Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being, Thom Hartmann.
Well, now, here is a fascinating and unusual book. Kind of an unexpected twist on the path to spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health. My friend Thom Hartmann has written this remarkable little treatise about a new approach to using walking — simple walking as a means of healing emotional trauma and bringing forth optimal mental functioning.

As he has done now for years, Hartmann here is once again going to drive psychologists and psychiatrists wild with his ideas. This book…
• Explores why and how we carry emotional wounds, and how they can be healed and resolved
• Shows how walking stimulates both sides of the brain to promote and restore mental health
• Provides simple, yet potent, mental exercises to use while walking
Our bodies usually heal rapidly from an illness, injury, or wound. Yet our minds and hearts often suffer for years with debilitating symptoms of distress or upset. Why is it so hard for our minds and hearts to heal? The key to healing them is simple and can be just a short walk away.
Are you ready for this? Just a short walk away. You know when you get angry people sometimes say, “Go take a hike!” Well, this might be the best advice you ever got.
It turns out that walking — a bilateral therapy that has been a part of human life throughout history — allows people to heal emotionally as quickly as they do physically.
Author Hartmann says that’s because bilateral therapies engage both sides of the brain and unlock natural states of optimal function and creativity. Thom here examines how memory works and why emotional shock can resist normal healing.
He found that the simple act of walking is effective in treating emotional disturbances ranging from temporary upsets and problems to chronic conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Case studies have shown dramatic results. Walking consciously, while holding a distress or desire in mind, can rapidly dissolve the rigidity of a traumatic memory or negative mind state, dispersing its unpleasant associations in as little as a half hour’s time.
While walking has always been a natural part of life, its importance in promoting and maintaining mental health is only recently being rediscovered. Hartmann’s simple yet potent exercises allow us to create our own walking journeys to restore our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being as well as rejuvenate our body’s health.
I would recommend just about any book that Thom Hartmann has written, simply because I know the man to have a genius mentality. But this little number, not the most well known of his books, could very well be, in many ways, his most intriguing, his most helpful, and his most important. Certainly it brings and makes accessible some remarkably useful ideas about healing an aching heart, salving a wounded mind, and opening up a soul which has been closed down by life.