Pilgrimage as Therapy: Healing Lessons from the Camino de Santiago

Five years ago, I felt stuck.

I was practicing psychotherapy in Manhattan—outwardly successful, but inwardly confined. My office had become a box. My patients came to manage symptoms so they could return to their own stagnating and limiting boxes—from their corporate cubicles to our culture’s materialistic paradigm—and continue performing predictably in a society obsessed with security over freedom, productivity over purpose. I began to sense I wasn’t offering true healing. In helping people adapt to the endless work wheel, I was preserving the status quo of their conditioning. I realized I was complicit in keeping them disembodied, disconnected, and spiritually malnourished.

Then, like a message from the depths of the psyche, I received an unexpected visitation from Asklepios, the ancient Greek god of medicine. It wasn’t a dream. It was a waking vision—a call to adventure toward a different existence, a path forward into an unknown future. So, I followed the hero’s thread into the labyrinth. It led me down an internet rabbit hole to the concept of the Asklepieia—the original holistic healing centers of ancient Greece and Asia Minor. What I discovered there changed everything.

These sanctuaries weren’t cold or clinical. They were vibrant ecosystems, designed to harmonize psyche and soma, soul and body, with the land itself. Healing at an Asklepion wasn’t a transaction—it was a rite of passage. Pilgrims walked on foot from great distances to reach these precursors to modern hospitals, often in bucolic and energetically charged rural localities, where they purified themselves with fasting and bathing at the entrance gates, crossed thresholds into sanctuaries suffuse with wind, soaked in sun, and dotted by natural springs, to offer prayers and sacrifices at lesser shrines, incubate dreams in sacred dormitories, walk among trees and herbal gardens, recover from physical maladies through surgeries, diet, massage, sound healing, exercise in the gymnasium, and experience spontaneous healing through divine intervention, dream interpretation, and counsel from temple priests. Emotional catharsis took place in the great amphitheater at Epidaurus, where as many as 15,000 pilgrims would enter into the psychodrama of tragedy and comedy, activating their right brain and allowing their soul to vicariously experience the protagonist’s epic journeys of breakdown and breakthrough. Patients weren’t suppressing symptoms with allopathic pills as we do today—they were healing holistically, drawing on the body’s innate placebo intelligence and the soul’s capacity for symbolic sense-making. Healing, therefore, came through vision, presence, ritual, nature, and divine connection.

THE QUESTION

In that moment, a question rooted itself in me:

Could I bring all of myself—my background in psychology, meditation, Jungian analysis, Buddhist tantra, mythology—onto the road? Could I fuse my passions and skills for therapy and pilgrimage into a single art form, where the outer journey mirrors the inner transformation?

That question became the seed of Return with Elixir, the book I would spend the next five years writing.

This June, I tested that vision on the road.

Our Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in June was not a retreat or tour. It was an experiment. Could I lead a healing journey not through Asia, where my work had long been rooted in Buddhist cultures, but through the Christian landscape of lush rural Spain? Could the archetypal process of solve et coagula—to dissolve and reconstitute, to die and be reborn, that underlies all mystical traditions, be accessed anywhere, on any route, if approached with sacred intent by those empowered with what I call the pilgrim’s mindset? The answer was a resounding yes.

Of course, I couldn’t speak the local language, navigate to the next town, or even recognize the streets to our inn. I couldn’t share the history of the towering Cathedrals we entered for prayer or provide the cultural backstory of the cuisine we savored. We were blessed to be led by a local guide, Maria, for all these wonderous externalities. What I could offer was guidance for the inner, secret pilgrimage.

The Camino is a living network of arteries of transformation. For over 1,200 years, pilgrims have walked its miles through France, Portugal, England, and across Spain to the fabled destination of Santiago de Compostela, where the relics of Saint James—one of the three closest disciples of Jesus Christ—are enshrined in a massive, awe-inspiring Cathedral that rivals any in Christendom. For centuries, pilgrims have sought redemption, salvation, and renewal here. Trails were forged by those walking heavy with the burden of sin, but also those emboldened with love and devotion in their hearts. In centuries past, all would have sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears for a chance at atonement at Santiago de Compostela. You can feel that in the ground beneath your feet today, there is both an energetic charge that activates one’s karma to be processed along the route, as well as an energetic pull that draws you in like a gravitational source towards Santiago. Today, the motivations of pilgrims walking vary—health and fitness, adventure travel, or simply curiosity—but I introduced a deeper mythic framework, reframing the pilgrimage through a trauma-informed Buddhist lens—as a mythopoetic healing initiation of descent, ordeal, revelation, and rebirth.

