96 - John Brierley - Ch 5 - "Integration and Bringing the Camino Home - The Docuseries

Can we truly bring the transformative power of a pilgrimage into our everyday lives? Our guest today, John Brierley, the celebrated Camino Guidebook author, believes it's not only possible but also essential. John candidly shares his experiences on the Camino, highlighting the shift from fear to love it can bring about and the importance of taking time post-journey for reflection and integration.

Moving on from personal stories, John presents an engaging proposition of how we can bring the Camino home. He talks about infusing our regular lives with the sense of love, kindness, purpose, and direction discovered during the pilgrimage. John implores us to tap into resources and communities that can facilitate our transformation, like the Camino organizations in our home countries and podcasts like the Camino Cafe. Underpinning his entire conversation is a powerful sentiment that our life is a Camino, a pilgrimage we're constantly on. Tune in and be inspired to carry your own Camino in your everyday life.



For more info about John and Camino Guides:
https://caminoguides.com/pages/your-guide

Watch the video versions of this interview and more:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6VN9ze3z61n6tRLtDXWuQw

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

I'm John Riley. The Camino as a path of awakening from fear to love.

Speaker 2: 0:25

As we are transformed, we begin to head towards the path of integration. How do we integrate this into our lives?

Speaker 1: 0:35

This is such an important question because without the integration process, the insights that come to us, the learning that comes, the transformation of processes that's been happening, gets lost. If we want to cement and deepen the insights in the learning, we have to take time to integrate it. Unfortunately, for the vast bulk of people that I know pilgrims that I know there comes a little bit of a pressure. As we reach Santiago or Finastero, wherever our end point is, we begin to think about other flights, home and tickets, and then suddenly we're off at 500 miles an hour over the air. We did not allow time to integrate the insights and the experiences. After weeks, months, the insights go, particularly if we get home to our old situation and people say welcome back to the real world, wherever on earth. That is, from my perspective.

Speaker 1: 1:48

An essential part of the pilgrimage is when we arrive at our destination point, wherever that is. We should take time, maybe off the Camino although, as I've said previously, once we see our life as a pilgrimage we're never off the port. We take ourselves away from the business of the route and to take time to integrate it. Maybe we go to Moshea or maybe a little village on the way, like Lirres, or somewhere completely off the routes. In that time we take some days, however long. We need to just rest and let the insights come, write up our notes really let the experiences we've had and the insights we have become embedded in us. When we get back home, as sure as anything is sure, people are going to try and pull us back to where we were, and then all that sort of possibility for real transformation, real shift in consciousness falls away.

Speaker 2: 2:54

I mean, that's the bringing the Camino home. You know it's easy to feel connected to yourself, to your higher source, when you're out in nature and you're on the Camino path. But once we're home, what tips do you have to help us keep the Camino alive, no matter where we are?

Speaker 1: 3:14

That, to me, is the theme I'm working with for myself, and I love to discuss it and join it because, again, it's essential to integrate the experiences. But part of that essential nature of the integration is bringing the experiences back home. We have to bring the Camino back home. If, in order to feel connected to a higher source, in order to feel connected to love and kindness, we need to come and fly to onto the Camino Francesa, portuguesa or whatever, we've sort of lost the point. Bringing the Camino home means bringing home that sense of love and kindness that we've discovered along the way, the sense of purpose, direction, and to literally bring it home with us and not let it go Now.

Speaker 1: 4:09

The great thing about the Caminos, which aren't available on many other routes, is that our confatranity is all around the world. Where people can come together, remember, join things like the Camino Cafe, where people can link in, there's our Camino family that we walk with and met along the way. So we need to connect with these situations to remind us of our commitments to ourselves and our commitments to the world and to really find the resources that we need around us that will support our transformation, and that's really important. So bringing the Camino home means bringing it back to our workplace, bringing it back to our family life, bringing it back to our social life. Now, some of this might need to change. We might need. In my own case, I changed a lot. I changed my work, I changed the country I lived in. You know, a lot changed, luckily.

Speaker 1: 5:07

I brought my family with me and they were a rather important part of the journey. I'm not sure I could have done it without them, but you know, sometimes things need to change. There need to be as dramatic as it has happened to me. But whatever, we need to remind ourselves about our new intention, about our new direction, and that is bringing the Camino home into our everyday life so that when we're walking, wherever we're going, we remind ourselves that every step is a prayer for peace and when we forget, we forgive ourselves and remind ourselves to do better next time.

Speaker 2: 5:49

Start again.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Sort of start again. But you know, wherever we are, we don't need to be on the Camino to be walking the Camino. Camino is life. And you know, in my own sense, when I realized fully that my life was a Camino, that life is a Camino, then my life suddenly became meaningful and joyful. Yes, there are some rocky places, there's some deep valleys, but I'm always know I'm on a journey and the journey doesn't end in the Santiago. My life is literally a journey. I'm on a journey now. I'm on the Camino with you. I'm on a Camino when I go to the cafe. I'm beyond the Camino when I fly back with EasyJet, back to London in a few days' time. Really, I mean that, and that's the task for the pilgrim is to really integrate it fully into our being so that we become a pilgrim through life.

Speaker 3: 7:11

Thank you.