Walking meditation in nature

Recently some doctors discovered and agreed with the fact that hiking in wild and rustic nature is a full-fledged therapy for the mind, soul, and body the golden triptych which brings harmony.

John Muir wrote in Our National Parks: “The peace of nature will seep into you as the sun’s rays penetrate the trees. The wind will give you its cool, and the storms their energy, at the same time that the worries will fall like autumn leaves.”

The first point is this is vital to be reconnected to nature, we are one with it: it feeds us and in our urban life we are too disconnected from it which is comparable to try to do yoga or stretch with armor from the middle-age.

In addition to that walking meditation in nature allows avoiding to have too many negative thoughts about oneself and also anxiety, depression and other problems such as binge eating or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Indeed have you ever observed nature properly: just passively, without any judgment, just as a sponge emptying your mind to absorb the vibrations of the environment. When you do that, suddenly and miraculously after a certain practice, you will feel the energy of the whole, the subtle ether encompassing, entangling everything… The object, the subject, and the observation are making one: this is the Oneness… You become like a recipient, a glass containing a part of The Source. By mimicry, you absorb the high degrees of the vibrations of nature. But for being deeply penetrated it is better to remain silent: the power of nature is thereby more intense and transcendental.

I invite you to do the test and to marvel at the process of life, to admire that everything is perfectly at its place. You could meditate of this Veda saying “find the place which is already yours in this cosmic breath and dance”. More down to earth if I can afford the French writer Victor Hugo said: “How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.”

The study demonstrates that hiking in nature by disconnecting from technology stimulates creative problem-solving.

A very simple method of having an amazing result is to have a normal speed of walking by meditating. You just walk at your own pace but you align and coordinate 3 aspects of your body:

1. Your heartbeat which should be your metronome, your cadence indicating your natural rhythm
2. The pace of your steps/treads are natural, not forced (not too slow not too quick)
3. Your breathing follows also your natural rhythm

And you will turn around these 3 axes rotating by the consciousness of each of them and if you want to inject mindfulness the fact to observe passively things you can but the goal is to avoid the excess of thoughts. By practicing the mindfulness that to say the fact to be incompletely absorbed by the present moment (with the observation of your 5 senses – activating step by step the 6^th one – and the 4 elements (subtly the 5^th one: “ether”) it favorites the deep inner connection to your higher self.

Aligning these 3 aspects creates a balance in our brain: an equilibrium in between your both hemispheres that’s to say the right one: the seat of creativity, sensitivity, the Yin energy and the left one: the seat of rationality, structure, the Yang energy. Thanks to the good balance in between both hemispheres, it allows to stimulate your pineal gland and thereby to activate it. The pineal gland which represents as Rene Descartes defined it as “the seat of the soul” and which correspond to the gate to open up the doors of new perceptions, new perspectives, and the channel, the pathway towards the outer world: the invisible world.

Walking meditation is excellent to reconnect to your true nature through nature: to recharge through its high frequencies of calmness and serenity that we all aspire and need to live peacefully.

You can see walking meditation like climbing as ascending: a kind of difficulties or effort to reach a peak and the reward at the end is the view: you have a horizon, high visibility of the landscape. Even if I always say life is a path for which happiness occurs on the road not only at the destination…

This can be perceived as a metaphor of life as well because in a certain extent all is a pretext to meditate. Meditation like mindfulness is a permanent state of mind: this is not an activity but a style of life, a mindset…

If we go beyond by extension we could see walking as meditation because it reminds us of the process of life: stability/movement/stability/movement and also balance/unbalance/balance/unbalance. It is a kind of metaphor: to advance you need to take a risk and question your stability. Keep always in mind the incredible Egyptian philosophy regarding the endless inner journey “True teaching is not an accumulation of knowledge; it is an awakening of consciousness which goes through successive stages”.

Subtly you will “innerstand” that you are reaching step by step your inner temple allowing to be able to contemplate literally what we used to call in Shambali “The Great Book of Life”.

In Shambali you will learn many ways for meditating: the active and passive way through the main known schools of the world giving you a maximum of tools and tips to make easy your learning. It will become a natural need afterward, a physiological need like eating, drinking or sleeping…

Issa ~ AM