Walk Your Way: The Connecting Walk
Welcome to Walk Your Way - Week Two.
I hope you enjoyed your first walking practice. This week, I’m pleased to introduce you to The Connecting Walk.
About
Do you ever have days or weeks even, when you feel completely disconnected from life?
I don’t know about you, but whenever I felt disconnected I also felt quite flat, lonely and uninspired with my lot. You might have your own version of disconnectedness.
Reports suggest that a sense of being disconnected seems to happen with alarming frequency in people’s lives today. But the thing is, disconnection is not a permanent or involuntary state. Nor is connection. Both are made up of thousands of moments where you actually chose to connect or not, either in the emotional sense, or physically. With yourself, with other people, with the world you live in.
Think of the times when you focused on your phone rather than smile or say ‘hello’ on a station platform. Or you reached mindlessly for the TV remote, glass of wine in hand, to switch off from a stressful day. Or you worked non-stop for days at your computer to meet some deadline, and hardly looked at your partner never mind put your nose outside your door.
“Disconnecting can actually become an unconscious habit – even if it’s the last thing we want and need.”
So, we’re choosing in every moment, whether to connect and become fully present to our experience, no matter how we feel about it, or to withdraw, disengage and avoid it altogether.
This is serious stuff. As science has recently discovered, connection is crucial for our survival psychologically - and as it turns out, physically too. Our bodies need us to be connected in order to sustain the ability to fend off disease and keep us balanced.
Despite that, in order to cope in today’s fast moving, chaotic and stressful world, it can mean that disconnecting actually becomes an unconscious habit – even if it’s the last thing we want and need.
This walk is designed to help you practise choosing connection more often – and to help you do so in a fully present and embodied way. It is also going to re-connect you with the land and non-human nature as a pathway back into connection with your own body and heart - and the extended body and heart that is your ecological and evolutionary heritage.
Resources
Listen to The Connecting Walk practice
And for your post-walk reflections, here’s a handy structure to guide and note down your thoughts.