Good morning friends
At the moment, I am re-reading the book “The Path of Emancipation” by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. These are talks given at a 21-Day Mindfulness Retreat at Vermont. Here, he has talked a lot about mindful breathing and mindful walking. He says, “When we practise mindful walking, every step we take is like placing a seal on the ground……. We print our solidity, peace, and freedom on the ground”. I have experienced mindful breathing and mindful walking in meditation camps ( also called as Vipassana and vipassana walks.) So I knew first hand that this kind of mindful walking can bring you a lot of peace and relaxation, but I was not really sure that you could put this into practice in your day-to-day life, especially when you are doing multiple chores on a busy road. But life has its own way of teaching you lessons that you need to learn and I experienced this the very next day.
The next day, I was walking to my bank in a hurry as I had a lot of chores that day. The road to the bank is narrow, full of traffic, with hardly any place for pedestrians to walk. I was soon brought to a halt as an elderly man was walking very slowly in front of me. It was not possible to overtake him, and this is the time one usually gets anxious and frustrated. Luckily, for me, I remembered Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings about mindful walking and decided to put them into practice. As it is, I had to walk slowly, so why not try this mindful walking, even though I am on a busy road? And no sooner I started walking mindfully, I realised the truth of what Thich Nhat Hanh was saying. As I took each step mindfully, I found myself filled with peace and relaxation and it did not seem very long before I was at the doorstep of the bank.
Once I finished my work in the bank, I was back on the road, walking at my normal pace. But life had certainly decided to teach me about mindful walking on that day. Because within a few minutes I was walking on a road where a school had just left. The entire road was lined up with school buses and children queueing up to get inside the school bus and obviously I had to slow down once again, and got another opportunity to practice mindful walking. Before I reached home, I could practice this wonderful technique two more times: once, when an elderly lady was walking, very slowly in front of me with her 3-4 years old grandchild and another time when a limping lady blocked my path. And every time, I could feel the Peace and Relaxation permeating my being, during those few moments that I practised mindful walking. So, now I understand that you can practise mindful walking, even on a busy road, even when you have a lot of chores to do, and when you practise it, within a few minutes, you can feel peace and relaxation descend upon you and fill you and surround you.
If we really want to practise mindfulness, we can get hundreds of opportunities every day to practise either mindful breathing or mindful walking —— when you are stuck in traffic, and can’t do anything about it, when you cannot walk fast on a busy road, or on an escalator, when you’re waiting for a bus, or a train or your taxi to arrive, when you are waiting for your loved ones to return home—— normally we become impatient or anxious during these times, but actually these moments can be converted into an opportunity to put into practice mindful breathing and walking. Would you like to try this out the next time you’re stuck in traffic?
I hope that I remember to practise mindful breathing and mindful walking every time I am waiting,
Love,
Anjali, Bhatawdekar
