Walking to Wellbeing: Eco-Somatic Wellbeing in Felt Thinking (Experiential Guides), #1

By ANNA DAKO

Walking to Wellbeing is an experiential guide that introduces walking with embodied receptivity as the grounding principle of ecologically-minded wellbeing. 

The book presents twenty-four walks as guides to self-care outdoors, which form the first part of an ecologically inclusive practice of Somatic Felt Thinking in mindful movement, and invites to re-think wellbeing in wider contexts of being-well-with-nature. 

Presented together with inspiring imagery of versatile landscapes, the guide offers therapeutic instruction on personal development while walking outdoors in creative self-reflection as well as further teachings about this self-help methodology by Dr Anna Dako.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: ANNA DAKO
• Release date: Apr 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781739088613

Book preview

Endorsements

Walks to Wellbeing is a simple guide to putting one foot in front of the other and also a complex cosmic journey. Like our lives. Dr Anna Dako, with decades of inspired and dedicated somatic practice in her fingertips, has created a practice of felt thinking which is of real use. The words on the page are like her voice in your ear, showing you breath by breath how to connect with the earth as it is, as your body and mind are, and tap into the strength and wisdom needed to navigate these times. She speaks with soft practicality, precision and a deep freedom.

Dr Sarah Luczaj

artist and writer, therapist in private practice in Glasgow and co-founder of the terrealuma healing refuge in South-East Poland

On this series of walks I experienced a slowing down of tempo, and with this, a softening and opening to what is... I noticed how nature is in process and not progress. I noticed how nature, just is! It wears no mask. It is un-apologetically itself. The guide enables one to view oneself as bigger than our usual ‘personality’ selves. It expands us into our ‘bodyminds’ and the encompassing resonances with the organic ecosystem we reside in and are a part of. The guide takes us on a journey right down to our cellular existence; and our exchange and interplay with the surrounding air/atmosphere. It helps us question ‘when and where’ from the various perspectival shifts taking place through the course of the walks, accentuated by the changing of the seasons, the landscapes, and the soundscapes. The openings, offered within the guide, help one to become more consciously aware of the elemental transformations taking place within, by turning our attention to different ways of being-in-process. Via the process of active receptivity, ‘Walking to Wellbeing’ offers a rich dive into one’s inner landscapes, and into the parasympathetic nervous system ‘where and when’ we can restore and rebalance.

Shayne Lilith-Moon

educator at special needs school in Aberdeen, somatic movement artist and outdoor athlete

Preface

On Somatic Felt Thinking

––––––––

How can a mindful shift from exploitive habitation to creative co-presence benefit both our own and Nature’s wellbeing?

Contemplating movement in receptivity, while walking, is a very intuitive, imaginal and improvisational activity that involves sensual acuteness, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive awareness, embodied presence and a very open attitude towards listening and being with whatever comes onto our path.

Embodied experience of the self, in movement, is about addressing questions about our care for being well in the world. It is a deep self-inquiry journey which brings the lived connections between Nature and the self to the fore and which offers new insights on how we are in the world and on how to remedy multiple imbalances.

In the introduction below, I will briefly discuss how practising sensuous presence with the natural environment, while walking, can teach us about proprioceptive and interoceptive sensitivity, about dialogical processes in relation to feeling, sensation, imagination, and functional movement, as well as about the inner landscapes of the body.

I will also discuss why it is so important to nourish the skills of interoceptive and exteroceptive listening that support sensory homeostasis as our active state of wellbeing, and how being in the moment with experiences in nature can serve as a form of self-therapy, for all ages, and all life seasons.

Then, it will be my pleasure to guide you through a series of 24 walks, during which I hope you will find your own answers to our opening question, and which, I hope, will offer you solid ground to continue exploring the depths of your own wellbeing in harmony with the natural world around you. The walks will introduce you to the practice of Somatic Felt Thinking and grow your ability to sense into both inner and outer environments of living your life in a fuller way. They will also support your natural capacities of embodied, creative response and ongoing resilience.

