One of the most limiting ideas in popular Western meditation is that meditation means sitting still. Every major contemplative tradition treats walking meditation as a primary practice, just as real and just as deep as sitting. In Theravada Buddhism, walking meditation (cankama in Pali) is traditionally alternated with sitting on retreat, 45 minutes sitting, 45 minutes walking, through the whole day. The Zen tradition practices kinhin after each round of zazen, walking in silence with careful body awareness between sittings. Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition puts walking meditation at the center of daily practice, with the instruction to treat each step as an arrival rather than a departure. You walk not to get somewhere but to be here, fully, in this step, in this breath, in the contact of foot with earth. The instruction sounds almost too simple: walk slowly, feel every part of each step, and bring your full attention to the experience of walking.
The brain science for walking meditation has grown stronger as researchers study exercise and the brain. Walking, even at a slow meditative pace, boosts blood flow to the brain, raises production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), sometimes called 'fertilizer for the brain,' and activates the hippocampus in ways sitting still does not. A 2014 Stanford study by Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that walking, especially outdoors, increased creative output by 81 percent compared with sitting. More useful for meditation: outdoor walking lowers activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, the region tied to repetitive negative thinking (rumination), more than indoor or city walking does. A walk in nature plus meditative attention may be one of the most powerful simple tools we have for low-grade depression and chronic anxiety.
Before meditation rooms and retreat centers, there were labyrinths. A labyrinth is a single winding path, with no branches, that leads to a center and back out. It is one of the oldest human contemplative tools. It shows up in Neolithic rock art, in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France (built in 1201), in the Palace of Knossos in Crete, and in Native American sand paintings. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has no wrong turns. You cannot get lost. The path is fixed. The walking itself is the practice. Chartres-style labyrinth walking is now offered in hospitals, prisons, schools, and retreat centers around the world, often as a first taste of contemplative practice for people who find sitting meditation hard to reach. Research by Lauren Artress at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who brought labyrinth walking back to the modern world in 1991, records steady reports of clarity, calm, and unexpected insight during labyrinth walks, even from secular people with no meditation background.
How walking meditation produces its effects is still an open and interesting question. One good idea is bilateral stimulation. Walking alternates left and right, and because of the crossed wiring of the motor system, each step activates the opposite side of the brain. That gives you a natural version of the left-right stimulation used in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a therapy for trauma. EMDR has strong clinical evidence for lowering the emotional charge of traumatic memories. The steady left-right rhythm of walking may be part of why walking meditation is so good at working through hard emotional material without you directly 'working on' it. Freed from the job of steering across terrain, especially on a familiar path or a labyrinth, the mind slips into a loose, half-guided reverie a lot like the theta state of yoga nidra. Difficult emotions that would overwhelm you in direct contemplation often surface and drain away harmlessly on a long walk.