The 5 Symbols of the Camino de Santiago, Part Four: The Bandage

On September 10, 2025September 10, 2025 By Well Worth BeingLeave a comment

Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss”. Pilgrims follow their bliss/ters.

On no past Camino de Santiago or long-distance local hike have I had to deal with blisters. The only trek I suffered from blisters was in 2001 on the Annapurna Circuit (Nepal) when I walked in leather boots I took out of their box to pack in my backpack … I didn’t walk in them once before boarding the plane to walk for 21 days across and over the Himalaya at 5,400m altitude.

Symbolically, my life in 2001 was plagued with abrasions that caused more pain than pearls and by 2016, my first Camino of 250km with my then 11-year-old son, I had recognised and was acting on my need to nurture my wounds.

Some people diminish their wounds; some deny them; some go into a trauma response and simply obliterate them from memory; some defend their wounds and use their pain as a badge of honour, and some just never quite manage to shine because that would mean giving up on the psychic injuries they have been subjected to.

Adapting to different footwear—I now wear Altra trail running shoes for Camino and will be wearing T-Rockets running sandals on some days too—and conditioning my feet long before the journey, as well as every day before and after walking, is a good analogy for building capability and competency to face challenges … and also to recognise where the stone in my shoe is going to hinder my journey and where the stone in my shoe is the grit that the oyster uses to make the pearl.

It is erroneous to bandage and splint healthy body parts, so there is a call for discernment in how one treats one’s wounds, both from the past and those that present themselves currently. Self-care can reprogram one’s emotional, physical, psychic and mental bodies to engage differently with personal injuries or traumas and shift perspective from being overcome by wounds to using them as a pathway to healing.

As I walk this journey from next week, for Mental Health I will be intentionally working with fellow pilgrims who approach me with specific needs around grief, loss, trauma and dis-ease and I am cognisant of needing to be discerning in how much self nurturing and self supporting I must do in order to be able to support others on their unique walk to wellness.

We are not here to be perfect, we are here to heal. And the first part of any healing process is to recognise the wound as a symbol of healing rather than as an obstacle in its way. It’s important to not get too attached to the strapping and then fail to acknowledge that the wound is no longer there. Struggle can be used as a tool to justify one’s actions or one’s suffering and to eliminate the need to step up and show up. A wound isn’t a life sentence and a bandage isn’t a ticket to victimhood. Letting go of the identity of injury can be empowering and can create the space for taking on the responsibility of stepping fully into one’s essential self.

Take care on the journey by training well in order to diminish the risk of injury and by also preparing well by carrying a first aid kit.

Questions to ask yourself:

How do I grieve whilst supporting others through their struggles without comparison?
How do I create discernment between compassion and a bleeding heart?
How do I bandage the internal wounds that hurt more than anything that bleeds?
How do I relate to past wounds, injuries and traumas on an emotional, physical and mental level?

You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.

The 5 Symbols of the Camino de Santiago, Part Three: The Yellow Arrow

On September 8, 2025September 10, 2025 By Well Worth BeingLeave a comment

It may look like the same route as the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims before you yet it is different for your walking it. A pilgrim’s unique footprints make for a unique pilgrimage.

The Yellow Arrow is a sign of reassurance that one is following one of the routes on the pilgrim’s way and is an iconic symbol of direction in one’s life as well as ancestral direction and rites of passage—pointing out A way which is different to THE way.

When finding and following these markers it’s a reminder to honour those who have come before. There is a ritual to walking a path that many have taken before, honouring them for carving the way and then honouring oneself for creating one’s own journey from the way. There are many paths leading individuals back home to themselves.

A well-trodden path is still the path untaken until one actually takes it … and then one gets to make it one’s own. It is important to get lost in order to find my way and there is a particular practice of non-judgemental observation that comes with the acceptance of this. I feel it’s important to find myself in a place so unfamiliar that I am challenged to work out how to come back to myself or to accept the new place in which I find myself.

Every part of the entire universe is already right here in this one moment … this one step. There is no manifestation magic in life; it’s all about showing up and placing each foot down with attention and intention. In alchemy it is the third stage in the process, Citrinitas, which is the stage of education before Rubedo, the stage of transformation.

The present moment is your refuge, and this is your home … each footfall brings you back to your self and each self that footfall brings you to is changed because of the footfall. Each contour is as unique as the contours on each individual’s thumbprint; each arrow perceived as just a subtly different shade of yellow; each vista viewed with new eyes; each drop of dew a different prism of light.

