Awe walking is a simple wellness practice that involves going on walks and shifting your attention outward toward things that inspire awe. Awe walks can be as long as you like, but we encourage you to walk for at least 15 minutes. If you have limited mobility, feel free to look for awe in your backyard or outside your bedroom window.

The Awe Collective was created as a platform for creatively gathering, connecting, and mapping moments of awe. Our goal is to promote the wellness practice of awe walking by giving users a place to experience and share these moments with one another. We welcome you to browse the awe gallery and map for inspiration, and then to contribute and share this project with others to help us cultivate an online wellness community rooted in creative expression and childlike wonder.

In 2020, UCSF Neuroscientist Dr. Virginia Sturm published a study showing that going on short walks looking for the emotion of awe can promote brain health in healthy older adults. After sending a group of 52 randomized participants on awe walks and regular walks over the course of 8 weeks, the study found that awe walkers experienced more joy during their walks, as well as heightened prosocial positive emotions (things like compassion, admiration, and gratitude) and a decrease in stress in their daily lives in general. While her study focused on older adults, the benefits of awe walking can be experienced at any age.

Like other wellness practices, awe walking is a skill, and at first it can feel a little intimidating. While extraordinary places like the Grand Canyon inspire awe, we can also feel awe when looking at small everyday things like a flower petal or an insect. Going on awe walks that focus on a given awe-inspiring theme (for example light, colors, tiny things, patterns, or textures) can help you train your senses to tune into awe in everyday surroundings. We encourage you to explore the different themes in our awe gallery and then try out your own thematic walks. Perhaps focus on light on a late afternoon stroll, or colors—or a single color—on a spring walk in a garden. Then try repeating the same walk a different day with a new focus, perhaps looking instead for textures and patterns, or tiny things.
Scientists have found that awe inspires awe, so the more you learn to tap into this emotion, the more awe-inspiring things you should notice around you, and the better you should feel! Choosing creative themes for your awe walks can also help you stay engaged with this practice over time by giving you tools to explore your surroundings with fresh eyes and ways to connect with others who search for similar themes.

The easiest way to contribute to this project is by uploading photos of awe-inspiring things found on your walks. On the upload section of the website, select an image to share, give it a title or short description, and indicate a theme, sub-theme, and any additional tags that will help connect your moment of awe to those of others. We also welcome you to use other creative forms of expression to process and share moments of awe (maybe bring a sketchbook on your walk, turn a photo into a watercolor painting, write a haiku, or document a collection of small objects). Remember, the point of the platform is not to show perfect photographs or drawings, but to encourage one another to find creative ways to tap into and experience moments of awe in our everyday lives. Try to silence your inner perfectionist and connect instead with your inner child as you playfully document, create and share everyday moments of wonder.

1. One great way to build an awe walking practice in your community is by creating a month-long or ongoing awe walking group with friends, family or co-workers. To do this, form a group, choose some themes and/or artistic modalities to inspire your walks (ie color and drawing or light and photography), designate a leader to send out one theme a week, and share your awe walk finds here to the gallery and map!

2. At the University of Arizona, we have been hosting a Workshop Series called “Creative Encounters in Awe” since Fall of 2022. In the series we host creative awe walking events in partnership with community organizations and creative professionals. Please be in touch if you would like to learn more about this program and how we might bring this series to your community.

This website is part of a larger project created by Dr. Jennie Gubner (left) and one of her doctoral mentees, Sydney Streightiff (right), from the University of Arizona Applied Intercultural Arts Research (AIAR) Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. As applied and socially engaged arts researchers, they are interested in finding ways to use arts and creativity to promote accessible healthy aging practices and to build intergenerational, age-friendly communities. Having met and been inspired by Dr. Sturm's work while an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute , Dr. Gubner invited Sydney to work with her to explore how creative and artistic prompts might offer new ways to encourage people of all ages to learn about, and engage in awe walking practices. This website is one of the many projects emerging from their collaboration.

We would like to thank University of Arizona Health Sciences Innovations in Healthy Aging for providing us with financial support to create this website and organize the inaugural Creative Encounters in Awe Workshop series through the UAHS Aging and the Arts Initiative. We would also like to thank Dr. Bryan Carter and the coders at the University of Arizona Center for Digital Humanities for bringing this website to life. Thank you in particular to Duo Bao and especially Josh Tornquist for his tireless efforts in realizing our vision. This project would also not have been possible without the creative and intellectual support of the Erasmus + Strategic Partnership Encounters through Arts, Ethnography and Pedagogy that provided us with an international research community with whom to develop our ideas, and Arts Cabinet London their creative arts research publication platform where we published the initial findings from this exploration. Lastly, we would like to thank Dr. Virginia Sturm, her research team, and the Global Brain Health Institute, for inspiring us to think big and in creative, interdisciplinary ways about how to promote accessible and affordable pathways toward brain health and wellness across the lifespan.