Walking, No Walker

Here’s an idea for an informal body-based mindfulness exercise. 

It was 2019, the good old pre-covid times, and my sister and I were sitting in a bar in Havana, drinking rum and sweating – thermoregulation in Florida or Cuba seems to be a challenge for my body, a boundary that it can’t overcome. The topic of our conversation was incidentally the body. My sister is an avid runner and she was explaining how running is „her meditation“, to which I replied with a decisive eyeroll that almost popped out my  contact lenses.

I often hear that. Running is my meditation. Crocheting is my meditation. Playing solitaire is my meditation. Walking my dog is my meditation. Long walks are my meditation. 

No.

Running is running. Crocheting is crocheting. Solitaire is solitaire, walking the dog is walking dog. And while we’re at it – long walks are long walks. I love them myself, I go on one every Saturday, and sometimes I meditate on my long walks by finding a private, secluded space, sitting there and focusing on my breath. Because walking is walking, and meditation is meditation. 

If I’m being completely honest, there is something about what my sister said. No, running is not meditation, but you can run in a mindful way. You can wash dishes or shower or shop in a mindful way. But that’s not what she is talking about.

What she’s talking about, I assume, is that state where you run but there is nothing else except for running. That little nagging narrator that lives inside your head temporarily disappears and there’s only legs and arms moving, there are sights and sounds but no narration around them. There is the raw experience, but a story is not weaved around it. There is a huge experiential difference between “there is running” and “I am running”. 

This is an experience that I’ve had on some really long walks – after you walk 20 or 30 miles, it’s almost like out of exhaustion your brain shuts down. I’ve noticed a period where my mind starts to change and old memories come to the surface and emotions along with them, things that I’ve forgotten about or don’t usually like to go back to, and then comes the silence. There is the landscape, your legs are moving, there is the weight of your backpack, sensations of thirst and tiredness, but you seem blended into all this in a very special way. All of it is aligned, there’s no activity in the mind or in the body that sticks out, things seem to flow together. It’s not something that you’re doing or even something that’s happening to you, because you are all that at the same time.  What you slip into is a kind of nondual somatic awareness that seems like the most natural thing in the world as it’s happening. An experience like that exists firmly beyond words, at least for me, so I won’t write a verbose description that isn’t helpful. 

Instead, I invite you to try it for yourself. Find a place to walk – a long beach, a park. If you can be alone, that’s a bonus. Unnecessary distractions should be avoided but sounds like waves or the wind can actually be helpful.

This is not a formal meditation practice, so there are no particular steps to take. Get out there and walk. The only instruction I can give you is to just walk. Drop the you that’s walking and become the walking itself.

You can do this by easing into your body, sinking into the sensations of movement. You will be distracted by thoughts and images, and you can simply thank your mind for that gift and go back to the body. Don’t focus on any particular part of the body, be the body. Another thing to do to deal with distractions is to gently repeat “walking, no walker” and then sink back into the movements. 

When you do a typical body scan, you focus on each part of your body, but here you go a step forward. The focus is on sharpening your interception – the ability to know how your body feels. Here, with this exercise, you may start there but only as a way to ground yourself in the beginning because the focus is not on the body as an object, but on its movements – on proprioception. And more than that - if you hear a sound, you are the sound. If your legs are moving all you are is the movement of the legs. In other words: there is no you in this exercise.  You’re not invited. Leave yourself out of t. There is movement. There is sight. There is sound. There is touch. 

You can adjust this exercise to any other activity. My sister, as I mentioned, gets to this point while running. I prefer walking. You may prefer yoga or folding laundry, it doesn’t matter. Adjust the instructions accordingly and enjoy. The experience of that kind of alignment where your mind dissolves in your body is profoundly liberating. Whatever “shoulds” or “musts” you had before, they will too, dissolve. If there is only walking and no walker, then there are no concerns and fears and insecurities of the walker. 

Give yourself a break from you. You deserve it.