Episode 169 - Alysa Golden, WOACA The Camino
In this episode of Soul of Travel, Season 5: Women's Wisdom + Mindful Travel, presented by @journeywoman_original, Christine hosts a soulful conversation with Alysa Golden, creator of the WOACA The Camino Community.
Alysa loves empowering women to reach their potential through psychotherapy, coaching, and community development. She has recently added “pilgrim” to her resume as she prepares to solo walk 900km across Spain on the Camino de Santiago this Spring. She created WOACA, the Camino Community, a collective of over 8000 women all over the age of 50 preparing for and walking the Camino. Together, the community wrote and published the book, Hearing the Camino's Call: Stories of Inspiration and Celebration from Women 50+ Walking the Camino de Santiago. The group also started The Camino Love Fund, which helps women walk the Camino with more safety and ease through financial support.
Preparing to Walk the Camino de Santiago
At the time of airing, Alysa has been dreaming about walking the Camino for so long and despite all her plans and preparation, has accepted that the walk will be what it is. Beyond the practical questions, she persistently hears a small voice that continues to cast doubt on her journey.
She continues to turn to her community of women, all over the age of fifty, who are walking, or have walked, the Camino.
With their encouragement, she purchased her (one-way) plane ticket. But the resistance persists.
The Genesis of WOACA the Camino: An Online Community of Women 50+ Supporting, Sharing, and Walking
When Alysa first started to plan her Camino trek, she joined a number of online communities, favoring those specific to women. But she found herself not feeling comfortable and fully engaged in sharing in spaces that often contained judgment. As a woman over fifty, she wanted her experiences, perspectives, and insights to be mirrored, which isn’t something she was experiencing in those general groups.
She put the call out to some of the groups to form a specific community for women over fifty walking the Camino, and instantly received hundreds of notes of interest. With over 9,000 members today, the WOACA the Camino community is “accepting, generous, vulnerable, heart-centered…It really is a reflection of everyone walking their own walk,” says Alysa.
Identity…in the Moment
Christine and Alysa both speak of popping our heads out of the maelstrom of motherhood to see a glimpse of ourselves again, to turn our attention back inward to discover or re-discover a sense of ourselves that is ready to be nurtured.
And for some women, that calling turns into a call to walk the Camino. For many, that call isn’t the call to travel at all.
“It’s a calling to redefine. So who am I at my essence? What is inside of me that is calling to be expressed? And celebrated? And shared with others? That has nothing to do with any identity that anybody else out there is thinking about me as? What is really the essential part of me that is not being expressed in this moment?”
Hearing the Camino's Call: Stories of Inspiration and Celebration from Women 50+ Walking the Camino de Santiago
Inspired beyond expectations by the stories women were sharing in the group, Alysa recognized the potential power of bringing those stories together in a book.
When she reached out to the group, she got exactly what she was expecting–and so much more.
Some stories are records of women’s journals while walking; some are perspectives of women who are preparing to walk the Camino. And others are stories from the integration stage, where women return from their walk to their lives, discovering to see where they fit.
When putting together the book, it was essential for Alysa to honor the original language of each story, so she completed only the most minor of edits. She invited Caroline Gillespie, author of The Pilgrim, to read the book and write a cover review. Alysa also reached out to podcast host Nancy Reynolds to write a beautiful foreword for the text.
The result: stories of women brave enough to say, “Yes.”
“Why do people love to travel? It’s because we’re in the moment. And the moment’s unfolding; we don’t really know what the next moment is. And that’s actually what life is, itself – that’s all that’s happening every single day. The moment is arising, and we’re meeting it.”
Soul of Travel Episode 169 At a Glance
In this conversation, Christine and Alysa discuss:
Alysa’s own call to walk the Camino and the resistance she experienced, as well as the support she’s received in WOACA
The need for women over 50 to gather and talk about their experience and to prepare for the Camino in a supportive space
Hearing the Camino’s Call: Stories of Inspiration and Celebration from Women 50+ Walking the Camino de Santiago
The Camino Love Fund, which helps women walk the Camino with more safety and ease
Join Christine now for this soulful conversation with Alysa Golden.
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Related UN Sustainable Development Goals
Sustainable Development Goal #3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Sustainable Development Goal #5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
Sustainable Development Goal #17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.
Resources & Links Mentioned in the Episode
If there are any women over 50 listening who are hearing the call of the Camino, they are more than welcome in our group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/woacathecamino.
Donate to the Camino Love Fund.
Get your copy of Hearing the Camino's Call: Stories of Inspiration and Celebration from Women 50+ Walking the Camino de Santiago.
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Soul of Travel honors the passion and dedication of people making a positive impact in the tourism industry. In each episode, you’ll hear the stories of women who are industry professionals, seasoned travelers, and community leaders. Our expert guests represent social impact organizations, adventure-based community organizations, travel photography and videography, and entrepreneurs who know that travel is an opportunity for personal awareness and a vehicle for global change.
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Credits. Christine Winebrenner Irick (Host, creator, editor). Alysa Golden (Guest). Original music by Clark Adams. Editing, production, and content writing by Carly Oduardo.
