There are four types of meditations that most traditions embrace; seated, standing, walking, and laying down, and in our work we practice all of them.

After our workshops, many of our students continue doing their seated meditations at home. They wake up in the morning and the first thing they do is sit down to meditate. This is an ideal way to start the day. But does this sound familiar? You just had a great meditation, felt like you really connected, you overcame an aspect of yourself, and emotionally embraced a new future. You shifted your energy, you’re feeling powerful, and ready to have a great day.

There’s just one problem—the moment the meditation is over, it’s off to the races and you find yourself rushing to get out of the house, taking the kids to school, answering calls and returning emails, hustling to appointments, and so on. In other words, you fell back into the habitual programs and emotional states of your past.

When this occurs, we wind up leaving the energy we created right where we were sitting, as opposed to carrying it with us throughout the day.

So why a walking meditation?

I wanted to create a meditation that included standing and walking so that people could take their energy with them, first in their meditation, but ultimately embody that energy throughout the day. I wanted our students to be able to reinvent a new self and to be able to walk consciously in a new state of being with their eyes open—to be able in their waking state to shift into an elevated state that maintains and sustains an energetic, biological, neurological, chemical, hormonal, and epigenetic change during their day.

When we can tap into or embody this state with our eyes open, it begins to form new habits and change our personality. Then, after practicing it over and over, we become more mindful of not returning to autopilot where we go unconscious and miss the present moment. This is important because if the body is the mind, the moment we go unconscious and start living on autopilot, we miss the present moment. And when we’re not in the present moment, we’re keeping our dreams, visions, and goals at arm’s length.

How we do it

We start the walking meditation by anchoring ourselves in the present moment and closing our eyes to disconnect from our external environment. We acknowledge the heart center—the center of oneness, wholeness, creativity, and where the soul and heart intersects with the unified field—and bring to the center elevated emotions such as gratitude, joy, inspiration, love, etc.

By resting our attention and creating an elevated emotion within our heart, we begin to change the energy field surrounding our bodies. While our lower centers are all about consuming and turning energy into chemistry, our higher energy centers are about creation, and in this state we become more energy than matter. Now we’re contributing to our field instead of drawing from it. This is important because this is how we begin the creative process.

After a few minutes of centering ourselves in our hearts, we hold a clear intention in our mind’s eye, thus changing into a new state of being and broadcasting a new electromagnetic field. We then ask our students to begin walking with their eyes open and embodying the energy they created, as well as the frequency of whatever they’re creating in their future. If we can begin to take this energy with us during our waking, daily lives, we are activating the same neurological networks and producing the same level of mind as when we meditate with our eyes closed. So now we’re firing and wiring new circuits while connected to our external environment, and our brains are creating order between our inner and outer world.

By walking in the new energy we create, we’re embodying the energy of our meditation, and with every step we take we’re taking one step closer towards our destiny. In this process we’re not only modifying our behavior, we’re laying down new neurological networks and signaling new genes in new ways. If we practice this enough times, then we’ll begin to not only carry that energy with us throughout the day, but embody it. This type of repetition will make us more mindful in waking hours, and before we know it we’ll start behaving, thinking, and feeling differently, thus we are reprogramming a new personality self.

The walking meditation is a great way for us to begin to not only embody our future while living in the present moment, but to start practicing living in that energy—living in that future behavior, living in those future choices, living in those future thoughts, and living in the feelings that create our future.

Eyes open or eyes closed? It’s your choice.

Photo by LuciaJoy