Walking bare foot - @Isha Yoga Center #4

It does not happen every day that we get to walk bare foot. Especially in the corporate culture, we often try to find a way to avoid shoes and try to walk with chappal. Taking the chappal off and walking must be better forgotten. Here at the Isha Yoga Center, for me, it's been three days now to have wore chappal. The day we arrived in here, we walked in the campus with chappal and thereafter until now the chappal have not been used at least once. That has not made any difference to my feet physically but emotionally and psychologically yes, it's been good experience of sand, stones, mud, wet floor, and even hot floor at times.

Today morning while I was coming out of the cottage, I almost forgot that I did not wear chappal. It felt just normal unlike the last two days when I had to convince myself to leave the chappal at the cottage. May be that's the flexibility our body and mind have, which we often do not try experiencing.

This reminds me of an incident. Couple of years back, while traveling in train from my home town to Pune, I lost over of my chappals through the toilet's hole while the train was on the move. I had to let it go and I also had to let the other chappal go and join it's counterpart. From then and until I reached Pune, it felt so awkward to walk bare foot. I consciously felt different as if the world did not have any other job than minding about me walking bare foot. I knew at the back of my mind that it would not bother anybody. But I kind of failed to take that thought off my mind.

Well, may be it would have felt the same here as well when I had to walk bare foot. Since everybody around was walking without chappal, I felt normal about it and got used to it quickly.

Where is the difference? In my bare foot? or in the way I think others think of me? Undoubtedly in the later. It's a fact that different situations make us take the same thing in different ways. But it's also a fact that situations are nothing but the inhibitions or beliefs we usually have in our minds. Once they are handled, we will not be handled by our minds. Rather we handle ourselves in a better way for a better future.