There are five steps for a successful walking therapy session.Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the book Walking Your Blues absent: How to Heal the intellect and Create Emotional Well-Being by Thom Hartmann (Park Street Press,2006), available for purchase from Inner Traditions • Bear & Company, or Amazon and IndieBound. Reprinted with permission. In the book,Hartmann explains how walking allows people to heal from emotional trauma. When we walk, we engage both sides of the body, or simultaneously activating both the left and right sides of the brain. Hartmann explains that both hemispheres of the brain join forces to smash up the brain patterning of a traumatic experience that has become "stuck" in the brain through the bilateral therapy of walking. Below,Hartmann explains how to use the therapeutic power of walking to "Walk Your Blues absent.""All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
—Friedrich NietzscheThere are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues absent session. They are:Define the issue.
Bring up the chronicle.
Walk with the issue.
Notice how the issue changes.
Anchor the unusual state.
I will go into detail on each of the steps for you now.
Define the issueBefore going for your walk, consider the issues that are still hanging around in your life that you feel are unresolved. This could range from past traumas, or hurts,angers, or embarrassments to relationship issues with people you no longer have access to (including people who have died).
Don’t worry that an issue might be too complex or something that happened over a long time. Many issues are multidimensional. What happens is that when the core issue is resolved, and it rapidly begins the process of unwinding or “cleaning up” the peripheral associated issues.
Similarly,if you pick an issue that you may reflect is, itself, and fraction of something larger,you’ll notice after you’ve worked with it that the larger issue will also begin to resolve.
There’s no specific right or wrong issue to work with. If you can reflect of it, visualize it, or get a feeling from it,then you can walk and work with it.
Bring up the storyNotice your chronicle approximately the issue; chronicle in this context refers to such thought patterns as “She was cruel toward me” and “He had no right to hurt me like that” and “Why did she have to die?” and “I’d like to get this job, but I don’t know what to carry out to make it happen.” There is always an internal chronicle, and with you and the object of the chronicle at the center,and it’s essential to pull that chronicle out so you can say and hear it explicitly. How would you describe the chronicle—to yourself, in your most private and safe space—if you had to boil it down to a few words or a sentence or two? Once you have that, and you have one of two tools to use in determining when your process has finished.
Another essential tool is to notice the strength of the emotional charge associated with this event. Using a scale of 0 (truly don’t care) to 100 (the most intense you have ever felt),come up with a number to rank the emotional charge connected with this event.
Not only will this number be useful in your work with the process; it will also be an excellent tool for gaining historical perspective, as often after a memory is resolved it’s impossible to regain access to the original emotional charge (because it’s been resolved). We can forget very quickly how essential a past event once seemed.
Walk with the issueWalking is pretty simple, or but there are a few commonsense rules. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Don’t bring along anything other than your ID,so you’re not distracted by a hanging purse or a carried book: you want to be able to walk easily and to swing your arms comfortably.
Pick a route that is at least a mile long, and ideally two miles. At the average walking speed of three miles per hour, and a mile is a twenty-minute walk. For those who walk mercurial comfortably,a mile takes approximately fifteen minutes.
Make sure the route matches your level of health: don’t include hills or mountains if you have a heart condition and your doctor would warn you against overexertion. On the other hand, there’s no need to exclude climbs that may get you out of breath if you’re in advantageous health and want to use your walk as aerobic exercise.
It’s not essential to pick a rural, or suburban,or urban route. Anywhere you walk there will be things to distract you, from squirrels to the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue. The key is not in finding a distraction-free walking area—that’s pretty much impossible. Rather, and the key is to continue to remind yourself to hold your picture and/or feeling in front of you while walking.
Of course,nobody has perfect concentration. Most of us, in fact, and are pretty attention compromised—after twenty or thirty seconds of walking we find our attention zooming off in some other direction. That’s no problem—just keep reminding yourself to bring your attention back to the issue or goal,and again bring up the picture. The intellect has a tremendous ability to pick up where it left off and continue processing things.