THE WOUNDS

Each morning, I offered our group of 20 pilgrims a short reflection, drawn from Joseph Campbell's hero’s journey of departure, initiation, and return or the Tibetan tantric path of conscious death, sublime liminality, and altruistic rebirth. Each day, we walked 10–15 miles at our own pace, with intention, incubating themes of letting go of defenses, reliving memories, and processing trauma, or opening the heart and mind to welcome inspiration and revelation, or embodying joy and altruism to reset our nervous system and reorient the trajectory of our lives. I gave no long lectures—the terrain itself became the therapeutic container and classroom.

I remained at the back of the group, walking slowly and steadily, and those who wanted to speak with me would fall into step. We walked together for miles and hours, sometimes in silence, sometimes in deep inquiry and processing. The trail replaced my psychotherapy office, its walls exchanged for a moving kaleidoscope of nature’s multi-sensory bounty. No longer confined by cinder blocks and the 45-minute session, I was free to do deep, spontaneous work with pilgrims—individually, in pairs, or small pods. Some pilgrims also allowed me to process my thoughts and feelings, what I had been through since the pandemic, the heartbreaking ordeal of betrayal, the discovery of confidence on the other side, both chronicled in Elixir, and what the Camino represented to me now. When people weren’t walking and talking with me, they were holding space for each other with skills of active listening, deep empathy, and open-ended inquiry that I encouraged in our morning prompts. The group's presence became the medicine, fused with the land’s beauty and the legacy of pilgrims past.

And it worked. I observed and felt that more transformation occurred in two weeks on the road than what might be expected in six months of weekly office-based psychotherapy.

People cried, shared, and listened. They unearthed ancestral stories and processed long-silenced grief. To my surprise, nearly half the group experienced, took responsibility for, and disrupted ancestral trauma. Two sisters, estranged for forty years, began healing wounds caused by the childhood loss of innocence, dissociation, and the fire of resentment fomented in their dysfunctional family system. Another pilgrim discovered through genealogical research that his family’s struggle with debilitating depression was linked to an ancestral wound from centuries past—an ancestor deeply marked by devastating loss and repeated rejection. Just before the pilgrimage, he had stumbled upon records and accounts that revealed this hidden story. Through walking and talking, an insight connecting past and present emerged, he found compassion for both his loved ones and himself, opening the way for a process of intergenerational healing.

THE JOY

But it wasn’t just a descent to uncover old wounds and soul contracts—those unconscious patterns that repeat sadness and separation across generations. It was also about joy and beauty. More aptly put, infectious joy, and sublime beauty. The sun, wind, water, earth, and ever-changing flora offered unadulterated elements, each brimming with revitalizing nutrients for the soul.

The food was exquisite—slow-cooked stews and cave-cured meats, steeped in patience and love. And the complex terroir—that sacred interplay of soil, sun, and climate that gives wine its distinctive regional vitality—seemed to infuse everything. It wasn’t just the vineyards that carried it; it was in the air, the meals, the pace of life, the conversations.

The sense of unity and good cheer among pilgrims beyond our group, similarly, walking to Santiago was contagious. The ubiquitous greeting along the sacred way between pilgrims is “Beun Camino”, may you travel well, it’s underlying message applies both along the physical trail to Santiago as well as to our spiritual passage to reconnect with God by whatever name. This heartfelt and uplifting refrain echoes throughout the day on the lips of hundreds of pilgrims as a potent reminder. And of course, Spanish culture in general—so warm, embracing, and sensual—resonates at a different frequency in one’s DNA. All of this ensured that whatever traumas surfaced were held within a field of bliss—an ideal environment for repair and reprogram.

In therapy, we call this a “corrective emotional experience”—the chance to rewire early imprints and rewrite old soul scripts. In order to heal, old wounds must be felt in the body, but must be greeted, like fellow pilgrims along the way, with the alchemical salve of awareness. On the Camino, the joy we experienced—collective, embodied, and wholehearted—offered each of us the very corrective emotional experience we had been seeking.

