Circle Walking Pt. 2
By Paul Cavel
In our previous post, Circle Walking Part 1, we introduced walking, if done correctly, as a beneficial form of exercise for one’s health and as a way to help prevent future injuries through the use of accurate body alignment and stretching. Below we explore the benefits of walking further as a way to help the practitioner revitalize and energize their body, mind and spirit.
Improve Body Functions
Once you stabilize your walking, you can upgrade the quality of your walk deeper in your body. It requires refining your alignments and mechanics, but the good news is that if you practice results are pretty easy to come by for almost anyone in a short time.
The focus here is on opening the inside of the body so that as you walk you:
Engage and massage your internal organs — especially the kidneys and bowels.
Improve the functioning of your vascular system.
Both of these aspects are incredibly important for your overall health and vitality, and can be addressed by small yet profound adjustments to your walk.
Massaging Your Internal Organs
Giving your internal organs a gentle but firm massage is so important to keeping them from becoming stagnant and hard. Otherwise their function is downgraded. Your organs are on duty 24 hours a day—breaking down food, supplying all the nutrients your body needs to grow and repair and keeping you alive. The better condition your internal organs are in the better your overall health and vitality.
When your walking technique engages the deeper layers of tissue in the body the contraction and release of the muscles initiates a gentle massaging of the internal organs and begins to engage the vascular system.
Powerful Non-Aerobic Cardiovascular Exercise
Bringing the vascular system on line can be achieved without the need of aerobic activity. It takes pressure off the heart and improves the supply of nutrients and oxygen to every cell in your body while removing toxins and waste material most efficiently. You can make it happen with very slow walking by gently but firmly stretching through the core of your body.
As you bring your leg forward you lengthen the soft tissues, which directly connect to your blood vessels, organs and spine. From this open position, as you put weight into the leg, a therapeutic pressure wave is created and travels up the body. This action increases blood flow throughout the vascular system. It also engages fluids in the joints that further facilitate the massaging of your internal organs. Over time you can generate incredible energy just from walking.
From the outside you see almost no visible difference, but your internal experience is absolutely changed.
To achieve this depth of practice requires a live, competent teacher to make sure your unique body alignments and movements are correct and that you don’t strain your body.
When this level of practice stabilizes, then aerobic exercise is just a heartbeat away. Smoothly increasing your walking speed will raise your heart rate and with the vascular system open this will supercharge your blood flow and boost your energy, fitness level and health in general. With your alignments and mechanics in place there’s no worry about causing damage.
Building Energy
Circle Walking is an incredibly efficient container for developing your vital life-force energy. This is because walking in a circle circulates your blood and energy smoothly and strongly, opening, healing and revitalising your body to its core. Walking methods have existed for thousands of years as a sophisticated form of internal exercise.
There are two principles to remember when you want to build and develop your energy or vital life force:
1. Stay Within Two-Thirds of Your Full Effort
Many exercise programs keep you working out until you’re exhausted or in pain. You don’t need to run a marathon (or feel like you did), and in fact pushing yourself doesn’t work in the long game. Staying within your comfortable range of effort will allow you to exercise another day, but don’t go thinking it’s a prescription for laziness either. Neither doing too much or too little includes: warming up and practicing at a cruising level for a period of time that is sure to get the blood and energy circulating (at least 20 minutes) without depleting your reserves.
2. Walk In a Circle
You can practice in a relatively small space and you don’t have to be challenged by the elements — whether indoors or outdoors. When you walk in a straight line, you come to a point when you need to change direction. Walking in a circle allows you to gain a smooth rhythm that doesn’t require a stop or start for turning around. It is this smooth rhythm — without breaks — that generates the movement of energy around your body.
Like a generator that smoothly and continually spins to produce power, you keep walking and use little effort to achieve momentum. With this momentum, blood and energy circulates continually without interruption and builds your vital life-force energy.
When you can maintain the flow of Circle Walking, while adhering to your two-thirds comfortable range, you can grow your practice and experience real results. It’s not what you do, but how you do it.
Efficiency at Its Best
You can apply meditative techniques while you walk to help let go of anxiety and tension. Once your basics are in place, you can learn how to focus your attention to release your nerves, relax your mind and drop the stress out of your body. These techniques can give tremendous benefits, a way of neutralizing the negative effects of our face-paced and highly stressed realities.
SUMMARY
Right from the start walking with attention to internal flows opens your body, stretches the soft tissues, increases blood flow and releases excess tension. It works on your body, mind and spirit to foster balance, relaxation and peace of mind, which are becoming increasingly rare and precious in the modern age. As you progress, the exercises themselves don’t change much, but how you apply them and the aspects you’re able to focus on evolve as you do. The benefits you get from your training continually grow and improve the quality of your daily life.