Mindful Walking (3)

A human foot carved in limestone in Egypt around 600 BC.

. . . Take a look at your feet: the slanting row of toes, the ball, the arch, the heel, the ankle. Why don't you admire them? Go even further — love them! Why not? They are beautiful. Think of what they do for you. They are masterpieces of design; they are miracles. Stand up on them. Sway forwards a little, then backwards, then from side to side. See how you balance. You could not do this without them. Be conscious of how your body is standing upright, erect, the centre of gravity running straight from the top of your head through your spine and pelvis and legs right down to your feet. Watch how the mind controls what the body does. Wriggle your toes. Stand on tiptoe. Rock back on your heels. Bend your legs, one after the other, flexing the Achilles tendon. Your legs and your whole body are supported and balanced by your feet. It feels good, doesn't it?

Step out of the bedroom. What freedom you have on your own two feet, what choices, what infinite possibilities! You could take them — or they could take you — across the landing to the bathroom or into another bedroom. You could move them downstairs into the kitchen or the living room or the garden. Or down the street and round the park and into the shops. Or up the hill and through the woods and by the lake and past the crossroads and along the river as far as the sea. And beyond the ocean there's Yssingeaux, Xanadu, Morocco, Samarkand . . . 

Don't try putting on your socks just yet. Why don't you go barefoot for a while? It's normal, it's natural, it's liberating. We don't walk barefoot enough. We lose touch with our feet, our beautiful feet, in thick socks which make them hot and sweaty. We encase them in ill-fitting footwear, fashionable and expensive shoes and boots, which cause them suffering and deformity. We pervert four million years of evolution by forcing our feet into unnatural contortions. Go barefoot for a while and taste the freedom. Feel how directly and naturally the heel and the ball of the foot touch the wooden floorboards, the cool tiles, the lush carpet, the dew-laden grass. Feel how the skin loves this contact, and hardens a little to protect itself, yet remains sensitive to all the textures and temperatures of the ground surface . . .

(Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Mindful Walking (2)

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art. LEONARDO DA VINCI

The feet of the Solitary Walker encased in a pair of Keen walking sandals.

Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak. REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust: A History Of Walking

You don't have to embark on a long and significant trek before engaging in a bit of mindful walking. You only need swing your legs out of bed in the morning, plant them on the floor, and you can begin.

But first let us consider briefly the human foot, that masterpiece of engineering and work of art. It's a wonderful, remarkable thing — one of the most complex mechanical structures in the human anatomy. The foot comprises twenty-six bones (only the hand has more, one more to be exact), thirty-three joints (twenty of them articulated) and over one hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments. The hands and feet alone contain more than half the total number of bones in the human body, and just two bones in each foot carry the bulk of its whole weight.

It's taken four million years of evolution to walk upright. Walking on two legs distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom (ok, birds and kangaroos also manage on two legs, but they hop rather than walk, and use their tails for balance). This miracle of bipedalism was an essential evolutionary step forward in the development of the hominid, leading to our present unique human shape: straight toes, arched feet, long straight legs and spine, flat stomach, flexible waist, low shoulders and erect head.

Now back to those feet on the bedroom floor . . .

Click here for Mindful Walking (1)

(Click here for the daily Turnstone quote.)

A Matter Of Taste

See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. THE WHO Tommy

Unusually for me I feel a little under the weather. I woke up in Plymouth last Thursday, the final day of my south west coast walk, with a sore throat. At home later that evening the boringly familiar symptoms of the common cold made their unwelcome appearance: coughing, sneezing, headache, a general feeling of lassitude and a complete lack of sympathy from anyone else in the house. Nothing unusual there, you might think. What is he complaining about?

Well, actually I'm rarely ill, and the last time I was unwell - the only time since I began blogging over three years ago - was also when I'd just returned from a long hike. (I blogged about it here.) Could there be a connection? Any theories, anyone? Myself, I believe that multi-week trekking can be hard work, and can be stressful, even if we don't fully realise it when we're transported by the strangeness, the beauty and the freedom of it all; and this, plus the sudden, depressing jolt back into routine reality when the trip's over and done, can trigger an adverse reaction. (Then again it's probably simply down to the prosaic germs of a virus - there are always hundreds going around, especially at this time of year.)

