Dharma Blog
It’s one thing to “just walk” when doing walking meditation (kinhin) during formal practice. Mind and body doing the same thing. But how do we carry over our practice as we walk around during the day? Same activity, different state of mind, different settings.
Walking from activity to activity at work, at home, everywhere, we can find ourselves dominated by our thoughts. In fact, we may not even be aware at all of our body if we’re really deep in thought.
Taking refuge in “just walking” from task to task during the day, releases us from the strictures and strains of constant thought. Freeing ourselves in this way, step by step, we help us to recognize how our habit of continual thinking maintains a sensation of stress, feeds it, increases it, while the practice of “just walking” releases it.
So when you’re walking down the hall at work, or up the stairs, through an open door, waiting in a line, walking around the block at lunch or anytime at all, calling up the practice of mind and body doing the same thing, just walking, can bring you, me, all of us, back to this moment of our life, which is the only moment we have.