There are two sides to the barefooting debate:
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• Frantic Activity and Your Health
•Barefoot Living & Health
•Frontier-Style Health: Germ Resistance
•Asperger "Superiority"
• No Soul?
Frantic Energy and Your Health
Excitability is the quality most demanded of us. On the job, employers look for people with rapid gestures, prolific verbiage, and boundless, groundless, enthusiasm. If the candidate actually produces less than a more centered and self-contained co-worker, this goes unseen, as it is too bland to the eye. The observer rejoices in the ego-boost it gets from the loquacious brown-nosers.
Socially, rapid-fire jokes and commentary are sought after. If someone were to cease talking for more than 90 seconds, he would be branded "anti-social" or taken for an oaf.
When we are confronted with the need to maximize one's health, we have to examine a lot of "conventional behaviors" to ascertain whether there are some health risks arising from any of them. This "conventional" frantic behavior is one of the first things to go on the chopping block when energy levels, immune system issues, or blood sugar levels are at risk.
The phony behavior of mainstream social and professional environments was born out of a routine of overeating and caffeine highs. We burn out our bodies with this frantic consumption because when we don't, we "can't keep up" with the job, or the social demands of networking or "typical" conversation.
Of course the "great secret" to all of this is that we weren't meant to maintain that artificial tempo. Why do you suppose so many people are getting sick from energizing themselves for a "healthy" day's work? We're designed for work: it shows when exercise produces observable improvements in heart rate, metabolism and weight control. Why is this not the case on the job?
PHONY DEMEANOR and PHONY HEALTH. So, we're still stuck with the lousy jobs that we're clinging to. But we have to manage them while respecting the natural limits and boundaries of the body. Or would you tear-up your insides with glucose binges and caffeine attacks just to create the appearance of enthusiastic interest in lifeless activity?
Keep in mind that we're talking about appearances here, not the actual labor. Labor seldom depletes the body to the extremes that emotional displays of false enthusiasm do. Labor can be conducted while in a meditative state of mind. The problem is, this kind of centeredness, even when it is observably productive, doesn't stroke the onlooker's ego. Anyone who is not willfully aligned with God is, by default, aligned with the devil. And the devil's only satisfied when he controls your soul. He couldn't care less about your actual productivity.
Any trouble you may have with a particular job's effect on your health will require Spiritual Warfare: to either get the job to line-up with your health requirements, or to receive empowerment from God to secure a better job or your own business.
"Meditative Action," however, is a key component to maintaining even energy levels and preventing wear-and-tear on the body. Healthy labor dovetails with our naturally-designed glucose levels, heart rates, and nervous energy. It doesn't allow your spirit to get sucked dry by the egos of those around you, or those whom you work for. It keeps us centered, and that keeps us operating at the energy levels as they exist in our bodies at each moment - instead of artificially jacking-up the metabolism with excess food and caffeine.
There are situations that don't seek to feed off of another's frantic emotionalism. If you build this meditative center within your soul, in time the world will come around.
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There are two sides to the barefooting debate:
It is much too commonplace to hear of someone getting a foot amputated due to problems with circulation. There are many medical problems that are caused by the modern way of life: our diets, our submissive, depressed psychology, and our clothing.
Unless you accept amputation as a natural part of life, you need to expand your mind about feet.
First of all, we have to bear in mind that nature designed the foot to function best without covering. We therefore need to look at all these comments in light of this fact to arrive at the truth. For all of us who have grown up in an eternally-shod world, the first thoughts that come to mind when barefooting is mentioned are: cut skin, broken glass, infections, plantar warts, or even spreading germs. Alright, lets tackle these:
CUTS, INFECTIONS, BROKEN GLASS:
Yes it IS riskier to walk barefoot. There is ALSO a way to avoid injury while walking barefoot - it just takes a little conditioning, and caution. You will need to keep an eye to the ground to avoid sharp objects. You will also want to "pick your battles," in choosing the areas in which you determine it is safe to walk naturally.
CONDITIONING:
The sole of the foot has a natural repellency to surface dirt and contaminants, provided that they are brushed off quickly & washed upon returning to one's house, hut, or cave. The sole also builds up its thickness quite rapidly. With only 10 to 14 days of barefooting, you will see your sole quickly adding layers of protective skin tissue in eager response to your returning it to its naturally-designed function.
INFECTIONS: Infections are very serious threats when involving the feet. The circulation is a bit weaker there than in other parts of the body, and germs can linger and fester in one spot long enough to develop into an infection. It is critical to treat cuts immediately upon discovering them.
CLEANLINESS is the first order of treatment. Remove any visible dirt and debris from the area around the cut. Alcohol, bacitracin or other first aid treatment should be applied, and then bandaged. As with any infection, HEAT is the key to destroying bacteria. Soak the foot in the hottest water you can tolerate for 20 minutes 3 times a day. Use a heating pad on the foot during the night while sleeping.
