Walking Through Anger: Get Moving For Emotional Release

In this guided walking meditation, you will turn movement into medicine for the heart. As you walk, you'll recognize and release the energy of anger through mindful awareness of your body—your feet, breath, posture, and presence. You’ll explore how walking can shift perspective, settle emotion, and restore balance to mind and body. Perfect for moments when you feel stirred up or stuck, this practice transforms agitation into grounded clarity and flow.

Cover photo by Youcef Chenzer

Transcript

So I had like a couple of minutes before I start my hourly job and there's so many other things like do I want to do chores and I said I need to go outside for a walk. So wherever you are hopefully you have your shoes on if you've already gone into this audio meditation. So what I'm gonna do is start my watch. I'm gonna go for about 30 minutes and then to talk to you how we can incorporate our walking into our meditation practice. So I was writing this morning about how difficult it can be for me to contain my anger and at those particular points I really get overwhelmed with the energy of anger and and it's interesting how easy it is when we are angry to just yank out our phone and post a video of how outraged we are or we can send out a message a fiery email to someone or post a tweet or something very disturbing on social media or cut somebody out off in traffic or or even call our friend and tell them why we are right and why someone else or something else is wrong and that can be a good thing sometimes because it kind of gets somebody else to feel the energy that we are feeling but ultimately as we've seen in history that doesn't always bring a desired result. I know myself I have oh so many times recorded some rants of mine with this desire to tell somebody exactly how I felt but then I take a little bit of time and say you know let me look at it from a different perspective because the anger and the emotions of our moment just kind of shortcuts our logical brain and we react from a different state of mind and yes it does have a great amount of energy sorry I live near an airport it has a great amount of energy that can fuel action and that's just great oh yes it's great but it doesn't often sort through some of the consequences and if you think about it it doesn't really result in I don't want to say loving kindness but it really is the ego swelling up for that brief moment and demanding immediate action or a reaction rather than an intentional effort so obviously the better action is you know you take it you pause and you take it to meditation but as you know anytime you have that whether it's a righteous anger or just anger in general it can be very very difficult so what you do to kind of just kind of get that energy to kind of process because obviously your heart rate goes faster your breathing gets faster through some sort of exercise some sort of movement we kind of I don't know process is the right word but you you're able to channel that energy into something where it can have a chance to settle so in other words when you sit down and and hold on to that you might be tempted to put that anger aside and suppress it but as you know sometimes just that intensity can be so hot and it might take a pause for a moment but it will blow up later so by using movement such as a walk or even a very active breath practice we teach ourselves to get a better perspective of our situation and this helps us to regulate our emotions so that our emotions aren't running the show and by giving ourselves a few moments away from the situation and allowing the energy just kind of run its course because if you ever notice that even a craving of something usually doesn't last any more than about 20 minutes yeah they say you know if you can distract yourself enough for 20 minutes that craving will go away and emotions can sometimes do the same thing it's the hotness it's the intensity that can make you dizzy so what we do is we go out for a walk like we're doing let me say hmm let me just kind of walk this out and let it let it kind of sort through our brain for a little bit kind of similar to what we do when we sleep we take our minds off of it we kind of process it in the background and let things you know let the chaos sort of sort itself without us trying to put round pegs into square holes and I always find it interesting that some of the creatives have taken some time to themselves and separated themselves from their work and taken a walk they do something else engaging a different part of the brain engaging a different part of the body that allows us to settle that situation that might seem uncontainable when we fixate too much on it I even know that some of the most gifted mathematicians when they were trying to solve problems what they did was they had to step away from it do something different and that's what we're doing here we are walking away fixing our mind away not trying to figure it all out at once so we move we allow our feet to feel the pavement or the gravel or the treadmill we allow our feet to move notice your ankles there's one ankle working a little harder than the other let's see if you can balance that out notice your feet how they point and flex with each step but just notice that with each step so as one foot moves forward it must also surrender behind to move you ahead so one foot doesn't want to stay in front it does its work and it helps once it lands it helps propel your other