Transcription
... Do a period of walking meditation now. I'll give some instructions very briefly.
Not on the grass, so wherever you can, really. Walking meditation, it's good if it's in a limited area. So you're basically walking back and forth between two points. Could be 5 or 10 yards or so. And given what we just did in the meditation -- how was that for people? Was that at all helpful? Yeah? So you can do it two ways. The normal way, the more traditional way of doing walking, the more commonly heard way of doing walking meditation, you stand at one end, and really what I'm paying attention to is the sensations of standing, the sensations of contact in the feet. That feels a certain way. Sensations, if I want, in the leg. Just pay attention to standing. So raw sensation, in the way that we usually think about it. How does that feel in the feet, the legs, the rest of the body?
And then when you're ready -- and you can really take your time -- you just walk between these two points. But what does the walking feel like in the body? Could just be in the feet if you want. You can really zero in on one small area, the soles of your feet. Or you can kind of open up the aperture of the lens, the camera lens, and for instance work with just your legs, or the whole body if you want, or a really wide awareness. You can include sky and sound and everything, really wide, at the centre of which one is aware of the sensations shifting in the body. So you have really wide angle, very focused, or something in between. So play with that if you're doing it that way.
You can also play with how fast you walk. If you're tired, you might really want to zip up and down, or anyway it might work better, faster. What's helpful at that time? You can stop at any time, come back if you need more centring, whatever. When you reach the end -- this is the end of my path -- you can stand again, feel the standing, and what does it feel like to turn? What are the sensations in the body of turning? Very, very simple. Stand again and repeat. Okay?
It's too much talking today, but what we just did in the meditation, I couldn't tell, but it might be that some of you feel, "Oh, that was actually quite helpful. When we did those lines of energy, it opened something." Did anyone feel that? Not very many. Okay. [laughter] It's a different kind of mindfulness of the body. So if I stub my toe, I feel the sensations. If I put that raisin in my mouth, in the eight-week course [laughter], I'm aware of the sensations of taste. Right? Aware of this as an energy field, it's a different pitching of the mindfulness. They're not separate, but we're pitching in at a different frequency, and more as an energy field. Does that make sense? Yeah? If you want to, you can do the walking like that. You stand and you feel the energy field. Maybe you just want to stand there. Maybe you can walk up and down, and what you're sensing is an energy field. So it's just a different way. What happens is it opens up the practice in a different way, and different ways of practice open up certain doors. Not better or worse, just different.
So if you want to, you can do the walking that way, or you can do it in the traditional way. Is that clear enough? Yeah? Okay.
