Walking occupies a distinctive and underexamined position in the depth-psychological corpus, appearing at the intersection of somatic psychology, phenomenology of embodiment, and the psychology of consciousness. The most sustained treatment is found in Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy tradition, where gait is elevated from a merely physical phenomenon to a rich procedural record of personal history, trauma-related dysregulation, and attachment-derived belief systems. For Ogden, the characteristic style of walking is neither arbitrary nor merely biomechanical; it is a crystallized autobiography, encoding relational learning and capable of either perpetuating or transforming the psychological patterns that shaped it. Complementing this clinical perspective, Dacher Keltner draws on Rebecca Solnit’s cultural history and empirical research on synchronous movement to argue that collective walking generates an awe-like expansion of self into environment, fostering community, moral attunement, and wonder. Byung-Chul Han positions walking within a critique of hyperactive modernity, suggesting that the capacity to sustain walking as a form of contemplative boredom is itself a measure of psychological depth. Karl Abraham’s early psychoanalytic work links walking and locomotor anxiety to libidinal dynamics, disclosing the erotic substrate beneath apparently innocent motility. Across these voices, walking emerges as a site where soma, psyche, and culture converge, making it an indispensable term for any depth-psychological account of embodied subjectivity.
Habits of walking, like all movement habits, offer an inroad to the difficulties that bring clients to therapy, and changing one’s pattern of walking challenges the beliefs that influenced how the pattern developed.
Ogden establishes walking habits as procedural psychological artifacts that both encode and perpetuate trauma-related beliefs, making gait a primary therapeutic target.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis
The way we walk speaks volumes about who we are and how we feel. Whether we shuffle, stride, saunter, glide, traipse, or trudge with heavy footsteps, we are telling the world how we feel today, how we feel about ourselves and what we expect from others.
Ogden frames gait as a continuous somatic communication of psychological state, self-concept, and relational expectation, positioning walking style as a living psychogram.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis
With his therapist walking alongside him, they noticed together the ways in which Robert’s walk reflected and sustained what he has learned growing up—mainly, to keep to himself, not get involved in other people’s business, and stay focused on the task in front of him.
Through the clinical case of Robert, Ogden demonstrates that habitual gait actively sustains attachment-learned relational withdrawal, and that therapeutic modification of walking can alter these self-reinforcing patterns.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis
Alejandro’s walking pattern accompanied the ‘all work and no play,’ ‘life is hard’ attitudes that he had embodied as a boy in his struggling, hard-working immigrant family that often suffered discrimination.
The case of Alejandro illustrates how intergenerational sociocultural suffering is somatized into characteristic gait, with each step reproducing formative ideological and emotional schemas.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015thesis
These different kinds of walking, ranging from the more collective to the solitary, produce, in Solnit’s theorizing, an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment.
Keltner, drawing on Solnit, argues that walking—especially in collective forms—generates an awe-structured expansion of self-boundaries, connecting individual consciousness to social and natural patterns.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023thesis
Walking gave him ‘chance contacts on the streets and alleys,’ leading him to observe that ‘it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant.’
Keltner invokes Kierkegaard as evidence that contemplative walking in public space produces a heightened receptivity to everyday moral beauty and the wonder latent in the insignificant.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
What does this walk feel like emotionally? How do you feel about yourself when walking this way? What belief might this walk convey about you?
Ogden’s structured worksheet questions operationalize the theoretical claim that gait encodes emotion and belief, providing clinicians with a phenomenological method for accessing walking’s psychological content.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
DIFFERENT WAYS OF WALKING is not about improving how we walk but rather comparing the impact of different ways of moving on mood and beliefs.
Ogden specifies that the therapeutic exploration of walking is phenomenological rather than normative, aimed at revealing the bidirectional relationship between movement style and psychological state.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
If a person experiences boredom while walking and has no tolerance for this state, he will move restlessly in fits and starts or go this way and that. However, someone with greater tolerance for boredom will recognize, after a while, that walking as such is what bores him.
Han deploys walking as a diagnostic criterion for psychological depth, arguing that the capacity to endure the boredom of walking without flight into hyperactivity indicates the contemplative attunement essential to genuine creativity.
, The Burnout Society, 2010supporting
He said that when he was walking in the street he felt as though he were dancing. It further transpired that the patient, who was sexually abstinent, derived great pleasure from dancing; and his pollution dreams were often dreams of dancing.
Abraham’s early psychoanalytic case reveals that walking is libidinally cathected in locomotor anxiety, with the pleasurable kinesthesia of walking condensing displaced erotic and rhythmic impulses associated with dancing.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Walking a labyrinth activates a subtle pattern of mobilization and calm and opens the mind to new experiences.
Dana situates labyrinth walking within polyvagal theory, framing this ritualized form of walking as a structured alternation between autonomic mobilization and regulated calm that facilitates psychological openness.
, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection A Guide for, 2018supporting
Walking in unison gives rise: Collective movement also can generate, in certain conditions, more conformity and less creative thought, it’s worth noting.
Keltner introduces a critical qualification to the awe-walking thesis, noting that synchronized collective walking carries the risk of promoting conformity over creative individuation.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023supporting
Relax shoulders back and down. Align neck with shoulders (not reaching forward or retracted). Raise or lower your chin so that it is parallel with the ground. Look ahead and around you rather than down.
Ogden provides granular somatic instructions for modifying gait, treating each postural adjustment as a micro-intervention that disrupts habitual psychological patterning encoded in the body.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
Ian was equipped with an eye-tracking device—an apparatus worn on the head (permitting free movement) that continuously pinpoints the locus of the gaze.
Gallagher’s phenomenological study of bodily self-awareness peripherally implicates locomotion in the constitution of spatial orientation, touching on walking only insofar as free movement is a condition for normal topokinetic control.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside