Everyone wants to talk about the problems with shoes these days, 

But even those thinking about the issue are a level too shallow in their thinking. 

Yes - wearing shoes messes with our natural posture and negatively alters our body structure over time. 

Yes - it also keeps us out of the natural healing energies that the earth provides freely when we are in touch with it. 

But that’s just the fucking beginning - and boy does it get good. 

There are even bigger implications than the above. 

Wearing shoes disconnects us from the environment that we are in, and act as an artificial buffer - slightly dissociating us from the full experience of the place in which we stand. 

It’s like asking, 

What is it like to be in this environment, with earplugs in? 

What is it like to be in this environment, with a blindfold on? 

What is it like to be in this environment, without the ability to feel it with my feet? 

The difference might seem small, but it is absolutely distinct. 

This also allows us to tromp extremely fast through an environment, focused entirely on where we are going and feeling nothing along the way - ignoring and crashing through the environment around us in a way we could not do without the light dissociation of shoes (a pretty fitting metaphor for life in today’s society). 

For the next factor, it’s important to understand that our body gives off warning signals when something is not healthy or natural for us. 

We will smell smoke as a warning signal before the fire touches our skin. 

We will hear a cracking twig outside and be able to reach for our spear – or feel alarm bells on the roof of our mouth if pizza is too hot to swallow. 

All of these warning signals are feedback loops to keep us safe. 

But what if we were to sleep with our nose plugged? The fire would get far closer before we could escape. 

And if we were to turn off our temperature sensors, that scalding pizza would damage our esophageal and stomach lining, putting us in grave danger. 

As we can see, breaking the feedback loop puts us in far more danger than we would be in with our feedback loops in tact. 

Here’s the thing, our feet serve the same purpose. 

Our feet can tell us if an environment feels natural and healthy for us, vs if it is unnatural and dangerous. But if we have shoes on, it turns that signal off, so that we can crash right through environments that we are in no way intended to be in. 

Have you ever wondered why only a netflix-level-serial-killer would wear shoes on the beach? Or why nobody walks barefoot in a metropolitan area? 

Maybe, just maybe, it is because a part of us knows that streets made of screaming hot tar and chemical soup might be less than ideal to be around every day. And on the beach our body recognizes that it can finally relax and feel safe. 

So the problem becomes that by wearing shoes, we are blinding ourselves to our body’s warning signals, continuously putting it into environments that are completely unnatural and unsafe to it. 

But then, if the body’s threat signals go unheeded, eventually the person becomes deaf to them. They don’t notice they are even there. 

This necessitated dissociation means that unsafety has to become the new default, as the person goes from unnatural environment to unnatural environment betraying their body’s needs, unable to hear its cries anymore. 

And we wonder why people have an unfriendly relationship with their bodies. Why they might have a hard time trusting themselves, as they are continuously harming themselves over and over.  

And why, oh why, might we have a hard time accessing or trusting our intuition? Perhaps if we were to dig under the pile of threat signals over there, our natural ease might be easier to find.

Though it might mean making some big changes to the environment around us.  

Anyway, those are some implications of shoes. Enjoy.