Spiritual Practice on Pilgrimage

For eight days now, we have been on the 390 km pilgrimage route Via Francigena Normanna from Palermo to Messina. Here you can find all posts about it. When I’m asked why I’m doing it, I usually give two reasons: one is family, and the other is spiritual practice.

In this post, I would like to share a little about my practice during this journey. Although my meditation journey started with the motivation of being able to focus better, over time, through these practices, I found a deeper connection to life (or God, if you will). This text is an expression of that.

Connection with life

My overarching intention for this pilgrimage is to connect with life and build a relationship with its goodness. I practice this by talking to it, praying, and keeping my eyes open for signs of its goodness.

I appreciate how, when it starts to rain, cars passing by offer to pick us up and drive us to the next town. How people invite us into their homes for coffee, and we leave with water and croissants. And how they call Cleo amore, as an expression of the love they feel when looking at her, and maybe an expression of the goodness and love inside themselves.

And I find myself wishing people well and saying arrivederci (see you again) because I feel I might encounter them again sometime, because we have forged some kind of connection.

When I pray, I bless life and thank life. I wish it well, feeling connected with it. And I pray that it may show me the way, support us and guide us, and make it obvious what we should do and how we can be of service.

When dogs bark at us, I include them in my loving-kindness or compassion. And when they get too close, I send them away with my stick, saying, “I love you, but stay away.” And whenever I see a dead animal, I reflect on mortality.

Practicing while walking

My more classical meditation practice consists of a lot of Brahmavihāra practice. First and foremost, loving-kindness, which I often also interweave with prayer, but also, where suitable, compassion, equanimity, the combination of compassion and equanimity, and empathetic joy when I see fortunate circumstances and beauty.

I’ve found that all of these practices can be practiced not only in the formal meditation postures of sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, but also when hiking or waiting somewhere, even when listening to someone. I might even try speaking with loving-kindness in the back of my mind.

So during our days, when we walk between six and nine hours, I have many opportunities for practicing and experimenting with different ways to practice. But I also regularly make a point of stopping the practice and just being present with my family or whatever it is. Which, of course, can also be considered a practice.

Some spiritual food along the way

I also study a bit. For the last few months, I’ve been working with recordings of an eight-week retreat by B. Alan Wallace, which contains a combination of meditation practices, teachings, and the transmission of two texts from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

So when Cleo sleeps, I listen to teachings, I try to apply them to life, and the formal guided practices I do in the morning when I wake up before Marie and Cleo.

The main point here is that it’s nice to have some kind of spiritual input, or food, occasionally.

During our last long hike, Marie and I listened to the book Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg, which was just so good because we could listen to a chapter every couple of days and then practice while hiking. When I felt I was very familiar with one practice, we could go to the next chapter, listen to it, and practice again.

I can highly recommend that book. We actually ended up working with the same book again this summer over ten weeks, reading and practicing one chapter each week and really diving into the practices.

And to show how these Brahmavihāras, or Four Immeasurables, really stay relevant, useful, and interesting: we are working through them again, one month each, and discovering how practicing them daily changes our lives. (If you want, join the group with this link).

A big thank you

I want to conclude by thanking Mark for teaching me so much of what I know about spiritual practice and introducing me to a way of practicing that is rigorous and scientific while, at the same time, open to the magic and beauty of life and the connection to it through prayer (and direct observation, aka just keeping my eyes open and seeing it everywhere 😉 ).

I also want to thank all the other teachers whose teachings have inspired me and truly changed my life.