Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
The Gait of Power
To suspend the internal dialogue (the constant self-talk that holds ordinary perception fixed) by occupying attention with a demanding, defocused way of walking — opening a quieter, more direct mode of awareness.
Sánchez’s gait of power: On a safe, flat path at dusk, walk with trunk bent slightly forward, knees lifting high to the chest, fingers curled with thumb and index extended, and eyes soft and defocused on the ground just ahead — never glancing sideways. The demanding gait absorbs your attention until the internal dialogue falls silent. Don’t force the quiet; let the walking carry it. Build up slowly, then return to ordinary walking. Safety first — known ground, no hazards.
What it is
In The Teachings of Don Carlos (1995), Victor Sánchez takes the elusive ideas scattered through Castaneda’s novels and turns them into a workbook of doable exercises.
One of the central aims is “stopping the internal dialogue” — quieting the ceaseless inner talk that, in this tradition, locks perception into its habitual form. Sánchez’s most concrete vehicle for this is an adapted “gait of power”: a specific, attention-consuming way of walking in near-darkness with defocused eyes and a fixed posture, so demanding of the body’s attention that the verbal mind simply stops.
Read plainly, it is a moving meditation that uses a hard motor task plus peripheral vision to suspend inner speech.
The Method
A faithful representative protocol, following Sánchez’s practical adaptation of Castaneda’s gait:
- Choose a safe, near-dark path. A flat, familiar, obstacle-free stretch of ground — a field, quiet trail, or large yard — at dusk or in low light. Safety first: no roads, water, ledges, or hazards. (Sánchez ran group practices outdoors in natural settings.)
- Set the posture. Trunk slightly bent forward, spine straight, knees slightly bent. Lift each knee high — toward the chest — with every step. This unusual gait forces the body to attend fully.
- Set the hands. Curl the fingers against the palms, leaving the thumb and index finger extended on each hand. This odd, deliberate hand position is itself an attention-anchor.
- Defocus the eyes — look just ahead and down. Keep the eyes on the ground a short distance in front, slightly unfocused, taking in the periphery rather than fixing on any one point. The forward bend lowers the gaze naturally. A glance to the side breaks the flow — keep it soft and forward.
- Walk (or, with experience, jog) in this gait. Move steadily. The combination of the high-knee stride, the curled hands, the defocused near-vision, and the dark gives the conscious mind nothing to narrate.
- Let the inner dialogue fall silent. Don’t fight the self-talk; let the demanding gait absorb attention until words simply stop. When you notice talk return, gently re-immerse in the gait.
- Build duration gradually and return to ordinary walking to finish. Afterwards, Sánchez (echoing the tradition) advises not dramatizing the experience — note the quiet, then carry on. (Sourcing note: the gait’s posture, high-knee step, curled-fingers/extended-thumb-and-index hand position, defocused forward gaze, and the rule that a sideways glance disrupts the flow are documented in Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; Sánchez’s contribution is presenting it as a structured, teachable exercise for stopping the internal dialogue in a modern practice setting. Faithful paraphrase; no long quotation.)
Source & Lineage
Victor Sánchez lived for years with Indigenous peoples of Mexico and founded the AVP (Art of Living Purposefully). His first book, The Teachings of Don Carlos (1995), is explicitly a “reference manual / workbook” that extracts practicable methods from Carlos Castaneda’s writings — among them the body as a field of energy, the not-doings of the personal self, stopping the internal dialogue, the magic of attention, and setting up dreaming.
The gait of power itself originates in Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan (Ch. 14). → suggested node; lineage.
The Traditions' versions
Castaneda’s original gait of power — the cryptic source; Sánchez makes it repeatable. → (Castaneda entries)
- Walking meditation (Buddhist kinhin / Theravāda) — slow, attention-on-movement walking to still the mind; same family, gentler form.
- Soft/peripheral “open” gaze — defocused vision to loosen object-fixation appears in Toltec gazing, some Qigong, and trauma-informed “panoramic vision.”
- Flow-state absorption (Csíkszentmihályi) — a task that fully matches attention silences self-referential thought; the gait engineers exactly this.
- Trataka / fixed gazing (its opposite pole) — also targets the inner dialogue via the eyes, by fixation rather than defocus.
Common refinements
Practicing on hazardous ground. The single biggest error. Scout the path in daylight; clear it; start at dusk, not full dark.
- Trying to force silence. Don’t wrestle the dialogue — let the gait absorb you; silence is a by-product.
- Focusing the eyes / glancing sideways. Both re-engage the naming mind and break the flow. Keep the gaze soft and forward.
- Dropping the posture. The high knees and curled hands are what make it demanding enough to work; a normal stroll won’t silence the mind.
- Over-dramatizing afterward. Building a big story about the experience just restarts the dialogue. Note it, move on.