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Soul of Travel Episode 169 Transcript
Women’s travel, transformational travel, sustainable travel, women leaders in travel, social entrepreneurship
Christine: Alysa Golden is a soul who loves empowering women to reach their potential. She does this through psychotherapy, coaching and community development. She has recently added Pilgrim to her resume as she prepares to walk solo 900 kilometers across Spain on the Camino de Santiago this spring, Elisa is the creator of wca, the Camino community, currently 8,000 women strong all over the age of 50, preparing for and walking the Camino. The community wrote a book called Hearing the Caminos Call, stories of Inspiration and Celebration from Women Over 50, walking the Camino de Santiago. In our conversation, we talk about her own call to walk and her personal experience answering that call, the resistance she's felt internally and the support she's received from wca. She talks about the need she saw for women over 50 to be able to gather and talk about this experience and how to prepare for it in a space that really understood the needs of this community. And she shares more about the book that has come from the women on this journey. She also shares about the Camino Love Fund, which helps women to walk the Camino with more safety and ease through financial support. Part of the proceeds from the book goes to the fund, and people can also donate at www.caminolovefund.com. Much like what comes up while walking the Camino. We didn't know exactly what might surface during this conversation, but it took us to so many beautiful spaces. Join me now for my soulful conversation with Elisa Golden.
Welcome to Soul of Travel podcast. I'm Christine, and I think we have a great conversation headed our way today. I'm really excited to be speaking with Elisa Golden, who is the editor of a book called Hearing the Kimo Call, and this was such a great connection because she sent me this email just wondering if I might want to hear the story of this incredible community of women over 50 who are focused on the healing power and all the growth that happens around traveling in a way that you do on the Camino. And I researched it and I was like, yes, yes, yes. And then we got on our first call and I told her, I was in the middle of listening to Walking with Sam, which is Andrew McCarthy's book about walking the Kino with his son. And then something else was happening with Kino, and she was like, aha, I know what is happening for you. But we're going to get into that further in this conversation. But firstly, I just want to welcome you to the podcast.
Alysa: Oh, thank you so much. I've been really looking forward to this conversation and being able to talk to your incredible community.
Christine: Thank you so much. Well, just as we begin, Alisa, I'm going to give it over to you to just introduce yourself and tell my listeners a little bit more about you and a quick introduction to the book and your community, and then we'll dive more into all of those pieces as we move along.
Alysa: Okay. We, I'll start with the normal stuff. I live in Toronto. I'm going to be 60 in a couple of months, and I have two children, twins, they've just turned 22, hard to believe. And I am a psychotherapist and a coach, and I am also now Pilgrim because I have been preparing for my Camino for the last 16 months after wanting to walk it for 30 years. So that kind of sums up my identity in the moment. I think
Christine: I love that, the identity in the moment, because that's also something that we're going to talk about. So I can't wait to bring this conversation to get the ball rolling. But the first thing we're going to talk about is a funny thing because we both sat down and you're like, oh, look, we have the same dress code memo of a scarp and a gray shirt. And I was joking that I was like, of course we do, because the scarf is the woman's Perfect travel accessory. And you're like, oh, I was just debating bringing a scarf on my trip.
Alysa: But
Christine: I would say after I don't know how many trips, that is always the thing, the thing I have with me, because you never know when you need it for either sun or air conditioning or modesty or a bad hair day or to look cute at an event you didn't expect you were at, or a towel or a blanket. There's so many reasons why you need a scarf, but I don't know your thoughts.
Alysa: Yeah, no, absolutely. And on the Camino, there's also the other use of it. If you're in an Alberta in a dormitory, you can clip it to your bunk for privacy. So that's a whole other piece. And actually, there's something called the traveling scarf. There's a scarf that women, it's so funny that we're talking about this, that women are passing on to each other. So you'll do your Camino, you'll have this scarf, you'll walk your pilgrimage, and then you'll pass it on to somebody else, and then they'll walk. And so there's an actual, as it's the perfect travel companion and the most meaningful piece of clothing that we're ever going to own, now it's sort of taking all these caminos, this whole, and you know what? I think it's actually the colors that we've chosen. I think it's a pink and purple kind of scarf. So there
Christine: You go. Perfect. The universe was like, I know what I need to do to set up this conversation today, because I literally put this on, I don't know, three minutes ago as I was walking, I was like, oh, I think I just need this need scar.
Yeah. So I love that connection. Well, you mentioned and reading the book, hearing Theos Call, which for our YouTube watchers, I'm going to just show it here, but yeah, you have yours as well that I of course read your chapter. So listeners, if you grab this book, it's so great because it's really an easy fun read. It's just simply all these short stories, and I mean short stories to inspire people to share their stories and their journeys, which we'll get into later. But the first thing I had to do was find yours. So that was fun. And I see that as you mentioned, you're just about to embark upon this journey. And in reading your story, I heard that you still have some resistance, which I was so curious about because after all the stories you've read, all of the support you've given, and you've celebrated all these other women, I was so curious about why you were still feeling that and how you've used this space of community to walk yourself through some of those personal hurdles to be able to really embark upon this journey that you've been dreaming about for so long.
Alysa: Yeah, such a good question. There's a saying, saying that you start your Camino when you decide to walk your Camino, and the Camino is something that you can plan for and do all of this prep and whatever, but it's still going to give you what you need in the moment. And of course, we don't usually know what that is. We like to pretend we do, but we really don't. So when you're out there on your own and you're walking, that's what's going to happen. So for me, when I first started preparing for this about 16 months ago now, I felt the fear, I felt the excitement, I felt all of that. I was like, okay, what is the Camino wanting me to do here? How long am I going to walk? All of those practical questions. But there was always this little voice in my head that said, maybe you're not going to do this.
Maybe you're not going to do this. And it just stayed there and it would attach itself to all these different pieces in my life. Maybe you won't have the money to do this. Maybe somebody's going to get sick. Maybe you're just going to be too scared at the end to do this. You can't take the time off of it. It was just over and over and over again. And it really stopped me from leaping in until last September when it became really obvious to me that I hadn't bought a plane ticket. I hadn't done a whole bunch of stuff. So I reached out to the community. So the community is all women over 50 who are either planning to walk, are walking, like We're going to get into the walking season in a couple of months or have walked before, or a combination of all of those things.
