Fingers of the Foot

For years, I used my toes as an auxiliary set of fingers. Seated at my desk, doing homework, if my pencil rolled to the floor I would reach out a foot, wrap my toes around the pencil, and transfer it to my hand without taking my eyes off the page. The same applied to errant socks, gloves, and hair ribbons. I liked my prehensile toes, which I felt bound me closely to the animals. With toes like mine, I fantasized, I could move into some jungle and live like Mowgli, in harmony with my cousins, the monkeys.

But then came the years of high-heeled boots and stilettos, and I stopped picking up stuff off the floor with my toes, although I would occasionally, at parties, demonstrate the trick. I lived ensconced in my brain, and my toes were at risk of atrophy from lack of attention. Fortunately, however, the East, with its gifts of yoga and meditation, came to the rescue, and I descended from the heights and learned to inhabit the rest of my body, all the way down to my ten neglected friends.

My first yoga teacher was fixated on toes. “Hold the toes of your left foot in your right hand and bend them all the way forward, and then back,” she would instruct. Next she would have us gently tug each toe, as if to lengthen it, followed by running our index finger in the space between the base of the toes and the ball of the foot. “Now shake hands with your foot,” she would say. By this she meant interlacing the fingers of the left hand with the toes of the right foot, moving the hand in circles, then stretching the fingers between the toes in order to spread them apart.

For the grand finale she would have us stand and spread our toes on the ground as far as they would go. “Put your big toe down and raise your other toes. Then put down your little toe and raise the others.” As we struggled to comply I noticed that everyone in the class, myself included, was moving her fingers in concert with the toes. “And now put down your big toe and your little toe, and raise the three middle toes!”

I never did master that last trick, but after three decades of yoga I am happy to say that I have integrated my toes, that most terrestrial part of the anatomy, into the rest of my body. No longer do they hang forlornly from the ends of my feet, but I am aware, standing barefoot on my yoga mat, of my ten toes spreading out and grasping the earth. If, like most Westerners, you are accustomed to living mostly in the penthouse of your cranium, you will understand how significant a change this is.

I find our culture’s general disregard and even cruel treatment of toes as another sign of its disengagement from the body in favor of the intellect. Somehow we have established a hierarchy that equates the head with the higher faculties, and the feet, especially the humble toes, with the dumb earth. But not all cultures think that way. The Romance Languages, with the exception of French, raise the toes to the dignity of “fingers of the foot,” thus recognizing and honoring the link with our tree dwelling ancestors. (dedos del pie in Spanish, dits del peu in Catalan, dita dei piedi in Italian, dedos do pé in Portuguese.)

If you want to make friends with the fingers of your feet, listen to this body-scan meditation by the terrific Jon Kabat-Zinn. He spends no less than three minutes encouraging us to bring a gentle, interested, affectionate attention to the toes of the left foot.

(I am pleased to report that, despite all those years of stilettos, I can still pick up a pencil off the floor with my toes.)