This guided walking meditation is a journey through Deep Time—a somatic and contemplative practice that invites participants to experience the story of life on Earth through the body, breath, and imagination.
This is taken directly from the principles and practices of Deep Ecology, the Council of All Beings, and The Work That Reconnects, and from the lineage of thinkers and facilitators such as Joanna Macy, John Seed and Arne Naess. It’s designed to bring us back into relationship with the long arc of life, of which we are a small, dependent, living part.
The meditation is designed to move through the story of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the birth of stars, from the molten formation of Earth to the emergence of oceans, the first cells, and the long unfolding of evolution. It spans a walk of around two kilometres, with each step representing roughly 8 and a half million years. Each step is a moment for mediation, reflection, imagination, and dare I suggest memory.
Evolutionary Remembering – A Guided Walking Meditation
Welcome. You are about to step into deep time.
This is not just a walk through nature. It is a journey across the 13.8 billion-year story of the universe, through the birth of stars and galaxies, the formation of Earth, and the long unfolding of life—from a single cell to you.
Each step you take today will carry you millions of years forward in time.
Over the course of two kilometers—just a short walk—you will traverse everything.
From the fiery birth of the cosmos to the dawn of humans, and onward into the unshaped future.
This walk is a meditation.
A remembering—not through the mind alone, but through the body.
As you walk, you are invited to feel, to imagine, to remember. Not as spectators, but as participants in this living lineage.
The atoms in your body were forged in ancient stars.
The cells that divide in you today are the descendants of life’s first flicker in the primordial sea.
You are not separate from this story.
You are its continuation.
Along the way, you will be guided—gently—through time.
At certain moments, you’ll be invited to notice, to embody, to breathe in the memory of fish and fern, mammal and monkey, to feel your ancient inheritance awake in your bones and blood.
This is a journey of reconnection.
Of awe. Of belonging.
So we invite you now—
to open your senses,
to walk slowly,
to breathe with the earth,
and to remember who you are
across the vast span of time.
Let us begin.
1: COSMIC ORIGINS
Steps 0–90 | 0–116m | 13.8–13 billion years ago (90 steps)
Take your first step…
We return to the beginning—not of your life, not of Earth, but of everything.
Before matter, before time, before thought.
Breathe in the silence before the universe.
And then—ignition.
A blaze of light explodes outward.
The great fireball.
You are walking now through time made space,
atoms forming, dancing light born from pure energy.
Each particle in your body was forged in this light.
You are the child of stars.
Walk slowly. With reverence. With awe.
Galaxies swirl. Space expands.
The universe breathes itself into being,
and you are there, walking through the breath.
2: BIRTH OF EARTH
Steps 90–916 | 116–1,145m | 13–4.5 billion years ago (826 steps)
The galaxy spins.
Spiral arms of stars shimmer through the dark, and far from the center,
a small star is kindled—a quiet sun, our sun.
Feel your feet on the earth,
and know: even this path was once stardust.
Around this newborn sun,
fragments of rock and gas swirl in wide elliptical rings.
Dust gathers. Gravity beckons.
Collisions spark heat.
Mountains are born in fire.
Earth takes shape—a molten sphere, turning slowly in the solar dark.
This is not a gentle birth.
For millions upon millions of years,
the Earth is a planet of flame and storm.
Volcanoes roar.
Asteroids hammer its surface.
The crust fractures and heals.
Iron melts and sinks deep into the core.
Lighter minerals rise to form a thin skin of rock—
the beginning of continents.
The atmosphere thickens with smoke and steam.
The sky is black.
Walk slowly here.
Imagine this world—not yet green, not yet blue,
but raw and blazing and alive with potential.
Then, after centuries of storms—
Rain.
Rain falls in torrents, hissing on hot rock.
Steam rises in clouds.
Pools gather in the low places.
These are the first oceans—
The cradle of life.
Breathe deeply.
Let your breath rise like mist.
The oceans stir with minerals washed from rock.
A soup of molecules.
Proteins, acids, chains of carbon and hydrogen.
The alphabet of life begins to arrange itself.
And then—perhaps a spark.
Lightning.
Energy cracking the sky,
dancing across the water.
A great silence follows.
Then, in the deep,
something shifts.
A molecule folds in just the right way,
and suddenly—it can copy itself.
It grows. It divides. It adapts.
The first cell awakens.
Pause your walk. Feel this moment.
That cell is your ancestor.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Every cell in your body—each neuron, each skin cell, each blood cell—
descends in an unbroken line from this ancient being.
You are not descended from fish or monkeys.
You are descended from life itself.
From a single act of emergence,
carried forward across deep time.
Resume walking now, in reverence.
The ocean is teeming with this one lifeform.
Billions of them, drifting, splitting, evolving.
They are blind, but they can sense heat.