So they've been there, and if they haven't gone through the Camino yet, they're planning to go on the Camino. So I just posted, I haven't bought my plane ticket and I'm really scared to buy my plane ticket. And I just got this flood of just do it. Just do it, do it, do it. Just do it. Just don't even think about it. Just do it. You're going to go. You're going to go. I had been acting as if I was going for almost a year at that point. So I bought the ticket, and then that just sort of grounded me, okay, I've got the ticket. But I got to say, Christine, two weeks ago, I realized that there was still this resistance. It was still there, this doubt, this fear that I wasn't going to get on the plane, and I hadn't bought my return ticket either.
And I went through about, I don't know, maybe 48 hours of just sitting with this, sitting with this, all the things I have to do yet that I hadn't done because there was a part of me that didn't think I was going to go. And so again, I've reached out to my support system both in my life and in the community, and it was just this flood of everybody's been there. It's a huge step. It's a huge step. So I think the resistance is normal, and I am pretty sure I'm going now. I said, pretty sure I'm going now. I know I'm going.
Christine: Yeah. Oh, I love it so much. And actually I love the realness of that because it's not just specific to this, but there's so many things that when we want something so deeply for ourselves and we kind of put it on this pedestal or put it in this really special place, sometimes it's like you're almost scared to just touch it or actuate it because you're like, once we turn that on, it's in action. And now I have room for maybe all the other things that I don't want to acknowledge of maybe it not being what I expected or I might not finish, or I might love it and I might never come home because I didn't buy a return ticket. We don't know what's going to happen once we start out. And I think sometimes it's not even the fear of doing the thing, it's the fear of who we are on the other side of this thing or of evoking this dream because it's really easy to have it be a dream, but as soon as you put it in your hands, it's not really a dream anymore, and it becomes something really different.
And I know I've done that in my life with my business. My girls and I were meant to have traveled this whole year. We left in June and we ended up coming home in September. We weren't planning to come home until the following June. So that was kind of like my Camino. I've had it on a shelf for seven years with me and my daughters. And also, I felt like all the weird things once it started to come to being, and we didn't finish, but we also, and we'll talk about this later, we kind of walked our own Camino. That's what my kids could do in this moment with all these other parameters that happened. And it has taken a little while and may still take a while for me to acknowledge that that was just the right thing to happen because it wasn't the way I had painted out the drain to begin with.
But I think this is something that probably a lot of women and travelers thinking about this type of experience probably come up against, because most of us don't think about whether you're doing a seven day or a 14 day or 50 day pilgrimage, all of those or things we haven't really done in our daily life. And so there's this, it's just such a different experience, I think, and a lot of emotions get tied up in it, and we're going to definitely talk about that later. This is such a beautiful place for growth, but I can really relate to this moment you're in right now. And then I can also really relate to taking a dream off a shelf and opening it up and just being like, okay, let's see what this really is.
Alysa: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And when you talk about the Camino, I hear so many parallels between that and just traveling that why do people love to travel? It is because we're in the moment and the moment's unfolding and we don't really know what the next moment is. And that's actually what life is itself. That's all that's happening every single day is the moment is arising and we're meeting it, but we forget about that in our daily lives. So when we go traveling, it's like we're almost like we give ourselves permission to be in that space. We don't know what's around the corner. And that's great. That's wonderful. And so the Camino is all of that times a hundred, I think just because it's got other elements of it's so physically demanding, it's just got so many elements of who knows what's going to happen.
And I've had so many conversations with the women in my community, and there's just nobody, I mean, some people will say, I went through it and I didn't have an injury. I didn't have to stop, and it was no emergencies and whatever, and I got to Santiago to Compostela and everything was great and it changed my life. And then you think, okay, well why did it change your life? It didn't change your life because you knew exactly what was going to happen. And that doesn't change people's lives. It is being in that moment. So I'm sure as your three month camino with your children was unfolding, and you got to that point where you were like, it was obvious that the next step was the step home. You were just open to that happening. It had to happen. So it happened, and that was your journey, and you were never in control of that. And it unfolded the way it was always going to unfold. And that's the thing we have such a hard time about. We're just not in control.
Christine: So yeah, that definitely resonates for me. And also the idea that in our daily life, we really work hard to control everything. I can't tell you how many color coded time sheets I have for all of the things that we have going on and planning all the things. And then it's like the flat tire or the kid homesick or whatever. That's your unexpected challenge. And I think maybe different than when you're traveling, it feels like such a burden or you've gone through all this effort to make everything so curated. And a lot of people when they travel, especially doing this experience, you actually kind of just take that off because you're like, you know, can't control it. And it is such a part of the process is to just be there and see what happens. You're actually waiting for the other shoe to drop times in your life when you're waiting because you kind of know that that's the special thing.
Well, I really want to start to talk about this community because you were sharing with me when we first met that you were looking for information. You've heard from other women that they've really been looking for information about the communo and planning and preparing and what to expect. And you would read it and the stories you would read, you weren't really finding yourself in those stories or the information was useful, but maybe not completely relevant. Again, you were taking something that was for a general population or a specific population you didn't find yourself in, and this not women over 50, you weren't hearing their stories or the things that they needed to prepare for this journey. So I want to hear a little bit more about that, and then I want to talk about the group.
