Walking Program
When our ancestors in wild nature gathered and hunted for their food, or moved on the land to seek new encampments, they inevitably were on foot – on two feet to be precise.
Humans are bipeds, and bipedal movement or upright walking, is central to the story of how our species succeeded in nature. We in fact evolved to become prolific walkers, and both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens people eventually moved on foot to dwell on most and then all of the earth’s major land masses.
This natural life of regular walking underlies our natural and instinctive relationship with the earth and the world at large. It still strongly influences our general orientation and greatly determines our health requirements today. Humans are remarkable natural animals in so many ways, and our adaptation to a nomadic life of upright grassland walking, a trait our ancestral line has possessed for at least five million years, is one of our most notable attributes.
We are walking animals
Human beings are walking animals, as much as we are social animals or thinking animals. As proof of this, we would point out that humans can walk great distances without injury or harm to ourselves. And even this strong statement is not the full truth of our ability and need to walk.
Long walks, in fact, bring great improvements in our physical fitness and emotional health. Walking and hiking lead to new personal freedom and happiness. These essential human activities open us to unexpected experiences and perspectives on ourselves and the world, and encourage new exploration, growth, and natural harmony in our lives. Walking and hiking strengthen our bodies and spirits, and teach us to endure and be at peace in our many paths through the world. For each of these important reasons, it is hard to overstate just how central and important walking is to natural health, natural conditioning, and human life.
Because walking is so natural to us and an integral part of healthy human life, when we do not walk or do not walk enough, even if we engage in other forms of exercise, our emotional balance, our sense of connection to others and the world around us, and our natural and complementary human feelings of completeness and openness are all greatly diminished.
Of course, walking underlies so much of our human existence that it is hard to avoid it altogether. But in fixed society – whether in industrial settings, where mechanized travel and full personal schedules are the norm, or in pre-industrial ones, where the land can be tightly controlled or under-policed and unsafe for walking – there often are great physical and practical obstacles to walking substantial distances. It is thus very easy for us not to walk nearly enough today to ensure adequate natural conditioning, or to provide us with sufficient exposure to the natural world and receive its cultivation of our natural well-being.
These important facts of settled life can make it challenging to maintain our natural health and fitness, and to ensure our natural well-being and sense of scale and place in the world. Today, most of us suffer from this now widespread and longstanding limitation on human life and health, and often far more than we may realize. Modern restrictions on healthy natural movement, especially in our scientific age and amid findings showing essential importance of daily movement, are of course routed in the structure and norms of traditional agrarian life, and in our current low overall health awareness and general condition of social health. The result is a profound under-appreciation of our need and new opportunity to better enable walking and greater human exposure to wild nature.
An essential human experience
As a species that lived nomadically and evolved for millions of years on open grasslands and in other wild settings, we each need the physical challenge, the cognitive stimulation, and the emotional engagement that regular and extended walks naturally provide. We need the unfolding landscapes, the changing horizons and perspectives, and the new places and chance encounters that are integral to the practice of walking and essential aspects of natural human life itself.
To be healthy and naturally grounded today, we require time walking in nature. We benefit, as we always have, from the feel of the wind and sun, and even the rain, on our skin and bodies. We grow and naturally flourish as people when we are on the land and beneath clouds, or have the regular opportunities to rest with stars passing above us. We explore ourselves, as much as we do the world, with the rise and fall of paths beneath our feet and with new vistas in our eyes and hearts.
Walking, outdoors and ideally in wild nature, provides an essential experience of whom and what we are as human beings. It helps us to better understand and live in a new and expanded awareness of how we developed, succeeded, and assured our health in nature.
Walking re-grounds and restores our natural human emotions and enriches our daily life. It re-connects us with the world, with others and with other species, and prevents and counters stagnation and regressive cycles in our lives.
Without regular and varied walking experiences, we inevitably become less healthy, less natural, and less robust as people. Our bodies weaken and our spirits become dulled or restless. We lose our innate sense of natural human life and what is most important and essential in our human place in the world. Even if we are health-oriented, we can fail to understand what it is to be naturally well and fit as human beings.
How often and long to walk
For all these reasons, daily walking is an essential aspect of HumanaNatura’s technique of Natural Exercise and a natural conditioning practice we strongly encourage, one that you can almost immediately validate as crucial to healthy human life.
As we begin the practice of walking, especially in the context of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program, two important questions often arise:
- How frequently should we walk? Our best advice is, as often as possible. By this, we mean every day, and more than once a day if you can – if you have the time, stamina, and inclination. In fact, we would encourage you to walk everywhere you can, to move away from a life of perpetually sitting at desks and in cars and trains. We would encourage you to take every opportunity you have to get outdoors and into the broader world, and to experience the natural enjoyment and power of a good walk. Walk when you feel restless. Walk when you feel exhilarated. Walk when you are in town or when you are in the country. Walk up hills and over them. Walk into valleys and through them, and to new valley and lakes and oceans always waiting beyond wherever we are. Walk with friends and family. Walk alone. Walk as recreation and walk as more than recreation. Walk as a practice and even as a meditation. Walk as an integral part of your life and an integral part of all natural and healthy human life. Walk to reconnect to the environment, and to the sights and sounds and other sensations, that are continually around us. Walk to create new states of personal fitness and well-being. Walk for discovery and learning. Walk for life and into life. Walk, in other words, whenever and wherever you can.
- How far should we walk? Our advice here will vary by person, depending on both your current physical conditioning and your current surroundings, since you must always walk within your physiological capability and only where physically safe. But what if we said – to challenge your thinking and perspective on the practice of walking and hiking, and the boundaries of your natural health and vitality today – as far as your body and spirit will carry you? In all seriousness, most of us greatly underestimate our ability to walk and be at peace in nature, especially before we have restored our natural health and fitness, and begun to experience the enormous life-enriching impacts that extended walking can have on our health and personal well-being. Walking to your local market or around your neighborhood is a good start. But walking across town, or to the next town, or across the land more broadly – in deliberate journeys into the natural world, and even into our natural health and self – may be where you need to set your sights over time. Walks lasting an entire day or more, in fact, allow us to more fully explore the natural conditioning, emotional renewal, and enriched and expanded connection to the natural world that all walking seeks to afford us.
With these ideas in mind – that we should walk more often and often much further than we might first think – perhaps you can begin to better appreciate the great emphasis that HumanaNatura places on walking and hiking. For HumanaNatura natural health practitioners, time spent walking is, literally and figuratively, steps toward new and transformative levels of personal health and fitness, the traversing of paths that lead to new, more natural, and far richer outlooks on our lives and human condition today.
Walking is time in our natural niche itself. It is time outdoors in nature, and often time returning to nature in new and startling ways. Walking restores and reminds us of our natural human ability to move great distances at will, and to be at ease, to be whole and autonomous as people, on the land and amidst movement and unfolding surroundings. Walking is also an ever-present opportunity to be and re-gain ourselves, to experience our natural human life of change and discovery, and to be reminded of the probing and exploring quality that is the essence of all healthy human life.
Perhaps most importantly, walking allows us as modern people a sustained and intimate re-immersion in the ancient world that created us and contains us today. It offers us all a direct and personal window into our human past and the underlying nature of human life. When walking, we again feel, and in truth become, an integral part of the natural environment and larger world around us.
At once, we are made smaller and larger, more attentive and freer, and far more richly connected to the extraordinary natural world in which we live.