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The pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago is an excellent opportunity to turn off the daily life and reflect. In fact, leaving home and spending some time moving, without worrying besides putting one foot ahead of the other, can change life.
The pilgrimage has been described as an injunction. As writes One cunningamProfessor at the University of Stockholm (Sweden), in an article in, Many people return to the house transformed.
Since the mid -1990s, the number of people running the way to Santiago has shot. And it continues to increase, probably approaching the numbers of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, when it is believed that up to 2 million people traveled the way every year.
The medieval pilgrims prepared for the pilgrimage, but rather in order to order financial and spiritual affairs: they wrote a will and were confessed.
The pilgrimage was seen as a ritual of passage or an individual search, where status and contact networks were exchanged for anonymity and poverty in constant mobility. Arrival meant salvation; or a cure; or a mystical revelation.
As expert Una Cunningham writes, the contemporary and post-secular pilgrimage on the path of Santiago is often performed at decisive moments of the life of the pilgrim, for Psychoexistential Reasons.
The pilgrimage allows you to take a break in your life. Authenticity and simplicity are valued and show it that it actually needs very little. Slow mobility facilitates introspection and can have transformative effects.
Technology during your pilgrimage
Una Cunningham writes that it is possible to organize everything “right” to a pilgrimage in advance, but Risk the risk of being hyperinformatedlosing the opportunities for discovery and surprise that are part of the pilgrimage.
In the online forums on the way, the teacher found many divided people about the use of technology during the pilgrimage.
Cunningham theorizes that uninterrupted digital interaction may frustrate some of the goals of the trip. Instead of fully enjoying the moment, it is socially present in a symbolic world, elsewhere, with all concerns of this world within our reach.
Opportunities will also be missed to trust our intuition and the pilgrim community that you will find on the way.
You don’t need a map. The rail is marked. “Even without a mobile phone, we can plan the walk the next day using a guide, and if you want to book a place to sleep, the pilgrim hostel staff is there to help,” the teacher suggests.
Digital Detoxization Place
Many see the pilgrimage of the way as an opportunity for digital detox and at least try to regulate the time they spend with the phone.
However, even if your mobile phone is kept in your backpack during the day and concentrate technology time at night, you will interrupt the separation of life at home, which is necessary for the pilgrimage to be such an “preliminary experience.”
A injunction experience does not always happendue, at least in part, to digital distraction and incomplete extraction of the daily environment.
To anthropologist Nancy Freysuggests that they use these types of pilgrimage to disconnect.
“If you need to take a mobile phonekeep it off in the backpack-strictly for emergencies“He recommends.
