“There is no moment of delight in a piligimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

For many of us, we have destinations and paths that we are continuously pulled toward. I know mine!

Recently I got to retrace a path that has deep meaning and healing for me. I went to a very sacred place that is connected to one of the chakra points of the earth. I had been there once before and knew that I needed to return and take a very serious pilgrimage there. I needed to go much deeper than my first visit which had been more accidental, which is sometimes how we discover these places of pilgrimage. We get called there for a holiday, or someone suggests we visit a place, without realizing that there is a profound coherence and something mysteriously compelling between that place and your deepest inner being.

Returning on this recent visit, I was able to fully dedicate myself to the calling that had brought me back. I structured my days around prioritizing my visits to this sacred place and participating in spiritual practice there in a very devoted, sincere and humble way. I would get up in the early hours of the morning, around 4.30 am and begin my preparation with meditation, yoga, and spending time in nature. I would wash my body, and wear fresh clothes each day, and make sure that my being was as sacred and open as possible, both as an act of honor and also a dedication to be open to and receive the blessings of this profound place.

“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.” – Henry Thoreau

Each day I would go there and bow to the deities, the devas, to the incredible power of nature there, and begin my hours-long practice. This practice included devotion, immense gratitude, study and a huge, huge amount of prayer.

The whole time I also asked that I receive and drink in my experience as deeply as possible because I also came on this pilgrimage to heal. I had known for some time that I had needed to do something radical to shift the physical suffering I had endured for several years. I needed to draw on sources beyond the traditional and known.

I needed to draw on the infinite and mysterious and sacred. While my primary calling on this pilgrimage was my spiritual evolution and deepening of awakening, and to take the next steps – whatever they were, in an act of surrender – I also went with deep supplication to this power place to receive healing for long COVID and other health challenges that had accrued over these recent years, and had generated deep levels of fatigue and impact.

I let myself open like splitting a piece of fruit, a pomegranate, and I allowed every energy and flow of healing to enter me at all times of the day. This meant that I also healed deeply while I was sleeping, and in fact I did not sleep very much which did not seem to matter. My energy was abundant!

I listened to signals from the world around me, signals the devas left for me, including immensely precious people that I met spontaneously. I listened to directions given for healings and actions to take, saying “Yes!” to all these things in acts of surrender, trusting and listening to their rightness.

I was directed to other healing places, to sacred waters, and services, and there I experienced the transformation of the damage I was living with in certain organs, and to my system overall, that I would call nothing short of miraculous.

“What a joy, to travel the way of the heart” – Rumi

I continue now that I am back home to feel the ongoing echo and unfurling healing of that grace I received there. I am doing all I can to stay steady and aligned with it, and staying deep in my spiritual practice to keep it flowing. I feel I have shifted out of the deepest, stuck places of the illnesses and my life is on a new physiological platform from where I will evolve. For this I place my forehead to the earth in deepest appreciation, because this will allow me to continue a life of well being, and to do the work I am here on earth to do.

The next steps on my spiritual and professional path have been made very clear to me and while some of them are a little daunting as you would expect them to be, I feel renewed and ready. There has also been a deeper spiritual death, because this dying never ends, and into the spaces created by this death flows the quiet beauty and bounty of the divine which in the coming times will slowly reveal more of itself to me.

The plans for my next Pilgrimage are already being laid.

“Wheverer you go.. go with all your heart” – Confucius

There are many places and ways that we can have our own pilgrimage. It can be to a sacred mountain or nature spot, to a sacred historical site, an ancient religious place or temple; it can be an actual pilgrimage path, one that is known publicly and celebrated, or to a place that is deeply private where the pilgrimage is between you and that sacred path or place. 

Some of my pilgrimages have been to places like Sedona where I lived for three months and took a daily pilgrimage to my earth spot there, in prayer. I have also gone on pilgrimages to sacred places in Australia, and in Europe, to earth-based sacred sites, to Christian monasteries and Hindu holy places, in addition to many faiths and religions around the world.

What matters is that the place calls you, even if by surprise, and that you go there with intention and the deepest respect. That you follow your deepest knowings or external instructions on how to dedicate yourself to the pilgrimage so that you can evolve, receive, transform and ultimately awaken.

One of the incredible gifts of pilgrimage is that it can profoundly shift you, transform you, liberate you. You draw on the power currents, the energies, spirits, and deities that exist there, meeting the realms of possibility beyond the known. Through the intentional dedication to your own pilgrimage, to its refined goals and intentions, you get to harness this intense single focus, and all of the capacity that is there to elevate you.

Has a pilgrimage called or served you deeply too? Where have you gone? What intentions did you set? And what happened for you?