Walking meditation is a form of mindfulness meditation practiced all over the world. At its core, walking meditation is simply bringing your attention to your feet, your body and the ground below you and focusing your mind on what it feels like to walk. It’s easy, requires no special equipment and can be worked into your everyday life.
This form of meditation is a standard part of a practice for Buddhists and others who meditate regularly. “According to Buddhist teachings, there are four basic postures of the human body: sitting, standing, walking and lying down,” explainsMushim Ikeda, a Buddhist teacher associated with the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. “And meditation can be practiced—and should be practiced—in all four postures,” she adds.
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What Is Walking Meditation, Exactly?
Health Benefits of Walking Meditation
Practicing walking meditation can also help you reevaluate what you think “relaxing” should look like. “Mindfulness requires us to be in a state, ideally, that is both relaxed and alert, which is very different from the way most Americans (myself included) think about relaxation, which is kicking back and watching Netflix and having some ice cream or something,” says Ikeda. “It’s not alert, in other words. If we’re alert, we think we’ve got to be on edge. There’s this element of tension in it. So we want to release tensionandwe want to be alert, which is very good for mental and physical health.”
Lastly, many people practice this form of meditation because it makes them happy. “Looking at Thich Nhat Hanh’s way of walking meditation, we can say that we do it to bring joy into our life,” says Ikeda. “We can think about ‘Can this path lead to joy?’ ‘Can our walking meditation bring more lightness, more ease to our lives?'”
How to Start Doing Walking Meditation
The easiest form of walking meditation to begin with is a simple mindfulness meditation. When you first begin your practice, it helps to set aside some dedicated time and space. (According to theGreater Good Science Centerat UC Berkeley, you’ll want to dedicate 10 minutes a day to the practice for the first week, or longer, because studies show that mindfulness increases as you get more practice.)
Guided Walking Meditation and Walking Meditation Apps
If you’re looking for some help with walking meditation, you can find a number of different apps and guided meditations to get you started. Leading meditation experts likeJack Kornfieldand Sharon Salzberg offer taped instructions for getting started orguided meditationsthat you can listen to while you walk. If you’d prefer an app you can keep on your phone, tryHeadspace, which has lessons like ‘Walking in the City’ and ‘Walking in Nature,’ orCalm, which offers different lengths of walking meditations starting at a short, 5-minute meditation and ending with a 30-minute meditation. You can also combine a walking meditation with another kind of meditation, like focusing onphrases of loving kindness.
Of course, walking meditation doesn’t work for everyone. “The first thing to remember is disability and access; not everyone can do walking meditation,” says Ikeda. If you can’t walk (or can’t walk comfortably), there are other forms of movement meditation that you can try. Ikeda recommends Mahasati or “great mindfulness” meditation (sometimes also called “rhythmic meditation”), which is done with just arm and hand movements. The practice, which comes from Thailand, involves repeating a simple sequence of movements with the arms and hands, usually slowly lifting one hand at a time and placing it first over the stomach and then over the heart.
This practice can also be useful to anyone looking for another form of meditation or for a form of meditation that can be practiced during everyday moments. “It can also be boiled down to just starting with the hand palm-down, turning it up on the side mindfully, feeling the sensation and then turning the hand palm-down,” says Ikeda. “You could do this if you’re riding on a bus, if you’re a passenger in a car or, if you’re in a meeting, you could do it under the table, on your lap, and no one would even know.”
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