Day 279- Walking Meditation
Today I wake up to a glorious morning. It’s the middle of April and the temperature hit close to 80º yesterday, so we slept with the windows open. The birds wake me up just around sunrise. I have so much to get done today, even though it is a Sunday. I didn’t get a chance to do my sitting meditation yesterday or Friday.I feel like i need to meditate. But, I want to take a walk this morning and Ty and I have a pretty full day planned. So, I decide to combine my meditation with my walk. I set my meditation app for 25 minutes (I’ll walk for a little over an hour) and I set out.
The sun is just coming up and the air is very cool. I have decided to wear shorts and a t-shirt. It’s actually a bit nippy as I walk through the long shadows cast by the houses and the trees. I concentrate on just being where I am, not thinking about the walk ahead of me or what I’m going to do after I finish or anything that happened yesterday. I focus on the feeling of the shoes on my feet, the way my foot hits the ground, the feeling in my abdominals as they lift and lower my legs. I focus on how it feels different walking uphill or downhill, how I push off going uphill. I noticed the way the road curves. I look at the cracks in the pavement as I walk by them and I contemplate how old the road is and how many times it’s been repaved. I watch and listen to the birds as they start their days prompted by the return of the sun. There are so many birds, so many types and they’re all just doing their thing. I notice the sidewalk is covered with worms and I think that I don’t want to kill them, but I realize most are dead and the others are dying. I think about yesterday when I saw the birds in the yard eating the worms and how it prompted me to think of how we are all here to serve each other. The worms are food for the birds. The worms die and become food for the grass. The worms eat other dead things turning into into fertilize. Ah… the circle of life.
I feel the air as the temperature, at least the perceived temperature, changes as the sun strikes me and falls behinds trees and houses, depending on my elevation and the angle of the road. There is a stretch after about half a mile from my house that is about a mile straight almost straight uphill with a lot of rise and very little fall. I notice how it feels to make that climb and I try to stay focused on where I am and not where I am going. The climb feels good. As I get 10-15 minutes into my walk, I swear I can feel the temperature has changed since I left the house. Normally on my walks, I listen to a Podcast or to music. To walk silently would be too boring. I’m surprised at how much I notice. I reach the end of the uphill stretch and I make my u-turn to head back down. The sun shifts from striking me in the face to my back. I notice my shadow now which I couldn’t see before because it trailed behind me. My shadow is 20′ long. I’m a giant.
The timer on my meditation goes off and I put on some music. I listen to Frankie Beverly and Maze. Happy Feelin’s feels right. It’s an excellent metta meditation song so I play it a couple of times and take in the light from the sun that is hitting me from the right, then the left, then the back as I twist and turn and head back home. I take in the light from the sun and I spread it as unconditional love to the world after saying prayers for Josh and Kristina and a few others, specially.
The last few minutes of the walk I put on some Kirtan music and pick up the pace a little to get my heart rate up a bit. My band buzzes. It’s 8 o’clock AM and I’ve hit my step goal for the day.
