Body and Grace by Dami Roels
(www.transformation-travel.com)
How walking can be a healing, wholeness, and spiritual practice for the female soul.
In a culture that celebrates speed, productivity, and relentless effort, many women find themselves silently longing for something slower, deeper, and truer. It’s not another self-improvement program. There are no more promises to “fix” something that has never been broken before. But a way back into the body: a return to presence, intuition, and grace.
in body and graceDami Roels provides a powerful and deeply feminine answer to that longing. Through his decade-long relationship with the Pacific Crest Trail, Loelse reveals how walking can be a sacred practice—one that can heal grief, restore trust in our bodies, and reconnect us with the living intelligence of nature.
This is not a book about conquering mountains. This is a book about meeting yourself, step by step, in the quiet, honest words of the trail.
When the body leads, the soul follows.
Loelse didn’t get into long-distance walking at a young age. She became a walker in her 60s after going through major changes in her life, including being widowed and her children leaving home. And the silent question that many women face in their later years: Who am I now?
Rather than looking for answers through analysis or reinvention, she turned to the elemental element of movement. walk. Breathing. time.
As she spends a decade hiking portions of the Pacific Crest Trail, the trail becomes both an exterior landscape and an interior mirror. Each step reveals the truth that the body remembers what the mind forgets – how to adjust, how to release, how to belong.
Walking becomes a teacher. Fatigue teaches humility. Injuries teach patience. Weather teaches surrender. And beauty, overwhelming and indescribable beauty, commands respect.
This is the embodiment of spirituality in its purest form.
Grief, Loss, and the Pace of Divine Healing
One of the most powerful elements of Body and Grace is its honest depiction of grief. Loelse doesn’t rush it, solve it, or mentally exorcise it. Instead, she allows sadness to walk next to her.
On the trail, Grief has room to breathe.
In the simple daily routine of walking, eating, resting, and sleeping, grief loses its sharpness and becomes portable. The body processes what the mind cannot. Tears fall secretly to the ground. Memories emerge and dissolve like mist.
This approach is quietly revolutionary for women who are experiencing loss of their partner, identity, health, former role, and more. Healing needs no introduction. Space is required.
The Woman’s Way: Trust over Control
Unlike the outcome-driven stories of endurance hiking, “Body and Grace” is told with decidedly feminine wisdom. Loelse doesn’t rule the trail. she hears it. She does not force progress. she adapts.
This is a spirituality rooted in trust rather than control.
This path tells her when to stop, when to continue, and when to turn back. There’s no need to rush to finish it. There is no obsession with mileage. She walks only the sections she needs each year. It’s an approach that reflects the way women live and grow well.
In a world where there is still pressure on women to “push through,” this message feels both radical and deeply relatable.
Nature as a living relationship
Throughout this book, nature is not a backdrop but a companion.
The tree is the elder. Water is nutrition. The mountain is a threshold. Weather is a mood and a message.
Loelse’s prose and poetry are seamlessly woven together, inviting the reader into an interconnected relationship with the earth. The land provides guidance, reflects emotions, and supports walkers in moments of weakness.
For spiritually inclined readers, this resonates with ecospirituality, animism, and embodied mysticism. For others, it simply feels true, a reminder of what they once knew instinctively.
Books for women in transition
body and grace It speaks most powerfully to the women who stand on the threshold.
Women transitioning into midlife or late life
Women dealing with grief, loss, and changing identities
Women attracted to embodiment, walking meditation, and nature-based spirituality
Women seeking wholeness, not reinvention.
This is not a guidebook. I’m a friend.
Readers don’t have to walk a long way to recognize themselves on these pages. This path becomes a metaphor for any life lived with care, courage, and generosity.
Why body and grace are important now
In a time when many women feel overwhelmed by noise, responsibility, expectations and disconnected from their own bodies, Body and Grace offers something unusual. It’s permission to slow down and listen within.
It’s a reminder that healing doesn’t always happen through effort. Sometimes it happens through rhythm. Through repetition. By putting one foot in front of the other and trusting its meaning, its meaning will emerge.
This book invites women to return to their relationship with themselves. Return to the relationship not as a project to be improved, but as a living being worthy of grace.
About the author
Dami Roels Long-distance hiker, author, and meditation practitioner based in Taos, New Mexico. Since her mid-60s, she has been walking the 4,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in several installments for 10 years. Body and Grace: A Hike to Wholeness on the Pacific Crest Trail is her memoir about the physical, emotional, and mental changes that walking brings.
body and grace Written by Dami Roels will be released on April 1stcent Wherever books are sold.
For more information, please visit www.transformation-travel.com.
Book link: https://amzn.to/4pH5uyB
Source: Spiritual Media Blog – www.spiritualmediablog.com