Is this a lot of work? For one thing, cuts are pretty rare occurrences once you become accustomed to the maneuverings of safe barefoot walking. Secondly, once you weigh-in the benefits, barefooters decide that it is an "acceptable risk." The repositioning of joints, disks in your back, elimination of any pains you may have had in knees ankles and back prior to your barefoot regimen - these are worth the extra work it may take to return to your natural walking state. The risk is far greater in keeping your feet in "casts" throughout your life, never stimulating them to keep fresh blood circulating through their minute blood vessels, never flexing and exerting the muscles and bones within them - all of which must support the remainder of your body weight while you ignore them!
PLANTAR WARTS: Plantar warts are picked up in public areas where bare feet are the norm, such as swimming pools and locker rooms. But simply being exposed to the wart virus doesn't CAUSE plantar warts to develop on your sole. It is MOISTURE that incubates the virus and produces plantar warts. Once again, shoes are the culprit. Suffocating feet, sweating in dark, inflexible foot- casts for 18 hours a day are germ-growing petri dishes for your feet. As with athlete's foot, the remedy is simple, as described below:
ATHLETE'S FOOT: Athlete's foot is another shoe-induced affliction that can be remedied by barefooting, at least in part. Often when one starts frequenting a pool or a gym for the first time, they'll initially experience some itching on the soles of their feet from the changing areas. Thereafter they usually avoid contact, relying on flip-flops or germ-killing sprays. But it's really the sudden exposure to a new environment that initiates the problem. The outer layer of our skin maintains a colony of its own healthy germs that fend-off foreign germs, and thereby allows us to walk naturally barefoot with the rest of the world. The question is, how do you build up your resistance to germ-exposure & avoid these afflictions?
After your workout, splash some of your own urine onto your feet (after returning home, of course, not at the gym!). Urine is a natural antibiotic that prevents infections. And, no, it won't leave an odor. Just let it air-dry, and it will destroy fungus and unhealthy bacteria while letting the skin's natural moisture and bacteria restore itself. Urine doesn't develop an odor when applied to living tissue and allowed to dry. It is only pungent when it stagnates; this is not an issue when using it on your skin. In time, your skin will develop a resistance to the germs you're encountering at the pool (or wherever you are regularly barefooting). By avoiding shoes, your feet stay naturally air-dried, thus avoiding warts, athlete's foot, and odor.
Given all the natural provisions for safe barefoot walking, there's no sensible reason to avoid the exercise this neglected appendage is craving from us. It's really just a matter of will. Those who cannot accept the foot as something suitable for general exposure to the world will not be swayed. Those who recognize that this unseemly-looking body part connects them to the "ordinariness" of the human experience will be able to get over themselves enough to pay heed to their health more than to fashion. The psychological repellency toward the foot is learned from a society that would rather lose their feet than expose them. Sane choices can often be unpopular ones.
For More Information:
Barefoot Health Benefits (Feature
Article)
Barefoot Living - Whys, Hows, & History of Barefooting
GERM RESISTANCE
You don't build up resistance to infection by constant use of antibacterial soaps and sterile living environments. The ideal is a GRADUAL immersion into general, non-threatening germ "forums" in public areas. The body is designed to resist infection IF we keep it nourished, exercised, and immersed in healthy environments (not STERILE ones).
Initially, you will likely experience occasional germ reactions, such as cold or flu symptoms, perhaps athlete's foot depending on the activity. But the key to resistance is treatment without killing your own healthy bacteria. For a cold, high water intake aids the body's natural reaction to flush out the infection with an increase in mucous production (there's some picturesque phraseology). Piping-hot water with ground ginger should be sipped as rapidly as the burn marks on your tongue allow you to. Herbs including garlic and cayenne pepper also help.
For skin infections like athlete's foot, urine will kill-off bacteria without stripping your skin of its natural oils or altering its pH balance. Urine can be applied to the affected areas for 2 to 5 minutes (minimum), rubbed into the skin for 1 minute or more so it will be thoroughly absorbed - then allow it to air-dry. Odor will not be an issue as the residue blends with the perspiration and healthy bacterial activity on your skin's surface. (Urine odor only occurs in areas where it lays stagnant for prolonged periods, e.g., plumbing fixtures).
DRY SKIN: Moisturizing the skin can be maintained by applying (your own) saliva. Again, it doesn't disturb your skin's pH, and it keeps an assimilable moisture on your skin's surface. Jojoba oil is effective for keeping jojoba oil on your skin; it just doesn't seem to get absorbed. But it is natural and many people find it useful.
