Mindful Walking: A Ten-Minute Walking Meditation Practice

About this tool

Mindful walking is a formal meditation practice in which the movement of walking becomes the object of attention. Instead of walking to arrive somewhere, you walk to notice: the shift of weight from one foot to the other, the moment the heel leaves the ground, the rhythm of the breath against the rhythm of the steps. Attention wanders within seconds, as it does in every meditation practice, and the practice is the return. Walking meditation is the same instruction as sitting meditation with a different anchor, chosen because for many people a moving body is easier to attend to than a still one.

It reached Western clinical settings through two routes. Jon Kabat-Zinn included walking meditation as one of the formal practices in mindfulness-based stress reduction, the eight-week program he developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and described in Full Catastrophe Living in 1990, alongside the body scan, sitting meditation and mindful movement. Separately, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh taught walking meditation widely in the West, including a short book on it in 1996, with the distinctive instruction of coordinating steps with breath and with a silent phrase. Both traditions teach the same core move and differ mainly in pace and framing.

Pace is the first choice to make and the one most people get wrong. Very slow walking, a step every few seconds, makes the mechanics of a single step vividly available and is the classic retreat instruction, but it is impractical outdoors and can feel self-conscious. Ordinary walking pace works perfectly well and is what most MBSR participants settle into. A useful rule: slow enough that you can feel the weight transfer, fast enough that you are not performing. You can also change pace deliberately mid-walk and notice what changes with it, which is a practice in itself.

The second choice is the anchor, and there are four good ones. The feet are the default: the contact, the pressure, the lift. The breath works if you can attend to it without controlling it, and coordinating it loosely with steps, in for two or three, out for three or four, is Thich Nhat Hanh's approach. Sound works well outdoors and is the easiest anchor for people who find the body distracting. And open awareness, taking in whatever arrives without choosing, is the hardest and the one to try after the others feel steady. Pick one before you set out rather than drifting between them.

A 2013 randomized trial by Teut and colleagues is the best-known on mindful walking specifically, with later small trials in other populations: 74 psychologically distressed adults, randomized to eight hour-long group sessions over four weeks or to a waiting list. The walking group showed a clear drop in perceived stress at four weeks that was still present at twelve, and improvement on the mental component of a quality-of-life measure. With 74 participants and an inactive control, the trial cannot separate the mindfulness instruction from the walking, the group, or the expectation of taking part, which the authors say themselves. It is honest to call it encouraging and preliminary rather than conclusive.

The broader mindfulness evidence is better established and also more modest than the popular claims. Goyal and colleagues' 2014 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programs improve anxiety, depression and pain, and low or insufficient evidence for effects on attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep and weight. Crucially, when mindfulness programs were compared against active control conditions rather than against nothing, the advantages shrank. Walking meditation sits inside that picture: a reasonable practice with real but moderate support, not a treatment.

Walking outdoors adds something the research can separate out. Bratman and colleagues reported in 2015 that a ninety-minute walk in a natural setting, compared with a walk along a busy road, was followed by lower self-reported rumination and lower activity in a brain region associated with it. That is a finding about the setting rather than about mindfulness, and it points to a practical combination: where there is a choice, walk your practice somewhere green. If you do not, the practice still works on a corridor, a car park or a residential street.

What mindful walking is actually for is worth being precise about, because the benefits are often oversold. It trains the capacity to notice where attention has gone and bring it back, which generalizes slowly. It gives you a practice you can do when sitting still feels intolerable, which matters for people with restlessness, agitation or physical discomfort in seated meditation. And it tends to interrupt a day that has become one long braced state. It does not clear the mind, it does not require you to feel calm afterward, and a walk full of distraction that you kept returning from is a successful session.

Common mistakes are easy to name. Turning the walk into a route to be completed defeats the purpose, so loop rather than travel. Checking a phone once resets the practice, so leave it in a pocket or at home. Adding a podcast makes it a pleasant walk and not a meditation, which is fine but is a different thing. Judging the session by how peaceful it felt is the deepest mistake, because the number of returns is the practice and a session with fifty returns did more work than a session with five. And trying it for the first time in acute distress is harder than learning it calm.

Not being able to walk does not exclude you from any of this. Mindful movement works identically with a wheelchair: attend to the push, the roll, the shift of weight, the air moving past. Seated practices such as the body scan at Body Scan Meditation use the same instruction with no movement at all, and the wider set at Mindfulness Exercises Library includes short practices for standing, stretching or eating. Adapt the anchor to a sense and a body that are actually available to you, and treat any instruction here that does not fit as a suggestion rather than a requirement.

If stress is the reason you are here, mindful walking is a coping and training practice rather than a solution to the load causing it. A practice that steadies you for twenty minutes does not change a workload, a caring responsibility or a conflict, and treating it as if it should can quietly become a way of tolerating something that needs to change. The self-assessment at Stress Level Test can help you reflect on your recent stress; it diagnoses nothing. If stress, low mood or anxiety has been interfering with your sleep, work or relationships most days, a licensed therapist is a better next step than more practice.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the practice instructions against how walking meditation is taught in MBSR, and confirmed the page states the limits of the single mindful walking trial and offers a seated and wheelchair adaptation.

References

1. Kabat-Zinn J. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delacorte Press; 1990.
2. Thich Nhat Hanh. The Long Road Turns to Joy: A Guide to Walking Meditation. Parallax Press; 1996.
3. Teut M, Roesner EJ, Ortiz M, et al. Mindful walking in psychologically distressed individuals: a randomized controlled trial. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2013;2013:489856. doi:10.1155/2013/489856
4. Goyal M, Singh S, Sibinga EMS, et al. Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2014;174(3):357-368.
5. Bratman GN, Hamilton JP, Hahn KS, Daily GC, Gross JJ. Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015;112(28):8567-8572.
6. Kabat-Zinn J. Mindfulness-based interventions in context: past, present, and future. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. 2003;10(2):144-156.

Mindful Walking FAQ