However the real point of this post is not to gripe about a minor ailment affecting millions at the moment, or even to crave a smidgen of sympathy from cyber-buddies. No, the motivation behind the piece is to say: let's all be gratefully aware every minute of the day for our five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell - and the sixth 'sense' of our mind, which coordinates them all! Because of my cold I've temporarily lost two of these - the interlinked senses of taste and smell - and I miss them acutely. The savour of food and drink, the scent of a late summer breeze in piney woods, the bitter tang of woodsmoke, the redolence of herbs, the taste of tarragon chicken, lamb with rosemary, garlic-roasted vegetables - all these things are lost to me. Why is it we often seem to need to lose things - our health, our senses - before we can really appreciate what we have and take for granted?

(Awareness going out to all those who have either temporarily or permanently lost the use of either one or more of their senses.)

(Zen exercise: try to imagine what it must be like without first one, then two, then three etc, then finally all your senses.)

(Nowadays we recognise many more senses than the traditional five senses: eg the sense of pain, of balance, of motion and acceleration, of time, of temperature, of direction etc.)

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

The Unfolding Path

In the middle of this road we call life / I found myself in a dark wood / With no clear path through DANTE Inferno

The journey metaphor is used in all cultures to describe life and the quest for meaning. In the East, the word Tao, Chinese for 'Way' or 'Path', carries this meaning. In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as a path - the path of mindfulness, the path of right understanding, the path of the wheel of truth (Dharma). Tao and Dharma also mean the way things are, the law that governs all of existence and non-existence. All events, whether we see them on the surface as good or bad, are fundamentally in harmony with the Tao. It is our job to learn to perceive this underlying harmony, and to live and make decisions in accord with it. Yet, frequently, it is not exactly clear what the right way is, which leaves plenty of room for free will and principled action, and also for tension and controversy, to say nothing of getting lost entirely.

When we practice meditation, we are really acknowledging that in this moment, we are on the road of life. The path unfolds in this moment and in every moment while we are alive. Meditation is more rightly thought of as a 'Way' than as a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. This means in part acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. At the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged, or without hope). On the other hand, it often happens that we can become trapped into believing too strongly that we do know where we are going, especially if we are driven by self-serving ambition and we want certain things very badly. There is a blindness that comes from self-furthering agendas that leaves us thinking we know, when actually we don't know as much as we think. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

An Infinite Expectation Of The Dawn

Daybreak's coming earlier and earlier each morning as spring advances. I love the dawn and the early mornings. When I was young I had to drag myself out of bed. Now I relish that quiet hour or two before the workaday world begins to stir. There's something special about it, magical even. It's a good time to meditate, and rinse the mind, before its relentless daily stream of thoughts starts to flow.

Thoreau liked the mornings, too, and in this piece he considers the dawn, but ends up contemplating something wider...

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look ...To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

THOREAU Walden

A Mindful Walk (2)

I set off on my walk the next day with a heightened awareness of my five senses and of my mind interpreting and coordinating them. It's a revelation if you do this. It makes you realize that most of the time our minds, left to their own devices, are continually constructing and reconstructing unreal, conceptual worlds of prejudice and supposition, half-truth and fantasy, set in the past and the future - and we're lost to the intense richness of the immediate present.

I 'rotated' my senses one by one, bringing each in turn to the forefront of my awareness, finally trying to spotlight them all equally at the same time. Every time my thoughts meandered off on their usual, routine course of worry and anxiety, taking me away from the 'now', I reminded myself (from some place beyond the 'me' of my thoughts) of the whole chaotic mental process. I became super-conscious of these random, unbidden thoughts as they streamed past - watching them arise, stay a while, then disappear - with a certain detachment and wry amusement.

It suddenly dawned on me that, although my thoughts were part of me, I was not my thoughts. In fact the idea of 'I' or 'me' or 'self' became less central and important the more I immersed myself in pure sound and vision, touch and smell. If I had to put it into words, I'd say, perhaps, that I'd actually become the sightscape and the soundscape, the touchscape and the smellscape - even the tastescape, for smell and taste are very much bound together, and I could almost taste the air, the rain-soaked grass, the early spring freshness. My petty-minded, puffed-up ego seemed miles away, and for a few moments I rested in an ocean of undiluted being...

