MORE and more people are walking nowadays. I see it locally when I’m out and about, at Hamilton’s extensive Palace Grounds, at Strathclyde Park where people walk around the loch, and at Chatelherault Country Park. It’s great to see people outside.

People walk for many reasons. Let’s exclude the obvious one of getting from A to B for the moment. People walk for their health. Power walkers, upright and fast-moving, arms swinging, treat walking as an alternative to running, cycling or swimming for cardio-vascular or aerobic exercise.

Others walk at a moderate pace, often with a friend. This tends to be a combination of companionship, enjoying being outdoors, and a modest degree of fitness activity.

Many people walk their dog, which in turn becomes the dog giving them a walk, for the usual combination of reasons, health and fitness and sheer enjoyment. The added factor of the loyalty and fun of a dog as a pet is clear when you see how people interact with their pets on these walks.

A smaller number of people walk primarily to clear their minds or to help them manage something problematic or painful in their lives. These people tend to walk more slowly than others, as if the slow pace of the steps allowed their mind to ponder their predicaments and enable solutions to arise. This works, and it’s what great scientists, including Einstein, Newton and Darwin, did almost as daily practices.

Then there’s something called mindful walking. When we walk mindfully we don’t do it to become fitter, though that may be a side-effect. We don’t do it for companionship, even if others are with us. Nor do we do it to free up our minds or to ruminate or ponder something that’s bothering us.

We do it as part of our wider mindfulness practice, whose aim is to free our minds of all the conditioned junk, harmful states, and unhelpful habits we’ve picked up from our genes and our life experiences. But we don’t think about these aims when we walk mindfully because that’s rumination and pondering. If you want to think about something while walking that’s fine but don’t mistake it for mindful walking. They are two entirely different things, producing entirely different results.

When we walk mindfully we walk slowly. We walk slowly so we’re better able to notice things. Logically it’s harder to notice things if we’re moving fast. Mindfulness is after all, paying attention on purpose to what’s going on moment by moment.

How do we notice when walking mindfully? Use your five senses. I tend to just allow my mind to move from sense to sense, because my mind is now used to doing these practices. This means my mind tends to linger for some time on one thing, then it moves onto another. We just notice for the sake of noticing. Not to enjoy what we notice, nor to take a note of it, nor to think about it. It’s raw, bare awareness. Noticing for its own sake.

If you’re starting this practice there’s a danger in just allowing your mind to wander in the way I’ve just described. A mind which is not yet trained in mindfulness will readily and quickly wander to worries, plans, concerns, daydreams, and it may be several minutes before you realise that you are no longer being mindful of what’s going on in the here and now. So for that reason you might want to start a bit more methodically. Give say roughly 20 or 30 seconds to each of the four main senses we have available to us when walking, assuming you’re not eating on the walk, so the fifth sense, taste, is not activated. So, just notice what you see for a short period. Say it’s a bird feeding on the football park. Just notice it, what it does, how it moves. Don’t make any judgements about it, though it’s fine for you to notice any immediate pleasure or dislike arising in your mind as you see it.

After 20 or 30 seconds, deliberately change your attention to what you hear. It could be the traffic, or bird song, perhaps the rustle of leaves in a tree as the wind blows through them. Again, just notice gently, lightly, without making inner comments about what you perceive through your ears.

Then on to the sense of touch. What do your steps feel like, as the heel then the ball of the foot completes a step? How does your ankle work when you step? What does it feel like physically? And your knee? Hip joint? Arms? Shoulders? Just feel it all without trying to think about it or judge it in any way.

Still on the sense of touch, you can notice the feeling of the air or wind on your cheeks, your hair, your hands and fingers. You can even notice the soft feeling of your clothing on your skin, especially at the shoulders and tops of the arms.

Finally, occasionally you can notice smells. Pleasant, unpleasant, it doesn’t matter.

Then repeat the cycle of the four senses for as long as you want to do it.

This is particularly effective for people with anxiety and serious worries as it allows the mind to gently focus on everyday things, and is a useful alternative for people who feel they can’t focus properly doing classic mindfulness practices with their eyes closed in a room in completer silence.

So go out, give it a try, and just enjoy the beauty of noticing.