Women and The Magic of the Camino

Today I am proud to celebrate International Women’s day with all the beautiful women from the Marly Camino family.

It fills me with so much joy to know that a great number of our lady Pilgrims have chosen us as their Camino organizer because they have felt identified with my story and see themselves reflected in some parts of my life.

I must confess that moving to a new country with only my two children has been one of the most challenging things I have ever done, however, there have been many other difficult things that I had to overcome like separating from the most important people in my life: My family.

Through this process of change, I never doubted myself nor feared what may happen, on the contrary, I felt stronger and full of faith that I would achieve everything that I had set out to do.

Of course, I had many moments in which I felt vulnerable, but I used those moments for reflection and I started to write down what I felt in those susceptible moments. It honestly helped me to get back on my feet and made me realize my own importance. Knowing this, I knew I had to find something that made me feel fulfilled and where I could give my very best unconditionally.

The most important thing I learned was SELF LOVE.

To all my wonderful pilgrims, please, I want you to love, pamper, value, and accept yourselves as you are, you are your number one priority. Listen to your FEMININE INTUITION and your heart. The “Way” to your happiness is inside you. We deserve the best.

When you discover the purpose of your life and you do what you love, I guarantee that you will feel an inner peace that is beyond anything you could imagine. You find happiness within yourself, not outside. Today, I can say this with great certainty because I feel infinitely happy and proud of who I am and what I do.

I owe all this to you because I have grown and learned so much from your stories, which I admire, and value all the thousands of women that I have met in this great family and that are worthy of recognition. That is why I have always thanked God for having put the Camino in my way.

I want to finish by sending my congratulations to an incredibly wonderful woman, my daughter Samantha for her impeccable example of perseverance and effort.

Thank you, my beloved queen, every day I learn more about you, and thank you for always being present, for your support, your love, sensitivity, warm heart, and your kindness.

You are all truly wonderful and lovely WOMEN.

March 8, 2017

Women. Spectacular women of the world, have you truly realized how fascinating and magical you really are?

With your sensitive soul capable of perceiving the world’s subtleties.
With your wide range of emotions, your capacity to feel, your capacity to love.
With your self-awareness and self-consciousness.
With your doubts and insecurities.
With your pride.
With your humbleness.
With the weight of the world on your shoulders.
With your need for appreciation, validation.
With your need to be understood.
With your capacity for understanding.
With your intuition.
With that unbeatable strength.
With your wonderfully rich interior.
With your contradictions.

Have you become your own best friend yet? Recognize your own beauty and strength. Give yourself credit for everything that has brought you to this exact moment of your life. Remind yourself every day of your life, as you keep striving to be better, that everything you are is always enough.

This is called self-love.

And it’s an art. It is an art that some few are naturally good at, but that most require arduous practice to master. And it is the most beautiful, the most peaceful, the most rewarding art you will ever master: The art of self-love.

I love the word magic. Why you ask? The definitions I find of the word are:

1. ‘The power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces’
2.  ‘A quality of being beautiful and delightful in a way that seems remote from daily life’.

Magic is inherently implying that you will never fully understand it but it has some kind of power. It leaves you in awe somehow. You can try to use logic, try to decipher it, say “it can’t be”… but if it is true magic, you will never fully understand it, only understand parts of it.

And that is what both women and the Camino are for me. Pure magic.

Many experiences, people, words, art, music, etc. have the ability to reconnect women to their magic. Unfortunately these things are not often in our daily lives. Quite the opposite, our daily routine often disconnects us from our deepest parts of ourselves. Few are the lucky ones that can nurture their soul on a daily basis.

The Camino has a few of these components: Nature. Trees. Flowers. Smells. Walking. Time with yourself. Unhurried time. Disconnection. Solidarity and support from and to beautiful strangers on a similar path. Reconnection. Culture. A goal to reach but a journey to enjoy. A beautiful physical challenge. Reconnecting and rediscovering your body. A mental and emotional challenge.

Continuous novelty and intrigue, every step, every day of the way is different from the last. A new ‘routine’, a new focus, where your body, your well-being, your daily goal is the focus. Where you are forced to take care of yourself and listen to your body in order to get where you want to go. (I could write a blog post on each one of these components, but I’ll try to focus!)

And you do you know what happens when the magic of women unites with the magic of the Camino? For example, when you explore the last 100km of the Buen Camino from Sarria to Santiago, we reconnect with some of the basic things we’ve forgotten along the way. We gain clarity from the world, from our obligations and responsibilities, from our daily thoughts, and we begin to reconnect with ourselves. We gain perspective. We let go of perfection. The Camino doesn’t ask perfection from you, it just asks that you try. There are no demands of you. You can allow yourself to be enough.

And ironically, sometimes when we let go, that’s where we find our biggest strength.

When she truly sets her mind and soul to something, nothing can stop her. The women that actually discover and tap into their magic become unstoppable forces of nature.

“I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue and what you are is the point.” -Susan