(All photos taken on my village walks.)

A Mindful Walk (1)

I try and go for a walk most days, even if it's just round the village. With a little imagination you can walk a subtly different route each time by using slightly different variations and permutations. I may only walk to the end of the village and back, I may take in some of the surrounding countryside, or I may even walk seven miles to the nearest town if I have a few hours to spare (you can reach it on paths, tracks and quiet lanes without touching a main road.)



The other day I returned home from one such walk and realized with a shock that I could scarcely remember anything about the walk at all. I knew the ground I'd covered, but I'd been on 'automatic pilot' - so deep in thought, so immersed in all the plans, preoccupations and anxieties that plague our minds much of the time - that I'd barely registered any of the things I'd seen or heard (let alone or touched or smelt). Of course my senses were there all the time, working away. I just hadn't tapped into them, so I'd missed out on all the peace and calm, the joy and pleasure they could have instantly brought me.

The next day I resolved to be more present in the 'nowscape' of my walk, to be fully aware of every sense experience, to be mindful of each moment...

(All photos taken on my village walks.)

Ring Them Bells Of Mindfulness

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail / For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale / And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail / And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing BOB DYLAN Chimes Of Freedom

Ring them bells St Catherine from the top of the room / Ring them from the fortress for the lilies that bloom / Oh the lines are long and the fighting is strong / And they're breaking down the distance between right and wrong BOB DYLAN Ring Them Bells

When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain? BOB DYLAN When You Gonna Wake Up?

The poet John Donne said 'never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.' The bell Donne is referring to is the funeral bell, the bell that reminds us of our brief sojourn in this world. But there is another bell, the bell of mindfulness, that tolls in each moment, inviting us to come to our senses, reminding us that we can wake up to our lives, now, while we have them to live. The bell of mindfulness tolls for thee as well. It tolls for all of us. It tolls in celebration of life and what might be possible were we to hear it in its fullness, were we to wake up. JON KABAT-ZINN Coming To Our Senses

No News Of The Affairs Of Men

Ryokan (1758-1831) is a Japanese poet of whom I'm very fond. A Buddhist monk, he trained 12 years with a Zen master. When his master died, he set off on a 5 year pilgrimage. Finally, at the age of 40, he settled down in a spartan hut on Mount Kugami and became a hermit for more than 30 years, living in absolute simplicity with very few possessions. This short, simple, yet for me profoundly resonant poem of his is quoted in Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Coming To Our Senses. It's the very essence of Zen:

My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe.
When the moon comes out, I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

RYOKAN

Liberation From The Self

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. ALBERT EINSTEIN

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Out task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation, and a foundation for inner security. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Your One Wild And Precious Life

Two poems about awareness and mindfulness, and the amazing possibilities of the present moment in our sensory world...

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

WILLIAM STAFFORD

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean - the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

MARY OLIVER

I like the way Mary Oliver considers 'awareness', or close attention, as a kind of secular 'prayer'.

Both poems end with a question, which is a wake-up call to all of us.

Can we awaken our minds and senses to what the 'now' has to offer?

How do we really want to spend our lives - our precious lives, our only lives?

Just This! Just This!

In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us. From Coming To Our Senses by JON KABAT-ZINN

Of course you can meditate anywhere, but I've always thought long walks and pilgrimages provide a wonderful opportunity for mindfulness and meditation (Pilgrimpace, in much the same way, relates walking to prayer). Away from the demands of job and family, email and cell phone, the ever-accelerating rat race, there's time and space to explore your own mind and face up to who you really are. It's less easy to be distracted from appreciating, fully and with an open heart, the beauty and significance of the present moment. For the present moment - here, here, now here - is all we ever have. But far too often we don't recognize it or inhabit it at all, preoccupied as we are with regrets about the past and anxieties about the future.

Mindfulness is the act of becoming aware of awareness itself, standing back and watching our teeming thoughts (which seem to have a mind of their own) come and go, realizing we are more than our thoughts and ideas, our fears and hopes, our instincts and emotions. By observing and understanding these processes we can free ourselves from their tyranny over us, and be delivered back to our true selves.

