Writing Prompt: Take the Blindfolds Off Your Feet!

We did this one during my Untame in Tulum Retreat in March 2026. For a week, we did yoga everyday, wrote together, and experienced transformative ancient Mayan ceremonies in a luxurious barefoot beach hotel, where shoes were irrelevant since there was soft sugar sand everywhere we walked. But you can use this prompt anywhere!

In her modern classic must-read Women Who Run With the Wolves*, Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells the story of La Que Sabe, the archetype of the old woman who knows everything about women because she created women from a wrinkle on the sole of her foot. ‘This is why women are knowing creatures;” writes Estés. “They are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels everything. This idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of truth,” she continues, “for an acculturated Kiché** tribeswoman once told me that she’d worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty years old and was still not used to walking con los ojos ventados, with blindfolds on her feet.” 

Now close your eyes. Take off your shoes and socks. Feel your feet on the ground. Become your Nahual (the “other you that is not you but is you,” as our wonderful Mayan ceremonialist Maia put it). Take the blindfold off their feet. Begin with a texture. Keep writing for thirty minutes.  

See what I wrote below. It will be part of the book I am currently writing about my breast cancer journey.

Lou Garou and me napping after surgery

Nahual

In the Mesoamerican folklore of the Aztec and Mayan traditions, a Nahual is considered a personal guardian spirit. It is often a human, shaman or sorceress, able to transform physically or spiritually to use the keen senses (like sight or smell) of their animal counterpart for magic or protection. This entity reflects a belief that the human and the spirit worlds are connected through creatures like jaguars, wolves, eagles–or dogs. 

She lay in the memory foam shelter that had become her home since the amputation. The day before surgery, she had changed her duvet cover to the one made of clouds, ancient and holy, softer than her mother’s skin. Pillows formed a mote in which she whimpered as the soft animal of her maimed body surrendered. From her ribcage protruded a plastic tube hooked to a suction bulb called a drain, which she had to carry around in a net around her neck for walks or showers. Morning and night, her sister emptied and measured the fluid with the most exquisite concentration. Next to the hole in her ribs, her Nahual purred, guarding the scar that sawed her in half like a portal to the underworld. She tried not to move, so the Nahual, who mirrored every quiver, wouldn’t move. As long as the dense warmth of his back against her hip and the whir of his snores echoed in her bones, she remembered that death had been staved off–for now. 

When the lightning inside her nerves, pissed off from having been sliced off like prosciutto–when the lightning hit, as it did periodically, she jolted. Her Nahual woke up. He yawned, stretched his impossibly long body along the whole range of her vital organs, then walked over to the bottom of the bed, where her bare feet peaked out from under the blanket of oxy and grief. The Nahual approached his snout. It tickled. Then he started to lick the sole of her foot. She giggled. Her sister lifted her eyes from her screen, and giggled at the scene. The Nahual knew he was the cause of something in these humans. He stopped licking to stare inquisitively back and forth at each sister. Together they laughed, crescendo like fat blue jays, their infamous family laughter, wherein one would snort in while the other snorted out, in perfect sync. Through that laughter poured in oceans of memories: learning to swim on wet sand, dancing until dawn, hot croissants before bed, a lifetime of love to come–the kind that peels dead skin off your feet like soft white sand to let your sole implode into diamonds of light. 

My sister Cécile and I in Tulum, March 2026

* Clarissa Pinkola Estés,  Ph.D, Women Who Run With the Wolves (Ballantine Books, New York, 1992), p. 27. 

** Kiché (or Quiché) is a major Mayan language and indigenous group in the central highlands of Guatemala, with over one million speakers, making it the second most spoken language in the country after Spanish.