Body and Grace by Dami Roelse
(www.transformation-travel.com)
How Walking Becomes a Spiritual Practice for Healing, Wholeness, and the Feminine Soul.
In a culture that celebrates speed, productivity, and perpetual striving, many women find themselves quietly yearning for something slower, deeper, and more truthful. Not another program of self-improvement. Not another promise to “fix” what was never broken. But a way back into the body — into presence, intuition, and grace.
In Body and Grace, Dami Roelse offers a powerful and deeply feminine answer to that longing. Through a decade-long relationship with the Pacific Crest Trail, Roelse reveals how walking can become a sacred practice — one that heals grief, restores trust in the body, and reconnects us with the living intelligence of the natural world.
This is not a book about conquering mountains. It is a book about meeting yourself — step by step — in the quiet, honest language of the trail.
When the Body Leads, the Soul Follows
Roelse did not come to long-distance walking in youth. She became a walker in her sixties, after profound life transitions: widowhood, children leaving home, and the quiet question that so many women face in later life — Who am I now?
Rather than seeking answers through analysis or reinvention, she turned to something elemental: movement. Walking. Breath. Time.
As she hikes sections of the Pacific Crest Trail over ten years, the trail becomes both outer landscape and inner mirror. Each step reveals the truth that the body remembers what the mind forgets — how to regulate, how to release, how to belong.
Walking becomes a teacher. Fatigue teaches humility. Injury teaches patience. Weather teaches surrender. And beauty — overwhelming, wordless beauty — teaches reverence.
This is embodiment spirituality in its purest form.
Grief, Loss, and the Sacred Pace of Healing
One of the most powerful threads in Body and Grace is its honest portrayal of grief. Roelse does not rush it, resolve it, or spiritualise it away. Instead, she allows grief to walk beside her.
On the trail, grief has room to breathe.
In the simplicity of daily routines — walking, eating, resting, sleeping — grief loses its sharp edges and becomes something that can be carried. The body processes what the mind cannot. Tears fall unnoticed into soil. Memories surface and dissolve like mist.
For women navigating loss — of partners, identity, health, or former roles — this approach is quietly revolutionary. Healing does not require explanation. It requires space.
The Feminine Path: Trust Over Control
Unlike achievement-driven narratives of endurance hiking, Body and Grace speaks from a distinctly feminine wisdom. Roelse does not dominate the trail; she listens to it. She does not force progress; she adapts.
This is a spirituality rooted in trust rather than control.
The trail teaches her when to stop, when to continue, and when to turn back. There is no rush to finish. No obsession with mileage. Each year, she walks only the sections that call to her — an approach that mirrors the way women often live and grow.
In a world that still pressures women to “push through,” this message feels both radical and deeply familiar.
Nature as a Living Relationship
Throughout the book, nature is not a backdrop but a companion.
Trees are elders. Water is nourishment. Mountains are thresholds. Weather is mood and message.
Roelse’s prose and poetry — woven seamlessly together — invite readers into a reciprocal relationship with the Earth. The land gives guidance, mirrors emotion, and holds the walker in moments of vulnerability.
For spiritually inclined readers, this resonates with eco-spirituality, animism, and embodied mysticism. For others, it simply feels true — a remembering of something we once knew instinctively.
A Book for Women in Transition
Body and Grace will speak most powerfully to women who are standing at a threshold:
Women navigating midlife or later-life transitions
Women processing grief, loss, or identity shifts
Women drawn to embodiment, walking meditation, and nature-based spirituality
Women seeking wholeness rather than reinvention
This is not a guidebook. It is a companion.
Readers do not need to hike long trails to recognise themselves in these pages. The trail becomes a metaphor for any life lived with attention, courage, and openness.
Why Body and Grace Matters Now
At a time when many women feel disconnected from their bodies — overwhelmed by noise, responsibility, and expectation — Body and Grace offers something rare: permission to slow down and listen inward.
It reminds us that healing does not always happen through effort. Sometimes it happens through rhythm. Through repetition. Through placing one foot in front of the other and trusting that meaning will emerge.
This is a book that invites women back into relationship with themselves — not as projects to be improved, but as living, breathing beings worthy of grace.
About the Author
Dami Roelse is a long-distance hiker, writer, and contemplative practitioner based in Taos, New Mexico. She has walked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in sections over ten years, beginning in her mid-sixties. Body and Grace: A Hike to Wholeness on the Pacific Crest Trail is her memoir of physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation through walking.
Body and Grace by Dami Roelse is available April 1st from wherever books are sold.
For more information, visit: www.transformation-travel.com
BOOK LINK: https://amzn.to/4pH5uyB
