Tips & Tricks to Deepen Your Practice:
Find Your Feet

A luscious, rolling expanse of velvety lawn. Smooth, age-worn rocks that line a sunlit river bed. A beach of packed wet sand, cool and firm beneath your tread, or loose and powdery stretching on in mountainous dunes. Your feet are made to blaze all of this terrain and then some. But what have your feet been up to in the last 24 hours?

With 26 major bones, 33 joints, 19 muscles and 107 ligaments the human foot is an incredible piece of machinery. Our feet carry us through step after step, mile after mile, yet are rarely, if ever, the focus of our attention in exercise.

When you “find your feet” and really begin to use them in your yoga practice, standing postures become more stable, powerful and graceful, even punctuated by moments of effortlessness. Finding and using your feet as part of your entire body, you begin to find yourself more closely aligned to the fullest expression of all postures, seated and standing alike.

Feet are the Foundation
The feet are happiest when they are allowed to fully spread out, to flex and grip, and be in full contact with the ground we walk upon. Even when sitting, having our feet squarely on the ground keeps our legs and hips in alignment. Since everything is connected in the body, one part out of alignment means there are others. In this way our feet are like the roots of a tree – everything stems from our roots.

If you’ve taken class with Christy, you’ve probably heard her talk about the important role of the feet in yoga practice. Maybe you’ve heard her say, “How we stand on our feet and distribute the balance will set us up for success to be fluid and expansive or strained and stressed in our bodies”.

When we fully utilize our feet in yoga practice that greater level of whole-body awareness carries through to the rest of our lives. It becomes more comfortable to do standing activities like walking and cooking (or juicing veggies!). We even sit better with our feet in relaxed alignment when working at a desk.

Bare Your Soles
Christy says, “Nothing is more important to our connection to the earth and our practice than how we stand. We can be light on our feet and become open, flexible and expansive. Or we can be heavy on our feet and become tight, rigid and closed. When you find balance on the 3 points of your feet (big, little toe, and heel) you will feel strong as a tree.”

This alignment tip is the first of three for claiming the strength, balance and expansiveness available to us when we “find our feet”:

3 points of contact

• Tune into three points of contact when standing: big toe, little toe, heel.

• Play with the distribution of weight on these three points and get familiar with what balance feels like.

Press down and “bare your soles”

• In standing postures, especially when balancing on one leg, press down into the standing leg. Press all the way through the foot as if making an imprint in wet sand, or pushing the floor away.

• In postures where a foot is extended behind, such as Locust or Balancing Stick, or when the feet are out in front like in Separate Leg Stretching, keep the soles of your feet level and open. If extending out behind, the soles of your feet are either flat to the wall behind or flat to the ceiling, and if out in front the soles are bared flat to the mirror.

Whole foot

• Try settling little more weight into the heels. Most shoes pitch us forward and we’re so used to it that we often stand this way even when barefoot.

• Distribute weight all the way through to the outer edges of the foot, especially in separate leg standing postures like Triangle, for full stability.

• Allow the toes to spread wide so that each toe is open and grips outwardly like tentacles, rather than gripping closed in like a fist.

Give these tips a try in your next class and comment below to let us know what you think!

P.S. We hope these monthly articles are inspiring you to persist if you are new, and helping your practice grow if you’ve been coming for a while. We are always excited to hear from you – email us with any questions or topics you’d love to see us cover on the blog.