Walking around: Daily opportunities for mindfulness
The truth about living mindfully is that it is most effective when practiced in as many little moments of your day as possible. Long, formal sit down mindfulness meditations are great for building tolerance and resilience. But finding and taking those brief windows of opportunity to incorporate it into your day is the key in bringing our practice to life.
In my efforts to bring the benefits of meditation practices to a wider audience, I’ve found that walking meditations are an accessibility point for folks with acute PTSD for whom sitting in stillness can be too frightening, or even for some folks with more severe cases of ADHD or other neurodivergence. Formal walking meditations, like this one, help us prepare to integrate that state of presence into non-formal opportunities of walking like your daily trip to the bus stop, or whatever else.
Walking, in general, is a meditative practice, (when we put our phones down). Rebecca Solnit wrote, in her book “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”:
“Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking.”
For those of whom have the capacity or ability to walk, it ends up being something most of us do on a daily basis, whether we’re walking to our car, from one place to another, or simply from our bedroom to the bathroom in the morning. During these times, however, we are often lost in planning the next thing we have to do, rehashing what just happened, fantasizing about something, or as mentioned in previous posts, jumping into the information stream.
Can you use these brief interludes as moments to be unproductive? To feel the weight of each step? To tap into mindfulness?
Here is a short walking guided meditation I recorded to my podcast, in case you need a little help giving it a try.
Let’s deepen our connection–join my online community
Some of the benefits members receive include:
Monthly meetups
Twice weekly voice notes reminding folks to be intentional via WhatsApp
Exclusive community discussion space on WhatsApp
Professional support in a WhatsApp space for mindfulness teachers
Optional mentorship via one-on-one sessions
