OpenSourceOD
Mindful Walking
Beginner
Skill Level:
In walking meditation, you practice feeling the body in motion with great intentionality: one step at a time. Tich Naht Hanh refers to walking as if your feet were kissing the ground with each step. This can be practiced in just about any space where you are walking, but should first be practiced by picking a “lane” (an imaginary ‘straight line’) in which you walk back and forth. Beginning with your very first step, you slowly connect with the carriage of the body, movement of the bones, flexing of muscles, and all of the nerves at the bottom of your feet.
This technique is part of the Expanding phase of SERA, in which the OD practitioner must help participants shift their consciousness into a non-conceptual domain. With expanding the goal is to open conscious awareness further and deeper into a non-conceptual, sensate, and intuitive quality of awareness. In this way, the practitioner helps the client establish a more spacious orientation of awareness, in which sensing is amplified and thoughts are recognized like objects with various levels emotional intensity and attachment rather than truths.
As you think of unique ways to apply this technique to a new OD solution, remember that the aim of the Expanding phase is to stretch consciousness further into non-conceptual, sensate, and meta-egoic forms of awareness.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2017). Walking meditations. Mindfulness, 8(1), 249-250.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2017). Standing Meditations. Mindfulness, 8(1), 247-248.
