"Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet." — Thich Nhat Hanh
This is a fuller companion to The True Walk and Free Your Instep, Free Your Root.
Most of us walk the way we live: hurried, head first, the body dragged along behind our thoughts. We land hard on our heels, lock our knees, hold our breath, and arrive somewhere without ever having truly been on the way.
The True Walk is a different way of moving. It is a practice, a medicine, and a homecoming.
Walking Substantially
To walk substantially is to let your weight actually arrive in each step. Not floating above the ground, not bracing against it, but settling into it. Let your pelvis rock gently with each stride, the way water rocks in a bowl. This small, easy rocking frees the lower back, softens the hips, and lets the breath drop down into the belly where it belongs.
When the pelvis moves, the whole spine begins to sway like a willow. The shoulders loosen. The jaw lets go. You begin to walk from your center instead of from your worries.
Instep First
Try this: instead of striking the ground with your heel, let the outer edge and instep of your foot meet the Earth first, then roll softly through the sole. Feel the ground before you commit your weight to it.
This is how our ancestors walked, in moccasins or barefoot, listening through their feet. The instep-first landing is quiet. It is attentive. It turns every step into a question — are you there? — and the Earth answers, yes.
Free Your Root
The feet are the doorway to the root, the base of our energy body, the place of safety, belonging, and trust. When the feet are numbed in stiff shoes and hard pavement, the root grows quiet. When we walk barefoot on grass, sand, or soil, or in thin moccasins, the root wakes up.
You may feel it as warmth rising through the legs, a heaviness in the belly, a sense of being held. That is the Earth meeting you.
Walking With Danté
Most mornings I walk with my companion Danté. He has been my teacher in this. A dog never walks somewhere; he walks here. Every smell, every rustle, every patch of sun is the whole world. When I follow his pace instead of mine, the True Walk happens on its own.
We have both been through a hard season lately, and these walks have become our medicine. Step by step, breath by breath, the body remembers how to heal.