Barefoot Shoes

Barefoot Shoes

Since a certain encounter in my early thirties with submerged glass on a beach in Mendocino, I have never felt quite comfortable walking barefoot for extended periods of time in places that I don’t know very well. In 2018, I had the experience of putting on my first pair of barefoot shoes. For many years, I’ve known that I don’t like to hike in boots. For a long time I hiked in indoor soccer shoes– Sambas in fact– which have tremendous ball feel, and seemed closer to connecting me with the ground. (Also, if someone happened to have a ball, there you go.) I watched my friend Jimi hiking in a pair of barefoot shoes, and a light bulb went on for me, so eventually I tried on a pair myself. From the first moment I put them on, something in my body remembered the way that the ground is supposed to feel under you. I can only say that it was something ancestral that came awake in me; came out of hibernation. I don’t think of myself as a runner, but as soon as those shoes were on my feet, my legs were happy and I wanted to run. Let me say this again, for emphasis. My legs became happy. Not me. My legs themselves. They woke up in that moment, like a bear coming out of a cave at the end of winter, ravenous for sensation and life.

If you knew me, you’d know how strange this is. I’m not un-athletic, but unless I’m playing soccer or tennis, my general attitude has been that I’m perfectly happy to run if something is chasing me. Yet as soon as those shoes were on my feet, my legs got happy, and they wanted to run again. It wasn’t a thought. It wasn’t an idea. It was a feeling in my legs. And so, in my first experience with barefoot shoes, there was this unbridled joy, coupled with this sense of almost incredulousness, like, how is it possible that I’m forty-three years old and no one told me about this? Compared to any other shoe, they felt completely different and immeasurably better. They awoke the way my body was meant to function. Can you hear that? Immediately, from within 5 minutes of putting them on, I had an awareness that I would not go back to being in nature in any other kind of shoe. It is now four years later, and except for moments when I have been required to wear a formal shoe I’ve worn nothing else at all.

I wish that people in the general population understood how profound an antidote to anxiety barefoot shoes are. They provide a constant stream of proprioceptive input to the body. This is, itself, an input that counteracts anxiety, because anxiety happens when we lose contact with the ground. Anxiety is the flight response denatured–the flight response without flight. Barefoot shoes make it much harder to lose awareness of the ground, because YOU CAN FEEL THE GROUND all the time.

Here are some companies that sell barefoot shoes we like. We don't have a financial relationship with any of them. But maybe we should...

Check out Vivo Barefoot shoes.

Merrell.

These remarkable Japanese Kenkoh sandals are covered with knobs to stimulate the accupressure points in the your feet. Extraordinarily wonderful.