Enlightening Nonsense

It is July 4th weekend and while I am not at the beach or in the park, I still walked most of the day barefoot in the “Cement Jungle.” New York City is so full of wackjobs that no one seemed to notice one more Shoeless Joe babbling to himself and smelling like he had just bathed in a urinal and so my bare feet went pretty much unnoticed.

There are many benefits to walking barefoot. Dr. John R. Christopher, the founder of The School of Natural Healing where I received my Masters in Herbology, said that the human system is an electrical system and like any electrical appliance, when we don’t “ground” ourselves, we get a build-up of static electricity that can wreak havoc to the system. There was one case he told of a couple who came to him where the wife hadn’t really slept much in weeks and what little catnaps she did get were not very restful at all. Dr. Christopher gave them each a cup of peppermint tea as they discussed her issue.

Dr. Christopher told the woman to go outside and walk barefoot on the grass for about 20-minutes and then to come back inside. Perhaps he was a misogynist and it was wintertime, twenty below zero, the ground was covered with snow and he wanted to punish this woman for having a vagina. But this is doubtful, as being a Mormon himself, he probably had fifteen wives of his own and had already figured out how not to let women drive you crazy. Perhaps he wanted to talk porn and booze with the gentleman alone but this, too, is doubtful, for Mormons have little energy for porn and booze after spending all day proselytizing their religion to people who couldn’t give a shit.

When the woman came back in the house, Dr. Christopher told them that they could go home now. The husband was clearly not a Jew or else he would have bitched about how he “Had to drive all this way for a cup of tea? Is this how you treat a client? Had I know, I would have gone to the corner coffee shop and bought a cup of tea and saved myself the long drive here. And it wouldn’t have been as watered-down as you made it, that much I can promise you! What, did you use one teabag for both cups?”

The next day Dr. Christopher received a call from the gentleman, which is a poor choice of words, because before Dr. C could even say a word the man proceeded to rip him a new one. “What kind of drug did you slip into my wife’s tea?” he said, “Because she slept all night and is still sleeping now!”

According to Dr. Christopher, what had caused the woman her tension was the build-up of this static electricity and once she grounded it—which doesn’t happen walking around with rubber-soled shoes—the electricity was released and her nerves were no longer bombarded with the overload and thus was able to finally relax. Personally, I think he slipped her a roofie.

David “The Raw Messiah” Wolfe is one of the most well known people in the raw food world and not just because of the overpriced cashews and other “superfoods” he sells. I personally find him annoying and even more so the entourage of mindless raw freaks that follow him like zombies from “Dawn of the Dead” seeking brains to chew on. But he has done quite a bit of exploring in the world of health and raw food and in between his hyping of some product he’s selling, there is an occasional nugget of information that is worth biting into.

I signed-up to receive email announcements from “The Raw Messiah” (TRM) in order to prove to myself that the Buddha was right when he said that life is suffering. It contained a link to his latest video discussion that was about the benefits of walking barefoot. After about 10-minutes of barely tolerating him and fully certain that the Buddha was right, I decided to click it off, bind my genitals and hang myself in my closet in order to die the most stupid death possible: an asphyxiated masturbation mishap like David Carradine.

I’m at a point now where it is less information and more inspiration I seek. TRM’s video was the Universe reminding me of what I already knew and inspiration to be street Nike and “Just do it, bitch!” And so I did it, uh, bitch.

And it felt pretty good! “But what about stepping on glass?“ you ask. Of course there is always the chance of stepping on a piece of something, but that is why God gave you eyes—look where you walk, dummy! I bumped into one woman I had met on the sidewalk once before and had exchanged cards and in parting she gave me the useful advice of, “Watch out for splinters.” I tucked this piece of information away for the next time I was walking barefoot on a wooden boardwalk, doubting that there was any real risk of a paved sidewalk “splintering.”

