How the Year of the Snake led me to the Camino De Santiago

I used to think healing is a private matter that should happen quietly and alone. But the past few years have taught me otherwise. 

As a consultant, I’m brought in to be a stabilizing force, a holder of clarity. In 2024, though, my life behind the scenes was falling apart. How do you provide leadership when the identities that define you no longer fit? Answering that question has led me on a journey of rediscovery—and, now, a two-month pilgrimage on the Camino De Santiago. 

In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 was the Year of the Wood Snake. In cultures across the globe, the snake holds strikingly similar symbolism and spiritual meaning: wisdom, intuition, mystery, and transformation, both individual and collective. Given the profound act and metaphor of the snake shedding its skin, Chinese astrology forecast 2025 to represent a powerful time for renewal, personal growth, and letting go of the past.

For me, the year 2025 fulfilled its prophetic promise—but many of you don’t know that. Because leadership in our spaces too often means staying tucked in, pulled together and seemingly impervious to the daily toll of fighting for scraps to keep the lights on. Because, across our movements, we deny ourselves the time and space for the intentional and incredibly challenging self work that is the foundation of real leadership development. Because we have a leadership crisis that's happening behind closed doors, until it’s not, and I’m not willing to perpetuate that cycle in my silence. 

I want to be open about my experiences because who we are informs how we show up—and how we show up sets the stage for how movements are built, how organizations are led and how funding flows. I hope my sharing makes others feel more seen, more challenged to take ownership of their own work, and more compassionate towards one another as everyone moves through their journey. Because I deeply believe our collective struggle towards collective liberation depends on it.

For a snake to shed its skin, a lubricating fluid first coats its entire body. The fluid causes temporary poor vision or partial blindness causing the snake to retreat and hide away in dark, safe spaces. In its compromised state, it becomes more aggressive, more likely and quicker to attack defensively as it struggles to assess its surroundings—and it refuses food to conserve its energy for the shedding process. The fog lifts and vision returns only when the shedding begins.

In retrospect, I spent the better part of 2024 partially blind, like the snake. Significant burnout, a crisis of values, feeling like I couldn’t recognize myself anymore—now I see clearly that I was facing the constriction of identities that no longer fit. Some identities I carefully built, fought for, deliberately designed. Others had been placed on me, which I absorbed, slow and steady like trickling water. While my work was meaningful, I felt directionless. That disconnect and misalignment was all moving and churning in the undercurrent of my inner world. I can’t be certain what people perceived or experienced from the outside, but what sat close to the surface was my rigidity, impatience, irritability. 

Like the snake, I was quick to attack defensively, perceiving threats and seeing enemies where there were none and taking up battles that were not mine to fight. 

It felt as if everything was falling apart and my tight grip to hold it all together was growing weaker by the day. While I hid away (in my work, as leaders do) like the snake, desperately trying to shut out the noise, my absence didn’t go unnoticed. The unanswered texts and calls led my friends and family from, “that’s just Coco; she gets focused on what’s in front of her” to “we’re concerned about you.” 

In September, I resigned from my job—a leadership role that I had worked towards for the last decade but had eroded at my health and challenged my sense of personal integrity. At first, I thought that was the answer to “getting back to myself.” I thought that with the sheer power of will (and stubbornness), I could gather myself back and reinhabit those identities: wife, nonprofit leader, athlete, friend. But in the end, it was just the beginning—my sight was coming back, and the job was just the first layer of shedding. 

Call me superstitious (to be fair, we Italians are known to be that!) or call it simple coincidence, but, throughout 2025, snakes slithered across my path five distinct and auspicious times. Now cognizant of the season of shedding, I chose to welcome the snake as a guide, a messenger, perhaps even divine intervention. Encountering the snake along my path gave me courage to keep moving forward, believing I’d emerge in the light with new skin.

In my personal shedding process, I found support in familiar and unfamiliar places. I sought guidance from mentors, friends and all manner of healers. I consumed books that could help me make sense of this inner turmoil—this threshold between who I was and who I would be. In each I found invitations for deep personal reflections and solace that this is a universal experience, that everything is always changing and that change cannot exist without loss. That falling apart is the necessary precursor to heal and build anew.  

My healers helped me process somatically, not in the safety of my intellect. They guided me through grief, loss, self-hatred, guilt, and untangling co-dependency, while inviting in curiosity, love of self, forgiveness and wonder. I finally understood that feelings just want to be felt. Metabolized. And metabolized they were.

But falling apart also demands vulnerability — a quality so often touted as an important leadership asset and yet, very rarely supported, honored and protected. Continuing to show up professionally with this backdrop was one of the greatest challenges of my career. More challenging still was redrawing the topography of my emerging boundaries.  I had no choice but to learn to ask for help and harder still to openly receive it. 

