"Just Walk Until You're a Stranger to Yourself!"
Steve Smith’s thoughts from a recent podcast discussion, excerpted below, offers a fascinating insight into the practice of walking meditation and its transformative effects. Steve delves into his deepening awareness of elemental sensations and the dissolution of self-referencing thoughts. The portrayal of the body's movements and the connection with direct experiential reality without the filter of conceptual knowledge offers a unique perspective on the power of mindfulness and the profound insights that can be gained through a seemingly simple act like walking.
“It became exquisitely clear that it was just the dance of the elements moving along with every lifting, moving, placing, shifting, lifting, moving, placing, shifting, stopping, standing, turning.”
“I really credit Sayadaw U Thondara for teaching me the magic and power of the walking meditation. He once said, ‘Just walk until you're a stranger to yourself.’ I didn't ask what he meant at the time, but I took that in.
Before too long, I discovered what he what he meant, in that in the build-up of that energetic movement, the viriya, and the fluid concentration, it would just be these sequences of awareness where there were only the dhātus, the elements. The expressive elemental sensations – the earth element of texture; the water element of fluidity and cohesion; the heat element of warm and hot, cool and cold; and the air element of movement, oscillation, vibration, and support, firmness.
And then I understood what it meant to just walk until one is a stranger to themselves! That is, there was no self-referencing of the experience: ‘I'm experiencing this.’ Surely there will be thoughts, ‘Well, this is interesting,’ or, ‘I'm feeling tired,’ or ‘hungry,’ or normal thoughts, but in practice mode, in moments of really being connected, mindful with the process of movement, it became exquisitely clear that it was just the dance of the elements moving along with every lifting, moving, placing, shifting, lifting, moving, placing, shifting, stopping, standing, turning.
It became exquisitely interesting to me to experience the body from within the body in this way, and to begin to connect with that experiential, direct reality not filtered through thoughts or our conceptual knowledge. U Thondara was a really good Dhamma friend in that way and teacher to me. I was sad to learn that he got sick, I think pneumonia, and he was allergic to penicillin and passed away. I think he was just 47 years old. He would have been, I think, a really prominent teacher for westerners there in Burma and in the West. A number of us Westerners felt he would be invited to Europe and America.”