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bound feet
August 2009 
Unbind Your Mind
Posted on Apr 1st, 2006
by 
Jeff Mishlove
Jeff Mishlove
My wife, Janelle Barlow, collects antique, Chinese "bound feet shoes" such as those shown above. These particular ones, incidentally, are about three inches long (approximately the same size as the image on your screen) -- and were worn by adult Chinese women. The practice continued for many hundreds of years.
Make no mistake about it. Foot-binding was tortuous. It involved the breaking of the bones. It was an action performed by mothers upon their daughters -- in the sincere (and, no doubt, justifiable) belief that this crippling would enhance their marriage prospects.
This type of destructive behavior is not an isolated example..
In India, today, there are castes of beggars who deliberatly mutilate their children -- severely -- in order to enhance their prospects for receiving coins from strangers.
And, in western culture, we are only a few generations removed from corsets that caused distortion and, often, harm to the internal organs. And today I wonder about the psychological and physical effects of such things as neckties for men and high-heeled shoes for women.
For me, the interesting question here is to look at the more subtle ways in which we, as a culture, do damage to our own psychological and spiritual potentialities.
I believe that there are hundreds of ways in which this occurs, every day. I also maintain that this happens at all levels of society -- and in all cultures. I would even go so far as to say that the most enlightened among us -- even the Buddha himself -- is not/was not free of these crippling influences.
As a parapsychologist, the evidence is very clear to me in terms of the enormous resistance that people (even parapsychologists themselves) express concerning the integration of the paranormal within their world views. But this is just one example.
I think that modern equivalents of corsets and foot-binding can be found in the modern diet, in the drugs that we take, in the habits we form around our computers, in our consumption patterns, in our energy utilization, and in our relationships. It also occurs in terms of the psychological numbing that we experience with regard to war, poverty and environmental destruction.
It is not hard to look about us to find such destructive patterns. It is harder, however, to notice -- or to do anything to correct -- the destructive patterns within. Nevertheless, techniques do exist that allow us to correct the imbalances in our lives. And, these will be the focus of a future blog.
Access: Public
This is such an excellent analogy, Jeff! I’ve noticed that some people are called “small-minded,” and rarely do we examine how it is that we ourselves might be binding ourselves into artificially restrictive mind-sets.
“I think that modern equivalents of corsets and foot-binding can be found in the modern diet, in the drugs that we take, in the habits we form around our computers, in our consumption patterns, in our energy utilization, and in our relationships. It also occurs in terms of the psychological numbing that we experience with regard to war, poverty and environmental destruction.”
nice. thanks for this post. very appopriate for me. speaking of neckties, i hate them. i wore it in the office since i started working, actually, since high school i wore a necktie already, ugh! good thing i moved here in The Emerald City a couple of years ago. here i can wear shirts and my favorite jeans in the office. love it, but still hate working in the office.
~C (for Couldn't stand neckties)
i apprecitate your broader point – unbind, unchain our hearts and minds!
also, i recall a female friend in the 70's who was adamant that “modern, western” high-heeled shoes for women are a direct cousin of chinese foot binding – similarly deforming, while creating a similarly desirable [?] vulnerability. “if i'm walking down the street in those things and some creep in sneakers wants to grab me, what are my chances of getting away?”
she was also, at the time, angrily astonished by the sublimation of a women's identity at marriage. just inventing some names out of thin air here: susan jacobs marries walter smith and becomes mrs. walter smith. wait a minute! where'd she go?
things do change.
btw: thank you so much for thinking allowed! just recently re-read a transcript, here online, of your interview with stan grof. thank you, jeffrey!
how might a future collector collect and display liberations and transformations of consciousness? clearly, in a way, that is what janelle's collection represents.
perhaps, some day, our machines of war will be on display only as relics and artifacts of our former selves.
maybe neckties, too, eh, ~c?
Jeff,
I've been reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, which explores how foot-binding (alon with other aspects of Chinese cultural views of women) affected several young girls in the late 19th century. Thanks for making the connection with some of the modern crazy things we do to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex and more “socially acceptable.”
Nicole