Walking in the City x TfL

Hi, and welcome to this special Headspace exercise designed for walking in the city of London, and brought to you in partnership with Transport for London as part of their active travel initiative. So the idea of this is to as you find opportunities to get out into the city and walk, it's so easy in London, certainly when I'm living in London, when I'm staying in London, just to duck down onto the tube and find a way around the city that way. But very often there are opportunities when we can walk instead. And actually start to appreciate the city And I think living in any big busy city, it's really easy to feel that sense of busy-ness surrounding us, and for that to almost become overwhelming. But interestingly, if we can step back a little bit from that feeling, if we can step out of the thinking mind and not actually thinking about the busy-ness of the city, but instead simply being present in the process of walking, then all of a sudden the city starts to look a little bit different and we can start to appreciate it. You may have even had that sense. If you're ever showing someone around the city, if you have friends, family come to visit, all of a sudden you start to see the city through their eyes. And that's a really healthy thing. It changes our perspective. So this exercise sort of works in a similar way. It allows us to pull back from our every day sort of view of the city. And instead have that perspective, that fresh perspective of seeing a new. So in this exercise we don't have to walk in any special way. If you're still in a hurry to get somewhere you can still walk quickly and this exercise will work just as well. But know that when you do this type of exercise, it's quite normal for the speed of your your walking to slow down a little bit and that's fine. So we're going to start off walking. It doesn't matter where you are. Obviously number one is to always be aware of your surroundings, be aware of safety, cars, everything else, I know there's a lot going on in the city. But we're going to start off walking in the usual way and at your normal speed, whatever that might be, different for us all. And as you head off, begin to be aware of the space around you. It might be the buildings, it could be open areas, it could be parks. The shapes, the colors, the sounds, the smells. Just momentarily, stepping out of whatever you might've been thinking about and being more present in the space where you are right now, just for the next 10 or 20 seconds. Just taking that all in. Don't worry too much if thoughts keep jumping in, that's quite normal. Rather than giving them lots of attention, just letting any thoughts...