My Camino, My Bardo

by Cindy Leung | New York, NY

All my life I’ve carried a spiritual duality, birthed from my Catholic father and my Buddhist mother. With this expansiveness, at different stages of my life, I’ve believed in everything and nothing at all, and all points in between.

In 2025, the Camino Francés brought these two sides of me together. I walked in a state of bardo from one ermita to another. In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo (Tibetan for “gap” or “intermediate state”) refers to the transitional existence of a 49-day period between death and rebirth, where consciousness is separated from the body. This is the gift I carried with me on my pilgrimage. I did not bear the burdens of the divorce I had just finalized or of selling my home of 20 years or even the maternal closure of the youngest child going off to college. I also did not bring the fear of the future, the anxiety-inducing newness of what will come next in my solo journey. 

The Camino was my bardo, a liminal space to just be. 

With this, I awoke at the top of the Pyrenees to the sun rising behind the mountaintops that looked like islands amid the fog. For the first time in a long time, I could breathe. I felt a lightness, a joy and a grace that could only come from the Spirit— whether Catholic or Buddhist in origin, it didn’t matter.