Alysa: So Facebook is an incredible place for connecting people for all of its faults. And there are a lot of Camino groups on Facebook, and there's a couple that are specific to women and one sort of a bigger one that's specific to women. And so I joined a whole bunch of 'em when I first started to plan. And the women's one I resonated with more because it's just identification and it's just more relevant. But I just found that I wasn't engaging in the conversation. And it wasn't that there was no women over 50 there, or the conversations were one way or another way, but I didn't feel extremely comfortable doing it. It didn't feel comfortable doing it. And there is judgment in most communal communities, most communal groups, there's judgment and this and that. We can get into it if you want, but I just realized that being over 50 at this point meant that I had experiences and I had perspective that I wanted to see mirrored and I wanted it to be witnessed, and I wanted to relate to other women on that level.
So I just put it out there. Does any of women over 50 in this group want to just form a little group so that we can talk about what our experience is, which is going to be different than a 25-year-old woman or a 30-year-old woman? It's just going to be. And then I just got this hundreds of women just in two seconds, just fluff blew over. It was complete naivete on my part. I didn't know what to expect. And now it's just grown and grown and there's over 8,000 women in the community now. And the consensus is, and it's absolutely the truth that this community is absolutely accepting. It is generous, it is vulnerable, it is.
It really is a reflection of at this point, we know that everyone's walking their own walk, walking through life their own way, walking their commute, their own way. And if I get to do it the way I want to do it, you get to do it the way you want to do it. And we're just kind of there in that space together. And it's been absolutely powerful and beautiful, which is why I wanted, one of the reasons I wanted to do the book was because those voices are so powerful and beautiful and inspiring. So I don't care if you're walking the Camino or not, you're going to be inspired by these stories, by women who are doing this. So that's sort of the genesis of the community, and I'm very much in love with it and everything I put out into the community, I'm just so excited about being able to do something for the women in the group.
Christine: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that and for really showing the intention behind it. And I think even more the unexpected, like you said, the unexpected gathering and the deep community that was created. And again, I know when we prepared for this and we were talking and I was thinking about what is the impact that this is all creating? And as you were just speaking now, I was so reminded of that, of how this is really helping to break a mold and speak to women who have really been invisible in the outdoor space and the adventure space and travel space that even though this is one of the most well traveled sectors of the industry, it is the demographic that's missing from marketing campaigns and from those glossy ads you see at REI or whoever, as you said, people really wanting to see each other and be seen, you need a space that is unique to who you are.
And then the other thing that as you were speaking, I was thinking about the perspective when I'm thinking of myself when I set off backpacking in Thailand when I was 25, and while I think I didn't have a plan per se because I didn't book anything or whatever, I was also very much waiting for that journey to just reveal itself to me. I still kind of had an expectation or I felt like there was a way to do things or I still was measuring it up or knowing that there was maybe a way to do it or think about it or feel about it. It didn't have the freedom. Whereas now I think I would have a very different perspective and you're saying, oh, interesting. Over 50 know you have some life under you that things are probably not going to go the way that you expect, or you just know that there's so more to a type of experience or it is just a different knowing. That's a really important part of a space like this because it will get dismissed by people that haven't yet experienced that because it's not relatable. And so I loved when you were talking about that. I think it's important.
Alysa: Oh, so important. And that's why what you're doing is so important. You're holding space for women to do this and to have these conversations and it's so, so important. And I've had posts in my community like, hello, I'm this person and I am reaching out here because I need to walk the Camino. And I haven't told anybody in my life, I haven't told my husband, I haven't told my kids I haven't, but I'm telling you, this is what I need to do. Or I am 72 and my husband died three years ago and I've wanted to do this since then, but I have arthritis in both knees and I don't know if I can do this. And it's just a universal, if you've been called do it and we see you and we hear you, and we know that you are more than scared, you're more than hurting, you're more than grieving, you're more than that.
And that there's a center in you and you've heard this call and that this is what you need to be doing, and we're here for you. We see you, we have your back. And it really, there's one woman who started in that space of just, she's in her mid seventies, and when she bought her plane ticket, she posted when she planned what she was going to take, she posted. And so we've just been witnessing this sort of rising up of her stepping into her own power and her own intention to do what she wants to do with her life. And I mean, I can't tell you Christina, how excited I am for her and how I cannot wait for the first picture of her in Spain. I mean, it is really going to be something else. So who cares how many miles, how many steps, how many, what city you start in, what city you stop in. I mean, her life has changed. My life has changed. Haven't stepped foot on a plane yet. So yeah, we need to be seen and we need to be there for each other.
Christine: Oh my gosh. I feel like there's so many moments of that that also really resonate with conversations I've had and spaces that I've been lucky to hold. You've mentioned that there's just so many women craving that space to even be seen in. And I think with that, I want to talk a little bit about, because as you were talking with people maybe arriving into the group in a container of why they can't do this journey with this identity associated with that, and again, I think with women over 50, we've had a lot of time to earn those labels. I can't because I'm a mother, I can't because I'm a widow, I can't because I have bad knees. I can't because I'm 70. I can't because of all these things that people have told us about ourself, which are true, but it doesn't have to be who we are at the essence of ourself.
And that's that part, and we'll address hearing the Camino, but that's that part that's driving this, this deep true self that actually doesn't care about all these other things that people have put on top of us. And I think I'd love to talk to you a little bit about how you've seen that in your experience and within this group of how the roles of women and the sacrifices that we make as mothers and as women and the decisions we make kind of slowly disconnect us from this piece of self. Or maybe not even disconnect it, but just cover it up. We forget who we were in the core of our being. And this call is not a call necessarily to travel. It's not a call to Spain, but it's this call to just be, to just be. And it's like this part of yourself can no longer be silenced and it comes blaring out of you. And I've seen it happen in so many women and they're like, that thing, I think that happened to you. I think it's happening to me. It's really loud, it's really uncomfortable or very, I don't know what to do with this. And there's a beautiful quote about it by Brene Brown, and I can't remember it right now. I wish I could, but I just want to talk about that. What is this moment? I imagine more than anything, you're walking women through this, walking them home to themself, which is what happens in this process.
