Hiking Zen

INTRODUCTION
The Simple Act of Walking

Mindful walking is simple. You can do it right now, with one breath and one step. If you are alive and your legs are in good condition, you have everything you need. Mindful walking is difficult. Forces beyond our control drive us to hurry, and we stumble over ourselves — in our work and in our relationships — as one day rushes into the next. Where are we going? Will we know once we get there? Will we stop running before we die?

Mindful walking is the foundation of hiking Zen. Training yourself to stop this hell-bent sprint through life, to look deeply and see the profound beauty of the present moment, is one of the most difficult — and yet most rewarding — things we can do. Hiking Zen is mindful walking in nature, and it can be one of the most fulfilling ways to make this change. Stopping your habit of hurrying — turning off the music, the news, or the podcast — and opening yourself to the forest, the stream, the mountain, the prairie, the desert (or even to the daisy pushing through a crack in the pavement) can deeply alter your experience of the world and yourself within it.

Often in everyday life, we walk to arrive somewhere. Hiking Zen’s most basic principle is to arrive in each step we take, to stop losing ourselves in thoughts about the past or future. Like walking meditation, hiking Zen is not an exercise, but a joy. We walk not to arrive anywhere or to attain anything — we walk just to enjoy walking. We train our mind to stay in the present moment. In doing so, we allow this moment to be a moment of happiness. The simplicity of mindful walking belies its transformative power. Putting one foot in front of the other, an act as fundamental as it is overlooked, is central to a journey of mindfulness that supports personal and collective liberation. When we experience stability and wisdom in our bodies, we are not swept away by strong emotions like anger or despair, and we can respond skillfully to the big existential crises confronting our society and planet today — climate change, political turmoil, and everyday violence.

But weaving Zen practices into time spent outdoors is more than a self-care practice, more than an exercise that bolsters our ability to remain engaged in difficult times. It is certainly not a means to an end. Slowing down, synchronizing our steps with the rhythms of our breath, and recognizing interbeing — our connection with everything within and around us — at an embodied, cellular level is simply a profound experience. Life-changing.

This is the path we have walked as two Zen monks following rhe Plum Village tradition of Engaged Buddhism for the last two decades. “Zen” comes from the Sanskrit root word dhyāna, which simply means “meditation.” Engaged Buddhism is a movement started in Vietnam by our teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and others, to make Buddhist practices relevant to our times — responsive to violence, poverty, and social injustice. He and his colleagues worked for peace amid the suffering brought about by French colonialism and subsequently, the war between communist-backed and American-backed forces in his country in the 1960s and ’70s. Thich Nhat Hanh, or as we call him, “Thay” (a Vietnamese word of respect usually translated as “teacher,” pronounced like the English word “tie”) founded the Plum Village tradition after being exiled from Vietnam for
his peace work. From the beginning, the Plum Village tradition has been rooted in a commitment to bring the compassion and clarity cultivated on the meditation cushion into the world — to tend to suffering and injustice at every level. Personal transformation is intimately linked with action. Developing a deep awareness of our bodies and our connection with nature with mindful walking is an essential practice in our lineage.

As monks who hike and who offer Hiking Zen retreats, we love to be outside. We love to feel the earth under our feet. Mindful hiking has brought both of us profound healing and peace, as we will share in these pages, and we want to make this transformative, deceptively simple activity available to as many people as possible. Most wisdom traditions (and Zen is no exception) offer
periods of retreat as prolonged opportunities to deepen one’s practice, stability, and open-heartedness with the support of community. When we refer to “Zen practice,” “the practice,” or “our practice,” we are talking about the aspects of daily behavior — from breathing to sitting, walking, eating, even brushing our teeth — that strengthen mindful, peaceful, compassionate
awareness and action. Such retreats often happen in meditation centers, with participants arriving for days or weeks to follow a shared schedule of practice and reflection. Hiking Zen retreats take this program into more wild spaces. People arrive bearing backpacks, tents, raincoats, and pots and pans, and together we take our practice onto the trail, into nature.

Being in Nature

Nature is everywhere. Our bodies are made from plants, sun, and water; weeds grow in bits of unused land scattered through every town; even our machines and infrastructure — steel, concrete, plastic — are made of elements taken from the earth.

Artificial and natural are just concepts we create. This book, however, focuses on experiences in the undeveloped natural habitats that have nurtured us and been integral to our development as a species on this planet.

For those new to practicing it, mindfulness immersion and movement in the wild — being in unstructured nature — is extremely beneficial. There remains something special about the spaciousness of being outside for hours, days, or even weeks at a time in a landscape less impacted by human intervention. Being under the open sky, surrounded by trees or other plants, brings us unique possibilities of connection and exploration into our human experience — both our difficulties and our healing.

