I like the idea of someone talking me through a practice. I don’t always want to stop what I’m doing and make a whole session out of it.
Out for an easy walk, or folding laundry, my mind has plenty of room to go over the same three things again. I’d take a voice giving me something else to notice, or a question worth chewing on. I just don’t want to sit down for it.
I’ve tried the standard version. Ten minutes on the floor with my eyes closed mostly taught me how long ten minutes is.
It doesn’t have to be “feel your feet,” either. A prompt could ask what I’m still carrying from work, whether something actually needs a decision tonight, or what I’m walking past without seeing. A little direction, then leave me alone with it for a bit.
What I want isn’t another podcast’s worth of information. It’s also not coming up with the next useful question myself. It’s the bit in between.
And I don’t mean playing something in the background while I answer emails. More like the guidance being part of the walk, instead of the walk being something I have to finish before I’m allowed to start.
Does anyone actually use guided audio this way — reflections, check-ins, anything that isn’t a walking meditation? What fits, and what just keeps telling you to close your eyes?
An answer, since we have one
Yes, this exists, and it’s a smaller category than the question implies. What it needs from the audio is specific.
It has to fit an activity that doesn’t need your attention. Walking, folding, washing up, a train. Not cooking with heat, not anything with traffic near it, and never driving. The test is simple: if you had to stop and think about the task, the guidance is competing instead of replacing.
One prompt, then a gap long enough to actually try it. Most guided audio talks through its own silence because silence feels like dead air to whoever made it. In a walking practice the silence is the part where you notice the street. If a track can’t leave twenty seconds empty, it isn’t built for this.
Short. Five to ten minutes. A forty-minute session is a different product; it assumes you cleared the time.
The part that’s hard to get right is the “bit in between” you named — specific enough to act on, open enough that the answer is yours. “Notice the pressure under your feet” works because it’s checkable. “Be present” doesn’t, because you can’t tell whether you succeeded, so you start evaluating instead of walking.
What doesn’t fit: anything that opens with a long body scan, anything that asks you to close your eyes, and anything that treats the activity as an interruption. If the recording sounds like it’s waiting for you to finish walking so the real practice can begin, you’ll feel it in the first minute.
We make four walking practices for exactly this reason. They’re not the most popular thing we’ve built, which is its own answer to your question.