Guided walking meditation to enjoy the day

This short walking meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn encourages the acceptance of mindful awareness on all scaffolding.

Walking meditation is not about going anywhere on foot. Instead, you are completely on the step completely here where you are. I’m not going anywhere until the next step. Nothing will arrive except on a continuous arrival at the present moment where you can taste the day.

I’m not going anywhere until the next step. It will not arrive except on a continuous arrival at the present moment.

When you walk, you have the opportunity to be inside your body in a slightly different way than when you sit or lie down. We can focus our attention on our feet and feel our foot contact with the floor and the ground at every step.

Walking is a controlled collapse that falls forward, a process that takes a long time to master, and we often take it for granted. So, when the heart squeals, just like walking meditation as with any other practice, we pay attention to where it has gone, what is in our minds now, and escort it gently to this moment, this breath, and this step.

Distance: How long do you need to walk?

You’re not going anywhere, so it’s best to minimize your chances of self-dispersal by walking slowly back and forth in the lane over and over again. The lanes don’t need to be long. One way to 10 paces, the other way to 10 paces is fine. Either way, it’s not a sightseeing tour of your environment. You keep your eyes soft and look in front of you. You don’t need to look at your feet. They strangely know where they are, and consciousness lives in them, allowing their whole body to walk and breathe, with every part of the step cycle moment.

Speed: How fast do you need to walk?

Walking meditation can be practiced at any speed at various speeds. This gives you many applications in your daily life. In fact, we can easily go from mindful walking to mindful running, to practice in itself great ways. Of course, we abandon the lane. It’s certainly possible for a faster formal walk over long distances. However, when we introduce formal mindful walking, stress-relieving, mindfulness-based stress, it is done very slowly, and it is not said about the sensory dimension of walking experience and the connection between the whole body and the breath, and the better meaning of what is happening in the mind.

If you’d like to try walking meditation for yourself, try the guided practice from Jon Kabat-Zinn below.

Guided walking meditation to help you enjoy the day

The above is adopted from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 3. These guided meditations are designed to accompany Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Falling Awake and three other volumes based on reaching our senses.