Rebecca Weston is not an athlete. She’ll tell you that herself. She hated gyms, hated exercise, and never once went looking for something physically hard to do. When she got home from her first long walk across Spain, she learned her sister and brother-in-law had placed bets on how long she’d last.
She has now walked the Camino de Santiago more than fifteen times.
She first heard about it back in 2000, watching Shirley MacLaine talk about a book she’d written about a walk across Spain. Rebecca filed it away as a someday thing. Twelve years later she did it for real: a thirty-seven day walk, because at the time she thought that was the only option. Three days in, she had the answer to a question she hadn’t fully known she was carrying. By then she was hooked.
For years after that, people asked if she’d ever lead trips or build a business around it. For a long time her answer was no. The Camino was hers. Then our community came across her inbox, recommended by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, and she decided it was time.
The part that took the longest wasn’t the logistics. It was worth. Rebecca grew up Catholic, grew up volunteering, grew up giving herself freely. So she carried a quiet assumption that her knowledge wasn’t the kind of thing people pay for. There are a thousand free resources about the Camino. What did she have to add? It took her a while to land on the obvious answer. She’s walked it fifteen times. She’s lived on it. She volunteered on it. She speaks Spanish. Carolina kept naming it back to her, plainly: your knowledge, your skill, your worth. Until Rebecca’s own question flipped. Who am I not to share this?
You can hear what that flip is worth when she talks about the people she’s helped. A family of five recently left for the Camino. The wife had never been to Europe. Neither had the kids. Rebecca planned the whole thing. And she has people now who tell her, in so many words, “I would not have done the Camino were it not for you.” She tears up saying it.
Here’s the part that maps onto anyone building something. Rebecca doesn’t build the whole program first and then go looking for people. She builds as she goes. With her first group, she made the documents as the trip needed them and sent them out. She borrows the minimum viable product idea from her teaching days, when you could pour hours into a fifteen-minute presentation only to find out it was the wrong one. “You don’t have to have it all planned perfectly in order to do it.” Her trips are even built that way: she walks with you the first three days, then leaves you to the rest, because doing it on your own is part of the point.
Most people who come to her ask the same thing first. Can I physically do this? Under that sits a quieter question. Can I do this at all? A woman on last year’s trip had a knee replaced eleven months before she walked. Rebecca once met an eighty-nine year old man walking it with his three sons. So a lot of her work isn’t logistics at all. It’s helping someone believe they can, then handing them enough real answers that the belief holds. There’s a line she first heard out on the trail: don’t let your fears load your pack.
If you’ve been carrying something you already know how to do, expertise built over years that you keep deciding you’re not ready to charge for or put in front of people, this conversation is for you. Rebecca didn’t wait until she felt ready. She started before the thing was built and let it take its shape as real people showed up.
A few other threads from the full episode:
“You can’t plan an epiphany,” and what the Camino tends to give you instead of what you came for.
Why she only walks people for the first three days, then lets them go.
The one person she’s met in fourteen years who said never again.
What she tells people who are eyeing a cruise to Alaska instead.
How she helps people cut through the flood of Camino advice online, and why five hundred strangers telling you which shoes to wear is the problem, not the help.
The monthly group she’s building to bring the Camino’s lessons home, whether or not you’ve ever walked it.
The bet her own family placed on her first walk.
Curious about the Camino, or about the way Rebecca helps people get there? She’s at thecaminocalls.com and writes on Substack. Start as an observer. Look around. See if it moves you.
Thank you Josh Woll, Des Kennedy, Ralph Carabetta, and many others for tuning into In Full-Light with Rebecca Weston and Carolina Wilke!
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
