Walking meditation: just ideas, not from any teaching.

Walking meditation may be another one of those easily misapplied aspects of practice, but I don't know. It's possibly as personal and individualized as sitting meditation, but it's still a good thing to flesh out since, unlike with sitting meditation, I've never heard any extensive discourse on it. Quite honestly, I had never even heard of walking meditation until visiting Deer Park the first time, but it's a regular part of all Zen practice it seems.

In my over-analytical bizarro world, walking meditation can happen at various levels. It can be done at regular walking pace with just three elements: active awareness of where you are, i.e., being here, awareness of your breath, and awareness of your steps synchronized with your breath. This is pretty easy to achieve since it allows for distractions of the world happening around you and mind wandering, but is not ideal. It's easy to be flaky about it.

In the meditation hall, walking meditation can be seen as ritualized, or as practice, or as practicing for when you're out somewhere and want to meditate, but can't sit, but can walk. In the meditation hall, it's a very slow three steps with in-breath, three steps with out-breath. Turning is also done in steps counted with breathing. Some places sometimes have fast walking meditation which I thought was ridiculous and was probably rote copied from some Japanese monastery's practice, but never really thought through for practice for Americans (I argue that monastic practice isn't some universal, monolithic ideal, but is culturally (subjective, relative) defined).

Walking meditation in the meditation hall with the Sangha or alone somewhere else are both good. The same thing can be achieved. Out somewhere can be more difficult because of the distractions, but also more meditative if the distractions can be controlled and seen just as stimulus. I think it's good to have a defined space where there's no need to switch focus or frame of mind, so no crossing intersections or constantly dodging obstacles or pedestrian traffic, and where the slow three steps for in-breath, three steps for out-breath doesn't look really suspicious or strange. Four or five steps per in-breath/out-breath can be used for a quicker pace, too.

I heard someone say it's good to always start with the same foot to start the first in-breath, and I think that's a good practice to actively do something to signal that you're starting, like the bell signaling the start of sitting, even though being in a meditative mind should start before the bell and continues after the ending bell.

Unlike sitting meditation, walking meditation involves movement and outside stimulus, but I think the mind is trying to get to the same place where thinking and thoughts aren't active. With sitting, the "just sitting" brand of sitting, you're aware of your breathing and posture and surroundings and free-form focusing on nothing, just let it flow and be, perhaps running through some visualization processes. With walking meditation, you don't need any visualization, you're still aware of breathing, but instead of posture, you're aware of your movement, your legs, your balance, and the bottom of your feet contacting fully with the ground; aware of muscles and any tension in them and try to release it.

Whatever works. For starters, I did think a lot about what the hell this walking meditation thing was. I imagine energy channels running the length of my body from my feet up, and when I recognize that I'm actively thinking, I use those energy "winds" to push the activity out the top of my head. Works for me. Maybe pretend I'm a dispassionate camera, observing without thinking or feeling. The outside stimuli are still coming in, ideas and forms are still very real, they just flow through.