Being mindful of our bodies and our interconnectedness with the earth can offer a stark contrast to our experience in the urban environments in which many of us reside. In cities, which bustle with distractions and relentless sensory stimuli, it is not easy to remain centered. With the Internet more and more accessible, even when we leave the city behind, we bring the noise of advertising, consumerism, entertainment, social media, and news along with us.

Out there, in the forest, the prairie, the desert, or on the hillside, is the unknown. Because of our modern way of living, we may well have forgotten what to do and how to behave outside. The unknown can be scary. It may feel more comfortable to live indoors in a house or to drive to work in a car. Observe, though, how the boxes we spend so much time in affect our minds. The
mind mirrors its habitat. If we aren’t careful, our worldview is drawn with very clear borders: this is mine, that is yours — we become territorial, overly attached to our boxes. Unused to spending extended time outside, we can still feel some resistance, some sense of separation or fear that keeps us from deep immersion.

Through embodied mindfulness, we remember the richness of quiet presence that is possible amid the sounds of nature. Make no mistake; it takes courage to temporarily cut off our electronic connection to the world. But when we do it, immersion in nature can help us to truly connect to our wholeness, our stability, and to a sense of awe that enables us to take care of our anxiety, depression, and fear. Taking time to be with what is within us and around us, supported by the ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads, we find a respite from modern chaos — a place where we can uncouple from fast-paced urban life and transform our ways of being and thinking. We find space to calm our minds, reacquaint ourselves with our bodies, and cultivate a deeper awareness of our thoughts and emotions.

Practicing mindfulness in nature is deeply rooted in Zen. The Buddha had a habit of meditating outdoors and invited students to come out from their “dusty and crowded houses” when they became monks and nuns. These early practitioners learned to live outside, in harmony with the changing seasons, close to the elements.

But the Buddha wasn’t encouraging his students to leave their homes to learn to be good campers. As we deepen our understanding of nature, we meet our mind and our emotions. We see deep truths that free us. Observing nature, we realize everything changes, and our habitual fear begins to loosen its grip. To train our mind with the support of the earth from which we come is to experience lasting transformation.

Even if, from an early age, you didn’t have access to the outdoors, you can start now. To claim our sovereign nature as free, wild, endlessly creative, and beautiful creatures, we need to train ourselves by untraining ourselves. We need to step out of the boxes in which we find ourselves and unravel our contemporary conditioning.

Only then can we move from compulsion to conscience, building a stable foundation for both personal and planetary well-being.

How to Use This Book

Please see this book as notes from spiritual friends on the path. It is an invitation for all of us to clear the brushwood from our minds and rediscover an old path that is already there — a path
leading to our true nature, to freedom on Earth, our home.

The book in your hands invites radical change from within. These pages explore questions people often bring to our retreats:
How can I experience more joy and peace?
What is my place in the world?
How can I skillfully engage with the many challenges plaguing our planet without burning out?
Our own transformation and the transformation we have witnessed in others when we slow down on the trail and reconnect with what is beneath, around, and within all of us are the bones of this book.

In the following chapters, the two of us trace the roots of our monastic paths, share our experiences leading dozens of Zen retreats in nature, and offer concrete practices to cultivate wholeness and healing. We share journal entries and personal reflections, drawing particularly on a seven-week Hiking Zen retreat on the legendary Appalachian Trail, a 2,200-mile walking
route from Georgia to Maine. Our path started in Blue Cliff Monastery’s backyard in upstate New York and ended forty-two days later at the National Mall in Washington, DC, where we sat
together in meditation.

At times throughout the book, we refer to a bell. From time to time during our retreats we invite everyone, as they listen to the sound of a bell, to stop what they’re doing and come back to the present-moment experience of their breathing. In the Plum Village tradition, a bell used in this way is called a mindfulness bell. But you don’t need to already have a mindfulness practice to enjoy this book. Everything you need to start is here. Each chapter has specific practices to help you explore mindful hiking on your own or with your community as well as suggestions for applying the practices in your daily life.

We hope you slip this book into your backpack, bag, or back pocket the next time you head out your door. Ultimately, we encourage you to explore your own experience in nature. Zen is
very clear about this: take what is offered and then see for yourself. Give the practices time and notice their impact. Adapt what doesn’t work for you. As we say in Zen, do not confuse the finger
pointing at the moon with the moon itself. Your engagement and direct experience are required.

We hope this book is a call to a deeper understanding of ourselves, our place in the world as human beings, and our relationship with all that surrounds and supports us, for the benefit
of all beings.

Happy trails!