The Donkey We Ride: Why Walking Meditation Is Not a Journey to Anywhere

We often find ourselves caught in the strange paradox of looking for the donkey while we are already riding it. It is a peculiar human distraction—this idea that we are somehow separate from the totality and must perform specific actions to find our way back to it. We hear about practices, we hear about the "journey," and we imagine a future point where the "separate self" finally achieves a state of permanent peace. But who is this seeker? And where exactly is it planning to go? When we speak of walking meditation, the mind immediately wants to turn it into a tool for achievement. We think that if we walk slowly enough, or with enough focus, we will eventually "attain" a deeper level of conscious presence. But this is the old trap of the horizontal plane. It is the belief that time will eventually deliver what is only available right now. The absolute isn't waiting for us at the end of a path. It is the path, the walker, and the movement itself. There is no "you" that can do something to get there because there is no "there" separate from "here." Meditation, in any form, can certainly make the body-mind feel better. It can bring a sense of comfort or clarity to the daily chaos. That is perfectly fine. But let’s be frank: it is not a ladder to enlightenment. The idea that meditation leads to greater awareness is a misunderstanding of what we already are. Awareness is not a muscle to be trained; it is the screen upon which the entire film of your life is projected. Whether the film is a tragedy or a comedy, the screen remains untouched and unchanged. Whether you are sitting in silence or walking through a crowded street, the aware presence that you are is already fully operational. We often imagine that we need to reach a state where the mind is perfectly still, like a sky without clouds. But the nature of the sky is to hold both the sun and the storm. A sky that only permitted blue would not be the sky; it would be a cage. In the same way, the absolute includes everything—the perfect and the imperfect, the generosity and the greed, the silence and the noise. We are not looking for a way to delete the "separate self" or to fix the body-mind so it never feels agitation again. Liberation is not the liberation *of* the "I," but liberation *from* the "I." It is the sudden recognition that the one who thinks they are walking, the one who thinks they are practicing walking meditation, is just another appearance in the dream. Think of the dreamer in bed. In the dream, they might be sick and searching desperately for a doctor. When they wake up, they don't find the medicine; they realize they were never the sick person to begin with. They were the entire dream—the doctor, the patient, and the room. This is the non-separation we are talking about. There is no separate seeker who finds the absolute. There is only the absolute appearing as a seeker for a while, and then appearing as the realization that there was never anything to find.