Walking In Your Shoes®

Through Walking To

Understanding

The activity of walking is usually a simple means to get us from one place in the environment to another. Here and there we walk for some sightseeing, for exercising our body or just to get some fresh air. In simply changing only a few parameters of ‘a Walk‘, we are suddenly able to experience a facet or dimension of reality which by far surpasses the one we typically encounter in daily life. First we let go of any ideas to get somewhere and how our body is supposed to move. Then we give the Walk a clear intention (such as to be another person) and pay close attention to what is happening, what is arising in our body. During the entire process we “perceive information” and express it verbally and physically through our body. And this then may lead us to many new insights and ultimately to a deeper understanding of the subject we’ve explored.

Possibilities

Who or what determines what we are going after in life, what we seek to accomplish or not, the risks we are willing to take, options we are able to see or how resourced we are? For each one of us there are true limitations indeed: not everyone can be a theoretical physicist or a world class sprinter, no matter how hard one tries. But unconsciously we are limiting ourselves much more because of old but powerful believes, self images, (trans-generational) traumas, a hurting inner child, and for a variety of other reasons. WIYS is a powerful tool to (re-)discover and reclaim the tremendous possibilities in our life, in our profession, in our projects or in our relationships. It can help us seeing and going beyond our habitual horizon, only to discover a path where we never thought one to be.

Healing

Though WIYS is a powerful tool, we don’t aim to heal a person or ‘work’ on improving the particulars of a condition. What we do is exploring deeper layers of reality, other facets of it. For example: A person would like to explore the state of depression she often finds herself in. It is not the aim to get rid of the depression or perhaps to make the person feel better but to explore a condition. So the Walk might show an exiled, suppressed part of hers which was not welcomed by the parents or caregivers in the early years of life. Maybe this part was too exuberant, too intense for them to deal with. By now recognizing this part (an inner child) in the Walk, embracing it, maybe grieving the disconnection from it for so many years, she will eventually be able to integrate and own it. In this way we facilitate a path to some -very likely- healing, and ignite capacities which are already there but perhaps have been dormant for a long time.

Empathy

Four of the main pillars of WIYS are mindfulness, intuitive movement, somatic resourcing and empathy. The latter is a capacity we all have, which is the ability to recognize and share the feelings of another person. At times we can well tune into how something feels like for the other, based on our very own experience. But without such experience we more assume to know how it is like. Regardless though on how familiar someone’s situation might look like, it is nevertheless a unique experience of this individual. WIYS is a wonderful method to practice and ‘realize’ our empathy by putting ourselves into the shoes of someone else. Having this immediate, felt sense in one’s own body, without making any assumptions or following an old story, makes WIYS a powerful way to dive into the human experience and beyond (Find a nice read about empathy here).

Oneness

A main contributor to the magnitude of suffering in the world is our strong conditioning to see and experience the world as inherently separate. There is me, there is you, there is us versus them and each one of us being separate from nature and the world around us. We tend to emphasize much more that which makes us distinct from one another than realizing how much there is which connects us, that which we all share (we might call this a non-dual perspective). The reasons for this separation are manyfold, from survival instincts, various degrees of trauma, etc. all the way to the fundamental loss of the connection to our True Nature. WIYS has been used for team building, to (re-) establish communication where it had broken down and to facilitate reconciliation. It can be a deep spiritual practice, allowing us to experience being the bridge to each other and beyond, and ultimately arriving at the Oneness of all there is. To use Joseph Culp’s words: “Can we be another? Yes! Because we already are”.

Creativity

Much has been written and talked about ‘being in the flow’, the creative process and more. Nevertheless, many of us had the experience – at some point in our life – that a project or some endeavor was stalling because we had no ideas on how to continue or what the next step needed to be. There is the story we’re writing which needs a villain we can’t come up with, the dance choreography which doesn’t meet our vision yet, the marketing campaign or product design that we are not getting anywhere with. We could explore what is perhaps blocking your creativity – what’s in the way – but can also go for a more ‘direct’ approach and walk your project, your choreography or the villain for your story etc. You might be surprised in what is showing up. Joseph Culp – the WIYS co-founder – has used WIYS for decades to help actors, artists, writers etc to tune into what supports their work and make it flourish. His Walking Theatre Group is using WIYS to develop characters, story lines and more.

Life's Depth

The potential of our life actually lived, is all too often only the tip of the iceberg, those -say- 10% we see above the waterline. Unfortunately, we barely recognize that there is so much more than what seems to be, what meets the eye so to speak. So, what is keeping us on the surface rather than experiencing life in its depths, like 50% or 85%? Some of the factors contributing to this are: limiting believes, old patterns & self-images, sometimes trauma, following the standard notion of separateness & dualism, loyalties to ancestors and many more. We are mostly unconscious of these and other dynamics operating in us and some are sanctioned or even reinforced by society, like individualism, consumerism and other ‘-isms’. WIYS can help us to (re-)align ourselves with the original depth, to see what is in the way, what is limiting us and then go beyond what we think we might deserve or can achieve in this lifetime. In some way then WIYS is moving us towards ‘more life’ one step at a time.

Knowing

Osho: “For listening, one needs a discipline of being silent, of being in the moment, of putting aside one’s mind with all its garbage – making a way for whatever you are listening to. If it is true, bells will start ringing in your heart; if it is not true, nothing will happen within you. This is a different kind of knowing: through the heart, not through the mind. This is the only true way that one can understand.” – Osho, Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance, Ch.#5: Prologue
The above quote summarizes quite beautifully some key aspects of WIYS: we work phenomenological (with what arises in the moment) and during the Walk we listen more to our body than to our mind (what does it feel like). That which rings true then – not necessarily recognized by our mind – will express itself thru the body of the <i>Walker</i> in movements, words, emotions and others. We use our mind intelligently to understand and integrate our experience (not playing out any of our prejudices, judgements etc.) once the Walk has concluded. Welcome to A Different Kind of Knowing.