Available in 15, 30 and 60 minutes versions below.

15 minutes – Guided Walking Meditation for Beginners

30 minutes- Guided Walking Meditation for Beginners

60 minutes – Guided Walking Meditation for Beginners

The audio versions of all guided meditations is available to download as an MP3 for Patreon supporters. If you’d like to support, check out https://www.patreon.com/updevelopment

Become a patron

Walking meditation is important, because the purpose of meditation is to train the mind to be attentive and mindful in all circumstances. Therefore, we should train ourselves not only on the cushion, but while walking. You will soon see that walking meditation comes with its own set of advantages and challenges. Practicing it will increase your mind’s resilience and greatly deepen your overall meditation practice.

Walking meditation helps us bridge the gap between formal sitting practice and daily life. Eventually, this will lead to the cultivation of a meditative state of mind throughout the day, whether we are on the cushion or not. By maintaining the continuity of our meditation practice, we will progress faster and reap more profound and enduring benefits.

There are many ways to practice walking meditation, and we will explore more advanced walking meditation techniques in later stages. For now, we will learn a simple and useful walking meditation technique that can be practiced in public without attracting attention. While it is easier to practice in calm and predictable environments, you can practice walking meditation anytime you walk. In fact, you can practice this technique without walking, while waiting for the bus or sitting on the subway.

Here is how we will practice walking meditation:

1. Present moment. Become aware of the present moment. Open yourself to your surroundings. What sounds can you hear? What colors do you see? What smells can you discern? How do you feel? Let yourself appreciate this moment.
2. Sensations. While you stay aware of your surroundings, bring your attention to the sensations in your feet. Center your attention on the rapidly changing sensations in your feet. Can you feel the weight of your body shifting from one foot to the other?
3. Introspective awareness. Inevitably, the mind will wander away, either distracted by a sound, a sight or a thought. Like with sitting meditation, when you notice that the mind has wandered away, take a moment to appreciate this newfound awareness. Then, bring attention back to the sensations in your feet.

Practicing walking meditation in this way is excellent mind training. With eyes open and a changing environment, the mind’s natural tendency is to jump from one thing to the next. By bringing our attention back to the sensations in our feet, we will strengthen our “mind muscles”, and this will help us both in daily life and during sitting meditation. As walking requires that we remain conscious of our surroundings, we will further develop our peripheral awareness and clearly discern attention and peripheral awareness. These benefits will stay with us on the cushion: our introspective awareness will be clearer and more stable.

I recommend you practice walking meditation a few times per week, as your schedule and activities allow. Personally, I use walking meditation whenever I walk or wait. In the latter case, while I don’t actually walk, the same technique applies : I mindfully observe the sensations in my feet while I stay aware of the environment. Practicing like this, I can make the best out of waiting periods. Instead of seeing waiting as boring and annoying, I see it as an enjoyable opportunity.

Where and when to meditate

The easy answer to where and when to meditate is “wherever, and whenever you can”. And while this is true – in fact, it will become increasingly relevant as you progress – there are ways to make your meditation session more enjoyable and productive.

In terms of where to meditate, you should find as quiet and peaceful place as you can. You can sit cross-legged on a cushion if you want to, as that posture tends to be especially conducive to meditation. If you’re not comfortable sitting cross-legged, simply use a chair on which you can sit upright.

If possible, you should meditate in the same location each day. That will reinforce the habit of meditating. Eventually, simply moving to that location will put you in a meditative state.

This brings me to the second point of when to meditate. I recommend meditating daily. Like with any skill, daily practice, even if only for a few minutes, will yield more benefits than meditating for longer but infrequently. Once again to reinforce the habit of meditating, I recommend that you meditate at the same time each day. Personally, I find the early morning especially conducive to meditation. Setting aside some fixed amount of time each day to meditation will eventually feel easy natural. You will even look forward to it!

Useful tools and equipment

While not mandatory, here’s a list of all the “stuff” I use when meditating.

• A timer. I use the free app Insight Timer, which has a simple meditation timer that automatically keeps track of your daily sits.
• A cushion. I sit on a simple meditation cushion filled with buckwheat hulls, similar to this one. When it gets too soft due to prolonged use, I add a few scoops of hulls.
• A blanket. I use a blanket that looks like that one when meditating. The weight of the blanket is comforting, and provides warmth when meditating in the cold Canadian early mornings.

That’s all. Meditation is a frugal activity.

This guided meditation is also available on Insight Timer here.