While we can’t and shouldn’t expect our clients or colleagues to be our therapists, we can push back on how capitalism dehumanizes us, insists we leave our entire lives at the door in service of productivity. As I faced significant transitions, I started being more honest about the conditions that were shaping how I showed up. Sometimes I needed time to meet with my divorce lawyer; other times I had family in town. I asked for deadline extensions, I sometimes rescheduled calls because I knew I couldn’t show up well, I asked colleagues to tap in for me. While this may seem like minimal requests, when running your own consulting practice it feels like the difference between a renewed contract or positive referral or dried up work. 

Over time, I warily began to set longer deadlines, tested my no, actually took most of my weekends off, stopped answering work calls at 7pm, stopped bringing work on my time away. And while there were times when my clients were surprised or a little displeased, the work was still getting done and the quality was not compromised—if anything it was better. I had capacity to be more present, strategic and caring and, instead of reacting from a chronically empty tank, I had a deeper well to draw from in moments of true urgency or crisis.

Someone once told me: “You teach people how to treat you.” So simple, and yet so true, placing the onus back on us, back on me. I designed this life, and if it no longer fits, it’s not enough to leave a job, leave a marriage, move away. It’s actually facing what’s there and being honest about having been the protagonist in the narrative. Nothing changes if nothing changes. So frequently I wished for balance, spaciousness, joy, adventure, kindness in my life, but I wasn’t actually DOING anything to make it real for myself or by holding firm boundaries with the people around me that would enable the conditions for these things to show up more fully in my life.  

So, here we are, the last strands of summer giving way to the crisp welcome of a Minnesota fall. By the time you are reading this, I am on my way or well into my way to walking nearly 500 miles on the Way of Saint James, more commonly known as the Camino De Santiago. The Camino is a network of ancient pilgrimage routes leading to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, where the remains of the apostle Saint James are believed to be buried. The pilgrimage dates back to the 9th century and reached its “golden age” between the 12th and 14th century. It remains one of three great pilgrimages of Christendom, historically known as the Peregrinationes Maiores: Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. For centuries, traveling to these three sacred destinations formed the ultimate spiritual journey for medieval Christians.  

The choice to do a pilgrimage is something I could not have imagined for myself even two short years ago. Don’t get me wrong, as an endurance athlete, I might have called this an epic trek across 500 miles—I would have had all sorts of gadgets to track performance, optimizing my pace to walk 20-30 miles a day and “get her done” in record time. But, as I live into this new skin, I have embraced this endeavor as a pilgrimage, a deeply personal, meandering and sacred journey. It will take the time it takes. It will be a practice of unfolding, step by step. I’ll listen to my body to guide my pace. I’ll tune into my intuition to help me pause and rest. 

Some traditions would call this 500-mile journey a bid for power; others the search for the sacred or  an act of penance. By the time I’d be writing this, I thought I would know what it means to me. In truth, as I moved through the months of preparation, I also moved through versions of what I thought the Camino would give me. 

• Anonymity: A place where I could just fall apart or try on new versions of myself among strangers, with no preconceived notions of who I am or should be. 

• Penance: I am afterall, brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition (and by that I mean, born and raised within sight of St. Peter's dome, or perhaps in its shadow). The notorious shame and guilt sits there, heavy. What is it that I need to forgive myself for? 

• Initiation:  With the rise of a white-dominant, capitalist hegemony, we have lost the practice and ritual of initiation. “In the Absence of The Ordinary,” Francis Weller writes: When the safety of the familiar confronts the yearnings of the soul, it is time for initiation. It is a time of disruption and eruption as the demands of the soul make themselves known.” I suppose everything I’ve described felt like this “yearning of the soul” --- and yet, modern U.S. society has no place to process this. 

• Homecoming. Having been born and raised in Italy, I often feel homesick. I often feel adrift and culturally misaligned here in the U.S. And yet, as many others have, I have adapted. Of course, Spain is not Italy, but we do share common practices: slow living, rest as essential, long meals, identities tied to relationships and place rather than career or output. I miss it and, as I rediscover myself, I need to go back to the cultural backdrop I was born in. 

Much remains unknown but I do know I have to go and that I have to go alone. As I walk, I’m holding some questions close to my heart: How am I changing? Who am I? What kind of leader,  neighbor, friend, partner, co-conspirator do I want to be? What is my purpose? What do I believe I can contribute to the world? What is home?

I expect I may come home with more questions than answers—in fact, I hope this is the case. 

They say miracles happen on the Camino. I say miracles are happening all the time, we just aren’t always able to slow down or get quiet enough to recognize  them. These last two years have been nothing short of  a miracle to me—that I have stopped the futility of resisting, stopped efforting against the natural evolution of my identity in the world.  As a people, we have collectively experienced accelerated cycles of change, crisis after crisis, individual and collective grief. I mean, our very habitat is bucking (us off) due to our unquenchable greed. Francis Weller speaks of this time as walking through “The Long Dark”-- he asserts that ritual can help us meet these challenges.  If we can heal ourselves, then we can heal the world. 

Thank you all for reading this reflection and for your support to truly step away and take this time. My intention is to come back hopefully a little bit wiser, most likely a little more rested and committed to being a lot more connected.

Buen Camino!