“It’s hard of the foot, no?” Uh, no. Obviously, if you’ve had your foot pampered your whole life like The Princess From Spoilty, it is probably not advisable for you to take your first barefoot pavement walk for more than a block or two, as the risk of chipping your perfect pedicure may just not be worth the benefits of grounding. It is best for all of us to walk on grass or sand or dirt. I just live in the Concrete Jungle and am not always in the mood to walk 15-minutes just to find some friggin’ grass and the small patches nearer to home have been drenched with so much urine from my dog, Abandon, that unless I get stung by a jellyfish, I won’t be traversing anytime soon. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhE8Qk7eXUg]

When you first start playing guitar, you will find your fingertips will get numb as if you stuck them in Frosty The Snowman’s ass for too long. With time, your fingers will get used to the guitar, allowing you to play glorious music and in time your feet will get used to walking barefoot and allow you to play glorious, uh, walk gloriously! [Editor’s note: No one affiliated with this website condones sticking any of your extremities in Frosty The Snowman’s ass, except Swami X, and that is only after receiving permission.]

“Walking barefoot is dangerous to the structure of the ankle and foot.” Thank you, Dr. Science, for your unfounded opinion where you can now join Al Gore in the group of fake experts who make unscientific statements. There is a reason that the best runners in the world are from places like Kenya. When you spend your whole life running barefoot from someone with a whip, you learn how to efficiently use your body instrument. According to Danny Dreyer, author of Chi Running, when you land on your heel—like most people run—this sends a tremendous amount of force back up through your leg and can affect the ankle, knee and hip joints, not to mention the back, adversely. He says that we should be running more on the middle and front of the foot with a more “falling forward” body position that allows momentum to carry us like a ball and not like a pogo stick (That was my last addition. I normally wouldn’t feel the need to take credit like this, but the ball/pogo stick image was so awesome that until Danny gives me a kickback from the sale of his books—he ain’t taking my metaphor!) I attribute reading and practicing the running techniques in Chi Running for helping me not only finish The New York City Marathon but in finishing it in less than 3:30.

In addition, all the nerves in the body have endpoints in the hands and feet. What this means is that when walking barefoot on uneven ground, you will be stimulating all the reflexology points in the foot. In English, you will be sending nerve energy to the organs whose nerve reflexes you are stimulating in the foot, which is good for the organs and good for the whole system.

There was a story where Dr. Christopher had a patient with a kidney stone and nothing seemed to be working, from kidney flushes and kidney and stone dissolving herbs, to help the stone pass. Dr. Christopher, who was not just a Master Herbalist but also proficient in reflexology, worked the kidney point in the center of the sole of the foot and this was the stimulus that was needed to help the man pass the stone.

I passed a stone once. I was walking in the park and passed by a stone and said, “Hello stone!” Wasn’t as painful as what I hear from all these wimps that passing a stone is the male equivalent of giving birth. I suppose if the stone didn’t like how I addressed it and threw itself against my head it would have been painful but that didn’t happen.

“What about germs?” Your fear of germs is based more on your conditioning than it is on reality. I’m not afraid of germs. I have broken free of this conditioning and if I drop a grape on the sidewalk, I have no problem picking it up and putting it in my mouth. I’m like a baby in that way—I’ll shove just about anything that isn’t attached to a pedophile priest in my mouth.

What would really happen if you chewed and swallowed a piece of food with a couple of nasty germs on it? Let’s say I dropped my fictitious grape and just then some swine flu sneezer happened to KA-CHOO on it. There are enzymes in my mouth that are released in the saliva with the chewing process that will start to go to work to break down the unwelcome germs. When I swallow the now slushy grape, it enters into my stomach where the stomach acids will pretty much kill anything short of your mother and even her if you chop her up into little pieces and Jeffrey Dahmer her. Well, I’m guessing she’d be dead by the time you put her in the beef grinder but you get my point: that this fear—as well as most of our fears—is not grounded in truth.

“But it’s gross!” I saw a show on T.V. where they scraped a persons face with a toothpick and then put it on a slide and looked at it under a microscope and you saw some scary looking creatures on there. Gross? Get over it, pussy. This is more conditioned nonsense, as pathetically imposed upon us as the priest’s “divine knowledge that stroking your pecker is going to have you sitting around the table with Satan as your Bridge partner.

