On day twelve of walking the Camino de Santiago, Evelyn Higgins sat in the last pew of a small village church and heard a visiting priest describe three meetings that every pilgrim encounters along the way.

“You’re going to have three meetings along the way. You’re going to have a meeting with yourself. You’re going to have a meeting with the people that you meet along the way. And then your third meeting is going to be with God.”

The sequence matters. The meeting with yourself comes first, not last.

We tend to treat self-knowledge as the prize at the end of a transformative experience. We sign up for the retreat, the training program, the long journey expecting that after enough suffering and scenery, we’ll arrive at some deeper understanding of who we are. Self-discovery is the destination — the thing the brochure promises.

The priest’s framing flips this. The meeting with yourself isn’t the culmination. It’s the prerequisite for everything that follows. You can’t truly meet others — not the deep exchanges where strangers share their whole lives on a day’s walk — until you’ve first dealt with yourself. And whatever the third meeting means to you, it requires both of the earlier ones as foundation.

Higgins recognized this immediately. By day twelve, the first meeting had already happened. “When all you do every day is eat, walk, and sleep, you have time to process all that information that every day we say put that in the back, I’ll get to that later, because you don’t want to get there — the stuff that hurts.”

That’s the mechanism: sustained, unavoidable simplicity. Thirty-two days of walking across Spain. No broadcasting her radio show as she’d originally planned. No distractions sophisticated enough to outrun whatever she’d been shelving. Just the daily rhythm of body moving through landscape, and the backlog of unprocessed experience finally having nowhere to hide.

This is where movement practice connects to something larger than fitness or skill development. Any practice that strips away distraction and leaves you with your own thoughts for long enough will eventually surface whatever you’ve been avoiding. Long-distance walking does it. So does any physical practice sustained enough to quiet the noise of daily life — the kind where you’re hours into something and the mental chatter has finally exhausted itself.

But here’s what the priest’s sequence implies that we rarely consider: that encounter with yourself isn’t the transformation. It’s the clearing that makes transformation possible. Without it, the deeper meetings — with others, with whatever you consider sacred or meaningful — remain surface-level. You’re performing connection rather than experiencing it.

Higgins found this on the trail. The people she met weren’t having small talk. “By the end of the day you would have heard everybody’s stories of life and may not ever see them again, may not even know what their name was, but you got deeper with that individual than probably anywhere.” That depth was possible because the pilgrims had already been doing the interior work. The walking had cleared the ground.

The priest added one more piece that stopped Higgins cold: “Right now, you know exactly who you are. When you’re finished, you’ll be somebody completely different.”

This is the part that unsettles. Not “you’ll discover who you really are,” which implies a fixed self waiting to be uncovered. Instead: you’ll be somebody completely different. The meeting with yourself isn’t about finding a stable identity. It’s about meeting who you are right now clearly enough to recognize when that person begins to change.

Thirteen years later, Higgins can still drop back into the state she found on the Camino. Her daughter, meeting her at the airport afterward, took one look at her and asked if she was on drugs. Whatever had shifted wasn’t temporary.

For anyone engaged in a movement practice that promises transformation — and most of them do, implicitly or explicitly — the priest’s sequence raises an uncomfortable question. Have you had the first meeting yet? Not the surface version where you’ve identified your goals and assessed your weaknesses. The real one, where you sit with everything you’ve been putting off and let it catch up to you.

Because everything else — the community, the growth, the deeper meaning — might be waiting on the other side of that.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Revelation with Evelyn Higgins,” published April 7, 2023.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.