Learning How To Practice 1: "Mindful Walking"

by Brian Hughes

It’s been a struggle, but I have been trying to stay disciplined with my meditation practice for the last seven to eight months. I’ll go through stretches where I will meditate every day for two or three weeks, then stop suddenly for a week long stretch. But that’s okay, for it’s a “practice.” Buddhism is pretty cool when it comes to that. They understand that you cannot cut out all at once our greed, lust, anger and delusions. All one can do is smile and get back on the horse, and for the most part, I have been doing that with my meditation practice.

As in sitting meditation and with all Buddhist practice in general, it is very important not to criticize oneself for not staying concentrated when sitting, or for not being respectful of others, or any other indiscretion one encounters on the journey. What one must do is acknowledge it and move on. Perhaps if you judged someone in a malicious way, you would say to yourself very simply and with little emotion, “okay, I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know what that person is going through.” And that would be it; you would not cling to your anger about the situation, or your involvement in it. A solid, consistent mediation practice helps us get to a place where we don’t feel the need to react so suddenly, and we don’t feel the need to have situations be any different than they already are.

What I have been recently trying to incorporate into my life has been a walking meditation. I have about a ten to twelve minute walk every morning from the train station to my work office, and what I have been trying to do is walk in such a way as to realize the simple beauty of the activity. Recently I have had the great fortune of listening to a dharma talk on a Zencast podcast given by Zoketsu Norm Fischer. He talked of the importance of walking mindfully and how we tend to carelessly take advantage of this simple and miraculous activity. He tells us that the earth loves us and supports every step we take, and the fact that we are not clinging on for dear life is a miracle. I think we would all be surprised if we just slowed down and witnessed the basic joy and wonderment in the most basic of activities: brushing our teeth, going to the bathroom, eating, and walking. Fischer, as a monk, talks about how it is part of his daily routine to acknowledge all of these basic routines. He’ll say the equivalent of a Buddhist prayer before engaging in them. Even walking into rooms can be considered a sacred event, for we don’t really know what’s going to happen from moment to moment. Each room has its own aura and mystery and wonderment. Shouldn’t each room we enter into be acknowledged in some small way? Fisher mentions the “mezzuzot” in the Jewish tradition, and how this parchment is attached to the doorway of a room, or to the front of the main door of a Jewish home as a reminder of a Jew’s covenant to God. Turns out this activity is very similar to Fisher’s own practice, and it once again points out the similarities we all share.

So how can one stay disciplined in acknowledging these events, for even Fischer mentions his failure at times of staying present. Well, one of the old Buddhist standbys in the ringing of a telephone. This sound can call us back to the moment, back to a place where we begin again to recognize the joyousness of the present. He goes on to explain how often lives are changed forever by a simple telephone call, either in receiving good or bad news. So why not use the ring of a telephone, or a police siren, or any number of sounds to call us back to what is truly important - the present.

It’s a hard practice and I’m failing all day long. But, as with any bad habit, I try to acknowledge it and move on. And by doing that, we also stay present – by acknowledging how we are not present.

In getting back to walking mindfully, it is quite wonderful to feel the earth under our shoes, the weight shifting with each step. Is this type of slow, mindful walking practical when you are at the grocery store, or in trying to catch a plane? Probably not. But maybe we shouldn’t have put ourselves in the position of being late in the first place. But we find that when we take just a few minutes out of the day to walk, or to even sit in meditation, it can do wonder in calming us and making us more peaceful. Let’s face it, our minds are moving faster than we can speak, our new technologies are giving us the opportunity to become highly functional multi-taskers while increasing our levels of stress; sometimes our minds are filled up with so much craziness, that it can even get us into a whole heap of trouble. Why? Because the mind simply needs something to do. It needs to be the center of attention. Our minds control us when, in fact – we should control it. One way of controlling it is through concentrated and meditative walking. And don’t think walking mindfully is easy – it is not. Why even this morning when I was trying to walk mindfully to work, my mind was slyly interrupting me by filling me with ideas for this very essay on walking mindfully. Our minds are amazing! And when I get to work I try to stay mindful, in dealing with my co-workers, in eating breakfast and in sorting through my e-mails – but it never lasts. I get caught up in the everyday and my mind shifts to its defensive mechanism: calling people names, making excuses for not getting something done, thinking of sex, and genuinely being a pain in the ass.

But Buddhism tells us that this is not truly us. That underneath this soiled crust, there is a jewel. That underneath the lies, the self centeredness, the greed, the lust, is compassion, love and selflessness; that we are already perfect as long as we work on letting go of our greed, lust, anger and delusions. And the way to get there is to remove what we conceive as “us” from the picture for a little while each week. If we decide to take control of our minds for just a little bit of time a week, we start to see that we don’t need to be the center of attention all the time, we don’t need to have that new CD on the day it comes out, and we don’t need to be first on line at the bank. We begin to see the much larger picture. When you can concentrate on each step, breathing in and out, you realize the magnificence of controlling your mind, and the power it gives you. That so much of what our minds are trying to tell us, as it moves at the speed of light, is so much garbage. It simply just needs something to do. It cannot bare the thought of silence.

I was at the grocery recently, and as I always mistakenly do – I switched lines for one that I thought might move quicker. It didn’t – naturally. So what happened next? My mind starts creating reasons why this event has befallen me. “This is the type of luck I have. Every time I come to Dagastino’s, I have to get behind idiots!” My mind was going into its defensive mechanism – creating fiction that had nothing to do with reality. Just because I went to the other line does not mean that my life is full of poor luck and bad choices. All it means is that I switched lines and one is slower than the rest. Even if the salesgirl is slow, perhaps I’m not taking into account she’s had a real bad day, or shitty week, or her son is dying of cancer in the hospital. Our first instinct is to lash out – at ourselves, or those in our path. The world, or the salesgirl, or the people in front of us in line, are not out to get us. It just is – that’s all. And we can decide to deal with it or not. It is our choice. We are unable to deal with the reality of what is truly happening, so we make up all this stuff to make sense of the situation. It is ridiculous and selfish. When we walk mindfully, or meditate often enough, we find out two things: One, that to be on a line such as that is a blessing, for it offers us an opportunity to practice, and two, we realize that we don’t need the line, or the people to be anything different than they are; that the moment and all the craziness inside it, is perfect. And when we realize this, we are truly free.