On pilgrimage, healing happened not in clinics, but in village squares, quaint little churches, under open skies, through seas of wheat fields and rolling vineyards, down oak-lined corridors, and even in local cafés while sipping cappuccinos. The land held us. So did the legacy of Saint James who sacrificed his life to share Christ’s message of love and benevolence. We held each other in the embrace of open presence. The healing wasn’t top-down or expert-driven. It was Aquarian—decentralized, relational, and emergent.

THE WALKING

And then there was the walking—embodied, emotional, rhythmic. 100 miles in ten days with a group averaging 65 years old—an age rarely honored in our product-driven culture. The body in motion activated karmic landmines and worked out its own blocks, like a hot iron does wrinkles. The body also revealed unexpected bliss bombs. A wellspring of contentment can arise at any moment, regardless of circumstance. We walked around 10 miles a day, which took roughly 7-8 hours. For many, it eventually became effortless and delightful. Delight and enjoyment became our constant companions, accelerating healing. How many of you find your therapist’s office a total delight? Even the retirees in our group embodied inspiring vitality and emotional strength; it wasn’t a race but a celebration. We’ve forgotten how to walk in modern times, but walking has been part of our experience and anatomical structure since the dawn of our species. The modern world has made us sedentary and stagnant, and depression and paralysis follow us like a shadow. The Camino reintroduced us to the necessity of physical movement and facing challenges, as an alternative to always seeking comfort, for it is the doorway to the virtues of confidence, wisdom, and compassion.

Modern medicine, for all its marvels, has lost the thread of the sacred. It treats the body as a machine, symptoms as malfunctions, the mind as a chemical imbalance, and the soul with suspicion. It offers quick fixes on an assembly line and superficial solutions that keep us unwell and yearning. The Camino reminded me that true healing lies in presence—to pain, place, pace, and people.

THE PATH

We need a return to the gradual path of sacred walks, which were once the mainstay of healing for our ancestors, even if they never conceptualized it as such. Not a desperate sprint toward fleeting pleasures, status, or achievements, but a long, deliberate walk of humility and vulnerability—one that slows us down, unplugs us from media, reawakens our senses, and opens a dialogue with the inner psyche.

The body holds not only the memory of trauma, but also the treasure of transformation. We carry the elixir within. We don’t need more prescriptions or medications—we need the right conditions to ripen our innate well-being, accessing our inner pharmacology. This was a truth well understood and practiced at the Asklepion sanctuaries of Greece.

Walking a sacred path does precisely this. What we discovered on the Camino isn’t new—it’s ancient. And it isn’t unique to Spain. This path has been walked by seekers the world over—pilgrims and ancestors who were searching for salvation. Today, we simply call it healing. And it’s needed now more than ever in a world in collapse.

What I’ve learned is this: to become whole and who we are meant to be—for the acorn to grow into an oak—we need the right sources of soil, sunlight, and water. That means listening to the soul’s quiet whisper, even when it defies logic, forgoing comfort, and shirking social expectation. It means entering the underworld, risking everything, stepping into the unknown, and enduring the long, often difficult, path of actualization.

It requires facing our shadow, accepting challenges, and embracing struggle, including getting so lost we become unrecognizable to ourselves, not for its own sake, but in service of a higher purpose, to discover who we can be. The pilgrimage of the soul demands time for solitude and deep reflection, as well as connection with kindred spirits who walk the same path. In an Aquarian age, we each walk for our individual reasons, but in coherence together, ushered forward by the winds of joy, and empathy. There are no shortcuts—only the long, winding road that ultimately reveals the truth: home , Santiago de Compostela, has been with us all along, hidden in plain sight.

It took five years to bring this vision to life. It took a hundred miles to road test it. Perhaps it will take years and several iterations of pilgrimages to refine it. From the original call in my Manhattan office, to the first step on the Camino, to the fellowship that emerged from a group of strangers, to the deep conversations and shared silence—each learned that the soil of misfortune was the necessary conditions to ripen the seeds of our individual gifts and insights. My personal gift after years of unworthiness and self-doubt, and further years of ambitious, compensatory seeking, was the affirmation that my novel offering of “walk n’ talk therapy along a sacred road” can indeed work, because it’s the right medicine for our age of fragmentation. It has been my soul’s calling and contribution all along. And so a new chapter has begun, filled with hope and wonder, transforming the long miles of loss and shame into joy and compassion.

