Stresses and strains are an inevitable part of everyday life. What's your favourite coping strategy for managing life's ups and downs? For me, walking meditation is my go-to stress buster. It’s perfect for those times when you want to meditate but don’t want to spend more time sitting down. I’m a writer and I spend hours sitting in front of a computer screen and the last thing I want to do when I get up from my computer is to spend more time sitting. The answer to this conundrum is walking meditation!
In this article I’d like to share with you seven simple chakra-inspired walking meditations. The beauty of these meditations is that they can easily be slotted into even the busiest of days. And they can be done anywhere; along a corridor at work, walking from your house to car, walking from room to room, at the park, or in your garden.
Root Chakra Walking Meditation
In this meditation you slow your walking down and bring your awareness to the contact your feet are making with the earth and notice how the earth supports you. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, tells us to ‘walk as if our feet are kissing the earth’. 
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Writing, like yoga, is a form of magic! A writer puts words on the page, and, done skilfully, the words will elicit an image in the reader's mind. As readers we are more likely to be able to picture what the writer is trying to convey if the writer appeals to our five senses. The five senses are touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight.
Touch is the smooth feel of velvet, or a handful of sun-soaked soil. Taste is the flavour of melting chocolate on the tongue. Smell is the scent of sandalwood. Sound is the hum of traffic outside as you lie down to relax in Savasana. Sight is what you see when you look at a rainbow. For our writing to come alive we must use all of our five senses, and furnish the reader with sensual, concrete details, if we are to open a window that allows them to peer into our world.
            Writing sensually and evocatively takes practice. The Sensual Writing exercise, below, will get you into the habit of observing and recording the world around you with all your five senses. It will help to improve your writing, whilst at the same time lifting your mood by taking you out of your head, and into your body, bringing you firmly back to the present moment, which, as the Buddhists remind us, is a wonderful moment.
            Students, on my online yoga writers’ course, were amazed at how transformative this exercise can be. They found that when they did the exercise, even in challenging circumstances, it changed their perspective, jolting them out of autopilot and into a mindful, appreciative state.
Exercise: Sensual Writing
This exercise can be done in a cafe, in the park, on a train, at home, in your garden, at the start or end of your yoga class, or anywhere else you choose...
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Do you ever have anxiety dreams? You know the ones where you are about to go into an exam, and suddenly it dawns on you that you haven't done any revision. I don't usually have that particular dream nowadays, but I do sometimes have dreams about teaching yoga. In my dream, I'll be teaching a relaxation and suddenly one of the students might get up and leave. Other students will follow, and then I'm left teaching an almost empty class. Other times, I'll dream I'm teaching in an L-shaped room, which means I can't see all the students, and they can't see me. In one dream that I had many years ago, early on in my teaching, I dreamt I was teaching a relaxation, and my students were lying on the floor in Savasana, when two young, unruly lads came in and started bouncing power balls all around the class. I swore at them and shooed them out of the room. Whoops, not a very yogic dream, but funny in retrospect!
Do you remember your dreams? My guess is that your dreams are as weird and wonderful as mine. I'm kind of hoping they are! Keeping a dream diary is excellent writing practice. With a dream diary your challenge is to capture the mystery of your dream and get it down on paper.
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