I read a strange little book this afternoon: Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being, by Thom Hartmann, a psychotherapist who practices in Vermont. Hartmann theorizes that any side-to-side motion (like walking, or the movement of the eyes following a hypnotist’s finger or pocket-watch) is a “bilateral movement” that “causes nerve impulses to cross the brain from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere and back at a specific rate or frequency.” The “cross-patterning” that results from this movement, he continues, “produces an organic integration of left-hemisphere ‘thinking’ functions with right-hemisphere ‘feeling’ functions,” an integration that is “a necessary precursor to emotional and intellectual healing from trauma.” With many asides and divagations, Hartmann describes the rise and fall of hypnosis as a therapeutic tool in the nineteenth century and the development of techniques like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy before describing a simple way that anyone can use walking as a form of treatment for past traumas.

It’s all a little new-agey for me, and I’m skeptical, but I did enjoy learning about the history of hypnosis and the origin of the name “Svengali” in George du Maurier’s scandalous novel Trilby, which helped to create an intense backlash against hypnotherapy in the 1890s. And, despite my skepticism, I know that I did experience things while I was walking in Spain that weren’t completely outside the scope of Hartman’s theory. So maybe there’s something to it. Perhaps I’ll try Hartmann’s method of walking meditation on future walks and see what happens.