Getting Hooked on Walking Meditation
As one of the first Western meditators to become a monk and practice intensively under Sayadaw U Pandita, Steve Smith has more than a few memories to share. In the following excerpt, taken from our recent podcast conversation, he talks about his initial resistance to practice walking meditation, but his decision to at least give it a fair trial.
“The walking momentum and energy summoned through walking, along with them a more fluid and flexible concentration, since it was meditation in motion.”
“In the meditation hall, everyone would follow the schedule strictly. The wake up bell would come at 03:30 in the morning. The last sitting ended at 11:00 at night. It was expected that one sleep about four hours a night. And the practice itself would take care of the rest, the repose, deep relaxation of mindfulness and insight practice. I found this to be true. Because of different conditions of weather and food, sleep time for me was between four and six hours.
At the beginning of the time there, I was practicing with a young nāyaka sayadaw (Pāli ‘leader’), a young senior appointed by Mahāsī to be on this council. Maybe there were eight or nine of them, and U Thondara was the youngest. I found him very personable and friendly. He had spent time in Sri Lanka; he spoke English quite well. We became friends as well - I would help him with his English understanding and he, in turn, would share with me things that he had written in his journals or in the Mahāsī journal about practice. I liked him a lot.
I had a lot of respect for him, and he actually was the first one to inspire me to do the walking meditation. In equal measure, and with equal respect, as to sitting and walking. He would see me practicing in the sitting posture for long hours and asked me why I wasn't walking more. I told him at the time, I felt like I could get concentrated and stay mindful better through sitting than [with] the distractions I experienced in walking. So, in his agreeable and personable way, he said, ‘Well how does this sound? For just two weeks you practice - you do the walking - as per the schedule. And at the end of the two weeks we'll assess it. And if you still don't connect with it, in a similar way that you connect with sitting posture, then you don't have to walk.’ Of course, he knew that I would get hooked, which I did, because I did as I promised, sat an hour, would walk an hour.
Sometimes if I sat longer than an hour, an hour and a half or two hours, I'd walk longer as well. And I found that I could reach those same degrees of concentration, samādhi, in the walking. The walking momentum and energy summoned through walking, along with them a more fluid and flexible concentration, since it was meditation in motion, those combinations of a fluid concentration and the energetics of mindful movement would carry back to the next sitting till I began to feel the inseparable connection, or interconnectedness, in those two and later all four all four postures.”