In Short
Walking backwards has a spiritual meaning rooted in confronting the fear of the unknown. Because you cannot see where you are going, every step forces you to be fully present: a small, embodied act of existential courage. We walked 422 miles backwards on the Camino de Santiago this way, and over time, the fear made way for presence, trust, and a deep sense of being fully alive in the present moment.
How It Started:
The Irrationality Of Fear
Walking backwards is a direct encounter with the unknown, a symbolic acceptance of its existence, and an exercise in existential courage.
Many people are familiar with the physical benefits of walking backwards, but it also carries a spiritual meaning most people never consider. To discover this meaning, we walked the Camino Francés, a pilgrim’s trail of 422 miles, entirely backwards and created All Backwards: a short documentary about walking into the unknown. Watch it below for free (it’s 13 minutes), or if you’d rather read than watch, find the story below.
Like most things in life, everything we know was once tucked away in the fog of the unknown, waiting to be found. When I was training as a powerlifter, each increase in weight that I could push was essentially a step into the unknown: will I be able to maintain my technique, or will I snap under the crushing weight?
For each training, I didn’t only want to warm up physically. I wanted to warm up mentally just as much, because the challenge of breaking a personal record is as much mental as it is physical. One can master all the technical aspects of any given sport, and still fail miserably when the condition of the mind is lagging far behind.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
– H.P. Lovecraft
To warm up the mental condition as best as possible, I started experimenting with finding practical ways of facing the unknown and the fear it instilled. After some funky-looking Frankenstein manoeuvres, I ended up retro-walking on a maximum inclined treadmill, on a high tempo, for 20 minutes before every training, every day of the week.
However simple it may sound, walking backwards at a 45-degree angle and trying to keep up forces you to immediately face the irrational side of fear: even though you know there is nothing you can trip over (it’s a treadmill in a gym, after all), the body immediately tenses up because of its fear of crashing down to planet earth. The more fear, the more tense the body became, feeding the fear even more. This made a potential fall more likely, the longer I walked backwards – a good example of how we make imaginary fear manifest into reality.
By the way, if this resonates with you, we can send new thoughts and reflections straight to your inbox. Yes, send them →
The Intolerance Of Uncertainty
What the backward, inclined treadmill walking revealed is what in psychology is coined as the intolerance of uncertainty: 1 what we fear is often not failure, but rather uncertainty, or the unknown. A bad future can feel more bearable than an unknown future. In that sense, a 400lbs squat started to feel less frightening than a simple walk into the unknown.
Nonetheless, the backward walking started to reveal a deeper truth: By actively reminding the body to relax the legs, relax the hip joints, and to let go of any unnecessary tension that’s caused by the anxiety of not-knowing, the fear of the unknown would subdue and ebb away. It instilled a calm, relaxed confidence. It’s the closest I ever felt to what Bruce Lee described as “being like water”: relaxed, fluid, strong, precise. This is when I discovered that backward walking could melt down the crippling effects of fear, especially fear of the unknown.
Sounds nice and all, but most ideas that originate beyond the doors of a local gym are doomed to remain floating in the realms of bro-science. (Been there, done that.) So, this begged the question: What would happen if we were to take this a step further, take the safety off, and venture into the real unknown, out there in the real world, filled with rocks, cliffs, and heaps of shit that threaten our white shoes?
Taking It 422 Miles Further
And so, the idea of venturing into the unknown inspired us to set out on a journey of 422 miles of backward walking through Northern Spain, on the famous Camino Francés. We bought a small van, patched it up, drove to Northern Spain and started our journey in the French village of St. Jean Pied De Port.
Unlike in the gym, the stakes were now real: We didn’t look over our shoulders, but relied only on our senses and on feeling where we’d place our next step – empty at first, only then with weight. This was our only way of preventing ourselves from falling, which made the fear of the unknown a constant companion.
Even so, after the first weeks of slow backward walking, that fear came to subside, and made way for a sense of presence, trust, and joy. We’d walked through forests, mountain passages, and sunbathing vineyards. Funnily enough, not having to look down where you place your feet allows you to actually enjoy the view and take in your surroundings more fully.
Throughout the whole journey, instead of looking at what we’d be walking towards, we’d see everything pass us by, and for some reason, I could feel my whole body breathing and being alive. I lost myself in the mesmerising image of the world slowly fading away into the horizon, with each new object that appeared altering the image constantly, hour after hour.
The longer we walked, the more the unknown transformed from something to be fearful of, into simply a daily reality as present as oxygen, trees, birds chirping, or pilgrims walking with JBL speakers.
As long as we’d listen carefully to where we placed our next step, we could trust that the world would bring us to the most beautiful places (editor’s note to reader: we’d also end up in stink places, but alas). It was merely in the moments where we didn’t pay attention that we’d be surprised by tree branches, big rocks, or deep pools of muddy water.
The Spiritual Meaning Of Walking Backwards
What we found throughout our 422-mile backward journey, besides aching calves, dizziness, and an indescribable image of the world constantly transforming and fading away into the horizon, is the following:
Even though we tend to perceive our walks of life as if we’re “leaving the past behind”, the past is actually the only thing that we can face with certainty. In that sense, walking backwards melts down the greatest form of fear – that is, to be precise, the fear of the unknown. It is a direct encounter with the unknown, a symbolic acceptance of its existence. Not only does it acknowledge the unknown’s presence, but it encourages you to actively move towards it (and enjoy the trip while you’re at it).
“What you’re moving towards, is always the unknown. What you can be certain of, is the present moment.”
– excerpt from All Backwards (2025)
