Here’s a simple practice for shifting your attitude, on the spot, whenever you need to.
If you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or even just a bit preoccupied and distracted, pay attention to how you walk. If you’re walking down the hall, or along the street, or through the parking garage, slow down. You will lose a few seconds getting to your destination, maybe even a minute. So what? Walk at a moderate pace, relax your shoulders, look up. Let your breathing fall in rhythm with your pace. It’s not Monty Python’s Ministry of Funny Walks. It’s simply enjoying the movement of your limbs, and your movement through space.
It’s simple, but when we’re feeling encumbered by too many things to be able to bring our personal best to the moment, deliberate walking can have a remarkably unencumbering effect. Even if you don’t have anywhere to go, get up and walk around the floor once.
Your mind may be distractable, but your body is not. Let the physical sensations of walking unencumber you, and help you reconnect with a more expansive state of mind.
For many people, walking is a good way to relax and think, and that’s great. But this practice is different. It’s not about thinking so much as it is about sensing, using your physical senses to clear your head. It’s a practice of bringing yourself to a more spacious, expansive attitude first, so you then can bring that more clearheaded state of mind to whatever you need to think about, and to whatever you need to do next.
Throughout the day, you can practice bringing a sense of relaxed and spacious doing to simple things, even to getting yourself from one place to another. And out of many small simple things, bigger simple things arise, like a spacious, unencumbered attitude throughout the challenges of your day.