They are silent, but they begin to communicate in chemicals.
Over hundreds of millions of years,
some join together, forming more complex bodies.
Cooperation arises. Complexity emerges.
You walk now through the age of invisible transformations.
You are walking through time long before anything had eyes, or bones, or brains.
But the foundations are being laid.
The scaffolding of future forests. The blueprint for your blood.
Let yourself feel slow.
Feel how long it took to become you.
And remember—
Nothing here was inevitable.
Every breath is the result of chance, of courage,
of persistence across impossible odds.
You are a miracle of survival.
You are the triumph of continuity.
Walk with gratitude.
Walk with memory.
You are Earth remembering itself.
And the story has only just begun.
3: AWAKENING LIFE
Steps 916–1,020 | 1,145–1,275m | 4.5–3.5 billion years ago (104 steps)
You are now a cell.
A single being with the courage to split, to double, to become many.
You do not eat. You transform.
Sunlight is your food.
You breathe out oxygen,
and in doing so, shape the very atmosphere.
Walk with the rhythm of division—of life multiplying,
of becoming more,
of risking complexity.
Remember the courage of your microscopic ancestors,
invisible, yet eternal.
4: OCEAN LIFE
Steps 1,020–1,395 | 1,275–1,744m | 3.5 billion–500 million years ago (375 steps)
We walk now into the ocean of your origin.
Life stirs in the darkness—simple, soft, and slow.
You are coral, swaying.
You are worm, winding.
You are soft-bodied, salt-soaked, ancient.
You have no eyes, but you sense the light.
You have no bones, but you hold your shape.
You feel.
You listen through the currents.
For billions of years, life dances here,
rocked gently by the rhythm of the tides.
Years pass like waves.
No rush. No hunger for progress.
Just presence. Flow. Exchange.
And then—a backbone.
You become fish.
Sleek. A swimmer. Muscles and nerves sync in precision.
A flick of tail. A shimmer of scale.
Gills open. You breathe water.
Roll your shoulders as you walk.
Feel the current.
Remember the sea. The ocean shaped you.
You carry its rhythm still — in your blood, in your breath, in your bones.
You were born there.
You are still mostly water.
5: The First Ascent
Steps 1,395–1,419 | 1,744–1,774m | 500–300 million years ago (24 steps)
Plants creep ashore. Mosses, then ferns.
The land begins to breathe.
You follow—tentative, slick-skinned.
An amphibian, pulling forward.
Each movement is a prayer of exploration.
Then eggs with shells—reptiles roam.
You crawl with power. Your limbs strengthen.
Step with deliberate grace.
You are becoming something new.
Something ready for sunlight.
6: THE MAMMAL’S HEARTBEAT
Steps 1,419–1,438 | 1,774–1,797m | 300–60 million years ago (19 steps)
Warm-blooded now.
The sun no longer controls your speed.
You move with heat from within.
You hide in burrows, scamper in shadows,
alert, alive.
The earth shifts, continents drift, the sky darkens.
Dinosaurs vanish. You remain.
And from you come cats, lemurs, wolves.
Bend low to the ground. Walk with awareness.
Feel the scent in the air.
Taste your environment.
You are mammal—bone and milk and memory.
7: EARLY MONKEY – THE RISING SPINE
Steps 1,438–1,599 | 1,797–1,999m | 60 million–10,000 years ago (161 steps)
Leap. Climb. Sing. Groom.
You are in the trees—an ape, a cousin of gibbon and gorilla.
Your thumbs grasp. Your vision sharpens.
You laugh.
Forests retreat. Savannah opens.
And you rise.
Walk upright.
Feel the sky open above you.
Your hands are free now—free to carry, to craft, to cradle.
You tell stories.
You bury your dead.
You remember.
And in remembering, you become human.
100,000 years ago. Just seconds ago on this cosmic walk.
8: MODERN HUMAN
Steps 1,599–1,600 | 1,999–2,000m | Last 10,000 years (1 step)
And stop.
You have one final step to make.
With it, you walk through all that we think of as human.
Through all of the villages. Then cities. Then skyscrapers.
Through language, through music, through cultivation.
You scroll. You speak across oceans.
But your feet still touch the earth.
Your breath still echoes the wind.
Look around. You are the ancestor now.
What are you building with your awareness? What future walks behind you?
9: FUTURE HUMAN
Step 1,600+ | Sit in stillness
Sit down. Gently.
Let your breath slow. Let the silence return.
What comes next is not yet written.
Close your eyes.
Sense the pulse of a deeper Self—the ecological Self.
What images rise in this quiet?
A future of reconnection? Of balance? Of kinship with all life?
Breathe into that vision.
You carry the fire of stars.
You carry the dream of the earth.
Let that knowing shape you.
The House of Nerdery and Curios 