Alysa: Yeah. Oh boy. Walking them home to themselves. That's like ramdas's famous saying, right? We're all walking each other home. That's it. That's totally it. You cannot be a woman in our society or probably any other society without having to cover up a little bit of your essence. You just can't. I mean, we've come a long way and all of that, but it's still capitalism, it's still patriarchy. That's just what it is. And then when you add ageism on top of it, so I always say that being a mother is the best thing in my life. It brings me so much joy. I wouldn't train one single day of it. And I am so excited to be a mother for the rest of my life. And so it has nothing to do with, oh, I sacrificed myself and oh, nothing like that at all. But it's a shift of focus away from us.
And when we're mothers, it's not even a conscious shift of focus. It's a diving into a focus that's not us, and it gives us so much, and we love it so much, but there's an element of popping your head up out of the maelstrom. And for me, it happened when my kids were about 17, 16, 17, where I was still totally involved with them all the time at school and this and that and the other. But I knew something had changed. I had space to sort of turn that flashlight back in. And so that happened for me when, about five years ago. So I was sort of in my mid fifties. It happens for some women a little bit earlier, happens for women later. Some women have that around their partners. I need to take care of my relationship. I need to take care of my partner.
Not in a mothering way, but this is what I do as a wife. Or we have responsibilities at work or whatever it is. We are always doing that in some way, shape or form. It's very hard not to be in our lives, and that's all very good and fine, and it feels normal and natural and it is. But this calling, as you say, it absolutely is a calling to redefine. So who am I at my essence, what is inside of me that is calling to be expressed and celebrated and shared with others? That really has nothing to do with any identity that anybody else out there is thinking about me as what is really the essential part of me that is not being expressed in this moment? And for me, I have a sense of maybe what that is. I have have a spiritual practice, and so I connect there, but I need this reset in order to just clear everything away so that I know what my next step is in that expression of I knew when I had kids that my expression of was completely going through them.
I remember my mother, I had twins, so I mean, I was just nursing all the time, nursing, nursing. My mother said, don't you get tired of doing that all the time. Literally, it's hard to see you without nursing a baby. And I said, well, what else am I doing right now? This is the most important, wonderful time consuming thing in my life. This is what I'm doing now in my life. And it was so obvious, but now it doesn't feel as obvious. There's something, it needs to become clearer, and that's where the Camino is coming in for me. And I think that's what happens with a lot of women because who wants to do this? It's not a vacation. Sometimes people will say, oh, you're going on vacation to Spain for two months. That's amazing. I am. It doesn't really, there's nothing about this that feels like a vacation.
A vacation is lying on a beach in Mexico. This does not feel like this has been a lot of work so far. It's been a lot of stress. It's been a lot of fear. It's been a lot of emotional. I don't do any of that when I go on vacation and then I'm going to be walking 12, 15 kilometers a day, 20 kilometers a day. That's not going to feel very much like a vacation either. I don't think it'll feel like a break, but I don't know if it's going to feel like a vacation. So yeah, I don't know if that answered your question. Definitely. Yeah.
Christine: No, it's so powerful. And I think hearing too, you say about that moment of your time in your life with this focus and dedication to nursing, I definitely had that. I calculated at some point that I had been nursing my children for seven years, or I don't know, but an absurd amount of time. It was a lot of time with three daughters. And I was just seeing how we actually accept that because that did give me focus. This is who I am I taking that title on because that gives me clarity and it also gives me purpose. And I just say, this is what I'm doing. This is who I am, not because I am not saying that because I didn't want to do it same as you. I loved it. That was the most magical. I had such value to those small human beings.
It was a moment in my life where I felt like I had the most value to serve the little beings that I was serving. But all of a sudden when that role shifts, and like you said, your children are now 22 and you have this moment, and it's like the package they gave you when you had children that was like, you'll nurse them. You will get them to preschool, you'll get them through school, you'll help them apply to college. You had all these things, so you're like, okay, I just opened the next envelope and I do the next thing. All of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I have no more envelopes. And you look up
Alysa: Right
Christine: That moment, that looking up moment is so important. And when people have asked me, who is Lotus Sojourns for which is my women's travel company, I have always tried to say, I said, it's for the women in that moment when they've looked up.
Alysa: Oh, that's so amazing.
Christine: And people that know what it is, they know. They're like, oh my God, that yes. But people that don't know, they're like, oh, I don't really know how that fits into a marketing plan. It's like, believe me it.
Alysa: But you know, when you hear it,
Christine: It's vital. And so I love this space so much, and I hope our listeners are taking away the magic that we feel because we've experienced this at moments of our own lives and in gathering other women who are filling this. I want to get a little bit more into the book. I can already see that we're going to want to be in a conversation for six hours instead of one, which is so good. But with the book, you wanted to really curate all of these experiences, bring these voices together, give them a place to be heard and to reach more women. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Alysa: Yeah. So the book really was living inside of me from the very, very beginning because I know that it's hard for older women's voices to be heard. It's hard. It's just hard. And so what I did was I said, I reached out to the community and all I said was very simple. I said, who wants to speak from their heart? And just talked to us about the Camino. Just write a story about your Camino. You can be planning it, you could have walked it, you could be walking it as you're writing, it doesn't matter. Just write something from the heart and send it to me. And I tried to put a little word limit on it, but luckily people ignored that. So some of them are super short, like you said, a paragraph. And some of them are a couple pages, but none of them are longer than that.