Stepping into each moment builds awareness of what’s in the way, where the path is leading, how open you are to your intuitive GPS, when to follow outside signs or inner cues, when to change direction etc. Trust in self appears in the showing up without knowing where the path goes but recognising that no matter where it goes it is going somewhere and it’s ok to adapt along the way. It’s impossible to be ready for every eventuality before a journey but it’s possible to be prepared to be resilient enough to figure it out on the way. To be able to flex into the curves and detours of any journey is a skill we can develop through recognising that there are over seven billion unique humans and, therefore, over seven billion unique paths.

Questions to ask yourself:

Where did I lose my way?
How was I able to find my way again, find a new way, or ask someone to guide me?
In the moments of getting lost how did you recalibrate to a new way by asking for guidance?

You can follow, support and share my Walking for Mental Health fundraising campaign on BackaBuddy. All my socials can be found on LinkTree.

Walking for Mental Health

On August 15, 2025August 24, 2025 By Well Worth BeingLeave a comment

I have been a quiet activist for most of my life, starting as far back as pre-teen when I thought donating my pocket money would end world hunger.

I have also been a not to quiet activist, getting hate mail when I was feeding hundreds of people made homeless in the settlement in Hout Bay.

I’m not so naive that I expect this campaign or even the work I do to change the world; what I do know though is that if I die a pauper having helped just one person survive the darkest moments of their life then that is a rich life indeed.

What it means to live well means different things to different people. For some it is accumulating money, status and possessions and for others it’s about relinquishing such things. Some people require luxury and some need simplicity and there is no right or wrong. The key is integrity, authenticity and self-reflection on the meaning that is being lived through you and how that motivates you to purposeful living.

For many years I accumulated as much as possible feeling my prior years life as a sensitive activist was washed away by the perception of a waste of time.

My years in investment banking and consulting was like putting a metal cast on a grazed knee—it was the ultimate burden that almost killed me by first breaking the spirit of who I was meant to be in the world.

As I stripped away the layers and left myself exposed to those who couldn’t understand my giving up my feathered nest, I recognised that behind the criticism of many was that longing to also find meaning … and the intense and debilitating fear that often prevents it.

I have shadow boxed with depression and addiction my entire life. A recent confrontation with depression, addiction and dysfunction has helped me address the relationship these have with connection, childhood trauma and hyper vigilance around personal safety, boundary violations and feeling the need to give myself away in order to be accepted … to exist even.

Depression and addiction have deep roots and, although I have done decades of work on my childhood traumas (neglect, abuse, violations, hyper-vigilance and a lack of safety), as well as adult traumas (rape, relational and familial abuse, breakdowns, grief and self harm), I have to be vigilant. Sometimes my only saviour is feet in running shoes on mountain trails. Some call that an escape, others call it an addiction. I call it survival, serenity, self care. Running and hiking have always been my medicine; my means to process and progress on an ever-deepening spiritual path. Writing and story telling are my other elixirs. So, when looking for a passage through this mental health crisis, I recognised the Camino de Santiago as that tool that could save my life.

Grief is not always about losing someone you love, it can also be about losing aspects of self; it can also be mourning the loss of a person still alive and grieving the person you could have been if things had only been different.

My immediate aspiration is to walk 850 to 1,000kms across Spain from 17 Sep to 4 Nov ’25 whilst advocating for Mental Health with the sharing of tools & techniques with fellow pilgrims, to create a new narrative through coaching and story telling. I will also offer craniosacral therapy along the way.
My long term goal is to use the unique combination of my qualifications, wisdom and experience to initiate teenagers from disadvantaged communities into nature therapy (using my years of experience and studies in social development) as well as corporates (using my long history in Investment Banking and Consulting).

“My ugliest parts, when met with mercy, can become my greatest assets.” ~ Frank Ostaseski

My work is not to help people live the kind if life I have chosen to live; it’s to show them that they have their own way and to help them uncover and/or develop the tools that will enable them to find the path that will appear only when they take that very first step. It can be overwhelming deciding (in the head) which of the myriad paths to take until a felt (in the heart) sense is realised.

To support me to support others whilst walking the Camino de Santiago, please click on the link to pledge your support:
https://backabuddy.co.za/campaign/walking-for-mental-health
I offer donor incentives in the form of vouchers for specific minimum donations.

The amount you donate will contribute to my pilgrimage to giving the topic of mental health the bandwidth it needs and supporting me to support others as they too walk to wellness. Together we can remove the stigmas attached to the topic of Mental Health and support people in their times of crisis and healing.

We begin so we can end and we end in order to begin again.
Let’s get people walking their talk to better mental health.