Try to interpret the new sensations as just that, new sensations. At first, the unfamiliar textures overwhelm the tactile senses. The first ten minutes or so for a beginning barefooter can be the most difficult. You will be in a process of adjustment. Most find that after this time (sometimes just as they were about to give up), the going became considerably easier. Did you ever get too much wax (or some water) in your ear for a while, and then when you got it out, the world seemed really LOUD. Perhaps, when you first take your shoes off, the ground is too "loud". It's like listening to a lot of uncomfortable noise. After a while, your body adjusts and you begin to "hear the music".
This is an amazing article on truly reconnecting with the earth by experiencing it without shoes. That ability to revert to days before when people knew those sensations but could not explain it. Also serving as an example that all these things society claims we must do, in actuality may not be really what you need to do.
Meaning in simpler terms, it is better to challenge society, to challenge majority held views, like the idea of shoes, when you consider it, is based on fear, or on the idea of "Civilization" that the feet should be hidden, never to experience the sensations of the ground they once knew.
Considering more people are noticing this in this day and age, with people remembering how much better it is to run without shoes, as offered by wired (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/barefoot/) along with many other sources that speak to how it is often beneficial.
So why do you think so many never experience it? Simply because they are told that is how they need to be? Or they have subscribed to the idea that feet should be covered like every other part of the body, as if the clothes in themselves are a protective shell, from nothing in particular, except for the fact that if you are walking nude, the moral majority, will try and get you arrested, simply because you wanted to remember how things were.
We came into this world naked, and then the commonly held views of clothes of accepted practices, slowly but surely fortified false ideas, that we then taught to the next generation and the one after that.
We begin to forget about how we used to love to run barefoot, and did not care if we were out at the pool when only children if we were wearing nothing. It's an interesting concept don't you think? In fact Supertramp's - Logical Song (http://rogerhodgson.com/index.html), seems to speak to a similar idea, that people are forced to become something they are not as they get older. They change because everyone tells them they are supposed too.
To forget about having fun, and go and get a job, work till your 65, or whatever the chosen retirement age is now and then live life, instead of remembering that the kid you were is still a part of you, and it is possible that child within is suffocating. If you just go with the idea that the child is supposed to be forgotten, and you are supposed to be an adult, and never enjoy the things you once did as a kid.
It is odd to me, when I read through such ideas, this article helped me remember that there are other ways to reconnect with nature, to feel the earth beneath your bare feet, not under a lug rubber sole but to be there on the ground walking, hiking. Why not give it a try, why not remember the kid inside still exists, and to run barefoot or hike barefoot. To be free of the clothes that seem to often bind you, and make you self conscious. What do you think, share it in the comments.
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