And I got what I knew I was going to get. I got a range of these incredible women voices, and I decided I want a color picture, not block away a color picture. These women are vibrant and they're all in color of each of them. And to put right next to their stories, this is who you and I want you to own this story and own these words. And some women, I get choked up because some women, I have one woman who said, I've always wanted to write, and this is the first time I've ever written, and now I'm in a published book, and this means that I can do the writing that I've always wanted to do. So the stories, some of them are like women's journals as they've been walking, and it's just like five days of little journals. Some of them are women who are preparing, as I said, and then there's also the integration stage because we hear about that.
That can be difficult, which makes total sense coming back to everything that's just always the same. And so you're going to have a little bit of integration, probably challenges there. And so it's stories about that. So each story, I edited it for spelling and whatever, but that was it. I took every single story that came in. I didn't take words out, I didn't change anything. It's all in the voices, which is so incredibly important that we're just heard in our own words, in our own voices, and nobody's trying to change that and put it all together. And there's a woman, Carolyn Gillespie, who wrote a book called The Pilgrim, which is very well known in the community circle in the communal community. And she was kind enough to read it and put a review on the cover. And then I asked Nancy Reynolds, who has a Camino podcast that's also very beautiful and very well listened to write a forward. And so I felt like altogether we were sort of holding all of these women. And so the book is incredibly, it's incredibly powerful. I mean, it's the women who are brave enough to say yes, and it doesn't mean that you're not scared. And all of these stories are inspiring. They're all just incredible.
Christine: Yeah, thank you so much. And I do love that you put the pictures in, as I told you before we hopped on, I didn't sit down and opened it up and read it a book. I actually just picked it up and I was like, oh, that person looks so interesting. I'm really just curious about them. And then I read their story and then I just went to the next one and I was like, oh, she has a beautiful smile. I wonder what her story is. Oh, Christine, that's
Alysa: So great. And I just want to say one thing about the cover too, because these two women on the cover, they're both members of the community. They found out through the community that they live close to each other, so they just decided to meet. So they got together, and these are our patches. We have patches for our community, and they got together and they sent me this picture, which I loved. And when the book came out, my sister said, I can't stop looking at the cover because when do you see two women in their sixties smiling with all of this joy and vitality on the cover of a book? It's like you were saying around the marketing and the social media and everything before we started the podcast. Who are we marketing to? What do you see out there? You really don't see this on the cover of a travel book, so, so I just wanted to put that out as
Christine: Well. Yeah, I think it's really important and it's really nice to just, yeah, and you're meeting real women, which again, I think so many of us just crave community. Even if I don't know any of these people, it's just in a way that I feel like a little privileged to be with them for a moment. And I had really wanted to read one of the women's stories that I loved because it kind of speaks my language, but I think we're going to not have enough time. But I do want to just talk about it as a way of just bringing our listeners in. And the one that I read that really resonated was Mariam McCormick. So if listeners pick up the book, she's on page 38. But what I loved about it was how she was talking about the process of the journey and because this is how I speak a lot to the women that I work with, right?
I'm like, there's all these steps. And like you said, the integration part, but I could really recognize that a lot of us, when we think about a journey like this, we are in the first phase, which she mentions is for her, was this very external process, which is ego and body and gear and discomfort and all of those things, which are the things we probably know to expect. We know our backpack's probably going to get heavy. We really hope we don't get blisters. We hope our pants we bought fit comfortably because we're walking forever in them and all those kind of things.
We already know how to be that way. That's how we show up. Then the next phase, she said, is more of the journey inward where all of a sudden you stop noticing that your backpack's rubbing on your right hip and you stop noticing that your shoe squeaks or whatever, and all of a sudden you have, and she said, a euphoria like a runner's high. And I was like, yes. For me, that's when travel is opening up to you. All of a sudden there's this other space that wasn't there before when you were just running around in your mind. And then she noticed after even that moment, she kind of hit what she called the third space of spiritual awakening, where she noticed she could be present in every moment and start to see everything. And I think that's why one of these experiences is so important because it's long enough to get you through all of these processes.
And I think that's what can really attract people to it, is because they know their human self that they're going to most likely on a shorter trip just gets stuck in that first space. And maybe they have a moment that drops them into that euphoria or that magic, but they don't often give them enough space to move all the way through. And then I would say after that would be the integration that you said is so important for a trip like this, because you can't kind of be broken wide open and then just go home. That can be really uncomfortable too. And so I think that's why spaces this are really important, because that's harder than picking out your shoes and your backpack. It's like, okay, now I know who I am, and she's more resistant to go home than she was to get on a plane in the
Alysa: Right. I love her story too.
Christine: Yeah, it was really beautiful. So I really appreciated that. And then there was one other line that I read. Let me see if I can find it in my notes really quickly that I'll go to my written. I have handwritten notes and type notes. I was very into the process here. Oh, it was just words that I kept seeing in people's, in their stories were like soul searching, generous human spirit. But one of the woman wrote, I didn't do this to find myself but to be myself.
Alysa: Oh my gosh.
Christine: And I just was, again, I think the narrative even around these kind of experiences is to find yourself. But I think, and maybe especially in this community that you're not lost. You need to remember, you need to just come back to that space of being. So I really loved just picking through and seeing people's language of the experience because again, this is what I'm trying to cultivate for my travelers is the space for these emotions to happen or this process to happen. And so I really loved seeing the truth of other women's journeys. This is what they're looking for and this is what they're going through and what they're feeling. And for you, what has that been like helping not just help women get there, but return?