Please read more about the continuations of this work and trainings offered within the online presence of my practice at:

Dunami – Movement | Arts | Wellbeing

www.dunami-somatics.com

Terminology

Throughout the book I use the following terminology:

––––––––

-    Nature (with capital ‘N’) – as referring to the living Earth

-       nature (with small ‘n’) – as referring to ‘the essence’, or ‘core quality’

-       natural – as referring to being ‘in agreement with the way of Nature’

-       self – as referring to a person’s essential being accessible through reflexive perspective

-       Earth (with capital ‘E’) – as referring to ‘planet Earth’

-       earth (with small ‘e’) – as referring to ‘the ground’, ‘soil’, or one of the ‘classical elements’

Introduction

On Walking to Wellbeing

Walking. Wandering about, sinking into our own rhythms of pacing, choosing paths, following our own sense of direction or the safety of marked trails. 

One of the most blissful activities outdoors, isn't it?

At the same time, to many people who I have met during the many years of my professional practice of outdoor therapy sessions in Felt Thinking, walking did not mean much, initially. After all, it is that most basic kind of movement that helps us function in the world, and which we usually master within the first year of our developmental journey in life. At best, going for a walk is usually associated with airing the head, and stretching the bones, as we often say, and practiced in good weather only.

Nevertheless, evolutionarily speaking, walking connects us to a long journey of becoming vertical and sustaining our bipedal stance as a species, and, next to dancing, it actually is the most complex of moving ways, while we think we are just walking, right?

Looking through the lens of developmental processes here, walking outdoors can definitely be a life-long exploration. An exploration into the subtle adventures of embodied expansions happening somewhere in-between the inner and the outer worlds, and an exploration into how we can become more authentic, and more true to what our senses are opening up to, and to what they are communicating. 

I often feel that, as a living kind at the top of the food chain, we quiet our sensuous noticing because we do not value other life around us enough. Our own, human perspective is what usually wins. Eventually, we do chose to care about our day-to-day life most. And yet, our human predicament doesn’t need to be so self-centred. It is during outdoor walking that we can be expanding on and re-educating our bodyminds about the openness we share, and about the inter-connectedness of all life that calls for our appreciation. There is undoubtedly a lot of freedom to explore new ways of feeling safe and secure in our own outdoor environments, while feeling more whole within them.

Contemplating walking, in Felt Thinking, should then include active reflecting on our place in the context of all life on Earth, and the historicity of how the activity of walking has been the primal movement to our species. After all, we, humanoids, have been evolving on this ground, on Earth, for millions of years.

And perhaps, this very thought, the thought that our feet connect us to all this natural development of life on Earth as we ground and secure each step on the surface of today, while walking, can become our new anchor in more mindful pacing through landscapes. At the same time, the freedom of our arms swinging by our sides is also there to remind us that we keep evolving today too, and we continue to learn about ourselves every single day.

We could definitely say that our evolutionary story is very much alive in every cell of our bodyminds. And walking is an ongoing continuation of the two-footed stance in bipedal alignment that we have developed over the course of millennia. 

There is always something to move towards to, and there is always something to fall back on. 

Give it a minute here, soften your gaze and imagine yourself walking right now. Choose your preferred landscape, and imagine yourself in it. Try to stay with your way of walking and all the related intricacies of your movement for a little while.

I am sure you will be able to connect to that three dimensional rotation of the spine and the hips that allows for an amazingly quick response in any direction. Big or small, as long as you keep your feet on the ground, this rotational capacity is available to us, walkers, at any point in time. 

You can also play with how your body twists towards or shies away from any external stimulus, and play with how soft or sharp your reactions can be. Some will be voluntary and some will fly securely under the radar of our conscious thought.

Our capacity to think in three dimensions, into the now, the past and the future, is also a complex continuum of how we are able to relate to moving with and in a space. All body systems develop in relation to one another. We are able to reflect upon the past, contemplate the present and chase forward into our future plans. And while becoming more aware of the complexity of that motion, in relation to the landscape and our own physiology of ‘constant instability’ or even ‘constant falling’, we might take a moment to appreciate the responsibility of being in the constant mode of co-creating. 

Our movement toward things and our movement away from things that we choose not to engage with is like a living relationship.

We are indeed ongoingly giving in to the ground to be able to move away from it. 