This guided meditation is also available on Insight Timer here.

This guided meditation is also available on Insight Timer here.

Attention is the part of the mind that singles out, analyzes and interprets what we perceive. When we direct attention to an object, this object “stands out” from other stuff. It becomes dominant in our field of consciousness. We can think of attention as the foreground of consciousness.

Peripheral Awareness, on the other hand, is open and inclusive. Peripheral awareness is the part of the mind that perceives what surrounds our object of attention and gives it context. We can think of peripheral awareness as the background of consciousness.

For example, as you are reading these words, your attention is jumping from word to word, and analyzing their meaning. Meanwhile, awareness keeps track of their context. It also monitors many other aspects of your experience such as your posture and the sounds surrounding you.

The only faculty of mind we can directly control is our attention. Therefore, it is inefficient and even counterproductive to attempt to control peripheral awareness. This explains why questionable practices like those suggesting to “stop thinking” don’t work: thoughts can’t be directly eliminated!

Therefore, when we say “direct your attention to the breath sensations at the nose”, we simply mean that your conscious focus should be on this area.

A common mistake at this stage is to try to push other sensations, thoughts or sounds out of awareness. This only leads to increased agitation and frustration. Instead, we consciously allow other sensations, thoughts or sounds to freely do their thing in the background. We also make sure that our attention does not become so tightly focused that our peripheral awareness fades, as this would increase the risk of forgetting the breath.

Practicing in this way, we will train both attention and awareness to respectively cultivate concentration and mindfulness.

If you notice that your mind is particularly agitated, meaning that it wanders away after a few breaths, counting the breaths will help you. Counting the breaths will give your mind an additional task, and this will make focusing easier. If you lose track of the count or miss a breath, restart counting from one.

Your initial goal is to be aware of ten consecutive breaths. If you succeed in counting up to ten, you can drop counting and continue watching the natural breath sensations at the nose. There’s not point in counting beyond ten, as counting is only a temporary aid to stabilize the mind ; we’re trying to watch the breath, not numbers!

At this stage, it is normal to experience many forms of distractions. For now, we will consider attention to be continuous if we don’t:

• Miss an incoming breath
• Miss an outgoing breath
• Lose count of our breaths

Pay particular attention to the pause between one breath cycle and the next. During this short pause, the mind tends to naturally wander away as the breath sensations become more subtle. By remaining attentive during this short pause, your mind will grow sharper and be less prone to mind-wandering.

Progressing on the Path

The are only two reasons why some meditation practitioners don’t progress:

The first is lack of proper guidance. This is when a long-time practitioner can’t move past the initial stages of practice. Perhaps they are still struggling with drowsiness or distractions. We’ve got you covered here: I’ve written these resources specifically with this problem in mind.

The second reason is the absence of a daily meditation practice. Just as you couldn’t become a proficient pianist without a regular practice routine, it is unreasonable to expect the full rewards of meditation without daily practice.

Using a Timer

We recommend timing your meditation sits using a countdown timer. A timer allows you to focus on meditating without checking the clock to see how long you’ve been sitting. Most importantly, meditators who don’t time their sits tend to stop meditating when they encounter difficulties, like unpleasant sensations. This means that they never get the opportunity to work though these challenges, and therefore remain vulnerable to them.

Finding the Time to Meditate

It may seem like you can’t spare 10 minutes, or even 5 minutes, to meditate daily, Despite this, I strongly encourage you to give it a try and make it a priority.

Meditation relaxes the mind more reliably than distractions, and also increases efficiency. Meditation will improve your concentration and clarity of mind. On the days you meditate, you will see that you get more things done in less time. Think of meditation as mind training: you are sharpening your mind – our most valuable tool – for the rest of the day. Give it a try, and you’ll see why top-performers meditate, despite their extremely demanding schedules. As the Dalai Lama famously answered when asked how he finds the time to meditate:

On normal days, I meditate for 1 hour in the morning. But on extremely busy days, I meditate for 2 hours in the morning.

Our First Goal

At this stage, our goal is not length, but consistency. While we aim to commit to a daily meditation practice of 20 minutes, this duration can seem too long for beginners. We therefore recommend starting small with a duration of 5 to 10 minutes. However, you must put all your effort into meditating everyday.

The importance of daily meditation cannot be overstated, and it is the hardest step on the path. Once you have established a daily practice, you can then gradually lengthen your meditation sessions up to 20 minutes. Within a few weeks, you should be ready to move on to the Novice stage.