Specific irritations, like chlorinated water at a swimming pool, are very harsh and require diligent use of natural moisturizing. Avoid using soap when you shower after swimming - it only introduces additional harshness to skin that has already been stripped raw by chlorine. Shower, but only to rinse off the chlorinated water. Avoid the sauna, as the dry heat can, over time, draw-out the lipids and healthy fat of your skin, making it age prematurely. Use of a steam room is a healthy alternative. The moisture of the steam prevents leeching of elasticizing lipids, while the perspiration helps expel the chlorine from your pores. Massage the perspiration into your skin during your steam, to help maintain the nourishment of your skin's natural bacterial balance
Avoiding soap (sometimes), and using saliva and urine don't immediately strike us as being pillars of hygiene. But used appropriately, they can save us from the swamp of synthetic antibacterial agents, antibiotic drugs, and unnatural sterility that have weakened our bodies and removed us much too far away from the natural conditions we were designed to live and thrive in.
(In the following I refer to Asperger traits as I know them to be personally. I realize not everyone is affected in the same way. But I'm not going to stop each flow of thought with some statement that "everyone's not like this." 'Nuff said about that.)
Asperger Syndrome is a system of logical thinking which emanates from a particular personality type. "Neuro-Typical" (NT) people ("normal" people) don't separate emotion from fact, which is why salesmen have such lucrative professions.
Asperger people live in their own heads by far more than NTs. Therefore AS people have to master the discipline of drawing their consciousness out to the external world by some contrived means. This requires sensory stimulation of various kinds: music, singing or speaking aloud are some common examples. For others, a bit of pain is required: an alligator clip biting-down on a soft fleshy area, a workout over rough terrain while barefoot, or a feral shrieking session may be needed to direct certain Aspies' attention to the boring, listless world of the NT.
The key is to know which "poison" works for you, for ultimately the responsibility for successful living rests with us, not the world - no matter how illogical it behaves. Then we need the GUTS to carry-out those "bizarre" stimulations, fully acknowledging that we need them despite how they look to the bland world. Besides, when they're carried out properly, no one will notice them (unless you want them to: Embarrassment is also a stimulant to some).
Why is such stimulation necessary?
The AS person focuses on problems and solutions. As thoughts run through his mind, the AS person's immediate impulse is to discover the straightest line to the fulfillment of that thought. This is done internally and non-verbally.
When the NT has an idea or a problem, typically his first impulse is to chatter away about it with anyone who will listen. This increases his likelihood of gaining more information and resources in pursuit of a solution. It also increases the amount of time before anything actually gets done.
This isn't about one method being better than the other. These are inborn traits, not deliberate lifestyle choices. This commentary is meant only to identify the characteristics of the two types.
Naturally, to the Aspie, the NT appears obtuse and painfully slow to act. As he listens to an NT prattle on in the vain of:
"I examined the gray power supply using the refurbishing department's digital multimeter - like the one Carl brought in only larger, then hunted around for a flathead screwdriver and went downstairs to ask Fred for one of theirs in the repair dept..."...and on and on until every person's name and every object's color is identified before the orator ever comes close to making a point.
By contrast, an Aspie is likely to comment, "It's fixed, it's over there," and continue working, focusing silently on his internal dialog without casting a glance to the person he was speaking to.
This draws much scorn from NTs, as they believe that they're being shunned, or that the Aspie is actually a bit dull-witted for not churning out a 5-minute monologue to describe an accomplishment that should bear mute testimony to his skill and labor.
The world isn't going to change, so it is up to the Aspie to play "public relations" man for himself and his accomplishments.
Part of that effort should be informing the people close to him of just how difficult it is to transition from internal focus to (what seems to him) rather silly, emotional dialog. Examples like the above conversation may help some NTs understand a little more clearly. But whether they do or not, you need to know of your areas of superiority, and devise the means to exploit them as successfully as possible.
It is nothing more than politics. In all of the world's screaming about its supposed desire for "logic", it is always "emotion" that wins them over. We can't fight them on this: irrationality is as natural as the tides. All one can do is to play them with the emotions they react to so predictably in order to achieve the recognition one is rightfully due for the skills and labors one contributes to his world.
The answer to "No Soul" and environmental dependence:
Being IN a Faith-Field IN SPITE OF the environment - AN INDEPENDENT ISLAND.
"SOUL," as used in everyday speech, is just Cultural reaction to people of SHARED SENSIBILITIES: They "Feel" for each other: BUT the feeling never reveals any Deep Thought. It's a "Glazed-Eye" kind of thing where they stop "caring" & move on to the next distraction when they draw no more energy from the encounter. Hypnosis, it's all hypnosis.
"SPIRIT" is Faith-Energy that stands unaffected by the environment.
Meditation: An Awareness Exercise (Link to Article) - Finding Your Original Spirit...