue, or root through your feet. It’s a good starting point, but it’s not enough. Really, I invite you to give your students something to explore. Cues like lift all 10 toes and notice what happens underneath your arches. Or spread your toes like you’re spreading your fingers on the floor and try to lower them down one at a time.
or lower the toes without losing the lift at the center of your foot. feel into your heel, your big toe mound, and your little toe mound.
Notice which corner of your tripod feels the loudest.
That’s gonna get people so much more curious and so much more interested and activating their foot rather than just saying ground down through your feet, right?
Imagine a tiny vacuum cleaner underneath the arches of your foot, gently sectioning it upward. Yeah, that’s like one of my favorite cues.
Imagine the heel and the ball of the foot yearning towards each other. We already talked about that one.
Yearn your heels together without moving them.
Notice whether anything responds higher up in your thighs, your pelvic floor or lower belly. So that’s a great cue, right? Notice we said, notice whether anything responds. We’re not telling them something should happen or that they should feel a certain way. We’re just encouraging that exploration.
So my invitation for you this week is to turn your next yoga practice into a foot practice. I think a lot of times we want like these fancy themes as yoga teachers. We’re like, okay, we’re gonna do like a a chakra theme or something about the moon or seasons, and you know, all of that is beautiful, but what about the feet? The feet are a great theme. you can really cue through them and do, you know, even a couple reps in tadasana with the tripod, the arch.
The toes. In Warrior One, you can, you know, echo back. Can you still feel both feet? Can you still feel the arch of the front foot sucking up? How are you connected through the back foot? in triangle, right? Did you abandon the little toe side of the back foot? in a tree pose, right? Talking about what is the standing foot doing? Is it gripping, adjusting, communicating? in Warrior Three, like what happens as balance becomes harder? In Down Dog, what’s happening in the toes and the balls of the feet and the arches?
So you don’t necessarily need like new poses, you just need new attention, right? Like a new lens back to the feet in every pose.
So modern life puts so many barriers between us and the ground, between floor and shoes and cars and chairs and slippers. you know, yoga is so special, giving you and your students that that bare feet, the ground, their attention, their breath.
And we know your feet are sensory organs. So give them different textures and and surfaces to give your nervous system just like more information. So pull your pull your shoes off if there’s some nice grass or sand or wood or like a rock. I when I was young, I loved walking on this stone wall and uh I was always barefoot. So walk barefoot somewhere safe this week if you can.
And the next time you’re marveling at some engineering, like an incredible bridge or an incredible dome or an incredible masterpiece from the ancient world, you know, just remember you don’t have to travel across the world to see some of these magnificent architectural sites. You’ve been standing on an architectural masterpiece your whole life. 26 bones, 33 joints, three arches, muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia.
Sensory receptors, so much constant adaptation, supporting you through thousands of steps every day, mostly without you having to even think about it.
Your feet are carrying you through life. So give them some love.
And until next time, take care of you.
