THE LOWER LEG, THE NEED FOR ROOTS AND STAMINA - "make clear this deep root"

Because we are raised within an educational system excessively focused on mental skills - reading, math, and memorizing facts – we come to identify overly much with the mind. This leads to a profound imbalance; our energy gets upwardly displaced, particularly toward the brain. Thus, the greatest energy imbalance in many people is too much attention, too much energy in the upper half of the person and too little in the lower half. So perhaps the most powerful help we can offer our clients energetically is to help them address this imbalance by bringing awareness, aliveness, respect, understanding, and compassion to our lower half.

This begins literally and figuratively with the lower legs and feet. For some synchronistic reason I was thinking this morning about the need more “stamina” in my life. Curious, I looked up its root as a word and was delighted to feel how much the etymology of stamina reveals about the deeper meaning of our legs and our roots. “Stamina” has come to mean “the power to resist or recover, strength, endurance”.

That is from an earlier meaning of “congenital vital capacities of a person or animal”. That comes yet earlier from a Latin word in reference to the “threads spun by the Fates”! That is linked in turn to “stamen” “ the warp (of cloth” as in the notion of the warp as the “foundation of a fabric”). Most ancient is its root coming from the Sanskrit “sthamen” “place, strength, to stand, make or be firm”.

What if, like a tree and other plants, the roots and base of this stem of ourselves are most fundamental elements in the nourishment of the whole organism?

What if indeed the intrinsic foot muscles, the gastrocnemius, soleus and other lower leg muscles are indeed the roots, the origins for the entire fabric of fascia and the underlying, uprising foundation for our whole body and mind? Experienced as our deepest roots, the ongoing sources of fundamental stamina in our lives, they are even linked to the “threads spun by the fates.” Each journey begins with a single step and these are taken through the interaction of legs, feet and earth. Perhaps the destiny of our steps relies much more than we ordinarily have thought on these deepest sources, the very foundations of stamina in our lives' journeys – the feet and lower legs.