What significance does the Camino Santiago de Compostela have to my work?

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My Camino walk was an outward response to an inner calling. I had never been interested up till this point. But then to take a month off normal life with its myriad responsibilities was just the greatest gift! I rediscovered what I had known as a child and forgotten. When you abandon yourself to the elements like this, you can find an At-one-ment with Everything. Daily, life grows richer, simpler. There flows a sense of wellbeing, a wonderful lightness of being. There’s an appreciation of what it means to be human, strolling in-step with another pilgrim as you listen intently to their life story, or striding out solo through the landscape’s splendour beneath the brilliance of the open sky. In hindsight, it was preparing me for the phenomenological astuteness demanded by the transpersonal research methodology I chose for my PhD. Perhaps also preparing me for the stark contrast of three-years of cloistered desk sitting! Then too, there was the enduring richness of people I later felt destined to have met.

(See my thesis Coda (p.275). The link is on the Publications & Presentations page.)