Walking Helped Me Slim Down My Mind’s Worries

Often, to lift your spirits the best thing is… WALK. Taking slow, fast, smooth, hard, rigid and flexible walks helped me to slim down my mind’s worries and ease my heart.

Walking helped me to ease the burden of my pain, my emotions and my thoughts. It helped me to rest my anguish and release my worries. Because walking along paths has something that leads us to a healthier life emotionally and cognitively.

Why? There are many reasons, but the main one that is worth noting is that walking  helps us to reserve a portion of our own soul for ourselves, something we often forget and which no doubt causes us enormous problems at all levels.

When tension chokes you, WALK

When tension chokes you, WALK.  It’s no longer an ingredient in a happiness cookbook, but it’s certainly life’s main sweetener in terms of wellness. Something so seemingly simple can help us solve problems and reorganize the desk in our mental office.

This goes hand in hand with the simple reason that it determines our own emotional and cognitive state. Although what we do (conduct) is the visible tip of the iceberg, we are who we are thanks to an interrelationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviors.

For the sake of complete clarity, we cannot forget, in any area of ​​our own lives, that each behavior determines and is determined by thoughts and emotions. These three pillars live together inside us as if they were the cogs of a clock.

Did you know that you can meditate walking?

John Kabat-Zinn, the father of mindfulness in the West, proposes that a simple way to add awareness to our own lives is to practice meditation while walking. That is, it is about bringing one’s attention to the actual experience of walking as we walk.

This is nothing more than walking and knowing what we are doing. However, it is worth clarifying that this does not mean that we should look at our own feet. When we try to do this, we will find that nothing is as simple as it sounds.

It’s rare that we just walk, even in those situations where we go out to “take a walk”. We usually walk because we want to go from one place to another, which ends up making our own body the link of our mind.

So, as the expert already quoted in his book “Living crises to the full” states very eloquently:

“(…) often, the body is really the driver of the mind, taking it, like it or not, and following orders. If the mind is in a hurry, the body runs. If the mind is attracted to something interesting, the head turns, and the body changes direction or stops. Also, and obviously, ideas of any kind cascade through the mind just as they do when we are sitting and breathing. And all this happens without us realizing it”.

The process of meditation through the act of walking presents the need to:

• Make the effort to notice when one foot comes into contact with the ground and when our own weight rests on that, when the other foot rises and moves forward and then comes down to, in turn, stand on contact with the ground.
• If the mind goes away from the feet or legs or the feeling of how the body moves, with all the tranquility and simplicity,  we return there as soon as we perceive the escape.
• You don’t have to look at your feet, as they already know how to walk alone. In the beginning it would even be good not to look at what is around us, as this will prevent our own thoughts from starting to navigate and distort the process of meditation and abstraction about the world. Remembering that it is about experiencing the activity we are doing.

• After achieving the ability to walk mindfully on our own feet and legs, we can extend our focus of attention to the rest of the body as if it were a whole moving through space.

Walking meditating or without meditating helps us to clear our own minds and to fulminate certain somatic experiences that accompany the restlessness of walking a path full of obstacles (because often, as we know, our lives turn into this).

Any time is good for us to have the pleasure of walking through a place suited to our own needs. Anyone who has tried or has tried it will know that, with a long walk, walking in the rhythm of life becomes much easier and more fulfilling.