foot ahead so they work together to move you forward it's a constant balancing act of pushing and letting go pushing let go pushing let go notice if you're even favoring one foot over the other and notice your knees bend in the same way one knee flexes while the other extends all of this is something we've learned so this is our halfway point so you can turn around so just noticing the the knees extending and flexing how it's all so perfectly coordinated we learned this so many years ago and it's got us through life this far and now let's look at our hips here huh when we sit too much and we crouch into our own ego our hips become stiff they don't move the way that they should they become locked in our opinions and beliefs and our hips must be able to move with the territory they absorb a lot of the shock just like your feet just like your knees and they too propel you forward with approval from your knees and your feet and your ankles and just notice how the top of the pelvis and how it kind of moves forward and back you know kind of swims forward and back and how your core keeps you upright so all those muscles in your hip your pelvis your core all of it is there to to help propel you to help move you so just think about what happens when one part of your body says nope no more how that gets you fixed in place and then you can't move forward and you get stuck now let's look at our breath look at your shoulders are you hunching forward because sometimes when we have been insulted or when we feel low or small we actually will protect our chest area this is where we breathe this is where our lungs are housed but if you maybe try to pull yourself upright stand tall open your chest open your shoulders take a breath that gives us the ability to breathe a little bit more deeply we also project a little bit more confidence perhaps we're a little bit more vulnerable but we are also recognizing how limited our view can become when we are crouched down and always looking down at the ground by standing tall standing proud you're able to look around without having to torque your neck too much because your entire body can go with you see how tall you can stand just by keeping your shoulders relaxed just rolled back just a little bit and opening your chest so your sternum is pointing a little bit up but at least shining forward ahead rather than pointing just a few feet down in front of you look at this perspective look up look around see the possibilities and of course there's somebody on her riding more so you know that no walk is perfect yeah sometimes you're gonna have somebody bumping into you somebody disturbing your peace but that's all part of life being able to absorb any of this seeming disturbances but recognizing that it only just builds your resilience so yeah okay i hear you i know you're loud i know you want to have your voice but i'm just gonna keep walking keep walking tall so what i'd like you to do now is take a deep breath into your lungs the deepest breath that you can take right now as you're moving open up your shoulders open to your chest like you're trying to expand your lungs sideways upwards behind you and relax on your next inhale let's do it again deep breath in open up expand you've got this big balloon inside your lungs open open open relax and let's do one more inhale deep deep deep deep exhale sigh it out deep deep sigh okay all right now check all your body parts check your feet check your ankles check your knees check your hips check your shoulders check your chest are you standing tall now for the next few minutes see if you can walk with a little attitude shake the hips swing your shoulders a little bit shake it out shake out the hips shake out the shoulders like you're on a catwalk yep you might look silly but you know what that's all right shake it out come on more attitude and then relax settle down so if you haven't noticed we have put on different attitudes and energies throughout this walking practice at first we recognized we found community with others who have felt this anger that we do so it's acknowledging yep i feel anger or yep i feel like things are out of control yep so everybody is listened and anybody who will listen ahead who will listen right now with you we're all experiencing the same thing and there's community in that but then we recognize the importance of moving beyond that and it's a matter of moving our bodies so we can kind of absorb and process all of that energy so it doesn't become stuck in our bodies and then we become mindful of our bodies so this is recognizing where we are in this space and time and recognize how our bodies move and how they might get out of joint out of alignment and then we check in with our breath we say you know what maybe my breath hasn't been as deep as it could be because something has caused me to feel small so we expand our lungs and then we recognize that maybe by the way that we've been sitting breathing has caused us to become too fixed so we take our breath change our posture open up to different possibilities and perspectives and we sit with that for a few moments and then we just kind of see how that can manifest into an attitude how we can just kind of shake loose all that stiffness and stuckness that has become so housed in our bodies and our minds see what it's like to walk freely for a change so slow down a little bit so hopefully this has been some sort of service to you and feel free to join me anytime you want to take a walk i will be here take care