Mindfulness walking

One way of practicing mindfulness is to pay attention to the activity of walking, and to turn this into a mindfulness practice or meditation. 
Mindfulness walking is a practice of presence that you can bring alive in all kinds of settings and activities.
Mindfulness walking meditation can be particularly valuable for helping you to cultivate an awareness of the embodied experience in each moment, allowing you to bring the body, heart, and mind together as you move through life.

When we practice mindfulness walking meditation, we do not need to be going anywhere, and it can be helpful to let go of any sense of a destination or a purpose to the walking. 
The intention of walking meditation is just to walk!

When practicing mindfulness walking meditation we practice bringing awareness to the whole experience of walking: the lifting and placing of the feet, the sensations of the soles of the feet touching the ground, with shifting sensations of pressure and touch; the shift in balance of the body from one side to the next; the movements throughout the whole body as we move; the flowing of the breath.

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There will also be awareness of the space in which we move, the varying surfaces upon which we step, the touch of the air on our skin, the changing views and sounds and smells coming through our senses: moment to moment experiences, constantly flowing and changing.
There will be moments when we will noticing that our mind has wandered into thinking, perhaps distracted by some of the sense experiences, or by some inner thought activities.

Just as we would in the other mindfulness practices, we bring awareness to the fact that we are distracted, and gently bring our awareness back to the walking: lifting and placing; lifting and placing; breathing in and breathing out.
We can let our body do the walking, trusting that the body knows what to do – we do not need to guide it with the mind. 
We can just allow the mind to observe and the gently noticing the changing flow of experience.  
We can simply enjoy our walking.

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Mindfulness walking meditation can be practiced slowly and purposefully, and can involve choosing a path where we may walk back and forth or in a circle where we can bring awareness to the most subtle movements involved in walking. 
It can also be practiced at a natural pace where we can bring more awareness to a sense of movement in space and the energy of the body as we move. 

There may be other times when we can choose to bring awareness to walking when we are simply going about our lives: walking down the corridors in our place of work; walking through the car park; walking to our terminal at the airport; walking though a busy high street or down the aisles in the supermarket.
We can help ourselves to stay present in the mundane aspects of our lives which we may otherwise regard as uninteresting or frustrating.

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Mindfulness walking meditation is a key mindfulness practice which helps us to engage fully with our lives. 
It is a practice which connects us to ourselves, to nature, to each other and to all of life.
People usually consider walking on water, or on thin air a miracle. But the real miracle is not to walk either on water, or in thin air, but to walk on earth.
Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All this is a miracle.

Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness regularly organises mindfulness walks in the beautiful Scottish Borders. You can find out the dates of our mindfulness walks and book a place on one by visiting our events calendar.

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