As autumn season has started to make it appearance in Brussels, we have decided to kick off our meditative walks in the nearby park.
While these Saturday morning walks allow us to reconnect with nature and enjoy the beautiful fall colors and leaves falling from trees, they also teach us to walk without a purpose while living in a buzzing city. It has been heartwarming to see new members join the small group while working on a common goal to regain a peaceful state of mind.
‘What if we could meditate while we walk?’Says every person that has no time but wants to meditate more 🙂
If you are like us and spend quite a large amount of time walking when you go to work, to school, to the market or to take a break from other activities…learning a great walking meditation technique could really help get meditation into your daily routine.
How can we meditate while walking
When you walk, try focusing on all the thoughts which come to mind. You will probably notice that multiple thoughts come up. Let’s suppose your are on the way to work. Maybe there are many kinds of worries about your boss, your job, your results, your reputation. After work, you might get many stressful thoughts and negative minds from your day at work. If you have family, you might have thoughts about them…
1. Decide a starting point and an end point
For an effective and calm walking meditation, you better have clear in mind where your walk starts and where it ends so you won’t lose concentration thinking about where to go and how much more you should walk. From the starting point to the end point, we need to focus on meditation. You could start from your front door to your job or from your work place to somewhere like the gym, the grocery store… or even better you can choose a park to go to for your daily meditation. In Brussels for example there are many beautiful and big parks like the parc du cinquantenaire, parc de Woluwe, parc Léopold, La Cambre, Parc de Bruxelles. You can pick one per meditation or walk from one to another.
2. Focus on Meditation, this is what you are doing now
The most important thing to be able to do meditation while walking is to focus on just that. Even if it’s a short walking meditation there must be no other goal in mind.
3. Take a step back and look at your thoughts
As you start walking some thoughts will come up (including « what am I doing? » « does this even work? » « Am I actually meditating? »), you just need to take a sit back as if you were at the movies and just observe the thoughts (we also call them pictures or illusions as they are just in our mind) that come up. It could be hard at first but even if you are watching a confusing movie you are already going in the right direction! Just keep on practicing.
4. Best walking meditation technique: let go of all the thoughts
Our meditation is letting go as in litterally discarding of all the distracting thoughts. When you walk, look at the thoughts that are brought up. Then you need to imagine that a trash can is in front of you and every time you see a thought or picture just throw in the trash can. At the end of the meditation just empty the trash can in the fire and you will notice that all the pictures were burned and disappeared. Keep repeating this exercise.
This 20 minute walking meditation technique has helped thousands of meditation students to let go of their burdens. At the beginning it can seem uneasy but if you keep at it you will realize that your negative thoughts will decrease and your negative minds will be gone.
If you found this article interesting and would like to know more about meditating while walking or about meditation in general we offer a free 30 minutes consultation with a meditation teacher!
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