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The practice of slowness continues on the most primordial yet ordinary of levels: walking. Our upright posture is perhaps the defining characteristic of the human being. All of our daily necessities require walking. Nearly every job – even if the walk is to and from an automobile or commuter train – depends on it. Walking is a necessity and a tremendous pleasure in which our ayatanas (a Sanscrit word which mean the three-fold aspect of sense perseption: the sense organ, the sense "object" and the sense "field" of organ and object together) explode with changing sensations of each step. We are in constant contact with the elements of space, air and, of course, earth. When we walk we walk in “earth-time” an ordinary but magical dimension.

All transportion is an acceleration of the act of walking. Through the explosion of technology and the conmanship of advertising (the equation that makes car equal: sex, power, speed and other satisfactions) we have surrendered the act of walking to our machines and so-called conveniences to such a degree that we have almost completely severed ourselves from real communication with the earth through walking. In doing so we have lost touch with earth-time and with countless other the moment-to-moment (yet to be re-discovered) expressions of the earth.

Now, even when we try, we do not really walk. Most of us have introjected our doing-anxiety into an internalized speed that ejects us from the true poster of walking into haste and struggle. Our body lurches forward, our posture akimbo, with the anxiety of running late, having to get somewhere, pushing, stressing, rushing. We float across the ground in an eerie disconnect from the movement that walking is and the things it has to tell us. The anxiety to get somewhere has multiplied a thousand times as modes of transportation proliferate and increase in speed. To begin to remove ourselves from this bad dream is something that might never occur to us - and if it does and we try, it is not easy. Speed is a lie. When we walk too fast we are lying. This lie supports the paradyme of consumerism, it the price of admission to become part of it. Its is a lie that hurts each participant individually and the world as a whole. Ironically, it steals experience for the sake of time. It rampages our earthy resourses, stealing from both the past and the future (where the past took million of years to create an oil field and the future will be a wasteland).

How to walk? If it is humbling to realize that we don’t even know how to walk! We can acknowledge that for us, it is a warrior’s practice, an art we in the industrialized world must relearn. Jane Faigo, a late colleague of mine and long-time instructor of tai chi would often say, “My practice is simply to stand correctly.” What she meant, from a tai chi point of view, was that standing should occur with (among other things) one’s knees not locked. To do this alone is highly difficult - to neither lock the knees or intentionally “not” lock them. It is a flow that occurs within a developing awareness rather than something that one can merely learn and then “do.” Likewise, walking requires a similar mixing of knowledge and awareness. We are somewhat helpless without the instructions of tradition, but with a few techniques to base our practice on, we can become increasing self-aware and self-correcting since, after all, walking is natural and innate.

Mindfulness is the delightful basis of walking. We must learn to let the walk be its own activity, rather than a means to “get somewhere.” Taking this view brings a natural mindfulness with it and is the most important technique of all. In this regard, we don’t need to hunger for the most beautiful walk possible, but can let any walk – and chance to walk! - arise as its own ideal. Walking across the empty asphault of a Walmart parking lot is an excellent and ideal place to walk, as is the wilderness of Yosemite.

Further topics of study:

o Disengage the consumer viewpoint.

o Heels sinking into the earth.

o Dropping down.

o Moving from one’s core

o Hands and arms

o Carrying things

o Mahamudra of walking