Alysa: I haven't helped really anybody return because I haven't gone, and I'm very careful not to put myself out as something that I'm not. But when I listen to you talking, what really comes up for me is the piece around being on your own. And I think it connects to the integration as well, because when you talk about Miriam's journey, I keep thinking you have to be on your own. And being on your doesn't mean you're alone, but it does mean that you are free to be alone if you need to be. Some people can walk with friends or partners or kids or whatever, even and be able to take that time by themselves on their journey so that they can go through those phases and other women. And I see that struggle in the community. I'm afraid to go by myself, but I can't find anybody to go with, or I'm afraid to go by myself, so my husband is going to come with me for the first half, and then I'm going to, it's this process and I think when you come back, so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to like you hold space for whatever that looks like.
And if you're scared, fine, I'm scared too. I'm afraid I'm going to be lonely. And then I think to myself, I am going to be lonely, and that's okay. It's just going to feel lonely. It's not going to kill me. It's going to be okay. And so all of those learning pieces and then coming back, how many of us take the space to be on our own? I don't care how old your kids are or how if you have a job or not or whatever, we're not alone. And even when we're alone, we are with our screens, we're with our computers, we're with our who's alone anymore. You literally kind of have to go for a walk by yourself to be alone anymore. Dogs help. But even then, so I think that the journey that you're talking about, I think it's really facilitated. I don't know if you've found that in your work with women travelers, that there's a piece there around going on your own that's so important. Right.
Christine: And I even, because for many people that would travel with me, they're traveling on their own, right? In the sense that they're not traveling with someone they know,
Alysa: But
Christine: They come into a group of women. But there's still this sense of, because you're not with people that know you, they don't know all these other parts of you or these labels, you can kind of choose to bring them with you or not. And you also, they see you without those labels. So regardless if you're alone, it's like that mirror that they have for you. They might see something in you without knowing all these other things that you hadn't seen in yourself in a while or ever. And then you will have space, whether it's flying to where you're headed or not, where you are by yourself. And I do think that is, it's important and it's incredibly uncomfortable, especially in the day and age that we're in. Like you said, you're never alone with your thoughts.
You don't have to ever be alone with your thoughts. I think that that is what is really special about experiences in nature or in journeys where you choose to disconnect from social media and phones. And I think back to that time in Thailand when I was there, in which there was just still internet cafes and no cell phones, and I was traveling with a friend. But the growth that happened because we were so on our own to figure it all out and to be in a part of the world that we had no idea about and the growth that happened and the strength that rose up from that is really important. And I think that it's also what women are pushing themselves towards with this type of experience is just knowing themselves is really strong and independent. And again, like you said, whether they walk five days or 50 days or whether they make the whole trip that they thought they would make, just buying the plane ticket VI and figuring out the year, you actually have grown through all of that and it's so powerful.
Yes. Okay. So here we are at the end of the hour. I still wanted to talk about hearing the call to walk and walking your own, but I think listening to this so far, our listeners will start to understand what both of those things mean. They can definitely check out the book and if they're interested in the community, they can find you. But I wanted to talk a little bit about where you're headed. You've released the book, the community is Growing Organically, which is so beautiful, just showing the need for that space. I know you're getting ready to create something that's off of Facebook. And then you also have created the Communal Love Fund, which I want to hear about both of those two things. We wrap up our call.
Alysa: So we just launched this past, so a week ago yesterday, we launched our Camino Treasure Chest. And the Camino Treasure Chest is a place for our community to connect off of Facebook, which is important because Facebook does not really support, the algorithm doesn't support keeping the wisdom and the information and the experience that we're sharing. It just gets lost. It goes down the page and it's gone, right? So the Camino Treasure Chest right now has a space for women to connect. I can go to the Camino Francis, which is area, which is what I'm going to be walking. I can go to. I'm leaving on April 24th, so that's the last half of April. And I can put in, I'm leaving Toronto on April 24th, I'm going to be in St. Jean-Pierre deport on the 26th. I would love to meet other people, and I can just put that out.
And then somebody else who's walking at the same time in the same place can say, oh, I'm going to be there too. I'm going to be there at the same time and we can meet each other. So it's got a space for that. It's got a buy and sell space, which trying to get going, come put your boots that you don't wear anymore on this space. And then we also have these amazing Wilco Learning meetups. So it's where women in our community can share their wisdom. And so we had one on volunteering on the Camino. We just had one on how to use hiking coals. Someone's doing one today on taking care of your feet. So there's all of these learning meetups. So the idea behind the Treasure Chest is that it supports the community in that way, but it also supports the communal love fund, which has also been really part of my consciousness since I started this whole group, because it can be expensive and it can be a barrier to walking money.
So the Communal Love fund raises funds to help other women to walk their caminos. So we're just starting it. We haven't dispersed anything yet. And I have three women that are working with me who said to me, okay, so Lisa, you've put thousands of hours into this community. Let's support your Camino first, which was so incredibly beautiful. So that's what's happening first. But after that happens twice a year, there'll be disbursements for women to do anything from, I need a new pair of shoes, but it's going to be too much for me. Or I need some help with a plane ticket. Or I've been staying in dorms and I haven't been sleeping. I could really use a private room for a night. Or I have an emergency, a medical emergency, whatever it is that we can all such a large community, everybody puts five or 10 bucks in. We can really make a difference for a lot of women. So that's the idea behind the communal left fund. Certainly anything that's raised through the book or sold or whatever, it's all being put into one pot. And as you know, it also takes funds to keep everything going. But anything other than that, it's a way for us to expand our influence and expand our hearts and just to give on another level. So that's the communal love fund.
Christine: Yeah, I love that so much. And it even gives someone even deeper investment in someone else's journey to know that your community has helped them on their way, and to just continue to build that intentional connection and support of one another. I think it's a really beautiful gift. Thank you. Well, I have loved this conversation so much. Before we wrap up, we'll do our rapid fire questions, but I'm so grateful for the universe for connecting us to share your book, to share our scarves. It's been really great, a really great moment. So the first thing that I'm going to ask is what are you reading right now?
