The Thinking Body: Why Therapy Might Work Better When You're Moving

A person walking beside a therapist through a park is doing something different from a person sitting across from a therapist in a room. The difference is not merely environmental. Prince-Llewellyn and McCarthy's 2025 study, 'Walking and talking for well-being: Exploring the effectiveness of walk and talk therapy,' found measurable synergy between ambulatory movement and cognitive restructuring in CBT interventions — 90-minute estate walks over 12 to 18 weeks produced outcomes that warranted attention not simply as a delivery variation but as a distinct mode of therapeutic engagement. The paper invites a question that is genuinely odd: does the act of walking change what the mind can do with its own contents?

That question has a Thomistic answer, and it is less mystical than it sounds.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that intellectual operations depend on the activity of the cogitative sense — the faculty that mediates between sensory experience and rational judgment. The cogitative sense does not merely receive impressions; it organizes particular sensory inputs into meaningful wholes before reason acts on them. Benjamin Suazo's work on the cogitative sense notes that this faculty can be trained toward orderly perception or disordered by habits of avoidance and rumination. What this means, practically, is that the way a person physically inhabits a situation — the sensorimotor context in which thinking occurs — is not background noise to cognition. It is part of the cognitive act itself.

Walking changes the sensorimotor field. Gait is rhythmic and bilateral, engaging alternating motor activation in a pattern that neuropsychologists associate with reduced cortical arousal and increased access to episodic memory. This is the physiological substrate of what Peterson describes when discussing the exposure-and-articulation work central to processing trauma: the mind, once it is not occupied with postural vigilance, can approach the material it previously circled around. The seated therapy room, for some people, generates its own vigilance — the furniture of clinical encounter carries social meaning, hierarchy, evaluation. A path through trees does not.

Prince-Llewellyn and McCarthy's subjects were engaged in cognitive restructuring while walking, and the paper's language of 'synergy' is precise. Restructuring requires the client to hold a thought at arm's length and examine its architecture — to notice that 'I am worthless' is a claim about the world, not the world itself. Steven Hayes, working from Relational Frame Theory, calls this defusion: the loosening of the automatic pull that a verbal stimulus exerts on behavior. Defusion is harder to achieve when the nervous system is in a posture of threat. Movement — particularly rhythmic, forward-directed movement — appears to alter that posture. The body begins to act 'as if' the environment is navigable, and cognition follows.

This is not a new observation in practice. Thomas Aquinas walked while lecturing. Ignatius of Loyola built directional movement into the Spiritual Exercises — the exercitant is always oriented toward something, moving through a sequence of weeks, from purgation to illumination to election, never static. The peripatetic tradition in philosophy was not simply a quirk of Athenian outdoor life; it reflected an implicit understanding that the mind thinks better when the body is in motion. The 2025 study gives that tradition a quantitative scaffolding.

What the paper opens up, though the authors do not frame it this way, is a challenge to a subtle assumption embedded in most Western therapeutic models: that the person who needs help should first be stilled. The consultation room requires sitting. The couch, famously, requires lying down. These architectural choices encode a therapeutic epistemology — that interior work proceeds best when exterior movement is suspended, that the self is most accessible when the body is quieted. Walk-and-talk therapy is a mild empirical refutation of that assumption.

Gabor Maté's work on the physiological costs of suppression is relevant here. When a person holds a boundary, a desire, or an identity claim too tightly — or fails to hold them at all — the body registers the cost. Maté's observation that behind most chronic illness lies a frustrated need for genuine contact, and that healing requires recovering vulnerability, maps onto what walk-and-talk therapy changes structurally: the side-by-side arrangement of walker and therapist, rather than face-to-face, alters the social geometry of exposure. The client is not being looked at. The gaze is shared outward, toward the path ahead. This changes what can be said. Assertion of the self — Maté's sixth principle of healing — is easier when the self is not under direct visual scrutiny.

The CCMMP, in Vitz, Nordling, and Titus's formulation, locates the human person within a Created-Fallen-Redeemed arc in which the body is not a vehicle for the soul but is constitutive of the person. The premise that body and soul form a genuine unity — not as pious formula but as anthropological claim — means that therapeutic practices which only address the person as a rational deliberator seated in a chair are working with an incomplete map. The body's posture, rhythm, and spatial orientation are part of the person being treated. Walk-and-talk therapy does not add an outdoor amenity to an otherwise standard intervention. It changes the anthropological terms of the encounter.

The practical implications for counselors and formators are worth making explicit. The 12-to-18 week duration of the Prince-Llewellyn and McCarthy protocol suggests that the benefits of ambulatory therapy accumulate; this is not a technique for crisis intervention but for sustained formation work. The 90-minute sessions are long by clinical standards and permit the kind of rhythmic settling that short sessions cannot achieve. The estate-walk setting — neither wilderness therapy nor urban walking, but a managed landscape — provides enough novelty to engage perception without generating the kind of environmental demand that competes with interior attention.

For pastoral accompaniment in particular, these findings deserve consideration. The accompaniment tradition in Ignatian direction has always been directional — literally, the director and the directed are walking toward something together, even when seated. To make that movement literal, to take a directee on a walk during which the ordinary human activity of ambulation carries the conversation, is to locate spiritual accompaniment in the whole person rather than in the isolated intellect. The formation work that happens in the purgative stage of the spiritual life — the breaking of disordered attachments, the building of virtue — requires confronting what hurts, and it is precisely where something hurts that something matters. Walking, it turns out, may make that confrontation more available.

Prince-Llewellyn and McCarthy's study is modest in scope: a qualitative exploration of practitioner experience with a specific protocol over a specific terrain. It is not a randomized controlled trial and does not claim to be. But what it does is point toward a research question with genuine depth: not whether walk-and-talk therapy 'works,' but what the body's participation in forward motion does to the availability of interior material. That question is at once neuropsychological, phenomenological, and anthropological. The answer, if it is pursued with the same precision that the paper's observation warrants, would require Catholic psychology and cognitive science to think together — which is, increasingly, where the most productive work lies.

References

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Maié, G. (2019). When the body says no: The cost of hidden stress. Vintage Canada.

Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.

Prince-Llewellyn, L., & McCarthy, H. (2025). Walking and talking for well-being: Exploring the effectiveness of walk and talk therapy. Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12830

Suazo, B. (2021). The cogitative sense and its role in Thomistic psychology. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 95(3), 421–445. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq202195342

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (Eds.). (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.