“You’re not tourists,” she proclaimed. “You’re pilgrims.”
The June morning sun shone through the large windows of the yoga room and rested on Nórín’s golden hair, the rays chasing away the chill left by the persistent Irish rain of previous days.
Nórín Ní Riain and her son Moley Ó Súilleabháin, were spending the day with our yoga group to share spirit in the form of poetry, song, stories, and a sacred walk to the Tobar Phádraig, St. Patrick’s holy well.
Nóirín Ní Riain—Photo By Kim Dastrup
Nóirín Ní Riain at Tobar Phádraig, St. Patrick’s holy well.
As I sat there on the floor listening to Nórín speak, her simple comment about being a pilgrim sent bells ringing in my brain.
I had been leading and co-leading yoga retreats, like this one to Ireland, for a dozen years or so and I had been chewing on something in my mind. I love to organize and invite people on these yoga adventures, to these beautiful places, not just to practice yoga in different scenery but for a chance to create a bigger change in body, mind, and spirit for each of us.
Nórín helped to clarify this for me: these retreats are more than just simple tourism—they are personal and group pilgrimages.
What are pilgrims and pilgrimages? How are retreats and life in general pilgrimages?
I believe that pilgrimages start with a question and a keen willingness to start walking in faith, often toward unknown horizons, to see where the path will lead you and what you may discover along the way.
The Darkness Before Light (Connecting to Idyll)
A few days after our enchanted day with Nórín and Moley, we were invited to visit Richard Hearns’ home and art studio. He’s a world-renowned painter who lives and works a short drive from the Burren Yoga Retreat where we were hosting our retreat. He graciously welcomed all 17 us—complete strangers—into his home. His wife, Boo, made us scones and tea. He proudly showed us around their verdant garden and gave us a private showing of his art, even reciting a memorized essay he’d written about the spirit of his work.
Especially after our experience a few days earlier with Nórín and Moley, it seemed quite clear that one can’t a stick in this part of Ireland without someone ready to share a song, poem, or some sort of recitation.
Richard showed us several of his paintings including two pieces that he’d just finished that work beautifully together as a duo: Idyll and … (wait for it) … Pilgrim.
As Richard pulled the first of these paintings, Idyll, out from the back room and set it upon the floor, Seneca let out a spontaneous gasp. She said that she was immediately struck by the skill and depth of the painting. On first sight, without any analysis or interpretation, the painting simply moved her.
Richard explained that the word Idyll is an older English word that means a picturesque scene, something ideal, or, more poignantly, something that is ultimately unsustainable.
As Seneca continued to look at the painting, she saw the pathway of a journey. In this painting there are layers, steps in hues, from a light gray area through a valley of darkness to arrive at a brighter sky, maybe a brighter day laying in promise behind the formidable terrain. She said that the valley merely represents life itself and that there is as much love and beauty even in the darkness of the valley as the break of light beyond.
As I look at this painting, in this valley of life, I see an illuminated path—an alluring invitation to travel from what’s not ideal—the gray mere subsistence of being—through the darkness, following the light, into something brighter.
Like many good paintings, poems, or other works of art, Seneca says that in Idyll she sees a thousand stories and meanings. Though the paint is dried on the canvas, the painting is constantly changing by the meaning it evokes.
One of the meanings I see in this painting is the pilgrim’s journey of hope.
This vision of the pilgrim's journey through darkness toward light would resonate deeply with me during my next pilgrimage.
A Columbian Pilgrimage
Recently, I took a personal pilgrimage to a healing retreat in the mountains of Columbia. This time, I was a participant, not the leader. Having been to this retreat 6 years prior, I returned to receive further blessings, healings, and do deepen my spiritual work with one of the greatest spiritual leaders I may ever know, a healer, shaman, and cosmic jester named Tita Juanito.
This place is holy for me, a place where I’ve received some of my biggest revelations, downloads, and insights. For years, Taita has been coming to me in my dreams and telling me that I was late, that it was time to come back. It took six years but I finally made the pilgrimage back.
I prepared with weeks of cleansing in body, mind, and spirit, by meditating, adhering to a very clean diet and media consumption.
Intentions are powerful ways of facilitating transformation during retreats so I decided that Pilgrim would be one of my primary intentions for this retreat. On my retreat, I purposefully didn’t bring many things to read or distract me—just my journal, 3 of my favorite fountain pens, and a few books by poet and author David Whyte, all of which spoke to the idea of pilgrim.
For me, writing is a way of discovering deeper truths so in the days leading up to the retreat, I explored my pilgrim intention by writing many pages in my journal.
Some ideas that emerged on the page were:
Sacrifice: A pilgrim must be willing to sacrifice. A pilgrim not only sacrifices the comforts of their life at home, but must be willing to also sacrifice themselves, must be willing to give up the person they thought they were. They must sacrifice the life they thought made so much sense.
Discovery: A pilgrim is in a constant state of discovery, wields a healthy dose of curiosity, and can suspend judgement as new things are revealed.
