Inner Walk — Walking Meditation Retreat on Koh Phangan
What Inner Walk is, how the Koh Phangan retreat works, and a personal review of the practice
Inner Walk is a walking meditation practice developed on Koh Phangan, Thailand, by Phra Olarn, a Buddhist monk born on the island, who passed away in 2024.
At the center of the practice is a very simple act: walking.
You don’t try to stop your thoughts, reach quiet, or produce some particular state of mind. Walking creates a frame within which you can start noticing what’s already happening — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and our reactions to them.
The practice draws inspiration from Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen, but doesn’t try to teach them as a philosophical system. The ideas are conveyed in simple language and through images that are easy to carry afterward into life outside the practice too.
One of the central ideas in Inner Walk is that we spend a large part of our time inside thoughts, stories, expectations, and memories, and often barely notice it. Walking isn’t meant to make them disappear. It lets you see them as they appear, and return again and again to what’s happening now.
On Koh Phangan there’s a four-day process. Participants walk in silence for a few hours each day, alongside talks and explanations about the practice and sharing circles. Participation is donation-based.
How it actually works
You walk, again and again, along the same short route.
And that’s more or less everything you’d see from the outside.
But while walking, something starts to reveal itself.
A thought appears. Another follows it. Maybe impatience shows up. Maybe boredom. Maybe the body wants to stop. Sometimes a memory arrives, sometimes a strong emotion, and sometimes there are a few moments where you’re simply walking.
There’s no need to choose what appears. The practice is learning to recognize all of it as it’s happening.
You can think of this as training an “awareness muscle”: the more we practice recognizing a thought as a thought, an emotion as an emotion, and a reaction as a reaction, sometimes a little more space opens up before we act out of them automatically.
In this sense, walking isn’t only something you do during the retreat. It serves as a kind of simple laboratory for observing the mind — because the same things that show up while walking — impatience, wanting something to end, judgment, expectation, fear, or pleasure — also show up in the rest of life. It’s just that while walking, there’s less room to run from them.
Is this Buddhist walking meditation?
Yes and no.
Walking meditation has a long history across different Buddhist traditions, but Inner Walk is a modern practice that Phra Olarn developed out of various sources and influences.
In certain Buddhist walking meditations, attention is deliberately directed toward the movement of the body, the contact of the feet with the ground, or another meditation object. In Inner Walk, walking serves as a more open frame for inquiry into whatever is arising in the mind.
So I find it useful to see it as a practice that stands on its own, rather than trying to fully identify it with vipassana, Zen, or another traditional meditation method.
More information
How I got to know it
After meeting Yuval “Fluke” Birman I started practicing Inner Walk.
One of the things that struck me right away was how little you actually have to do.
Physically, walking was simpler and more natural for me than sitting for long stretches. But very quickly I discovered that through this simple act I meet a lot of the same things I meet in sitting: thoughts that keep arriving, restlessness, emotions, the wish for something to change — and sometimes moments where there’s nothing that needs to be done with any of it.
There’s something in Inner Walk that reminds me of shikantaza in motion. Not because the two practices are the same — they come from different frameworks and have different histories and instructions — but because of something in the approach.
I don’t need to try to reach a particular state.
If there are thoughts, there are thoughts.
If there’s restlessness, there’s restlessness.
And if, for a moment, you’re simply walking — you’re simply walking.
What speaks to me in this practice is that simplicity: trying less to manage whatever shows up, and learning more to see it. And then continuing to walk.