Walking meditation: a guide to find your inner peace
The mind can go in a thousand directions. But on this spiritual path called walking meditation, each step is a wind blows that helps you find your inner peace.
Many people think they can never learn how to meditate. Their minds don’t tune into a still calmness to practice mindfulness, to acquire a deep state of tranquility. However, something as easy as starting to walk can transform your life: it gets your spirits up and your mind is free almost instantly.
Some therapeutic approaches, like mindfulness, may not work for everyone. Teenagers or high levels anxiety people cannot reach this perfect point of relaxation to learn to be more aware of their inner world through a relaxed state.
When the mind screams, when our thoughts are obsessive and we carry all our worries stuck like an iron crust in our being, there is a strategy that never fails: walking. In fact, there is something magical about the simple act of walking.
The heart grows with each step, the breath becomes deep, sonorous, the brain oxygenates, and our being expands through these repetitive motions to reach its equilibrium. This is how you can control your own life through a physical exercise that combines meditation.
In this article we’ll help you find your inner peace and the enormous impact of walking meditation may have on your new you.
How to practice walking meditation?
Your walk should be daily, not lasting more than half an hour. But we need to do it in a natural, quiet space and wear comfortable shoes and clothing.
1. Start walking slowly, in gradual steps. Gradually you should find the pace that is more relaxing, more cathartic, and more liberating. There are those who walk at a slow pace and those who decide to start a faster walk.
2. It’s time to focus your attention on some aspects. Visualize your mind as a flashlight that directs your light on one aspect and then another: first your breath, then the feel of your feet as they touch the ground, then the wind that caresses your skin.
3. Gradually, you will realize that you no longer need to focus your attention on each of these aspects of your body. At the end of the day, the focus of your flashlight will be so wide that you will realize everything at once.
Now, your consciousness has expanded so much that your being will form a perfect calm and harmony whole.
Walking in a maze: the magic of concentration
Let’s go a little further now. Let’s imagine that in your case mindfulness is not helpful and you cannot learn to meditate while walking either. Just leaving home and walking without a fixed direction distracts you, scatters your mind and you cannot find your balance point, your center, your point of calm.
In this case, we can start a curious and ancient practice in many cultures: going through a maze. This ancestral practice is like visualizing your own tattooed problems on the floor to walk through them step by step while finding a way out.
1. In the mazes there is not a single way out, nor is it “won” when you can get out of it. The benefit is in the very act of going through it and what you get as you go through it.
2. The goal is to “calm the mind, open the heart” through the exercise itself.
3. When you enter a maze, firstly you have to stop and reflect, thinking about what you should let go before starting this concentric path to focus fully on the present, here and now.
4. The right thing is to walk slowly, placing one foot in front of the other and seeing at all times the shape of the traces.
When you reach the center of the maze, you should rest and meditate for a few minutes on the path you have you walked in. The purpose of this exercise is not to find a way out of the tangle of our problems, but to be strengthened by the learning gained during this process.
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