Alysa: I'm reading here The Camino Cult. No, I'm just kidding. I'm actually reading a Guide for the Camino. It goes really into deep depths, into the spiritual pieces on the trail, the religious pieces, the food pieces, all of that. So I'm sort of deep diving into that right now.
Christine: Excellent. What is always in your suitcase or backpack when you travel?
Alysa: My little electric to tea kettle thermoy thing, because if I don't have my Earl Gray vanilla tea in the morning, it's just not a good day.
Christine: And that one might be hard, I would imagine on the trail. I think you can probably get coffee everywhere,
Alysa: But Oh, definitely. Cafe Lattee apparently is the fuel and the wine.
Christine: Yes, I have read that as well to Sojourn is to travel somewhere as if you lived there for a short while. Where would you still love to sojourn?
Alysa: I've never been to Spain, so that is absolutely in my consciousness right now. But I would love to go to Asia at some point, Thailand or somewhere in that vicinity. I've never been traveled by myself, so I have a whole world to go and explore.
Christine: Yeah, this is so good. I love that this space you created actually can be the catalyst for all of that for yourself, which I think is so true of many people. We create the space we need for ourselves first and then we So true. We bring everybody else along with us. Speaking from my own experience, what do you eat that immediately connects you to a place you've been?
Alysa: Well, I've been to Greece, and when I drink Reina, which tastes like looking a pine tree, apparently to most people, there's no way I would have that in my life if I hadn't been to Greece. So it always brings me back to Greece,
Christine: Who was a person that encouraged you to set out and explore.
Alysa: My kids did that. I love showing them new, you're totally going to relate to this, but I just love showing them new places. It's the best. And if someday one or both of them could walk part of this camino with me or still go traveling, really them growing up, the biggest fear I have is that they're not going to ever want to go anywhere new with me. They totally inspire me seeing things from through their eyes. Isn't it just the best? It's just
Christine: It is. They don't let you miss the magic that you want to miss when you're trying to keep things in order for them. They're like, actually, I don't want it in order. I would just love you to see this heart shaped rock. And you're like, I forgot.
Alysa: Thank you.
Christine: If you could take an adventure with one person, fictional or real, alive or past, who would it be?
Alysa: I have to say my children. I would go on every adventure with them, and I would still be able to be myself at this point 22, but I would still get that joy of seeing them see new things and experience new things and see that excitement and adventure on their faces. So right now, that's where I'm at. They're kind of my favorite people and I want to experience so much of life with them.
Christine: My oldest has hit that stride. She's just about to turn 14. And since we traveled as me and the girls, she and I have taken a few solo trips as well. And man, she's my favorite person to travel with, which I never thought way back in that three nature stage that I would ever say that's the person you'd pick to travel with. But it is great when you developed that space. Well, the last question is really here to honor other women in the industry. And so I'm wondering if there's someone that you would love to recognize here in the soul of travel space that has inspired you. I know you wrote a whole book about the women that have inspired you.
Alysa: Yeah, that is a tough one. I dunno if she's in the travel space per se, but there is a woman that I met through this community. Her name is Susan, and she's special to me because she reached out at the very, very beginning of the community and she said, I'm here to support you. I'm here to help you. And we ended up actually meeting, she lives in Vancouver, which is really far from me. But I went to Vancouver for a few days. It was the very first time I'd ever traveled by myself. And she drove for two hours from where she lived and to meet me for a day in Vancouver. And it sounds like such a simple thing, Christine, but when we spent that day together, I felt myself drop into a place where I was just me, and I was me, and I wasn't home. And it was really magical. So that experience inspires me. And she's just a very generous, she's got a very generous heart. She's just always been there through this whole period. So I would say I really am grateful to her.
Christine: Yeah. Thank you so much. And I think it's really important to honor those kinds of connections too, because sometimes they are the smallest ones that have the biggest impact. And it may be people that never knew that they actually changed the trajectory of your life just by seeing you, or just by in a moment when you needed them standing beside you and saying Yes, or that is incredible, or you have the ability to do this, and then they just kind of vanish. Like a trail angel. Like a Camino angel. Yeah. Right. But I think it's really important. So I love that you mentioned her. Again, I'm so thankful for this conversation. Thank you for being here. For our listeners, if you're interested in the community, we'll have all of the links in the show notes and for the book as well. Thank you again so much for being here to share about your journey and the journey of all the women in your community.
Alysa: Thanks, Christine, and thank you for the work that you're doing holding space for so many women, allowing them to travel and reach their dreams and redefine and refine themselves. You're really doing an incredible job.
Christine: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Thank you for listening to Soul of Travel, presented by Journey Woman. I hope you enjoyed the journey. If you loved this conversation, I encourage you to subscribe and rate the podcast. Please share episodes that inspire you with others because this is how we extend the impact of this show. Learn more about each of my guests by reading our episode blogs, which are more than your average show notes. I think you'll love the connection. Find our episode blogs at www.souloftravelpodcast.com. I'm so proud of the way these conversations are bringing together people from around the world. If this sounds like your community, welcome, I'm so happy you are here. I am all about community and would love to connect. You can find me on Facebook at Soul of Travel podcast or follow me on Instagram, either at she Sojourns or at Soul of Travel podcast. Stay up to date by joining the Soul of Travel podcast mailing list. You'll also want to explore the Journey Woman community and its resources for women travelers over 50. I'd also like to share a quick thank you to my podcast producer and content magician, Carly Eduardo, CEO of Conte. I look forward to getting to know you and hopefully hear your story.
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