When our ancestors in wild nature gathered and hunted their food, or moved on the land to seek new encampments, they inevitably were on foot – on two feet to be precise.

Humans are bipeds, and bipedal movement – upright walking – is central to the story of how our species succeeded in nature, evolving to become prolific walkers and then moving on foot to dwell throughout all of the Earth’s major land masses amidst our natural foraging life.

This natural life of regular walking underlies our natural and instinctive relationship with the larger environment, and still strongly influences our general orientation and health needs today. Humans are remarkable natural animals in so many ways, and our ability to walk upright, a trait our ancestral line has possessed for at least five million years, is one of our most notable attributes.

We are walking animals
Human beings are walking animals, as much as we are social animals or thinking animals. As proof of this, we would point out that humans can walk great distances without injury or harm to ourselves. Indeed, long walks often can bring great benefits to our physical and emotional health, and new perspectives on and growth within our lives. Because walking is so natural to us and an integral part of healthy human life, when we do not walk, or walk enough, even if we engage in other forms of exercise, our emotional balance, our sense of connection and harmony with the greater world around us, and our natural and complementary feelings of completeness and openness are all often greatly diminished.

Walking of course underlies so much of our human existence that it is hard to avoid altogether. But in fixed society – whether in industrial society, where mechanized travel and full personal schedules are the norm, or in pre-industrial society, where the land can be either tightly controlled or under-policed and unsafe for walking – there often are great physical and practical obstacles to walking substantial distances. It is thus very easy for us not to walk nearly enough today to ensure adequate natural conditioning, or sufficient exposure to the natural world for the cultivation of our natural well-being.

This fact of civilized life can make it challenging to maintain our natural health and fitness levels, or to ensure our natural connection to and sense of scale and place in the world around us. Most of us suffer today, and often far more than we may realize, from this now widespread and longstanding limitation on natural human life and movement, and natural human health and well-being.

As a species that lived nomadically and evolved for millions of years on open grasslands and in other wild settings, we each need the physical challenge and cognitive stimulation that regular and extended walks naturally provide. We need the unfolding landscapes, the changing horizons and perspectives, and the new places and chance encounters that are integral to the practice of walking and essential aspects of human life itself in nature. We need and greatly benefit from the feel of the wind and sun, and even the rain, on our bodies. We grow as people beneath clouds and stars passing above us, and explore ourselves as much as we do the world with the rise and fall of paths beneath our feet. Each of these things is an essential feature of the natural human life we are adapted for, and they remain essential for our health and well-being today.

An essential human experience
Walking, outdoors and ideally in wild nature, provides an essential experience of who we are as human beings. It helps us to better understand and live with a new and expanded awareness of how we developed and succeeded in nature, grounding and restoring our natural human emotions and enriching our life perspective. Walking re-connects us with the world, with others and with other species, and prevents stagnation and regressive cycles in our lives. Walking reaches into and nourishes our natural instincts and health-seeking impulses, and even fosters our natural curiosity and our inclination to pursue growth, progressivity, and new connections in our lives.

Without regular and varied walking experiences, we are inevitably less healthy and natural as people. Our bodies weaken and our spirits become dulled and restless. We so often lose our innate sense of natural human life and our natural human place in the world, and equally what is most important to our well-being and healthy life. The natural movement and sensory stimulation that walking provides, the time outdoors in nature, the physical exertion and skillful covering of terrain, and the new experiences that walking opens up for us are all basic to who we are as humans and critical to our natural health and vitality. For all these reasons, daily walking is an essential part of natural human conditioning and the HumanaNatura natural exercise program, and a practice we strongly encourage and that you will likely soon validate as crucial to healthy life.

As we begin the practice of walking, especially in the context of the HumanaNatura natural health program, two important questions inevitably arise:

• How frequently should we walk? Our best advice is, as often as possible. By this, we mean every day, and more than once a day if you can – if you have the time, stamina, and inclination. In truth, we would encourage you to walk everywhere you can, to move away from sitting at desks and in cars and trains, to get out of doors and into the broader world, and to experience the natural power and energy of walking whenever you are able. Walk when you feel restless. Walk when you feel exhilarated. Walk when you are in town or when you are in the country. Walk up hills and over them, and to the valleys, and to the lakes and oceans that always lie beyond them. Walk with friends and family. Walk alone. Walk as recreation and as more than recreation. Walk even as a meditation. Walk as an integral part of your life and of all natural and healthy human life. Walk to reconnect to the environment, and to the sights and sounds, and other sensations, that are continually around us in the greater world. Walk for and into discovery and learning. Walk for life and into life. Walk to promote new states of personal fitness and well-being, for yourself. Walk, in other words, whenever and wherever you can.
  
  
• How far should we walk? Our advice here will instead vary by person, depending on both your current physical conditioning and your current surroundings, since you must always walk within your physiological capability and only where physically safe. But what if we said – to challenge your thinking and perspective on the practice of walking, and natural health and human vitality itself – as far as your body and spirit will carry you? In all seriousness, most people greatly underestimate our ability to walk, especially once we restore our natural health and fitness, and the enormous and life-enriching impacts that extended walking can have on our health and personal well-being. Walking to your local market is a good start. But walking across town, or to the next town, or across the land more broadly, in deliberate journeys into the natural world, and our natural health and self, may be where you need to set your sights over time. Walks lasting an entire day or more, in fact, allow us to far more fully explore the natural conditioning, emotional renewal, and enriched and expanded connection to the natural world that all walking affords us.

With these ideas in mind – especially that we should walk more often and often much farther than we might first think – perhaps you can begin to better appreciate the great emphasis that HumanaNatura places on walking as an integral part of natural human life and our natural conditioning, and as a key means of promoting restored and enhanced natural health and well-being. For HumanaNatura natural health practitioners, time spent walking is, literally and figuratively, steps toward new and even transformative levels of personal health and vitality, and to new, more natural, and far richer outlooks on our lives and on our human condition in the world today.

Walking is time in nature
Walking is time spent in the practice of natural health itself. It is time outdoors in nature and often a time of returning to nature in new ways, time that is in fact far nearer to our natural human state than most of us can otherwise achieve each day. Walking is time re-discovering and promoting our natural human feelings of personal power, engagement, adventure, and self-reliance. It is time with oneself and with others, and often with a more natural and open-ended viewpoint on human life and the larger world.

Walking is exploration too, an act that has remarkable effects not just on our physical health and conditioning, but on our emotional and spiritual well-being. Walking restores and reminds us of our natural human ability to move great distances at will, and to be at ease, to be whole and autonomous as people, on the land and amidst movement and changing surroundings. Walking is an ever-present opportunity to be with ourselves and with nature, to experience our natural human life of movement and change, and to be returned to the probing and discovery that is integral to all healthy human life.

Perhaps most importantly, walking is a re-emersion in the ancient world that created us. It therefore offers us all a direct and quite personal returning to our human past and human nature. When walking, we again feel, and in truth become, an integral part of the natural environment once again – at once more vulnerable in, more open to, and more intensely aware of the extraordinary and mysterious natural world in which we live.

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