Spiritual Connection lies in the Mundane: Walking
Being a Libra, I am airy and thinking often in lots of different directions. Deciding what to eat and read each night are decisions that take close to an hour on occasion. So you can only imagine the millions of voices and pressure I have when deciding how to navigate a tough feeling or challenge. All the parts of myself want to give their ten cents and I welcome all their opinions. However, it usually results in a feeling of being stuck, overwhelmed or deferring to avoidance. Throughout the past couple of years, I realized this is actually the key time for me to welcome mindful movement rather than being swallowed into the mind’s million rabbit holes. It isn’t the time to meditate or journal for me, it is time for me to walk outside in nature. This is my way of working through it, with equanimity. And this is my way of working inwards even if nothing is going on. Walking is my direct line to honoring my center.
Growing up as an athlete and as someone who was a tad obsessed with achieving in school, I was always on the go. My workouts were always all or nothing and there was never any space to not always have my nose to the grindstone for school. I never understood why you’d go for a slow jog or why you wouldn’t fight to get the A in the class you didn’t highly value. And in between, I was rushing: to be with friends or be there for the other parts of life. Walking? That was used to get quickly from point A to point B, to send a text that I couldn’t in class or to flush my legs after a hard workout. Walking for pleasure, connection, curiosity and deepening my spiritual self...never heard of her.
As babies, the majority of us fight hard to find our first ticket to freedom: walking. Our first step is celebrated and our brains marvel at the new capacity. The new tricks soon follow: hopping, skipping, running and dancing. We intuitively express ourselves and celebrate through this movement as children. The little girl skipping in summer rain or the little boy who can’t stop requesting songs from his favorite movie so he can dance it out embody this innate confidence to take up space. It is effortless and liberating. Many of us lose that confidence as adults to freely express through our bodies for an array of reasons. And yet, we can come back home to this movement. The organic kind. The kind that has no end goal and simply guides us into the present moment. Although there are so many physical benefits to walking that are so valuable, let’s focus on the more mystical elements of walking.
I am in awe of ideas and the birthplace of them within each of us. I am a firm believer that intentionally walking with the purpose of being aware of the self and its environment is a cauldron for ideas. We can dare to put our phones away and we can dare to take the uncharted way through our neighborhoods, the woods and towns. Our senses become enlivened just by stepping outside our four walled shelters. This spark of the senses returns the childlike wonder into my being. I find myself asking questions about people, plants and businesses. The way us humans operate is viewed with open curiosity rather than fact. I wonder with compassion about the gray haired woman I see sitting alone each night in her living room and I question our relationship to Amazon as I witness the fleets of delivery workers on my walks growing. I feel infinite space above me as I gaze up into the sky and I feel capable as I step forward. The modern dilemma is having an abundance of materialism and yet a constant wanderlust and boredom. Rather than accumulating more stuff or trying to satisfy that need for newness with a flight to the next hot destination, we can turn inwards to our senses with a walk. We may just return home to our kitchen table with a business idea or a horrible song we made up. Both permit the life force of creativity to course through our body. How beautiful.
Walking is also a beautiful way to connect back to the sublime experience of nature and its lessons, which I believe we are not always living in synchronicity with. We wake up to alarms, sleep after seeing blue light throughout the day and usually do not have much of a part in foraging for our food. Not to say we cannot make our next Trader Joe’s run feel like a foraging adventure! We don’t need endless woods or the ability to walk white sand beaches to connect to nature. Even living in a city, there is wildness. And this wildness is mirrored in our own self with our intuition, our seasonality and resilience. Nature reminds us we are not living in a vacuum but rather that we are a tiny microcosm for all of life. The birds, the weeds in the sidewalk, the moon falling in the morning all live in cohesion. Contrary to our culture’s messaging, we aren’t better than nature, we are a part of it. Regardless of the season, even in a harsh New England winter, life dies and regrows. We teach ourselves to triumph and feel through adversity, as nature does through winter, by walking with presence amongst the cosmic orchestra of birds chirping, leaves falling and snow crunching.
So now I walk not to skip the magic of what happens in the journey, but to tune into the process with my breath, with an awareness of my senses and with the feeling of connecting to the environment around me. Most spiritual traditions have walking meditations and it is not a secret that profound spiritual teachers, including Gandhi, Buddha and MLK walked to share their teachings and willingly chose to do so. The walk is a pilgrimage and a chance to awaken. It is a gift to walk. And it is a choice to walk presently. The devotion to our center, the gut feelings, the whispers which are sometimes dormant in our modern hectic lives, slowly return in our walking pilgrimages. The hint to take a different route, to stop and listen to the sound of kids playing, to marvel at the sun before returning to our day grants us permission to deeply trust our wise knowings that our culture doesn’t acknowledge. Walking is entirely simple and exorbitantly complex. In such an unplanned way there are surprises and wildness yet there is the constant harmonious step after step with breath. And in this dichotomy, lies magic that we cannot exactly put words to.
