Walking Meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn

A Simple Mindfulness Exercise by Jon Kabat-Zinn

What is Walking Meditation?

Walking meditation is bringing bare attention to the sensations of walking.  It promotes calmness and clarity. Practicing walking meditation does not automatically equal a mindful meditative experience for everyone. Some are impacted in a profound way. By naturally drawing their attention to the sensations of their breathing and feet.

Guided Walking Practice by Sharon Salzberg 

Walking Meditation by John Kabat-Zinn

One simple way of bringing awareness into your daily life is to practice walking meditation. As you might guess, this means bringing your attention to the actual experience of walking as you are doing it. It means simply walking and knowing that you are walking. It does not mean looking at your feet!

One of the things that you find out. When you have been practicing mindfulness for a while. Is that nothing is quite as simple as it appears. This is as true for walking as it is for anything else. For one thing, we carry our mind with us when we walk. So we are usually absorbed in our own thoughts to one extent or another. We are hardly ever just walking, even when we are “just going for a walk.”

Usually, we walk for a reason. The most common one is that we want to go from one place to another. Walking is how we can best do it. Of course, the mind tends to think about where it wants to go. What it is going to do there and it presses the body into service to deliver it there, so to speak. So we could say that often the body is really the chauffeur of the mind. Willingly (or reluctantly) transporting it and doing its bidding. If the mind is in a hurry, then the body rushes. If the mind is attracted to something it finds interesting. Then the head turns and your body may change direction or stop. And of course, thoughts of all kinds are cascading through the mind. Just as they are when you are sitting and breathing. All this happens without the least awareness.

Intentional Walking

Walking meditation involves intentionally attending to the experience of walking itself. It involves focusing on the sensations in your feet or your legs. Or, alternatively, feeling your whole body moving. You can also integrate awareness of your breathing. With the experience of walking.

We begin by making an effort to be fully aware as one-foot contacts the ground.  As the weight shifts to it, the other foot lifts and moves ahead. It then comes down to make contact with the ground in its turn. As with all the other methods we have been exploring. When the mind wanders away from the feet or the legs or the feeling of the body walking. We simply bring it back when we become aware of it. To deepen our concentration, we do not look around at the sights.  But keep our gaze focused in front of us. We also don’t look at our feet. They know how to walk quite well on their own. It is an internal observation that is being cultivated. Just the felt sensations of walking, nothing more.

Because we tend to live so unconsciously. We take things like the ability to walk very much for granted. When you start paying more attention to it. You will appreciate that it is an amazing balancing act. Given the small surface area of our two feet. It took us about a year as a baby to be ready to learn this dynamic balancing act of locomotion.

Practicing Walking Meditation

When we practice walking meditation, we are not trying to get anywhere. It is sufficient to just be with each step, realizing that you are just where you are. The trick is to be there completely.

To reinforce this message, we walk in circles around the room or back and forth in lanes. This helps put the mind to rest because it literally has no place to go and nothing interesting happening to keep it entertained. Either you are going in circles or you are going back and forth; under these circumstances, the mind just may grasp that there is no point in hurrying to get somewhere else and it may be willing to just be wherever you actually are in each moment and feel the sensations in your feet.

This doesn’t mean that your mind will go along with your intention to just be with each step for very long without a concerted effort to keep it focused. You might soon find it condemning the whole exercise, calling it stupid, useless, idiotic. Or it might start to play games with the pace or with balancing or have you looking around or thinking of other things. But if your mindfulness is strong, you will quickly become aware of this activity and just return your attention to the feet, legs, and body. It’s a good idea to start with awareness of the feet and legs and practice that for a while. Then, when your concentration is stronger, you can expand the field of awareness to include a sense of your whole-body walking.

Walking Speed

You can practice mindful walking at any pace. We sometimes do it very slowly, so that one step might take a minute. This allows you to really be with each movement from moment to moment. But we also practice it at a more natural pace. During the day-long session in the stress clinic, which is described in the next chapter, there are times when we do the walking meditation at a very fast pace. The point here is to practice being aware even when moving quickly. If you try it, you will find that you won’t be able to be with each step so easily, but you can shift your awareness instead to a sense of your body as a whole moving through space. So even rushing, you can be mindful if you can remember.

Formal Walking Meditation

To begin walking as a formal meditation practice. You should make the specific intention to do it for a period of time. Say ten minutes, in a place where you can walk slowly back and forth in a lane. To keep mindfulness strong. It’s a good idea to focus your attention on one aspect of your walking. Rather than changing it all the time. So, if you have decided to pay attention to your feet.

Then you should stay with your feet for that entire walking period. Rather than changing to the breath or the legs or the full gait. Since it looks weird to other people to walk back and forth without any apparent purpose. Especially if you are doing it slowly, you should do it someplace where you will not be observed. Such as in your bedroom or living room. Choose a pace that maximizes your ability to pay attention. This might differ from one time to another. But in general, it should be slower than your normal pace of walking.

Informal Walking Practice

Once you have practiced walking mindfully as a formal exercise and you have some experience of what is involved. You will find that you can easily practice a more informal mindfulness of walking in many different circumstances. For instance, when you park your car and go into stores to do errands or shopping. That is a good occasion to try walking to where you are going with a continuity of awareness.

So often, when we have routine errands to do. We feel impelled to rush from one to the next until we get them all done. This can be exhausting, even depressing. Because of the monotony of what we are doing if the places we go are the same old places we find ourselves all the time. The mind craves something new. But if we bring awareness to our walking during these routine tasks. It will short-circuit the automatic-pilot mode and make our routine experiences more vivid. Actually more interesting and leave us calmer and less exhausted at the end.

I usually do it with a sense of the whole-body walking and breathing. You can walk at a normal pace or you can decide to just “take the edge off” your pace to be more attentive. No one will notice anything unusual if you do this, but it might make a great deal of difference in your state of mind.

Another Way

For those resistant to more ritualistic meditation methods. Walking can serve as a bridge into other mindfulness exercises and practices. Explore with a ‘beginner’s mind’. It can lead to mental stillness and a deeper connection to knowing one’s self.

Summary

In summary, any time you find yourself walking is a good time to practice mindfulness. But sometimes it’s good to find an isolated spot and do it formally as well, back, and forth, step by step, moment by moment, walking gently on the earth, in step with your life, being exactly where you are.

Except for Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kab-Zinn,  pages 114-119

More Mindfulness – Visit The Mindful Coach

Respectfully,
Heidi & Ross

Please, Bookmark it helps our ranking.

G Ross Clark C.C.P.,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada,
Email- TheMindfulCoach@gmail.com,
Training- MBSR Training