3 Ways To Meditate On A Walk

You’re enjoying a walk on a beautiful day. 

Here’s 3 Ways you can meditate while you’re enjoying your stroll.

Walking Meditation is a perfect opportunity to practise both formal and informal meditation. A longer walk of over 10 minutes where you can really give your full attention to a practice makes a Formal Meditation possible. A shorter walk or one with more of a background approach to practise is an Informal Meditation. Being surrounded by sights to see, sounds to hear and the physical sensations of our bodies gives us many possible focus possibilities. We’ll take a quick look at 3 options and how to practise them in this article. 

3 Ways to Meditate On a Walk

What Techniques Can I Do When I’m Walking?

There are many possibilities. 

We’re highlighting safety by bringing the Attention Skills Of Mindfulness to what is around us so we can meditate safely while navigating our environment. These are techniques that we can (and in this case should) practise with our eyes open. 

We’re drawing on the Unified Mindfulness System to choose 3 techniques which focus on each of these experiences: 

1. Sounds in the environment around you
2. Visual experience in the environment around you
3. Physical sensations (that are non-emotional) that you experience in your body as you’re walking

How To Do These Techniques

Noting

These Techniques are examples of Noting Practices. Noting practices involve focusing on an experience with a high degree of focus for a short period (perhaps three to five seconds) then moving to another and another and….

This is done for the length of the practice.  

We’re training Concentration (one of the attention skills of mindfulness) by creating a kind of chain of high focus ‘reps’ – one after another. This type of Concentration is called Momentary Concentration. Using Momentary Concentration is a feature of Noting Practices. 

Normally we think of concentration in a fairly narrow way as the ability to focus on something small or specific for an extended period of time. An example of this kind of Sustained Concentration in meditation is breath practice where concentration is sustained on some physical aspect of the movement of breath in and out of the body. That might be the sensation of air moving across your nostrils or the rising and falling of your belly. 

Sustained Concentration is another way to practise and train the skill of concentration. 

Many Mindfulness Techniques (including those in those article) are Noting Practices as described above.  One advantage of Momentary Concentration is that we can move between many examples of a sensory experience within a single practice. 

How Noting Works in these Practices 

Noting has two parts:

1. Noticing when your attention has been drawn to an experience within the Focus Range (what you’ve chosen to focus on) of the practice you’re doing 
2. Focusing intensely on that experience for a short period

Labelling

To help us stay on track with Noting we can use labels. Labelling keeps us from drifting off and getting lost in thought (instead of meditating). Labelling can be done out loud or in your mind. The labels you use will vary depending on the type of experience you’re labelling.

Here are some labels you could use for the 3 practices: 

• When doing a practice which is focused on sounds in the environment around you could use the Label HEAR 
• If you’re doing a practice which is focused on visual experience in the environment around could use the Label SEE
• While doing a practice which is focused on physical sensations (that are non-emotional) that you experience as you’re walking you could use the Label FEEL

Putting It Together – Noting And Labelling During A Meditation Technique

Combining Noting and Labelling in these practices involves the following steps. 

While out walking you:

1. allow your attention to float freely 
2. notice when your attention has been drawn to an experience within your chosen focus range –  (Noting Part 1)
3. give the experience the appropriate Label in your mind or out loud
4. focus on the experience as intensely as possible for a few seconds – (Noting Part 2)
5. go back to Step One and repeat these steps for the length of your practice/walk

A Few Noting Tips..

• If you find your attention drawn to multiple experiences simultaneously just choose one. Focus on it, let it go and move on.
• If you find yourself repeatedly drawn to the same experience that’s fine. Re-note and re-label it.
• If an experience disappears immediately after you first notice it, just let it go and move on.
• If you’re attention is drawn to a space between experiences such as the silence between sounds (when focusing on sounds) or a moment when physical body sensations seems less active (when focused on body sensations) this is another kind of experience that you can label. These are examples of Rest. You can use the label REST if you like or you can stick with the other Labels (See, Hear or Feel) because they are still experiences within these categories.

Try a Noting Practice

What Are The Skills You Are Practising With These Techniques?

This is a really important question. 

When we know the skills we’re training in any activity we’re able to more efficiently improve them. Mindfulness techniques are exercises that train three specific skills.  These are the skills that work together to create Mindfulness (Mindful Awareness).

They are:

• Concentration power – the ability to focus on what you want when you want to
• Sensory Clarity – the ability to track and explore your sensory experience in real time
• Equanimity – the ability to allow your sensory experience to come and go without push or pull.  In other words to not suppress/avoid your sensory experience or cling to it.  Instead we allow it to rise, linger and pass away.

How You Are Practising the Skills of Mindfulness in these Techniques?

Concentration

You are practising Concentration:

• when you consciously choose a Focus Range and each time note an experience you are flexing your concentration ‘muscle’ and building that skill rep by rep.  
• when you attention is drawn to an experience outside the focus range you have opportunity to practice concentration by bringing your attention back to your focus range.   Distractions are not a failure to meditate. They are an inevitable part of the experience and present an opportunity to practise and develop concentration power.

Sensory Clarity

An important part of Sensory Clarity involves focusing on the details of our sensory experience.  While practising we do this when we’re Noting (focusing intently on an experience for a few seconds). We’re looking closely in a more fine-grained way at our sensory experience than we normally would.

To support this we might notice just details such as:

• the shape or colour of something we see
• the location or intensity of a sensation we feel
• Is an experience that we are noting changing or moving

When we increase our Sensory Clarity this also supports heightened Concentration.

Equanimity

We can think of equanimity as being either foreground or background.

• Background Equanimity

Background equanimity is equanimity we bring to experiences that are outside of the focus range of our practice. It means we allow an experience to go on in the background while we choose to focus on something else in the foreground of our experience. 

For example:

You’ve chosen to focus on visual experience around you. 

You notice that thoughts are capturing your attention so you bring background equanimity to thought. 

This allows it to do whatever it wants in the background. 

It’s not a problem that thoughts exist. 

They’re welcome to do their thing.  

You gently bring our attention back to what you see around you in the environment. 

• Foreground Equanimity

Foreground Equanimity includes welcoming the sensory experience that you’ve chosen to focus on in the technique.  

For example: 

You’re out walking and you’re focused on sounds that you hear in your environment.  

You suddenly heard a sound that you normally do not like.

This is an opportunity to bring Equanimity to that experience. 

It’s also an example of the three skills working together to support each other.  

You bring Concentration to that sound. 

You explore the details of that experience – Sensory Clarity which enhances your ability to bring equanimity to that experience.  

You may have explore details like:

• the location of the sound
• how loud it was
• is the pitch consistent
• how does the sound change In some way
• are there sounds within the sound  

Focusing on these details means we’re exploring and opening up to the experience and this increases our Equanimity. Increasing the Equanimity we have with an experience also supports Sensory Clarity and Concentration.  The less we struggle with a sensory experience the easier it is to bring the other attention skills to it.  Being able to do this can have a profound impact on our lives.  We might discover that in environments that normally cause us discomfort we are able to learn to experience with the new level of ease and effectiveness.

Learn More: What is Mindfulness?