Walking
Maybe you feel—at times, or often—a tug-of-war between the demands of life and the desire to make time for yourself: for your healing, your growth, or wellbeing.
The to-do list is endless. Every item seems to produce three more. Many of us are endlessly busy and just trying to keep up.
Even if we manage to sit and breathe for a little each day, what chance does that practice have to truly influence daily life in the middle of fifteen hours of back-to-back tasks?
For some, life is so busy. This causes an accumulation and backlog of unprocessed energy, which can lead to a sense of depletion, among many other things.
And yet—does your day include walking? Do you walk from room to room? Do you walk to the store or around the block? Where else do you walk? How many steps do you take each day? What if every step functioned as a bell of sorts, an invitation to return to your breath, the sensations in your feet, your body—the only place we can experience the here and now.
What if each of those steps was an invitation, a guide knocking on the door of your heart, asking you to awaken to life more fully?
This might sound like a nice, peachy idea, but what if it were a deeply transformative act? Do you know what would happen? What if you give it a real chance?
We can let go of the idea that meditation only happens while sitting with eyes closed. If you do sit each day, what if that was more of a supplement to all the potentially meditative moments of life that happen on your feet? There are so many chances for the mind-body-heart to relax, to rebalance, and for attention to gather.
Whether we know it or not, this gathering—a seed of presence—is what we are seeking at the deeper level of the heart. Whether we know it or not, we’re longing for it.
When I first learned walking meditation, I was skeptical, stubborn, and annoyed with my teachers. It challenged my views of meditation. It was boring, and I was grumpy.
Over time, it humbled me. It broke me open completely. It redesigned my understanding of struggle in the mind and our profound capacity to awaken to the joy of the being.
A teacher once described the mindfulness path as an acknowledgement that we want our life back. Walking meditation is a response to that. It is a declaration, from our deepest wisdom, that the only place peace can arise is in the now—even if we're just walking down the hall.
