Join featured artist Kath Fries in a collective act of meditative walking. Kath will guide you - along with a cohort of fellow travellers - through an experience of mindful walking, coaching you to focus your thoughts and embodied attention.
How To Participate:
- Find 15 minutes of free time.
- Decide where you want to walk, this can be inside or outside. You can walk along a pathway, or in a loop, perhaps around a table or around a tree. Please be mindful of traffic and other distractions.
- Stand by with your mobile phone and headphones or have your phone audio on speaker.
- If you are not planning to stay within your home’s WiFi range, then before joining turn WiFi off on your phone so it is just running on data the whole time (it’ll be annoying for you to stop mid-walk to change from wifi to data).
- When you play the walking meditation video, Kath will instruct you to hold your phone in one hand, with your arm loose and relaxed, so the camera is looking at the ground and you can see the screen.
- For the walking meditation, Kath will give you a series of simple instructions and walk you through it.
Walkdown in Lockdown by Kath Fries. Live cut David Ryan
For many of us in the pandemic lockdown, walking was the highlight of the day and one of the few excuses to go outside.
Going for a walk became a privilege and our appreciation of this simple freedom grew accordingly.
Walking is an act of touching the Earth, a series of rhythmically repeated acts connecting your body to the ground. Each breath brings the world, and the present moment, into your body, and then it releases the body back into the world in a continuous cycle of exchange. To walk mindfully rather than rushing from one place to another is to walk meditatively, opening your awareness to the metabolism that exists between yourself and your surroundings.
During the walk, you will inhabit your own world, breath, footfalls and bodily momentum - moving across the ground in front and through the air around us. This movement is not just the mind slowing down to meet the body, but the body also moving to meet the mind. The process of being attentive to your breathing and walking allows each step to connect you to the Earth.
A Gift: Slow focused breathing is a useful method of relaxation. It can help access your body’s parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS). Once activated, your heart and breath rate may slow. Muscle tension and some of the physical symptoms you experience will settle and you may feel more relaxed.
Further details on slow, focused breathing are available from NSW Heath here.
About: So’21 is an as-live-streamed public program. It is at once a memorial to the spirit of (what would have been) Cementa21, and a celebration of the irreverent, fun-loving and undiscouraged community soul of our artists and our festival IRL.
NEXT So’21 POST | 21st Sept 2022 | Open Mic | featuring artists; Diana Robinson, Dale Collier, Sarah McEwan, Johannes Muljana & Pamela Lee Brenner, Leanne Pope, On The Stoop, and Robyn Backen.
Nostalgic for more digital shenanigans? | Relive So’21 live HERE.