The two weeks we spent on the Camino across Spain were the most consistently joyful 14 days of any tour I’ve had the privilege to experience or lead over the last thirty years. Other pilgrimages have, of course, had their own remarkable profundity, magic, and depth of meaning, particularly those with my Tibetan master Geshe Tenzin Zopa, but the Camino was best characterized by its soul-quenching joy, which is innately possible for all of us, supremely healing, and was poignantly achieved without Zopa’s present. A testament to the wisdom of following our inner guru. Every mile, every moment, was a pure delight.

Allow me to share with you the last reflection I offered my group to sum up the entire journey at the conclusion of our pilgrimage. The scallop shell is a symbol of the forbearers of the Camino pilgrimage who ventured beyond Santiago de Compostela, a further day’s walk to Finisterre, the End of the World, on the Atlantic Ocean, where they burned their walking cloths in a ritual of rebirth, and collected scallop shells to symbolically affirm they had made it to their destination before the long return journey home.

In a Nut (or Scallop) Shell

Along the gradual path to awakening—life’s grand Camino—there will be plenty of landmines and bliss bombs waiting to be triggered. Remember: they come from us, not at us.

Know how they got there—planted by past vice or virtue. Then orient toward the good in the present to sow the right seeds for the future. Whatever arises, let it become our practice—of purification and rejoicing—take all of life onto the spiritual path.

With this pilgrim’s mindset, there’s no terrain too challenging, no place we can’t venture together. At every step, across the long miles, may we remember: to exchange getting with giving, and that the energy we bring into each moment, each encounter, is our gift that matters more than any external choices.

When we shift the inner frequency to openness and joy, the outcome will eventually follow. Because there is no spoon, we can heal, and make hell into heaven on earth for others. There are no limits in the vast ocean of quantum possibility. May we learn to swim in the depths.

In the end, it’s the journey that transforms us—not the sacred destination. Santiago has always been here and now, abiding in the heart, awaiting our recognition and our juice press to extract its essence.

Fellow pilgrims, this has been a trip to savor. I thank you all for what we created together. We’ve done this before—may we do it again, lifetime after lifetime, until we fully embody enlightenment for others’ benefit.

Buen Camino!

___

THE SANTUARY

After leaving Spain, I landed in Athens, Greece, for a brief but miraculous encounter that closed a five-year loop. With only one day to align stars and schedules, I met up with lucid dream guide and author Sarah Janes at the famous Sanctuary of Asklepios in Epidaurus. She led me on a private tour through the ruins—treatment rooms, gymnasium, amphitheater, sacred herb gardens, and lesser shrines—reviving not just the past but also a vision I had received five years ago: of a mysterious Greek God, his holistic healing sanctuary, and how they are sorely needed in our modern, dying world.

The heart of our visit was a deep meditation inside the Enkoimeterion, the dream incubation chamber where ancient seekers entered hypnagogic sleep in hopes of receiving spontaneous healing or symbolic messages. These dreams were later interpreted by temple priests—the very precursors to depth psychologists and psychotherapists. Sitting there in silence with Sarah, I could feel the centuries collapse into a single point of clarity suffuse in waves of inspiration.

What made this moment especially powerful was our shared path. Both Sarah and I had walked away from secure, traditional careers—she from media and academia in London, I from clinical psychotherapy in New York City—not because we were reckless, but because we were listening to something deeper. Each of us followed the soul’s whisper beyond the confines of convention to create something totally unprecedented. She now guides dreamers into ancient temples in Greece and Egypt to reclaim the wisdom of sacred sleep. I’ve taken my background in psychology, mythology, and Buddhist tantra onto pilgrimage trails, helping people heal through walking, talking, and ritual in nature. We are each reviving the ancient mystery traditions in our own way, rooted in lineage yet responding to the needs of today’s fractured world.

This encounter was more than confirming—it was catalytic. It reminded me that the path I’ve chosen, while unconventional, is aligned with something ancient, enduring, and essential. As a result of risk-taking, of following the lesser tread path, I’m becoming more of what I’ve always been meant to be: a healer on the road.

So, if your soul has been whispering—if you feel the ache, the call, the quiet longing, even the despair that life as it is just can’t go on—don’t wait for the world to understand and change its ways. Begin the journey from your own side. Even if it takes five years. Especially if it takes five years. Put one foot in front of the other, emerge out of stasis, out of the rubble of collapse, and into the great mystery, with its labyrinth corridors and winding walkways. Don’t fear or avoid the trial of the trail. For that is precisely the initiatory doorway through which you finally emerge more of what you are meant to be.