Bedbound to Pilgrim

Bedbound to Pilgrimage

On September 30^th 2016 I walked 52km in one day into Santiago, this was the final day of my 24 day pilgrimage along the French route of the Camino de Santiago, a 800km/500mile that has inspired, broken, blistered, released and empowered hundreds of thousands (maybe millions now – I should look this up) of hopeful pilgrims.

This may not seem very miraculous these days to many people, however only a few years earlier I’d been bedbound with chronic fatigue syndrome (as well as a handful of other diagnosis you collect along the way when you end up in this kind of pickle).

I spent 6.5yrs struggling just to conquer my staircase or to have a bath so the idea of any other physical activity seemed a pipedream.

However, in those brief moments when just for a few hours or days things did not seem so heavy there was still hope, still researching and still inspiration.

I kept myself going by constantly searching for recovery stories from people who were told whatever they had going on was incurable.  I began to realise that there were many people all over the world recovering from unrecoverable things and I thought if they can, I can too.

These little pockets of hope lead me one day to come across a film called The Way.  I then realised I’d read a book by Paulo Colleo called The Pilgrimage a few years before about the same walk.  Something sparked inside me and I read the book again and then searched for other stories about this crazy-long walk across Spain.

Around the same time I had come across this thing called Visualisation and the story of the truly amazing story of the Miracle Man and Visualisation gave him his body & life back and more.

So, inspired by this pilgrimage and this weird meditation upgrade (which is what I saw visualisation at the time) I decided to give it a go.

Every day I visualised walking the Scottish mountains around me and the Camino de Santiago.  I used screens from movies I’d watched and photo’s I’d seen and VERY vividly imagined my body doing these things.

And I believe my body started to believe they were actually happening to it and started to make changes.

I had setbacks and lost hope here and there, but I did a whole heap of other things too, however I am 100% that this formed an important part of my recovery.

Within 3 months of feeling like I recovered I was walking actual Mountains/Munro’s in Scotland and finding it fairly easy to do them and to recover afterwards, especially compared to my fit walking friends around me.

It took a little longer to walk my first Camino however, as living life got in the way. But I got there eventually, and it was one of the best things I’ve done in my whole life.  I pushed myself way more than I needed to or probably should do, but there was something I felt I still had to prove… I am not sure who too!

I hope to walk the Portuguese route next year and take a slower and more purposeful plod along to Santiago this time.

But I share this story to show you there is light and hope between the darkness and that our mind/body/nervous system/soul has a much greater capacity than we can even dream of to thrive.