The Shoe Socket-What My Bunion Taught Me About Attachment

A painful toe, an old pair of shoes, and the quiet invitation to unplug from the ego.

PART ONE OF THREE

Sometimes the body becomes the spiritual teacher we did not ask for. What begins as a painful toe can quietly reveal the deeper places where we are still plugged into the ego. Yesterday I started out once again since injuring myself, energically depleted, feeling like I had the weight akin to an anvil resting on my head – on the verge, but never quite becoming a headache/migraine. But the real issue these days is not my head, it is my foot. More specifically an inflamed, angry metatarsal on my big toe that has been interfering with my ability to walk my usual hour route in the morning, which is fundamentally essential to my spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. Those walks have become almost a ritual for me, a way to reconnect with myself before the noise of the day begins, and when something interferes with that rhythm it quickly affects my overall energy.

Recently I began receiving a new form of shockwave therapy as part of the process of healing this toe. During the appointment I felt it was something that might actually help these painful places heal. But the unfortunate news that followed the treatment was the instruction that if I truly want the toe to heal properly, I will need to move forward wearing flat, wide, supportive shoes. No more narrow high heels. This is not easy news for someone who has been deeply attached to beautiful shoes for most of her life. The irony, of course, is that the bunion itself traces back to an old injury when I broke that same toe in my twenties, which has now come back full circle to haunt me in the second half of my life. What a karmic full circle moment!

This morning I was grateful to take my walk outside because the temperature had warmed. While walking I listened to an mp3 of my spiritual director talking about her own issues with her feet. She described opening what is known as the bubbling well point at the balls of her feet, allowing them to widen and even grow two and a half sizes larger. She repeatedly emphasized comfort over beauty, and how the quest for beauty can incur negative karma. What struck me most was the timing. I had listened to this recording three times before and had not really paid attention to what she was saying. This time, after hearing almost the exact same message about my footwear the day before, I suddenly heard it in a completely different way. And honestly, I am not down for it at all. But I know myself well enough to recognize that I am growing steadily, incrementally, pragmatically and more realistically with regards to my inner self-nurturing and with my body (and the many ways it continues to change as I age.) I need more flexibility within, more compassion for my physical limitations, and more respect for my body. I am not resisting so much as I am simply finding myself almost incapable of fully internalizing, processing, and adhering to the guidance I am receiving. In the last year I have already fundamentally changed so many things that once defined me externally, including clothing purchases, which have become extremely minimal, and I have begun the purging of my closet of beautiful but impractical outfits. And now I find myself confronting something even more personal – my shoe fetish. Honestly, I am not ready – but am I prepared to endure chronic pain for footwear?

I could look at this, as I increasingly do, through the lens of attachments, which are the source of the majority, if not all, of our emotional, physical, and psychic suffering.The Buddha’s entire philosophical outlook centered around letting go of attachments, illusions and

spectacles. Even today we all struggle with attachments to religious ideologies, political affiliations, the need for power and food/substance addictions – stuffing them into our bodies, heads, psyches and souls, polluting them with all the things we simply cannot let go of. I know that if I allowed myself to rip the socket out of the plug that contains beautiful but

impractical shoes and instead plug into the socket of functional supportive footwear, my overall life would be easier and simpler. But I struggle with how that would make me feel liberated because when I wear what I like or do something aesthetic for myself I feel the most liberated. I think it belongs to the stubborn rebel in me who likes what she likes, knows what she knows, and be damned with the consequences. She will do what she wants, the way she wants, when she wants, without any external input or influence. But that stubborn rebel does not only resist external influence, she resists internal influence as well. My guidance, my intuition, my common sense (which are all on my INNER-net) are also voices she can ignore, and my refusal to plug into those inner sockets of reason and detachment from the things I love still feels very elusive.

When I talk about plugging into sockets, I like to visualize a wall full of sockets with me standing in front of them holding numerous plugs in my hand. And that is when I began to realize – this was never really about shoes. In this case, to fit with the analogy, I am holding the shoe plug -I look at the wall of sockets and the one labeled shoes is the one I plug into, and right away that current begins to run and I am animated. Whatever we plug into becomes personal. We begin to take it personally, defend it, cling to it, and once we are plugged into that socket we are no longer objective. Carl Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Attachments often work exactly like this, because whatever we take personally in our lives is often a clue that this is exactly where our work lies. In my case, unplugging from the shoe socket is really about unplugging from the ego that has been feeding off that attachment for decades, and the real invitation now is to consciously choose a different socket altogether—one that leads not toward ego reinforcement but toward something closer to mystical liberation.

For me the shoe socket runs deep. I still recall in the late 1970’s at the age ogf fifteen, purchasing

my first pair of high heels. They cost $80, which at that time was an exorbitant amount of money to spend, especially for a teenager whose only source of income was babysitting at fifty cents an hour. That pair of shoes represented roughly 160 hours of babysitting. In today’s terms that would be somewhere around $380 or $400. I remember how beautiful they were. I still have them and occasionally take them to relive those fond memories. That pair of shoes made me feel confident, mature, attractive, and noticed for the first time in my life. That moment was so fundamental to my trek into adulthood that I kept them as a kind of memento of when I first began to take pride in my appearance because I could finally afford to. Before that I was doomed to shopping at discount stores for less desirable brand jeans while all the

other teenagers’ parents were buying them Levi’s. At a very young age I learned to attach

productivity to purchasing beautiful things, and beautiful things then translated into feeling good

about myself, even if only momentarily. Hence feeding the shopaholic craving that began at such a tender age.That shoe socket became one of the first places I ever felt positive about myself, so it makes perfect sense that I would cling to it – even though it no longer aligns with my foot problems. Now, in my sixties, I find myself reckoning with the karmic full circle of that broken toe returning as a bunion. And I am beginning to see that this moment is not really about shoes. Shoes are simply the spectacle – the attachment I plug into so that my ego can replay the message “If you look good you feel good… and when you feel good you look great” That old commercial slogan from my childhood clearly did its job well because I still remember it forty years later!

The Buddha taught that “Attachment is the root of suffering.” And yet the hardest attachments to

release are the ones that go back to those early moments when we began forming our identity and sense of self-worth. That fifteen-year-old girl who bought those heels simply wanted to look good so she could feel good because she had not yet learned how to love herself from the inside out. Those are the hardest sockets to unplug—the ones that go back to the beginning when our character traits were formed during our often painful formative years. Perhaps the only socket worth plugging into now is the one connected to purpose rather than ego. A

difficult but necessary realization. And perhaps the real beauty that emerges from this moment will not come from the shoes I wear at all, but from the quiet freedom that comes when I finally

recognize the places where we have been plugged into ego for far too long are- and gently,

consciously, unplug so we can connect instead to something deeper, something quieter, something closer to the mystical liberation that comes from no longer needing those old sockets at all. And if we are honest with ourselves, we might ask: what sockets in our own lives are we still plugged into that quietly keep the ego alive? If this reflection resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who may also be examining the attachments in their own life.

Wanda

Transforming Minds, Healing Hearts