from our friends at Triarchy Press:
Walking is clearly an end in itself. The body needs no excuse to move around in whatever way it comfortably can. BUT, the mind likes an excuse and often needs to be bribed (liked a recalcitrant 4-year-old) with ‘getting to the top of the hill’, ‘following that footpath’, ‘exercising the tortoise’, ‘losing weight’… add your own favourites.
In recent months, Triarchy authors have come up with some wonderful new ways to bribe your mind to walk ~ all neatly wrapped and popped into three brand new handbooks published this month. In a nutshell they cover:
- walking to unlock creative writing
- walking to reawaken our deeply ingrained, but often forgotten, connection with nature
- walking to defend our unconscious selves from assault by phones and the digital world
walk write (repeat) ~ We all know that walking helps us think (try to solve a problem sitting down). Writer and lecturer Dr Sonia Overall’s handbook uses walking as a tool for creative thinking and writing. It’s a whole collection of sparks, experiments, projects, catapults, prompts, drifts and exercises to help us walk to unlock our creative writing. Sonia suggests ways to gather materials, submit to the sensory, explore our homes like a tourist, and scour the streets like a metal-detector in search of the hidden, the forgotten and the overlooked.
Nature Connection is a handbook of practices for therapy and self-exploration. As Drs Margaret Kerr and Jana Lemke explain, “Experiencing ourselves as part of nature tends to an underlying wound we all carry – a subtle, ever-present feeling of disconnectedness that is clearly visible in our current lives and culture. Experiencing ourselves as part of nature opens up a larger community of life, unconditional acceptance and a deep feeling of belonging. …this journey can motivate us to start tending the Earth’s ecological wounds and rebalancing our part in the web of life.”
Covert responds to three afflictions in society: our growing fixation with spending time looking at a screen; the proportion of our lives we spend sitting/lying down; the invasion of our privacy in the digital age. Drs. Melanie Kloetzel and Phil Smith use 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ to suggest a straightforward, embodied practice that you can use to defend and preserve yourself and your beleaguered unconscious in the everyday world.
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That’s three wonderful new handbooks, all extensively illustrated, all full of thought- and body-provoking suggestions and practices. Each one is £12.50, but use code tpdirect to get them for £10 each from our website. Or go here to buy all three for just £25.
You can find details of these and all our Walking books here.