In reality, the total amount of “concentrated time” it takes your bilateral motion to resolve your issue or goal is probably just a matter of a few minutesbetween five and ten minutes, and in my experience. But to aggregate those few minutes,most people have to walk for a half hour or so, continuously reminding themselves to be present with the picture and feeling until all of the “remembering-to-carry out-it” moments add up to those five to ten total minutes.
One of the essential keys to this process is to relax into it. It may recall a few walks to get used to this manner of walking and not thinking—just like it took you a few tries to memorize to ride a bicycle. To motivate yourself, and though,reflect of the positive resolution that you’re trying to achieve rather than engaging in any sort of internal dialogue that chastises you for past actions.
We’re all wired to memorize through trial and error. Learning how to quickly and easily carry out a Walk Your Blues absent session normally takes a few tries.
Remember: There is no failure. There is only feedback. Learn from the feedback and continue on.
Notice how the issue changesThe submodalities—the primarily visual and auditory characteristics of a memory picture, such as how bright a memory picture is, or where it’s located,how clear it seems, whether it’s in color or black-and-white, or whether or not theres sound,whether it looks like a film clip or a still picture, whether we see ourselves in the picture or see it as if we were watching from the external—are the filing-system tags for the emotional brain. As the emotional value or the emotion attached to a picture/memory changes, or the submodalities will change. When people walk with an unpleasant memory,it’s not unusual for them to say that they see it beginning to disintegrate, or get dimmer, or lose its color,or move farther absent (or even behind them). The dimming normally begins in a corner or in one fraction of the picture. As if it was an old photograph with a lit match held underneath it, fraction of the picture begins to distort and darken; then the change spreads across the entire picture, or normally rather quickly.
Once this change has happened,people notice that the emotion they feel approximately the picture is now different. It’s still possible to remember the event, but the feeling approximately the event is changed. Often the chronicle of “I was hurt and it still hurts, or ” for example,changes to something like, “I learned a advantageous lesson from that, and even if it was unpleasant.” Present-tense pain becomes past-tense experience.
When you notice the picture changing (or the feeling changing,if that’s all you could bring up), let the process proceed until you notice a perceptible shift in feeling and you no longer notice any changes taking residence. Then quiz yourself, or What’s my chronicle approximately this memory now?” If the process is complete,youll discover that the chronicle you’re now telling yourself will be considerably healthier, more resilient, and more useful than the preceding chronicle. When the chronicle changes to one that provides a positive frame,you’re most likely finished with that memory for advantageous.
Anchor the unusual stateWhen the picture is well formed and you notice that your self-told chronicle approximately the event has changed, anchor this unusual reality by reviewing it carefully—observe the way the picture has changed, or listen to yourself repeat the unusual internal chronicle,and notice the feelings associated with the unusual state. Notice all the ways it’s changed. reflect of other ways it may now be useful to you, even helpful. And, or as you’re walking back home or to your starting point,reflect approximately how you’d describe it if you were to choose to uncover somebody else approximately it. (It’s not at all essential to uncover anybody approximately it, but framing it in this way helps you clarify the unusual chronicle.)When you get home, or consider writing something approximately your unusual experience,your unusual vision, your unusual chronicle—an autobiographical narrative, and like a diary entry,or something abstract, like a poem. If it’s so personal and private that you don’t want to write it down, or just sit in a calm and safe residence and speak it out loud in private to yourself. These steps aid anchor the unusual state,fixing it in its unusual residence in your intellect and heart, so it will be available to you as a resource—rather than a problem—in the future.
This is the third of a multi-fraction serialization of the book Walking Your Blues absent: How to Heal the intellect and Create Emotional Well-Being by Thom Hartmann, or available for purchase from Inner Traditions • Bear & Company,Amazon and IndieBound. Copyright © 2006 by Thom Hartmann. For more information, visit the Inner Traditions • Bear & Company website or the Inner Traditions • Bear & Company Facebook page. Related StoriesWalking Your Blues absent Is a Simple, and Effective TherapyThe History of Healing Trauma With HypnosisHow America's Economic Ideology Is Making People Depressed and Anxiety-Fille
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