Sure there was the time I was walking behind some dude on his cel phone who kept spitting wads of phlegm on the sidewalk in front of me. And then there was the dead mouse. I probably would have chosen static overload over stepping in either one of those. But if you live your life in the fear mindset of “What if…?” “What if a car hits me?” “What if an air conditioner falls on my head?” “What if she turns me down?” then you’ll never take your car out of your driveway, you’ll look like a retard wearing a helmet and looking skyward whenever you go for you walk and you’ll never ask the girl out and, just possibly, get a date or even find love.

It’s a pussy way to live and it’s really not living at all. It’s avoiding life. I see it when a caretaker of an aggressive-behaving dog makes a big circle to avoid all other dogs she may cross. I see it when the New-Age yoga poser continues to go to festival after festival, workshop after workshop, retreat after retreat, because she knows that if she steps out of her fantasy freak world for a minute, she is going to have to face that life is not all bliss and she has some serious issues she’s never dealt with—and didn’t have to—surrounded by clowns that tell you that despite being 300 lbs. overweight and having pussing acne over your entire body that, “I can still see the inner beauty within you,” without someone punching them in the face. I see it in the person who smokes weed every day and lies to himself that, “I can quit anytime I want.” Or the person who goes to the bar everyday after work for a few “stiff ones” to forget the day that’s past—and after taking a few stiff ones, he then has a few drinks to forget the pounding his ass has just taken.

Take the car out. Walk outside without a helmet and unnecessary neck strain. Ask the girl out. And walk barefoot in the streets of New York City or whatever town it is in which you reside. Well, maybe start with the sidewalks. The worst-case scenario will be that someone crashes into your car and kills you. Or an air conditioning unit falls out of a building window and kills you. Or the girl, mistaking you for a mugger, pulls out a gun and kills you. Or you step on a dead mouse infected with a government-created virus and it kills you. So what? It will probably be the first time you’ve actually taken a deep breath of life and filled your lungs up beyond the small puffs you take each day like an emphysema victim. And if any of these life behaviors do actually kill you—you’ll be dead anyway, what the hell difference will it make to you?

Stop being a victim. Instead become a mugger. It’s a lot more fun hitting life over the head with a sock full of rocks than it is walking around like a pussy zombie who really does deserve to be mugged. Start by taking off your shoes and walking. You may be surprised what a little connection to Mother Earth may do for you. And if people look at you funny, just do what I do: scratch your head fiercely, snap your neck from left to right, up and down, and shout, “LOOK OUT FOR BATS! LOOK OUT FOR BATS!” This will do absolutely nothing for you but it will help me know who read this piece. And if I see enough people babbling along the sidewalk, warning of bat attacks, that will be my sign from God that it is time for me to create a fake religion—like Scientology or Mormonism—in order to get laid and start raking in the dough!

“Become more sensitive. You will not go mad. Closing yourself to life you have gone mad. Open up, listen to everything.”

—Osho from Walk without feet, Fly without wings, and Think without mind (p. 160)

“How could I attain a practice that could begin to change the world, starting with the only thing directly accessible: my own consciousness of reality?”

—Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love by Daniel Odier (p. 45)

REFLECTION:

When was the last time you walked barefoot on the earth? How often do you walk barefoot outside your apartment or house? If you can’t find the time to walk barefoot, you could always hug a tree…but then you’d be a tree-hugging pussy.

MEDITATION:

Sit in a chair and imagine two grounding cords coming from your first chakra at the base of your spine and shooting through your legs and into the ground, penetrating all the way to the center of the earth. Imagine two more grounding cords dropping straight from your first chakra through your butt and into the ground and all the way to the center of the earth. You can imagine your grounding cords like roots of a great tree or maybe as energy or whatever floats your boat. Imagine, see, feel, know these roots to be firmly grounded. Now feel the energy of the earth coming up through all four grounding cords and into you, filling your whole body with this supportive, nurturing, grounding energy. Feel connected to the earth, connected to your body, connected to the All.