Your feet are taking instructions from WHERE??
Some Body Parts talk to the most unrelated companions!
What Do Your Eyes Have to Do With Your Feet?
There are some relationships in the body that make perfect sense.
Your neck and shoulders.
Your hip and knee.
Your brain and nervous system.
And then there are the relationships that sound as though the body has been arranging secret meetings without telling us.
Like your eyes and your feet.
They are at opposite ends of the body.
Your eyes look.
Your feet stand.
What could they possibly need to discuss?
Quite a lot, actually.
Standing still isn’t really still
Even when you believe you are standing perfectly still, your body is making constant, tiny adjustments.
Your weight shifts forwards and backwards.
Pressure moves through different parts of your feet.
The muscles around your ankles respond.
Your body quietly corrects, adapts and reorganises to keep you upright.
Most of this happens without you being consciously aware of it.
Your feet play an important part in this process, but they aren’t working alone.
The body’s balance group chat
To understand where you are in space, your brain combines information from several sources.
Your eyes provide a visual reference to the world around you.
Your inner ear contributes information about movement and the position of your head.
Receptors throughout your muscles, joints and connective tissues help your brain understand where the different parts of your body are.
Your feet also provide information about the surface beneath you.
Is it firm?
Uneven?
Sloping?
Stable?
Slippery?
All these messages are gathered and compared as your nervous system works out one very important thing:
How do I keep this body upright?
It isn’t really a boss-and-employee arrangement.
It is more like a rather busy group chat.
What happens when the information changes?
When one source of information changes, the body may alter its balancing strategy.
Pressure may shift towards one foot.
An ankle may begin working harder.
The toes may grip.
One hip may carry more weight than the other.
The head or shoulders may subtly change position.
This doesn’t mean that the eyes have caused a painful foot, or that every foot problem begins with vision.
Bodies are far more individual and complicated than that.
But it does remind us that the area working hardest may not be the only area worth considering.
A foot that appears weak, tense or overworked may actually be doing an excellent job with the information it has been given.
A different question
When we find an area that is tight, uncomfortable or working too hard, it is tempting to ask:
What is wrong with it?
But sometimes a more useful question is:
What is this area trying to help the rest of the body do?
Perhaps the foot is helping someone feel more stable.
Perhaps the ankle is adapting to a repeated shift in weight.
Perhaps the body has found a strategy that works, even if that strategy is no longer particularly comfortable or efficient.
This is why looking only at the painful area can mean missing some of the most interesting clues.
The body’s unlikely work buddies
The body does not organise itself into the separate sections we see in anatomy books.
The eyes, jaw, neck, breathing, spine, pelvis and feet all contribute information to the way we orientate ourselves and move through the world.
That doesn’t mean we should force every symptom into an elaborate whole-body theory.
It simply means we should remain curious.
The next time you look at someone’s feet, remember to glance upwards.
Their eyes may already be involved in the conversation.
And perhaps the foot doesn’t immediately need to be corrected.
Perhaps it needs a reason to feel less responsible.
Discover more unexpected body connections
The body is full of surprising relationships, and once you begin recognising them, you may never look at it in quite the same way again.
I explore more of these unexpected connections in my free Listening Body ebook.
To receive it, simply enter your email address. That is all you need to submit, and the ebook will be sent directly to your inbox.
Download your free copy here:
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Tel: +31 643818706
www.jacquihoitingh.com
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