Keep your feet warm.

Tuesday, September 8, 2026 11:14am

Many years ago, I wrote a “how-to” article on footsoaking and its benefits. Yesterday, I spent a few hours outdoors doing a skillshare with my students and realized that there’s an even easier way to achieve a similar effect on a sunny day.

Find a comfortable chair. Take it outside. Position yourself mostly in the shade, and put your feet in the sun. If you want to absorb Vitamin D, expose skin. If not, wear black, or dark colors, which warms up faster. When it is not sunny, wear socks and fuzzy slippers, or put a blanket over your knees.

Historically, I’ve only bothered to sun my feet like this when working on foot fungus. However, this morning I was working on my laptop in the backyard and actually found myself feeling drowsy, which is impressive, because I have chronic insomnia.

Keeping your feet warm is good for your health because it anchors yang. By its nature, yang rises. Without adequate yin to anchor and contain it, yang will rise upward like a helium balloon with its string cut. Unanchored yang can show up in our bodies as headaches, anxiety, allergies, and poor sleep. The lower parts of your body that doesn’t have enough yang will be cold to the touch and slow to function: cold feet, creaky knees, low back pain with weakness, slow intestines, infrequent menses or infertility, nocturia (having to get up at night to pee for adults, bedwetting for kids).

I’ve always thought of 容平 róngpíng (the energy of fall, which can be read as “acceptance and balance” or “containing and flattening”) as restrictive. Chapter 2 of the Suwen recommends a number of actions in autumn that make me think of Liver stagnation. But today I am appreciating the action of containment. Without it, energy cannot be harnessed in a useful direction.

Sunshine is free. It is easier to access than a bucket of hot water. Make use of the incoming heat advisory, and do a little grounding for yourself this week.