The Benefits of Walking the Camino de Santiago

This is the third time I have walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage path crisscrossing Europe. When I need to take time out from my daily routine, or when it is time to reflect on my life, my intentions, my priorities, or what is meaningful in my life, some time on the Camino “does the job.” This year I walked with two of my adult children, Bella, a graduate student in psychology, and Ben, a product designer who decided spontaneously to continue on and walk the Camino to its final endpoint in Santiago de Compostela.

Every year, about 300,000 people, young and old, walk through the beautiful Spanish countryside, meeting in villages and towns, sharing food, drinks, and stories. There is an etiquette of openness, friendliness, and respect for the questions each person is carrying. Most of them seem to be wrestling with some existential concern.

After my 25-year-old son Ben’s company in London had failed with Brexit and COVID, he said that he would keep walking until he found inspiration for something meaningful to contribute to society. Sean and Lyn, who both had just passed the Bar exam in New York, wanted time to think deeply before committing themselves to this stressful professional path. Pascal from France had just come from a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat and hoped that Camino and meditation would help him shift from his administrative job to something that would connect him in a more personal way with others. Especially captivating was the story of Felix from Munich. Felix was contemplating how to transition from a lucrative programming job to becoming a psychotherapist.

It is widely known that pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago can have astonishing effects on people's emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing, and I became interested in the available research. Rhea White, 1998, introduced the term Exceptional Human Experience (EHE), which describes spontaneously emerging unusual experiences, which have positive effects on mental and physical health and touch on areas outside the common reality of our everyday world. Life changes after a pilgrimage experience were compared with life changes after unitive/mystical experiences (U/MEs), combat near-death experiences (cNDEs), and hypnotically induced death experiences (HDEs) (Greyson and Ring, 2004). We can see these spiritual experiences as a subcategory of EHEs, as experiences of a universal reality which one does not need to interpret in a traditional religious way.

Snezana Brumec describes life changes after the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, which includes a deeper sense of spirituality. Brumec’s findings suggest that improvements in people’s mental, emotional and spiritual well-being after doing a pilgrimage like the Camino can be compared to those of EHEs, and that with these different types of extraordinary experiences a person’s life can transform significantly (Brumec, 2022). She finds that the most striking changes involve an increase in appreciation for life, a heightened quest for meaning and sense of purpose, more concern for others, greater self-acceptance, and a deeper sense of spirituality. An additional finding describes a decrease in concern with worldly achievement.

As a meditator with four decades of experience, I wondered what these two paths to self-improvement and actualization have in common. And, looking through a Buddhist lens, I wondered if both paths, the path of awareness meditation and the path of walking the Camino, allow us to go beyond a sense of separate self to experience a bigger sense of interdependence, unity and caring. Research shows how a separate, isolated sense of self is often the source of our anxiety, as well as mental and emotional distress.

Mindfulness retreats and awake-awareness practices allow a person to transcend a painful sense of separateness and alienation, and to feel a greater sense of interdependence, connectedness, and wellbeing. (Davidson, Kabbat-Zinn, 2003). Loch Kelly’s glimpse practices allow us to experience moments of a bigger, boundless selfless self during brief moments during the day. Those practices, as they become integrated into our daily lives, increase our well-being, our sense of meaning, and a feeling of connectedness with others (Kelly, Loch, 2015).

Ben walked the Camino with a whole group of his international friends. When he walks by himself, every morning he does a glimpse practice. Now, after completing the Camino, he reports not feeling so alone anymore with his questions. Through the experience he had come to see the Camino, the way, not as a goal but as a process. He realized that what mattered was the journey, and that the journey of life needed to give him a sense of community and belonging. Having made the choice to prioritize meaning and connection over career and earning power, his anxiety had lifted. During his walk with his spontaneously gathered Camino companions, he had the chance to talk about his questions as well as about different work possibilities. Ben told me how surprised he was to feel an increased sense of trust in life—trust that new doors will open to him in time.