The Dolorosa: Standing in Stillness Without Why
A story of presence and surrender from this year’s Camino.
By day nine, our small group had found its rhythm. We gathered for breakfast, then shouldered our packs.
Our shared presence was a wordless unity. Over miles and mornings, we built an unspoken connection, a quiet trust among us. Some days we walked together; on others, our steps drifted apart and found each other again farther down the path. It was a bond both steady and rare, formed in the company of women walking with open hearts.
Jen and I walked side by side, our poles tapping out of sync, their familiar clink mingling with our voices. We laughed at how often we missed the turn, our talks wandering as much as our sense of direction.
The road did not care who we were. It was indifferent. Animals grazed along the fence lines. Grapevines climbed at their own pace toward the sun. Everything moved in its own time. Ahead, the landscape opened into hills of rock, and pale stones lay scattered like white and gray snowflakes, each one ancient, ageless, and facing the sky, unbothered by the weather to come.
The Camino strips away what isn’t real. You eat, walk, talk, sleep, wake. The body moves; the mind watches. Step after step, thought loses its argument with silence. Still, my mind tried to bargain with memories and organize the unknown, but the road teaches by uncertainty.
By midday, the sun had sharpened, and the heat made the dry air feel motionless. My face wore a veil of trail dust and sweat collected from the miles behind me. Jen and I had long stopped talking. There are stretches of the Camino when words simply run out.
Our pace quickened as we entered Navarrete and saw a café ahead. We sank into the chairs, grateful to be off our feet, and shared coffee and lemon cake. A mirage shimmered over the cobblestones, and a cool breeze drifted through the terrace, chilling the sweat on our backs.
Aileen appeared, hat pulled low, poles in hand, already on her way again. As our group’s self-inquiry facilitator, she had a way of appearing out of nowhere, like sighting a lighthouse just when your boat drifts, unsure of its way.
“Don’t miss the church,” she said, and was gone before we could reply. That was her way: gentle and precise. I’m grateful for her nudge that day; it reminds me that guidance often arrives when we’re ready to receive it.
I took her suggestion, and a short while later entered the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. The door closed behind me with a soft groan. The air was hushed and cool. It smelled of burnt wax and damp stone. Light from the vigil candles flickered like dancing fireflies, and the faint creaking of wood could be heard as visitors sat or departed the pews. The silence felt close.
A narrow entryway opened into dim light. To the right, the long aisle stretched toward the great gilded altar. I turned left instead, drawn toward a side chapel along the far wall.
And then I saw her.
The Dolorosa, Mary of Sorrows, stood above the figure of Christ, who lay beneath glass, his body pale and marked with wounds. From a distance she seemed to be praying, her black velvet robe falling into a triangle, embroidered with gold vines, her hands joined, her face calm and dignified.
I stepped closer. The light shifted.
I glanced at the face of Christ, his body lifeless, already past pain. My pulse beat loud in my ears. The wounds in the curve of his hands, the marks along his skin, drew a raw helplessness to the surface. Despair rose slowly, like a tide. Then came grief, followed by anger at the absence of compassion, until all of it met the thought that such injustice should not happen to humans. I wanted to turn away and leave in protest.
Then I looked up, and the scene shifted.
The Dolorosa had not been praying. She was looking directly at me now. Her eyes met mine, human, yet unexplainable. She did not plead or bless. She revealed, not through movement but through seeing.
Something in me stopped moving. The moment felt eerie, intimate and unsettling, as if I were being seen from within her gaze.
A voice within whispered, Stay. Don’t look away.
So I stayed.
I looked again at the carved stillness of Christ’s body. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Her eyes met mine again, steady and unresisting. Together we witnessed the same truth, the undeniable fact of impermanence, what cannot be undone.
In that instant, I understood Byron Katie’s words: I give God no commands. I saw how many times I had tried to dictate terms, asking life to be softer, fairer, mine, as if compassion were a matter of control.
Her gaze made those demands meaningless. Something in me broke awake.
She stood in the stillness where nothing is bargained for, where pain remains untouched, loss is neither resisted nor repaired, and love holds without condition. I understood. She was showing me the courage that begins when there is nowhere left to go. Bravery of standing unshielded, of letting the heart break and not rushing to mend it.
In her presence I saw that love endures not by holding on, but by witnessing what is finished. This place of a deeper calm, one beyond acceptance or refusal, where nothing needs allowing, nothing needs defending. There was no “I” left to bargain with life, no pride, no righteousness to protect.
In that absence, love stopped being something traded between one and another. It was no longer measured by reprieve or fairness, by the ending or the outcome. It was simply unmoving, the truth of this moment before thought touches it.
The moment ended as it had begun, folding itself back into stillness.
When I turned toward the door, Jen was standing near a wall relief, her face soft in thought. We caught each other’s eyes, a quiet signal that we were ready to leave. Together we stepped back outside. The light was blinding. The café was alive again with voices and the clatter of silverware. Nothing had changed, and everything had.
Dust lifted around my boots. Heat pressed against my shoulders. The road stretched ahead.
Resistance, I understood now, looks like discernment or justice, yet underneath it hides the wish to manage what cannot be managed. It keeps the illusion alive: I am here, life is there, and I can decide how it should be. I had been selling it as vigilance, when it was really the self refusing to surrender.
People ask why such moments happen on the Camino. I think it is because the road itself does the humbling. You walk until every disguise falls away. The repetition, the fatigue, the simplicity—they undo “you.”
The Camino teaches by subtraction. When nothing is left to hold, you see what was holding you all along.
That is where the Dolorosa found me, not in a miracle but in a small church, when I was too tired to search for meaning. I did not find meaning there. I lost the need for it.
If you ever stand before what breaks your heart, stay. Let the road teach you what presence means. That is where this journey ends and begins again.
Victoria was a Camino pilgrim with Honest Heart Journeys 2025. She is the founder of Heiter Studio and member of the German Association for The Work of Byron Katie (vtw)
”Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing the monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” — C.S. Lewis
Your Support Matters
Have a friend who might be interested in a journey with us? Please feel free to forward this email!
If a friend forwarded this to you, please Subscribe Here to join our community!