Fox Walking

Fox-walking.

The first time I heard this phrase, I was intrigued, as you may imagine given the name of this blog.  I was reading Tom Cowan's blog, Riverdrum, where he mentions it.  This is what he has to say:

"Fox-walking is a term for stalking in which you move extremely slow, I repeat extremely slow. You put your foot down on its outer edge and roll it over onto the ball of your foot, and lower your heel. You cannot walk fast doing this. This is more extreme than slow-motion scenes in movies. It will take perhaps five times as long to go wherever you're going to compare to your usual pace. But it is truly ecstatic. You're hardly moving so you feel like just another thing in the forest. Birds don't see you coming and fly away. Chipmunks don't bat an eye. And you notice everything. You see everything partly because you're spending so much time at each step you take, but also because you don't have to look down at the ground. When you Fox-walk, your foot feels the roots or rocks or dips on the earth, and you adjust your step accordingly. Fox-walking frees you up to keep your attention on the 180° scene in front of you. You can spend a lot of time looking at what ever you see."

So, of course, I had to give it a go. What I immediately noticed was that I am not nearly the ninja I thought I was when I was younger.  Eventually, once I figured out that I needed to open myself so that energy flowed into me rather than concentrating so much on noticing as much as I could that I was pumping energy out of me, the animals and birds no longer flew from my presence.

Once I became calm and open to the energies and consciousnesses around me, I immediately became "bigger".  That familiar connection and oneness, that I was formerly only used to feeling in meditative and sitting trance states, rushed into me more forcefully than I had ever previously experienced.  I began to make this as regular a practice as I could from then on, and I highly recommend everyone try it.