Receptive: While a pilgrim may be on a journey toward something or to gain something, more importantly a pilgrim must be receptive and available for whatever comes along the path, often something they never expected or hadn’t even conceived of. They must receive some wholly unimagined version of themselves that they may stumble upon along the way.
The Evolution Of The Pilgrim
One of the great benefits of retreating from every-day life and immersing yourself in a new experience—be it Ireland or Columbia or anywhere else—is that by doing so it makes you available for incredible insight. It does this by opening both your heart and mind. It opens your eyes because you’re no longer anesthetized by the every-day.
There’s real magic to simply getting you out of your old routine.
The Dark Night Leads To The Light
I believe a pilgrim says yes to their own evolution and that usually involves some sort of death of their old self to either a small or larger degree. This can sometimes come in the form of a simple soul update and sometimes in the form of a dark night of the soul, a crisis of ego, or soul death.
During my Colombian pilgrimage during one of the ceremonies, I experienced a very intense dark night of the soul. It was so difficult that I almost abandoned the retreat to return home only a few days into the 10-day retreat. But something kept me there and I found the courage to stay. I am happy that I did because of the life-changing revelations that were in store for me toward the end of the retreat.
Sometimes, the being that had only known itself as a caterpillar is called to abandon everything, isolate themselves, and morph into the being that they meant to become. This growth usually comes with pain but pain with beautiful results.
This is what I see in the painting Idyll
Arriving
Bringing my pilgrim theme into the retreat setting in Columbia, I made myself receptive to any insight about pilgrimages. One night during a sacred ceremony, as I stood outside transfixed at the brightness of the moon, my mind was illuminated with the idea that a pilgrim eventually evolves from their sacred hunger of searching—striving, and traveling toward something—and eventually lands into a state of constant arriving.
A pilgrim discovers that though they may be traveling in a particular direction, toward some goal or destination, with open eyes and hearts, the pilgrim discovers that the ground at their feet is holy ground, that each step is “here,” the arrival they thought was somewhere else. But there is no “somewhere else.” There’s only here.
David Whyte
David Whyte has a beautiful essay in his book Consolations about the Pilgrim.
He says:
The defining experience at the diamond-hard center of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation; a beckoning dynamic asking us to move from this to that. The courageous life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and strangely beneath all, stillness being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence. We are so much made of movement that we speak of the destination being both inside us and beyond us; we sense we are the journey along the way, the one who makes it and the one who has already arrived. We are still running round the house packing our bags and we have already gone and come back, even in our preparations; we are alone in the journey and we are just about to meet the people we have known for years. …
We give ourselves to that final destination as an ultimate initiation into vulnerability and arrival, not ever truly knowing what lies on the other side of the transition, or if we survive it in any recognizable form. Strangely, our arrival at that last transition along the way is exactly where we have the opportunity to understand who made the journey and to appreciate the privilege of having existed as a particularity, an immutable person; a trajectory whole and of itself. In that perspective it might be that faith, reliability, responsibility and being true to something unspeakable are possible even if we are travelers, and that we are made better, more faithful companions, and indeed pilgrims on the astonishing, never to be repeated journey by combining the precious memory of the then with the astonishing, but taken for granted experience of the now, and both with the unbelievable, and hardly possible just about to happen.
Whyte, David. Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (Kindle Location 808). Many Rivers Press. Kindle Edition.
Yoga Nidra
Since the idea of arriving is such a key element in the arc of a pilgrim’s experience, practices that prepare us for arriving at this exact moment, this exact place, are indispensable.
I can think of no greater practice to arrive at this exact moment than meditation and yoga, but more specifically Yoga Nidra.
While I was in Columbia, even though I went as a participant, I was asked to teach Yoga Nidra each afternoon as a way of practicing presence, integrating the teachings in ceremony, as well as resting from often rigorous or difficult ceremonies that would last all night.
Yoga Nidra is a potent yet gentle way of agreeing to simply welcome, recognize, and witness whatever is directly at your feet, resting in this moment in your Awareness. It helps us arrive at the present moment better than any other practice I’ve ever known. Indeed, Yoga Nidra is so powerful and expert at helping us arrive at an exquisite experience of the present moment, that the first time I worked with a shaman in sacred ceremony, one of my first thoughts was, “Oh, I’ve been here before with Yoga Nidra.”
Wendell Berry Says in his poem “A Spiritual Journey”
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
Each opportunity to practice presence through things like Yoga Nidra is a microdose of our own total enlightenment. It does this precisely because it trains us to not only stop looking outside ourselves for the answers, but also that everything we’ve ever searched for is somehow at the ground at our feet, at the tips of our fingers, and that all we must do is to open our eyes and hearts to see.
Closing
I invite you to consider your own pilgrim journeys.
What do you consider to be the traits of a pilgrim or pilgrimage?
Remember how Richard pulled out two paintings, Idyll and Pilgrim? Well watch for my special Saint Patrick’s Day message on Monday where I’ll share more about sacred pilgrimages and the holy wells of Ireland.
In the meantime, if you’re ready for a pilgrimage, please consider joining me at my next yoga retreat in the French Riviera.
