The Awareness of Nature Can Become a Walking Meditation
Walking meditations are one of my favorite forms.
Just to be fully present while walking in nature’s elements can take you to a place that can constantly remind you of abundance and renewal.
A walking meditation can begin by strolling through your neighborhood and viewing all the varieties of plant life. Noticing the shapes and textures of their leaves, the curves of their stems, their scents, and even their ability to grow in places you would least suspect.
A Meditation on Possibility
The image of this little papaya tree growing on a telephone pole is an example of how nature can spark a meditative exploration.
One of the first awarenesses I was lead to was how life will find a way to thrive no matter how difficult the odds. Perhaps that thought came to mind because the last few days have felt a bit challenging.
But, what if I choose to take this observation a little further and I move my perception to a bird’s eye view? What could I contemplate by looking down at the top of this little tree? What might I see as I expand and view from further up? What if I meditated on the telephone pole, accepting to co-create an existence with the plant expanding past its human designed usefulness?
Walking Meditations Can Start Anywhere
If you live in the city, it doesn’t have to be hard to connect with nature. It is all around you from grains of sand between the pavers in the sidewalk, to the billowy clouds in the sky. Play with shifting your perceptions to various angles, and from seeing wide to narrow. View the very small starts of plant life, or expand your vision wide to view large spaces. Notice what you notice.
You can also view signs of life growing in the strangest places, like the papaya tree growing on the telephone pole. Imagine what had to happen for all conditions to line up perfectly to give that seedling life. Nature can seem pretty miraculous.
But on the other hand, nature may be reminding us that we always have everything we need. Nature may be whispering through our senses that if we can see it, we will believe it, and if we believe it, we can create it. What if it were the other way around? Create in our mind’s eye, believe, then see?
Nature as a Form of Release
We can also walk in nature for the mere pleasure to be a part of it. To breathe into our senses the sensations that surround us and let our senses be filled. Nature can help to facilitate emotional release. Like pent-up anxiety, frustration, fear, and anger. It can help us release emotions that get stuck in our cellular memory when we forget to remember that we are not really singular beings.
We all have our unique vantage points so we may seem singular, but beyond this we are swimming in the same stream of everything together. Therefore, we must have access to that everything.
Being the Center of the Universe
Certainly our assumptions can lead us as human beings to somehow separate ourselves from the wholeness of nature. And nature can remind us that we are much bigger than we can conceive in any given moment.
Each of us is indeed the center of our universe. And so is each of our cells, our DNA, and so on . . . presenting many unique vantage points of possibility.
Going with the Flow
When we can be present in the moment with nature, our natural instincts and intuitions can align us with the larger forces of nature where we are all connected. Our meditative experiences can become quite personally profound. We can learn to embrace any given moment and what that moment presents, and learn how to redirect our perceptions to more useful perspectives to support greater fulfillment.
It is a wonderful feeling to participate in the greater harmony of life, beauty, and connection with what we see, feel, and hear with an open mind, all while enjoying a walking meditation in nature.
