Walking meditation

While conquering the world’s swimming pools in the late 1990s and the 2000s, Amanda Beard had already included breathing exercises and visualization techniques in her training.

She was not the type of person to practice meditation, though. She didn’t completely understand it, or she thought of it as something incompatible with her “anxious and fidgety character.”

Several years after the end of her athletic career, she discovered walking meditation. “I put on my earbuds, turned up the music really loud, and just went out for a walk,” Beard says.

Today, the seven-time Olympic medalist practices walking meditation in nature, around the house, on a plane, or while walking the dog. It’s a daily practice that contributes positively to every aspect of her life, she says.

Here’s what you need to know about walking meditation, including how to do it, the potential benefits, and tips from meditation experts.

Walking meditation is a mindfulness practice that weds the physical benefits of walking with the focused mindfulness of meditation.

Instead of sitting cross-legged, you meditate on the stroll. Vietnamese meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh has poetically defined it as, “printing peace, serenity, and happiness on the ground”.

The 2018 report in Health Promotion Perspectives also found that walking meditation can improve your balance, make your legs stronger, adjust your heart rate, boost your mental focus and clarity, and help you battle anxiety, chronic illness, and depression.

“The benefits of this brilliant and easy way of meditation are many, including improved memory, mood and our ability to focus,” Dr. Schramm says. “When we do this over and over again, we train the brain to focus on only one thing at a time and, over time, this increases both our blood flow and actual neuronal changes within our brains.”

Even just two weeks of meditating can lead to improved moods, as feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin increase, Dr. Schramm says.

“The magic of meditation is to be able to help you connect with yourself; meditation shouldn’t feel a certain way,” Stiles says.

It’s a common mistake in meditation: People fear a wandering mind.

“A wandering mind is completely normal,” Stiles says. “Even long-term meditators aren’t sitting there never having a thought, but when they have the thought, they choose to guide themselves back to their breath instead of getting frustrated.”

Beard recommends starting with five or 10 minutes of walking meditation, and not worrying about distractions.

Three years after practicing walking meditation almost daily, the highly decorated swimmer reports she has become kinder to herself, less judgmental of who she is and the things she does, and more focused.

“And these have overflown into all the different aspects of my life,” she says.

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