Day 5

Day 5: Roncesvalles - Zubiri -22 km


	My Camino - Chapter 5 We were up early, to do as much of the legwork as we could before it got too hot out. Breakfast was not included in the price so we walked to the next little town Burgete for our breakfast. What a lovely little town or hamlet. All the towns seem to be kept clean. We walked 22 kms that day, from Roncesvalles to Zubiri. As an old student of Vipassana, I thought the hurting feet were the impurities of my mind that needed to surface so that I might face them. Every step I took felt like the bones in my feet were shattering like glass. This is going to be a doozie I thought remembering my first Vipassana when a buried memory of mine came up and I realized that I had indeed buried it for decades. It was on the fourth day of my sit. I had told the assistant teacher that my legs were hurting while sitting in the lotus position for 14-hour days and asked if maybe I was sitting wrong. She smiled and said, “The pain comes from the impurities of the mind.” “Impurities-shmurities!” I thought as I walked back to my dorm and sat on a chair to meditate instead of sitting cross-legged in the hall. And that’s when it happened. A memory bubbled up. Something that I had buried long ago and the truth of it hit me hard. Tears flowed down my face as I observed my feelings and emotions throughout my body. Slowly scanning head to toe then toe back up to head… observing every itch, twitch, blockage, cold spot, hot spot, observing every sensation in my body…. I simply breathed and observed… until the roots of the memory let go, the feelings dissolved. And my legs stopped hurting. As we walked, I shared the experience with Fran, telling her that I was preparing for a new memory to surface and if the level of pain is any indication of the depth of the memory or the pain of the memory then this one must be deep… traumatic… The funniest thing happened as I was telling Fran about my experience walking along a dirt road that day, with trees and grass as high as we were… I noticed we had company. There was a honey bee just a few feet ahead of us. It hovered a few feet off the ground, about four feet off the ground, level with my chest and stayed a couple feet ahead of us. I watched it for a while before I even mentioned it to Fran thinking I might be hallucinating… I wanted to see if it really was “bee-ing” with us: “following” us would be the wrong word because it was in front of us as though leading the way. But it stopped when we stopped and kept going when we did. We stopped to eat and it stopped and waited. When we continued walking, the bee also continued…

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