When Walking Becomes a Deep Practice

with Drs. Jacques MoraMarco and Yun Kim
How walking, breathwork, and embodied attention become a daily practice of self-directed wellness.

Walking is something we do every day. Yet we can travel considerable distances without noticing our breathing, feeling our feet, or being fully present for a single step. The body moves while the mind rehearses yesterday or anticipates tomorrow.

In this Integral Being conversation, Mark V. Wiley joins Drs. Jacques MoraMarco and Yun Kim to explore how mindful walking brings these separated aspects of experience together. Their book, Walking Your Way to Vitality, connects walking, breathwork, mindfulness, and practices drawn from East Asian medicine and the internal arts through five approaches to walking practice..

The discussion begins with walking, but its deeper subject is how we inhabit ourselves. What changes when movement becomes attentive? How does practice cultivate steadiness, confidence, and presence? And how do those qualities become available beyond the time we set aside to exercise?

When Walking Becomes a Practice

What does it mean to feel vital?

In the conversation, vitality includes energy, psychological and physical well-being, resilience, and serenity. It concerns the quality of being alive and available to experience.

Chronological age does not tell the whole story. MoraMarco describes older people whose curiosity and engagement remain strong, while some much younger people seem to have lost that quality. Vitality, in this sense, is something to cultivate through our relationship with daily life.

This changes the questions we bring to walking. Alongside distance, pace, and calories, we can ask: How do I feel while moving? Am I tense or at ease? Am I present? What quality of attention am I bringing? The walk becomes an opportunity to notice how we are living.

Mindful Walking Brings Attention Into the Body

Sitting meditation can be difficult. Stillness may bring discomfort, restlessness, or a heightened awareness of how busy the mind has become. Walking offers another point of entry.

Movement supplies a recurring sensory experience. Each step gives attention somewhere to return. The feet meet the ground; weight transfers; another step begins.

“In some ways, the moving meditation, not for all, but I think for some, the moving mindfulness meditation is more accessible and more doable.” —Dr. Yun Kim

The important distinction is between completing movements and experiencing them. Familiar choreography can continue while attention wanders. Mindful walking asks us to remain involved in what the body is doing. Remembering the sequence is only one part of practice. Feeling the movement is another..

Breath, Movement, and Intention

The walking practices bring breathing, stepping, and attention into relationship. A breathing pattern may initially require counting and coordination. With familiarity, the rhythm can become easier to sustain. The structure that first needs deliberate remembering becomes a way of gathering attention.

“It’s a wonderful concentration practice.” —Dr. Yun Kim

Kim describes how attending to breath and steps anchors the mind in the present activity. MoraMarco recalls students who used a brief breathwork walk before returning to demanding work or examinations, reporting that they felt calmer and better able to focus.

Within this discussion, breathwork becomes a practical means of exploring how we meet activity. The emphasis is on a rhythm we can inhabit rather than a performance we must get through.

What Slow Movement Reveals

Moving slowly can expose details that speed carries us past.

Mark recalls martial arts training in which his teacher required familiar combinations to be performed at an unusually slow pace. What first seemed unnecessary revealed problems in timing, distance, coordination, and the order in which different parts of the body moved. The same demand appears in walking. Attention must stay with the transfer of weight rather than rushing ahead to the next step.

“You got to stay in that moment and not have your mind ahead of the movement to the next one.” —Mark V. Wiley

Slowness makes patience tangible. It reveals the impulse to finish, advance, or reach the next position before fully experiencing the present one. A familiar movement can become unfamiliar again when we give it enough attention.

Balance as a Living Relationship

Balance is often pictured as holding still on one leg. Everyday life asks for something more dynamic. We turn, carry objects, negotiate obstacles, and adjust to changing surfaces. Remaining steady involves sensing where we are and responding as circumstances change.

“You don’t have to lift your leg up to 90 degree.” —Dr. Jacques MoraMarco

That observation matters because it makes room for a modest beginning. In discussing the animal walking practices, MoraMarco emphasizes awareness of weight and position, including small, deliberate steps.

His account of recovering from several falls also places balance within lived experience. Practice matters when its qualities remain available during an unexpected disruption. This connects directly with Inner Life’s larger inquiry: how does a trained capacity become something we can draw upon when conditions change?

