Carolyn Scott Kortge - Healing Walks for Hard Times: Quiet Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Get Your Life Back

Few things are as healing as a good walk. I heartily endorse Healing Walks for Hard Times.

Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdom

Courageous, compassionate, and compelling, this wise guide to the healing power of walking elegantly demonstrates how simple steps can offer profound benefits.

Carol Krucoff, author of Healing Yoga for Neck and Shoulder Pain

Reading Healing Walks for Hard Times is like traveling with a wise mother who understands the depths of anguish that can visit a life, but also has a literal and metaphoric road to healing thats available to all of us. Carolyns advice is practical, lucid, and speaks to every aspect of our lives.

Dan Shapiro, PhD, author of Moms Marijuana

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sometimes lifes hurdles literally stop us in our tracks, sapping vitality and preventing us from participating fully in our own lives and the lives of those we love. Carolyn Scott Kortge recognizes that a key to joyous re-engagement with the world can bejust as literallyto get moving again. With a focus on walking for wellness, Kortge outlines a compassionate, practical program for navigating your way through lifes physical, emotional, and spiritual hard times.

Within the supportive framework of this eight-week walking program you set your own pace, taking steps that restore a sense of balance and order, even if youre weighed down by the lethargy and loss of control that often accompany illness, depression, or trauma. Discover how to link mental focus with physical movement to create healing periods of stress release. Learn to match your steps with meditation in a way that clears a path through confusion. Move forward, literally, both in good times and in tough ones, with mental and physical steps that lead you away from fear or stress and guide you toward wellness and peace. Engage in a path to recovery that attends to not just the physical, but also acknowledges healing as an emotional, spiritual, and mental journeya journey of survivorship.

To learn more about the author, visit her website at walksthatheal.com.

CAROLYN SCOTT KORTGE is an award-winning journalist, a former competitive race walker, and a cancer survivor. Kortges Walking Well program has been presented at medical centers, wellness events, survivor conferences, and health resorts and spas across the country. She is the author of The Spirited Walker: Fitness Walking for Clarity, Balance, and Spiritual Connection.

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Healing Walks for Hard Times

Quiet Your Mind,

Strengthen Your Body,

and Get Your Life Back

CAROLYN SCOTT KORTGE

TRUMPETER

Boston & London

2011

Trumpeter Books

An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

trumpeterbooks.com

2010 by Carolyn Scott Kortge

Cover photograph Ted Levine/CORBIS

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kortge, Carolyn Scott.

Healing walks for hard times: quiet your mind, strengthen your body, and get your life back / Carolyn Scott Kortge.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2237-5

ISBN 978-1-59030-740-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. WalkingHealth aspects. 2. Stress (Physiology)Health aspects.

3. Mental healing. 4. Comtemplation. I. Title.

RA781.65.K66 2010

613.7176dc22

2010008310

For Dean,

So lucky to be loving you

Contents

Walking is mans best medicine.

Hippocrates

When the alarm went off at 5 AM , I was waiting for it. Fear had roused me already. I rolled to my side and reached out to silence the buzzer on my bedside table. Slowly, I pulled up into a reluctant hunch at the edge of the bed. The countdown had begun. Two hours to surgery. Two hours to prepare. Two hours to worry and fret. Instinctively, my shoulders pulled forward in a protective reflex. I wrapped my arms across my chest and lingered amid my fears.

How would my body feel to me the next time I woke up? How would it look? How would it be changed by the breast cancer diagnosis that had spilled a chilling terror into my days? A swirl of what-ifs and whys gripped my mind. I knew what I had to do next. Still, it took a deep breath and a dose of determination to get me out for a walk. It wasnt simply habit that moved me. It was willful effortan intentional pursuit of mental calmness.

The cool air of a May morning awakened my senses as I turned onto a neighborhood street. My husband fell into step at my side in silence. The rhythm of his footsteps steadied me as we settled into the hush of a new day. Soon, the words of a familiar chant began to roll through my head. I am walk-ing. I am breath-ing. I am walk-ing. I am breath-ing, I repeated mentally. The words matched the rhythm of my steps and breath, creating a steady, four-beat cadence.

Over and over, the phrase cycled through my mind. When fears intruded on the phrase, I started over again. I am walk-ing. I am breath-ing. The pattern was soothing. It silenced uncertainties that tumbled through my thoughts and quieted the fears that pursued me as I prepared for surgery. Earlier in my life, Id used these words to block the self-doubt that tripped me up in athletic competition. They reminded me to breathe and to move. Fresh air in; stale air out. Nothing else right now.

On this day, I needed the words as a shield against panic. For two weeks, I had been grappling with the questions a crisis unleashes. Why did this happen to me? What should I do next? What did I do to deserve this? Over and over. Around and around. The questions taunted me. The struggle is familiar to everyone who has been leveled by a life-changing event or diagnosis. Nothing will ever be quite the same again. In such times, we grope for something familiar to provide reassurance, stability, and a respite from the storm. Sometimes its a friend or family member. Sometimes music. Sometimes prayer or an uplifting poem.

For me, reassurance stretched along the sidewalks of my neighborhood. Id been walking them for years. Once these streets had presented a training challenge as I discovered an athlete hidden inside me. Back then, I measured off a mile and bought a stopwatch to clock my walking pace. The surprising thrill of endorphins and physical exertion led me to learn racewalking techniques. At age forty-six, I entered my first track meet.

Athletic competition was an exhilarating experience. It opened a new outlet for my competitive spirit and rewarded me with national medals. But my greatest achievement as an athlete was learning to heal the philosophical fragmentation of body, mind, and spirit that had governed my approach to life. Success in competition demanded a unified effortbody, mind, and spirit working as one. By focusing on breath, or on positive words, I learned to control the erratic distractions of my active mind. I discovered the power, and the joy, in alignmentin all of me working together toward a shared goal. I felt whole. When I stopped competing as a racewalker, I settled back into fitness walking and used the tools of athletic competition to make my steps an active meditation.