Our physiology is intricately woven into our emotional and ethical considerations, through care and receptivity, while our living body operates on all planes possible: vertical, horizontal and complex diagonal.

Our embodied physiology is also both vulnerable and expressive, as we move through our lives in constant dialogue with gravitational dynamics. Feeling into that dynamic and expanding on the presence of this versatile exchange happening for us every single moment gives us grounding and support, but it also opens up further to help us follow the many freedoms of ongoing choice that we have. We are the choice. We live in constant movement, within and around us. 

And so perhaps you can ask yourself:

When did you last dance in response to the movement of the clouds, or walk in tune with the singing birds? Have you ever exchanged a thought with a tree? Or got all fuzzed-up muddy rushing barefoot down the nearby grassy hill? 

This is where the path to wellbeing begins, as connective presence is all about our wilful participation in what is actually happening. In Felt Thinking, we learn how to connect the felt sensations with what constitutes our mindsets. And to contemplate the movement of walking mindfully means being with what is unfolding for us with every step that we take. Participation is the connective link to our embodied awareness and all-inclusive attention, as Andrea Olsen (Olsen, 2002) reminds us.

And so, when contemplating walking as a practice of ontological reconnection of what we feel with how we move in the world, I continuously choose to look at human nature as the nature of being in movement, and acknowledge both differences and commonalities within wider considerations for life on Earth, i.e. life in earthy contexts of ‘time and space’ shared reality that we, as a species, come to live and co-create in.

Also, alluding to the somatic experience of walking as the most basic example of free movement improvisation, and the grounding phase of the Felt Thinking practice, I see it as a new depth of awareness, away from habits of only mental, i.e. conscious processing, and as a way that offers connections to the larger contexts of selfhood and belonging.

The task of making good progress in the direction of thinking out of habit though, if we think of environmentally inclusive contemplation as an undertaking concerning sensuous perception, is to broaden the horizon of our experience of life, as somatic praxis suggests, and to think beyond our customary images of matter.

In that way, the freedom of movement expression corresponds to breaking with the habits and conventions that govern life of the social ego, the ego that Bergson calls our ‘superficial self’ (Bergson, 1988). It is important to refer here to Bergson’s contention that human thinking, at least in its logical form, is unable to appreciate the true nature of life and that our failure to appreciate the ocean of life we are carried within explains why we are so alienated from life and our full condition of existence.

I do then propose exploring walking, in somatic experience of the self in Felt Thinking, as opening up to new possibilities of relating to ourselves, not as human but as living beings. All movement happens through an engagement with and in time-space, and the most extended version of such engagement in movement is what I call sensuous co-presence.

It is when, and where, in mindful walking, we can become aware of the dimensionality of being, and when and where we can sense that our own frame of spatio-temporal being co-exists within the multitude of other frames. And following such when and where questions, the questions about the time and space of being in movement, opens ways for connecting to the living dynamic of being in the world.

To further ground this therapeutic point of view within its philosophical relevance, Bergson points out that nothing occurs except in some kind of time-frame (Ibid.), and that we all build our relationships to life thanks to and through personal, social and cultural frames of time. And those frames can also be related to as depths of experience, as in Bergson’s words, when he says that there are diverse ‘tones’ of mental life, and that ‘our psychic life can be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life’ (Bergson, 1988, p. 8).

As the most natural path to embodied time-space experience, the proposed here practice of somatic receptivity in movement presents itself as an opportunity to connect to the primally relevant, ecological dimensions of our species, much deeper than social, cultural, or human communication. And the experience of walking refers to those deeper layers of relatedness that correspond to feeling time through pacing and other qualities of co-existence as opposed to picking on spatial bearings from occupying space only. We do not just walk through the landscape without creating a change. To me, embodied receptivity conveys this implicit co-presence of time and space in the experiential dimension, and includes patterns, rhythms, frequencies, and shapes, both visible and invisible to the eye, that our embodied attention brings forth into movement experience.

To start with, I propose we look at embodied receptivity as a form of witnessing, following movement led by ‘being with’ or relating with whatever enters one’s attention in the fullest way one can possibly experience. Beginning with the bipolar dynamics of the breath helps us find the feet on the ground.

Experiencing co-presence-ing in the mindful exchange