Foot Binding Part 2: Energetic and Epigenetic Impact
When I tap into the collective consciousness, I’m given the message that Footbinding is one of the critical topics for Chinese women to be aware of.
This practice is a transgression on the souls and bodies of women for over 1000 years of Chinese history. Source wishes me to include that this practice has created an energetic harm for women and created energetic harm towards the whole Chinese society.
As footbinding has already been abolished, the purpose of this article is not to move you to action. Rather, it is for awareness on all holistic levels, how this practice has impacted you through your ancestry and epigenetics.
Violence is not over when the act is abolished. Violence ends when the current inheritors and victims can name what occurred and produce the conviction to refuse the energetic current to carry on further.
If you are moved or impacted by this article, please share your thoughts in the comments or send me a message through my contact page. Bringing awareness to this deep generational pain is like pulling out a deeply embedded thorn. I expect it to hurt.
I also don’t want everyone walking about with thorns stuck inside them, and so, I am pulling them out through this article.
This topic is Part 2 in a three-part series on Foot binding. You can read Part one here.
The Systemic Framework: Everything Is Connected
One of the most important concepts of health, spirituality, and life is the principle of interconnectivity: Everything is connected.
We’ll combine that with Systems Theory: Everything is connected in a system.
As a Shaman, Asian-American, and Systemically-trained Family Therapist, I view all facets of life from this philosophy.
This systemic and interconnected concept suggests that in order to assess the health or robustness of a group or system, we must look at all the parts of the system. Holding a bias to ignore or overlook one part will result in a failure of assessment, which will hasten the deterioration of the system.
If one part of the system suffers, every other part in the system will suffer due to their interconnected nature.
We can apply this concept to racial and ethnic treatment in America, witnessing how the discrimination and obscurement of People of Color first manifests in the negative quality of life for People of Color, but will eventually negatively impact White people, by way of collective outrage, protests, societal violence, and a reduction of the material and energetic benefits White people have inequitably transacted from People of Color.
We can also see this concept playing out in the parallel of Patriarchy and the Oppression of Women. Women’s presence in society and history has been downplayed and overlooked for thousands of years. The short-sighted view would be that the act of pushing women down will elevate men. However, all damage to the system will eventually circle around to impact all parts.
As a couples therapist, I have witnessed a billion and one examples of how patriarchy hurts men. The most notable consequence I have witnessed is the socialized infantilization of men who had relied since birth on women to soften and cushion the physical and emotional reality of daily (read: Domestic) life. When women are not allowed to live as actualized humans, but rather shift themselves smaller to prevent men from experiencing the everyday discomfort and friction of social relations, men do not develop conflict resolution skills or social perception skills because they are never practicing in authentic social contexts. Additionally, if men do not assume it is their basic responsibility to learn the domestic skills of food preparation or textile work, they are rendering themselves incredibly vulnerable by not learning survival skills. Domestic skills are survival skills.
TCM Pathology: Footbinding and Meridian Interruption
Circling back to footbinding, we can see there is a crucial issue when a girl’s feet are brutalized and mutilated. When this part of the body is damaged, it will impact not just the localized area, but will eventually impact all aspects of functioning in the body. Taking a deeper look, six of the twelve main meridians of the Traditional Chinese Medicine framework travel through the feet: the Kidney, Liver, Spleen, Stomach, Gallbladder, and Bladder¹. For some of these, the meridians start at the foot and for the others, the foot serves as a crucial transport channel so that this energy flow can reach other areas of the body.
Notice that these meridians are named for the organs in the body. If you brutalize the foot and thus damage one part of this energy flow network, these organs WILL be impacted. Saying this plainly, the act of footbinding creates lifelong damage to the organs and whole body functioning of Chinese women.
Classical Classical Philology: Zhuangzi and the Huangdi Neijing
In the Taoist Text of Zhuangzi 莊子, there is a quote - 人之生，氣之聚也。聚則為生，散則為死。It means “Human life is the gathering of qi (or energy). When it gathers, there is life. When it disperses, there is death.” Now if you continue reading the original text, the passage is actually about not fearing death as life and death are one and the same. But for the purposes of this article, we will not focus on that! What we will focus on, is that explicit and deliberate dispersal of Qi that will usher in death is a malicious act².When a mother binds a girl’s feet, she is breaking the energy flow network and preventing the energy from gathering in the girl’s body. Thus she is dispersing or isolating it, which invites death.
Chapter 8 of the Basic Questions in the premier Chinese medicine text – The Inner Canon (Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經) decrees this explicitly and honestly without any ambiguity³.
主明則下安, 以此養生則壽，歿世不殆，以為天下則大昌 When the ruler has clarity then the subjects are peaceful.
主不明則十二官危， If the ruler has no clarity then the twelve officials are in danger,
使道閉塞而不通， the communication pathways will be obstructed and impassable,
形乃大傷， and the physical form will suffer severe harm.
以此養生則殃， To nourish life on the basis of this results in calamity.
以為天下者， To take this to be [the way of] the world,
其宗大危， will greatly endanger one’s ancestral temple.