Walking Without Having to Arrive

Ordinarily, walking is a means of getting somewhere. Mindful walking allows the movement itself to become worthy of attention.

Kim recalls practicing walking meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh at Deer Park Monastery in California. The retreat participants walked together in silence. What stayed with her was the peace he embodied.

“Ever since then, I incorporated walking meditation into my daily practice.” —Dr. Yun Kim

The conversation turns toward teachers whose steadiness developed through suffering, displacement, and loss. Their peacefulness was meaningful because of the circumstances through which they had lived.

Walking meditation becomes a setting in which that orientation can be explored: attending to the life already happening, without requiring every moment to justify itself through an achievement.

Let the Practice Work on You

Some days the mind settles. Other days it remains busy.

Variation is part of practice. Expecting each session to reproduce a previous experience can become another source of effort and disappointment. Kim offers a reminder from her Zen teacher:

“Let the meditation work on you.”

That invitation releases some of the pressure to manufacture an outcome. We can participate in the practice without continually measuring whether we feel peaceful enough. Returning matters. So does allowing time for the effects of practice to unfold. The conversation repeatedly places value on consistency, patience, and attention to experience.

Start Where You Are

An ambitious goal can make beginning harder.

Kim describes working with people who are sedentary, elderly, hesitant to move, or living with limitations. Her emphasis is on safety and gradually developing confidence.

“Start where you are.” — Dr. Yun Kim

MoraMarco similarly proposes a manageable commitment:

“Begin with a few minutes, establish continuity, and adapt the practice to the person.” —Dr. Jacques MoraMarco

One person may want greater confidence in walking. Another may need a quieter entry into meditation. Another may be interested in energy, coordination, or the experience of moving with attention. A useful beginning respects those differences. It gives the person somewhere to start and room to develop.

From Practicing to Having a Practice

Toward the end of the conversation, Mark distinguishes a period of practicing from having a practice. A session has a beginning and an end. Having a practice means the qualities cultivated during that session increasingly inform the rest of life. Awareness of weight and posture can accompany the walk to the car. Attention to breathing can return while waiting. The care brought to stepping can reappear when preparing food, washing dishes, or speaking with another person.

Dr. Kim describes how ordinary chores can become more pleasant when approached with the same quality of attention. Dr. MoraMarco emphasizes adapting the methods to what the person needs at that time.

Here, mindful walking opens into a larger possibility: the practice continues through the way we meet familiar activities. A practice becomes part of life through those returns.

The next step is another opportunity to be present.

About the Guests

They are the coauthors of Walking Your Way to Vitality: Integrating Walking, Breathwork, and Mindfulness Into Your Daily Exercise, which includes walking instructions and QR codes linking to videos.

Jacques MoraMarco, a doctor of traditional East Asian medicine, has been a licensed acupuncturist since 1977.   A pioneer in the field of Asian medicine, he took the first acupuncture licensing examination ever administered in the state of California. He apprenticed with See Han Kim, a renowned teacher of traditional Korean medicine, who was trained monastically. He completed his postgraduate work at Ecole Européene d’Acupuncture in Paris. From 1994 to 2004 he studied Sun Tai Chi with Sun Shurong in Beijing, China, and he is a fourth-generation lineage holder of Sun Tai Chi. He is a co-founder of the International Sun Tai Chi Association, along with Thomas Duterme and Eric Lee. Dr. MoraMarco has served as a clinic supervisor at Being Alive, an LA-based organization that provides free wellness services to people with HIV/AIDS and at the PTSD Clinic at the VA Greater Los Angeles Health System. He is dean emeritus at the former Emperor’s College of Traditional East Asian Medicine.

Yun Kim is the founder of Emperor’s Wellness, a doctor of traditional East Asian medicine, a fifth-generation lineage student of Sun Tai Chi, and has practiced mindful meditation for the past twenty years.  She has learned from renowned meditation teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh, Trudy Goodman, and Christiane Wolf.  A licensed acupuncturist in the state of California, she completed her doctoral clinical rotation at the PTSD clinic at the VA Greater Los Angeles Health System and maintains an acupuncture practice in Los Angeles. She earned her Doctor of Education at the University of Southern California, Rossier School of Education.