Friend reported that they were considering barefoot shoes but their PT said their arches were too high and they were pigeon-toed.
Me
“arches are too high for barefoot shoes” just sounds like bullshit if they’re not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development—and either can cause the other as a secondary condition—in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Is one foot affected more than the other?
FYI for barefoot shoes I found anyasreviews.com helpful to narrow down the search to a few brands
>”arches are too high for barefoot shoes” just sounds like bullshit if they’re not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Yeah I was wondering about this
Me
though now I’m finally transitioning to Vibram FiveFingers after a good session with my shiatsu practitioner
Huh I just realized I’ve had more crazy “try to fix your condition X with wildly inappropriate intervention Y” from “conventional” than from “alternative” practitioners
Friend
I didn’t have time to ask the PT if I was supposed to be wearing shoes in the house which is where I spend half my daytime hours chasing kids around...
Me
like, after the urgent-care doc told me I definitely didn’t have gout (I did), I consulted a well-regarded podiatrist who said there was no way to know for sure if I had gout, so here’s some orthotic inserts (he had me buy cheap ones that he then bent himself to customize) and here’s a water bath to stick your foot in so we can electrocute it to help manage the pain
then months later I found a DO who correctly diagnosed the gout and prescribed the conventional cure
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development—and either can cause the other as a secondary condition—in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Friend
I’m pretty sure it’s some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
I think I would count literally every time I’ve been recommended an antipyretic for a mild infection—WITHOUT being clearly advised of the symptom intensity / disease duration tradeoff—as an inappropriate crackpot intervention, too.
Friend
The pigeon toe thing has been present since I was five, I was told I had “weak ankles” and when I was seven a doctor told my mom it was simply too late to fix it, would have needed leg braces, etc
But it improved as I got older and was much better when I was doing strength training. More dramatic rn I think because of postpartum muscle/fascia stretching
I’m pretty sure it’s some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
If there are noticeable asymmetries in the pattern then that suggests some potential value in: 1 Balance practice standing on each foot separately (ironically, I think asymmetric walking like one-foot-on one-foot-off curb-walking can help with this, since it prevents you from using your normal asymmetric copes). 2 Trying out an eyepatch on each side separately.
Friend
Huh, eye patch?
Me
eye dominance is related to the overal pattern of balance asymmetry, I think
Friend
I’ve sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Me
It’s cheap to try and if it doesn’t feel at least slightly interesting when you do it you can just stop
Friend
Thanks!
Me
I got the basic idea from Neal Hallinan’s YouTube channel—it didn’t seem as important an element for me as for him, but it’s an interesting idea that’s probably at least partly true for many people
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement...”repair,” I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
Me
>I’ve sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Ooh, if you haven’t gently practiced closing your jaw without a lot of tension, that’s a thing to try too—I spend maybe 30m a few years ago holding my jaw at just the edge of where a lot of tension would kick in, waiting for it to relax, and moving it a bit closer
and, while I’ve since backslid occasionally, it’s easy to fix once I notice, as long as I’m a bit patient and seems like an important node in some larger complex system
I think this is the main thing that makes “Mewing” actually helpful, and the stuff about bone-structure changes may not quite be true but that’s just based on my experience
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement...”repair,” I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
When I looked up some info on this therapeutic school I discovered I supposedly have the mirror image of the most common asymmetric bias which was a bit odd
Me
Neil Hallinan’s associated with an org called Postural Restoration Institute
Friend
Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for “content” to get “stuck”
Yes, postural restoration, that was it!
Me
>Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for “content” to get “stuck”
When I can close my jaw without excess tension, I can also much more easily assert boundaries nonreactively
& OTOH when I get triggered into defensive reactivity my jaw tension returns
which means there are other things to retrain here
which is part of why I’m doing tai chi
Friend
I haven’t catalogued my triggers for jaw tension yet, mostly figuring them out by figuring out what kind of content arises when it can relax
Something here entangled with my mom and maternal side of the family, there was a major shift after she passed and I did some intense grief processing
I think I both take after her side genetically wrt hyper mobility and also picked up some of her health symptoms via mirroring
Probably my answer is still “more movement, more varied movement, more patience”
What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Specifically “high dimensional”
Me
>What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Less like isolated movement drills for your ankle, more like walking on cobblestones or balancing on one leg.
Friend
Aha
Me
Less like practicing specific hip stretches, more like squat-walking and other sorts of playing around.
Literally dancing close to the edge of difficulty
Friend
Ok that tracks with what my personal movement practice was turning into before third trimester kind of knocked me out
Me
One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Friend
Which indicates that I was on the right track and am just still in recovery
>One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Very important!
Me
Main reason it doesn’t get recommended in the formal literature AFAICT is it’s not trivially reproducible
but when they can slap a label on it like “tai chi” all of a sudden it counts as reproducible, sorta
Friend
Seems like that’s bc it would be very idiosyncratic and those kinds of practices and schools of thought tend to have massive variation in quality of instruction?
Like it comes closer to “art”
Than something that is simple to turn into a procedure
Me
yeah the expense of formalizing a set of instructions unambiguously and reproducibly can expand combinatorially with the degrees of freedom involved, I think.
Then, about 2 months later:
Friend
Trying out the eye patch today
Definitely does something different to my coordination and tension patterns
Me
Nice
Interested in details if you can articulate them
Friend
A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Sensory input is a little crispier
Easier to attend to taste and tactile input
Me
>A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Ooh I wonder what happens if you gently investigate some triggers in that state
Friend
Hmm...left hip moves forward a bit
There is a spiral holding pattern that seems to relax a bit the longer I wear it.
Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
It’s connected to verbal cues like “pay attention”
I was screened for scoliosis as a kid bc of my intense asymmetric posture when writing
Me
>Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
Alternatively it may have been load-bearing at a past developmental stage, & other skills are chained to it, but can be refactored while wearing the eyepatch to remove the dependency.
No guarantees
Friend
Yeah I’m not sure about the relationships here yet
I’ve been doing some primitive reflex integration stuff, experimentally
Me
Other direction to investigate would be if you can consciously & directly invoke/activate the spiral pattern—if you can learn to do that, you may become better at consciously relaxing it.
Friend
Oh I hadn’t thought of that
2 more months go by
Friend
Eye patch tip has been excellent! Thank you. Yesterday a bunch of stuff clicked and I realized I have a mild lazy eye, convergence insufficiency that got much worse during COVID. Looked up vision exercises and got instant relief from a bunch of stuff I thought was purely psychological
Friend reported that they were considering barefoot shoes but their PT said their arches were too high and they were pigeon-toed.
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Then, about 2 months later:
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2 more months go by
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