Mindful Hiking: a working definition.
I get asked, fairly often, what mindful hiking actually is. The honest answer is that the phrase is used loosely enough in the wellness industry that it has almost stopped meaning anything specific. So this post is my attempt to write down what I actually teach in the first morning of every MindTreks retreat — and, just as importantly, what I do not teach.
This is not a manifesto. It is a working definition I have refined over six years of running trips, mostly by noticing what works for the eight people in front of me and discarding the rest.
The shortest version
Mindful hiking is the deliberate practice of bringing attention to the act of walking — to specific, identifiable elements of it — for a sustained period. That is the whole thing. Everything else is technique.
The elements I ask participants to attend to are usually one of: the breath, the contact of the foot with the ground, the rhythm of the gait, peripheral visual awareness, or the sound of the immediate environment. We rotate through these on retreat. We do not attempt to attend to all of them simultaneously, which is a common beginner mistake and an unproductive one.
What it is not
Mindful hiking, as I teach it, is not:
- Slow hiking. Speed is not the variable. On a retreat we walk at whatever pace the group and the terrain require. The practice is about where attention is, not how fast the feet move. I have seen participants walk briskly with excellent attention and others crawl while completely lost in thought.
- Quiet hiking. Silence is sometimes a useful container for the practice — we use silent intervals on retreats — but it is a scaffolding choice, not a definition. You can practice mindful walking while having a conversation, although it is harder.
- "Forest bathing" in the Japanese sense. Shinrin-yoku is a related but distinct practice with its own (interesting) research base. We do not teach it. If you are specifically interested in forest bathing, look for a guide trained in that tradition; we are not it.
- A guarantee of any state. I do not tell participants they will feel calmer, more present, or more anything. Some people do; some find the practice frustrating; many oscillate. The point of the practice is the practice.
The first morning, in detail
On the morning of day one — whether of a weekend or a five-day program — I spend about 25 minutes before we set foot on a trail walking participants through the same set of points.
First, we establish what attention even is, in operational terms. I ask the group to attend to the sensation of their feet inside their boots. Not the boots themselves, not the trail conditions, not whether the boots are comfortable. The sensation. We sit with this for two minutes. Almost no one finds this easy. That is the point.
Second, we agree on a specific object of attention for the first hour of walking. Usually I pick the breath: the rising and falling of the chest as it relates to the rhythm of the gait. Two breaths in, two breaths out, for example, paced to footfalls. This is not a meditation technique I invented; it has analogs in many walking-meditation lineages. I teach it secularly because that is how I learned it and what I can teach honestly.
Third, I explain what we will do when attention wanders, which it will. The instruction is not to maintain unbroken attention — that is not a realistic goal and pretending otherwise produces a particular kind of self-criticism that is the opposite of helpful. The instruction is to notice the wandering, and return. Once is enough. Once per noticing. The returning is the practice.
Fourth — and this is the part most often skipped in retreat marketing — I explain that the practice is portable and undramatic. It does not require a wilderness setting. The reason we do it in the Cascades is that wilderness reduces the number of competing demands on attention; it does not produce mindfulness on its own. You can practice in your neighborhood. You can practice in an airport. The mountains are a teacher's aid, not the lesson.
What changes, in my experience
I want to be careful here because I am about to step onto ground where wellness writing typically goes off the rails.
I have watched several hundred adults complete our retreats. I am not running a study. I cannot tell you what mindfulness will do for your nervous system, your sleep, your relationships, or your work. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you that based on a weekend retreat is selling you something.
What I will say, from the trail, is this: most participants leave saying something to the effect of "I noticed things I usually do not notice." That is a real outcome of the practice; it is also a small outcome, much smaller than the language of transformation that gets used around retreats. I think the small outcome is the honest one. The participants who come back for the five-day program after starting with a weekend are usually the ones who took the small outcome seriously.
If you want to try it before a retreat
You do not need our retreat to try mindful walking. You need a place where you can walk for thirty minutes without having to navigate traffic or interruption — a park, a quiet street, a long hallway in a pinch.
Pick one of the elements above. The breath is a good first choice. Walk for thirty minutes, pacing your breath to your steps in whatever ratio is comfortable. When attention wanders, return. Keep doing this until the thirty minutes are up. Do it again the next day.
If you have done that consistently for two weeks and you want a longer container, that is roughly when our retreats start to make sense. If you have done it once and felt great, the retreat will probably underwhelm you. If you have done it three times and noticed nothing, you have started the practice correctly.
Elena Marchetti is the founding guide of MindTreks. She holds an MBSR Teacher Certification from the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness and was a backcountry ranger in Yosemite and the Cascades from 2008 to 2019. Comments are closed; questions can be sent to hello@mindtreks.com.