Consistent with the vow of non-violence carried to its most rigorous extreme, Jain ascetics, sadhvis included, traditionally travel only on foot, refusing all wheeled transport, including in the modern period cars, trains and bicycles, on the reasoning that mechanised travel risks crushing small living beings the traveller cannot see and takes the ascetic further from the simplicity and hardship the mendicant vow requires; a sadhvi may therefore walk considerable distances between towns over the course of a preaching tour lasting months, a visible and physically demanding form of the same non-violence that shapes the Jain diet.
Many Svetambara ascetics, sadhvis prominently among them, also wear a muhapatti, a cloth held or tied across the mouth, to avoid inadvertently inhaling or harming tiny airborne organisms, a practice that together with barefoot walking makes the sadhvi immediately recognisable in public and that some modern reform-minded Jains have debated relaxing for practical reasons, without any such relaxation being generally adopted, since the walking and the mouth-covering are both understood as direct expressions of non-violence rather than as customs separable from the vow itself.