I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy because I want to help as many people as possible do as I did: survive long enough to emerge with my soul, dignity and career intact, on my own terms. A big thank-you to all those who’ve become paid subscribers — you make this work possible.
Survival Tool#28: Walk Barefoot
Nature’s medicine is free.
And you can receive it simply by walking barefoot on grass, soil, sand or rock.
Genevieve, Matilda and I spent three nights camping at our friend Tony Langford’s incredible Pitchcott Farm in Buckinghamshire last week, where a small group gathered for the latest Pitchshift, a do-it-yourself micro-festival built on an invitation is to “learn from the land.”
There was something dreamlike about the late July weather; the panoramic views of the Buckinghamshire countryside from the lip of the escarpment filled me with a sense of spaciousness and light.
The farm feels luxuriously expansive and free; and I felt my whole system gradually relax over the course of the three days we spent performing simple outdoor activities, from kite flying and chopping wood, to ecstatic dance, and singing round a campfire.
I feel great gratitude that my toxic workplace ordeal is behind me, even if echoes of the words spoken, and the trust broken, surface fleetingly in my awareness at times, remnants of a half-forgotten grief from a time gone by.
It would be easy to forget how the toxic atmosphere lived for months as a reflection in my body; how draining it was to be constantly scanning for threats.
The ordeal taught me that the people who project their disowned traits onto us; who lack civility or respect in their dealings with us; who seek to dominate and control us — they live on as energetic sculptures inside of us.1
We may know at a rational level that they cannot physically harm us, but the negative emotional charge they carry activates what lies unresolved in us, including the fragments we carry from layers of collective trauma accumulated over generations, and the wounds our particular lineage never healed.
This is a heavy load to bear. Human beings are exquisitely sensitive — far more so than a culture built on power-over dynamics is ready to acknowledge — and we aren’t designed to carry this weight for more than the briefest of interludes, and especially not by ourselves.
Of course, any number of self-help books or ChatGPT-generated LinkedIn posts will state the obvious: “Connecting to nature” is an effective, often neglected, resource for bringing ourselves back into balance.
It’s also true that the forlorn-looking trees corralled between the facades of Canary Wharf, or the other warehouses of misdirected ingenuity blighting our cities, won’t do much to lift our spirits. Like many of the people working in the glass towers, those poor beings are only just about surviving themselves.
Cultivating the Seed
At Pitchcott, walking through a meadow thick with mauve-headed thistles, brambles and knee-high grass, where an ash tree stood firm against the dieback ravaging its nearby kin, I had a momentary sense of contacting the true essence of Earth’s healing power.
Yes, bathing in the glory of a violet-orange sunset, as we did each evening in the big field, or waking up to the sound of birds and insects, is a balm for the soul.
But there’s something deeper that happens when we truly surrender to our surroundings, I realised. As we come into resonance with an overgrown meadow, or a hillside, or a patch of oak, the grayish psychic haze that can so easily become the default condition of working life evaporates, leaving a clarity that’s so self-evident, that it’s hard to understand how we ever lost touch with it. We might almost start to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
If we’re very lucky, we might find we can carry a seed of that clarity back home with us. We can use that seed to cultivate an awareness that the toxicity in our workplace is only a product of human minds — droplets of fluid meaning suspended in something so grand and vast, that our ordeal can no longer loom quite so large in our experience, relative to this larger reality.
Whether you’re in the deepest depths of your toxic workplace ordeal, or long since recovered, I heartily recommend a visit to Pitchcott Farm. But if we can find even a few minutes in a park or garden, and stop worrying about what other people might think long enough to slip off our shoes and socks, we’ll feel the healing intelligence start to flow. Skin-to-skin with the earth, we’ll receive an energetic cleanse that sweeps from the soles of our feet to the space above our heads, and vibrates every cell in between with the frequency of being celebrated, held and received.
Summary
Go barefoot on the grass or soil, preferably for at least 30 minutes, to relax your nervous system and flush out the energetic imprints your body wants to release. And don’t worry about what anyone else thinks.2
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I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy during my spare time from working as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog (a model workplace). Subscribing, sharing, liking, commenting or buying me a coffee helps make this project sustainable. Thank you!
I have borrowed the term “sculpture” in this context from Thomas Hübl.
Lots has been written, and documentaries made, about the purported health benefits of “earthing.” I am sympathetic to these ideas, but assessing them is beyond my scope here.
Loved this - thank you for the reminder.
We have stone flag floors and no damp course at home - when I'm asked 'what's under the flags?' I say 'the planet'.
Barefoot is the default at this time of year.