First days of spring
the sky is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.
Everything is turning green.
I carry my monk’s bowl and walk to the village
to beg for my daily meal.
The children spot me at the temple gate
and happily crowd around,
dragging at my arms till I stop.
I put my bowl on a white rock,
hang my bag on a branch.
First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,
then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball in the air:
I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.
Time is forgotten, the hours fly.
People passing by point at me and laugh:
“Why are you acting like such a fool?”
I nod my head and don’t answer.
I could say something, but why?
Do you want to know what’s in my heart?
From the beginning of time: just this! just this! RYOKAN

Coming To Our Senses

I haven't read a book in ages. Which is odd for me as I'm a bookaholic. On the Camino I felt like reading hardly anything at all, except my guide book - though, as you know, I was inspired to do a bit of writing. Being bombarded with Spanish all the time could be wearisome - especially since I have no confident grasp of the language. So, for a time, I turned away from the written word, and looked for hidden, unwritten words in outer and inner landscapes, words skulking behind situations and moods, words haunting broken conversations. And often I sank for days into the mire, or the nirvana, of the word-less, which was sometimes scary, and sometimes liberating and peaceful.

But I knew that I would always come back to words, for I love them, and I try to make sense of the world through them. (Though I'm aware, like all instruments of interpretation and perception, words are only a partial way of embracing 'What Is'.) The wonder of words and language is one of our greatest wonders. Words and language make us human.

Needing to engage again with a good, fat book, I picked up Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming To Our Senses, and I'm very glad I did. There's a saying about the Camino that it doesn't always give you what you want, but it does gives you what you need. Well, I wasn't really sure I wanted to read this book - dammit, it's 600 pages of dense text! - but, sure as hell, I probably do need it right now.

At one time I used to sell a lot of 'Mind, Body and Spirit' titles, various 'alternative', left-field books, and other assorted esoterica to bookshops in the UK, so I've a general, if superficial, knowledge of the subject. In this area it can be difficult locating the diamonds in the dross, separating the charlatans from the real gurus, telling apart those with true spiritual insight from those with just a secular yen to be on Oprah and earn lots of lovely dollars.

Truth to tell, since I came back to England I haven't felt very well for one reason or another. But I feel this might be the very book to banish those post-Camino blues. It's about mindfulness, meditation, Buddhism, awareness, happiness, healing, lovingkindness, yoga, freedom - and anything and everything that's part of the human soma and psyche. Perhaps in reading it I may at last come to some small understanding of my recent, difficult Camino...

Mindful Walking (1)

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,/'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'? From Afterwards by THOMAS HARDY

The longer I live the more I consider life to be a long, meandering, circuitous, eventful, aimless, up-and-down, weather-beaten . . . walk. Bipedalism distinguishes us from most other creatures and we've developed it into a refined skill. Walking is the most natural, the easiest, the most convenient, the most eco-friendly, the cheapest and, for me, the most satisfying and enjoyable form of locomotion. Possibly in the future our by-and-large sedentary lifestyle may cause our bodies to evolve differently, and develop shapes and features which reflect our current obsessions with sitting at the wheel of a car, sitting in front of a computer screen, sitting in meetings, sitting in front of TV. But for the moment — despite lack of funds for sport in schools, despite insidiously addictive computer games, despite increasing health problems due to obesity and lack of exercise — walking is what we do.

Often we just walk automatically without really thinking about it. But, as with yogic breathing, if we allow ourselves to be keenly aware of the process — a state Buddhists call mindfulness — the simple art of putting one foot in front of the other gains a whole new dimension. It's the same with all of our sense experiences while we're out walking. Observing, noticing things, registering that little breeze, that birdsong, that piney scent of rising sap in the trees — all this makes us more human, more sensitive to nature and to ourselves, more empathic with others. When I walked The Dales Way some years ago I was struck by how my senses became more and more acute as the days passed — particularly the sense of touch (the feel of that wooden stile or that limestone rock beneath your hand), the sense of taste (eating out of doors when you're hungry after a long walk is truly special) and the sense of smell (one of our most neglected, I think, but there's a wonderful opportunity to fine-tune it as you wander over flower-filled hay meadows — and through farmyards!)