戒之戒之。 Beware, beware!
The ‘twelve officials’ are known in Chinese medicine to describe the 12 organs. As you see, this passage encapsulates everything we have been discussing and prefaces what we will be discussing. Lines 1 and 2 emphasize the need for a central perspective, and implies that if there is no organization on the systemic level, all the parts (the 12 officials) are also faring poorly. Lines 3,4, and 5 directly illustrate the harm of footbinding. If the energy flow pathways in the foot are damaged, the girl will undoubtedly suffer physical harm. For an extra feminist kick, line 5 also firmly establishes that for a person (women apply to this too!) to live like this is extremely terrible. Lines 6, 7, and 8 speak to the ramifications that if a person’s body is damaged in this way, they harm the transference of ancestral or genetic material that their descendants will receive.
Epigenetic Transmission: Inheriting the Pain Alarm
Which brings us to the topic of Epigenetics.
Epigenetics refers to the process in which the “reading” or “expression” of your DNA can be altered by environmental factors and can be passed down to your children. Your DNA does not change, but by the process of DNA methylation, your system can learn to obscure or hide certain genes if it has reason to believe that the abridged instruction set is beneficial⁴.
When I refer to environmental factors, I’m referring to the level of stress and survival conditions each human is subject to in their lifetime. As explored in Part 1 and the earlier section, foot-bound women are subject to lifelong chronic pain. The body registers that the likelihood of physical trauma is great in the human’s environment and adjusts the expression of DNA to presumably support the human in this trauma-filled environment.
When the foot-bound woman has children, she passes down her genetic code as well as her epigenetic revised record of her body’s perceived best way to operate in order to navigate the most recent environmental conditions she experienced.
You can take my word on this or you could choose not to. But growing up as a Taiwanese American woman and being surrounded by tons of Chinese and Taiwanese folks in my youth, my hypothesis is that the body chose to protect our ancestors in their trauma-ridden environment by increasing pain signals in their body, or giving intense chronic pain. I believe this choice was under the assumption that if the body screams louder in pain, the human will realize that undergoing the physical abuse is a bad thing for their body and will seek to avoid the physical abuse. Through epigenetic inheritance, we the Chinese descendants, inherit a body that is hypersensitive and optimized to call out pain.
Neurological Toll: Brain Remodeling Across the Ancestral Line
The processes dictating pain perception involve more than 400 genes and directly impact peripheral nerves, spinal cord, the brain, and autonomic nervous system⁵,⁶.So following up on the hypothesis that our foot-bound ancestors transmitted epigenetic inheritances for increased chronic pain and pain perception, we’re now faced with a situation where our brain activity and nervous system are impacted⁶.
Chronic pain results in loss of grey matter in the brain, mostly commonly in the Insula, Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)⁶. These three parts of the brain are all directly involved in emotional regulation, our body’s internal regulation, and decision-making or cognitive control⁷,⁸. When we, as the descendants of footbinding, inherit the epigenetic predisposition for chronic pain, we also inherit the increased likelihood of grey matter loss over our lifespan and the cognitive and emotional consequences that comes with it.
The epigenetic consequences of footbinding impact both male and female Chinese descendants today. This is not just a “woman problem”. Circling back to the principle of systemic interconnectivity, damage incurred by the woman has ended up impacting the whole future generation, male and female alike. The Inner Canon – Huang Di Nei Jing that we explored earlier, mentioned that damaging the body is akin to endangering the ancestral temple. And we as the descendants are living it.
Thank you for reading! Please stay tuned for Part 3- on the Economic, Cultural, and Sociological Impact of Footbinding.
References & Sources
Pacific College of Health and Science. (2014). Healthy Body, Healthy Sole – Foot Health and Chinese Medicine. Pacific College of Health and Science Blog. Read Online
Wilcox, L. (n.d.). OM315: Fundamentals of East Asian Medicine [Course notes, p. 14]. Emperor's College of Traditional Oriental Medicine. Read Online
Mai-Thi, M. K. (2017). The Physiology of the Mind in Chinese Medicine: Interpretation of the 五神 “Five Spirits” in Zhang Jingyue’s Categories of the Canons (1624). Academia.edu. Read Online
Lacal, I., & Ventura, R. (2018). Epigenetic Inheritance: Concepts, Mechanisms and Perspectives. Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, 11, 292. Read Online
Bai, G., Ren, K., & Dubner, R. (2017). Epigenetics in Chronic Pain. Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science, 151, 151–175. Read Online
Bushnell, M. C., Ceko, M., & Low, L. A. (2013). Cognitive and emotional control of pain and its disruption in chronic pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14(7), 502–511. Read Online
Helion, C., Krueger, S. M., & Ochsner, K. N. (2019). Emotion regulation across the life span. Handbook of Clinical Neurology, 163, 257–280. Read Online
Krieghoff, V., Waszak, F., Prinz, W., & Brass, M. (2011). Neural and behavioral correlates of intentional actions. Neuropsychologia, 49(5), 767–776. Read Online
