Walking Home: A Book Review

This is the second book that I’ve had the opportunity to review of author and speaker, Sonia Choquette. The first was Grace, Guidance and Gifts in 2012.

Imagine at the height of your professional career, to suddenly experience the loss of your father, your brother, and, to have your marriage suddenly collapse all within a three year period. Your personal life is now unravelling. Time to step off life’s speedway and bind up the wounds.

Walking Home is Sonia’s candid story of how she bravely chose to do this. 

Her solution was committing herself to a pilgrimage walk of the Camino de Santiago. Also known as the Way of St. James, it is the ancient pilgrimage route stretching some five hundred miles between Arles in the south of France across northern Spain and ending at the Cathedral of Santiago. It is there that the remains of St. James the Great are said to be buried. 

Sonia planned for and scheduled a month and a half off from her professional and personal life commitments to walk and complete this pilgrimage. She committed to this not long after having knee surgery with a knee that was not 100% healed. Secondly, she had not allowed for time to build up her physical stamina for the arduous daily hiking through wildly unpredictable weather and the unfamiliar terrain that the journey would entail. 

She did not make extensive plans in advance for this undertaking as she had always felt confident in her intuition to guide her. For this, she paid a very painful daily price with injuries to her feet, sore legs and back and chronic pain with the unhealed knee. Still, Sonia was determined to make this journey because, in her words, “I wanted to walk the Camino more than anything to become free of guilt and anger and shame I was carrying so deep in my heart. I yearned for forgiveness for having all this guilt and resentment.”

It would take Sonia 34 days to complete her pilgrimage. During the course of her walk she experienced an amazing depth of adventures with fellow pilgrims she met, her surroundings, and, with dredging up emotions, some of which had been deeply buried since early childhood. 

While on her journey of healing and transformation, Sonia said, “I let go of blaming myself for someone else’s behavior. I let go of feeling I had to hide and pretend it didn’t happen. I let go of the need to beat myself up about it.”

What I found fascinating about Sonia’s sojourn were the encounters she had that might best be described as spiritual or even supernatural in nature. 

The first one occurred on the 15th day of her walk. While trudging along the Camino trail, she witnessed an elderly man dressed only in runners shorts and a tank top go trotting past her along the trail in freezing cold weather. Later she learned about the man. He had made a promise to God in earlier years that if his only son would be cured of cancer, he would commit to completing the Camino one hundred times. When Sonia saw him, he was on his ninth Camino journey. Witnessing the personal sacrifice and dedication of this elderly pilgrim inspired her to renew her determination to see her trip to its completion.

The second one happened on the 29th day of her journey. While absorbed in her thoughts, Sonya became disoriented and lost. Hiking further, she came upon several forks in the trail. Her intuitive voice compelled her to follow the one to the left. This she did and eventually came upon an old shed with a house attached. The door was open so she entered it. Within she was greeted by a smiling elderly man who invited her to accept a cup of coffee. She attempted to refuse but was informed by him that the Camino had brought her to his house for a reason. She sat down, accepted the coffee then was dumbstruck to be informed by the man, “Antonio your (dead) brother, brought you here.” She parted company with the old sage with an animal totem and crystal to protect and guide her on the rest of her journey.

Sonia’s daily narrative of her pilgrimage journey is a fascinating read as she wrestles with painful past memories, decades old emotional wounds and lots of raw anger. As each day passed, she began a process of first facing and confronting each of these feelings then allowing herself to simply let go of each of them.

Walking Home is a vivid account of one persons journey and transformation from being emotionally and psychologically wounded into one who became a reintegrated and healed soul. This book would make a great movie!

Jeffrey Dodson

November 24th 2014

FTC Disclosure:  I received this book for free from Hay House Publishing for this review. The opinions expressed in this review are unbiased and reflect my honest judgment of the product.

Alzheimer’s Research Game Changer

On October 12th 2014 an article appeared in The New York Times by Gina Kolata entitled, Breakthrough Replicates Human Brain Cells for use in Alzheimer’s Research. The next day on October 13th 2014, the online website KurzweilAI (www.kurzweilai.net) featured an article entitled, Alzheimer’s-in-a-dish is ‘first clear evidence’ for amyloid hypothesis.

Both articles are reporting the work of Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Genetics and Aging Research Unit and investigator, Doo Yeon Kim, PhD who shared authorship in a report to Nature on Sunday October 12th.

The Kurzweil article began with, “Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have created the first ‘Alzheimer’s-in-a-dish’ - a 3D petri dish capable of reproducing the full course of events underlying the development of Alzheimer’s disease.”

According to Dr. Tanzi, the key to their success was a suggestion by his colleague Doo Yeon Kim to grow human brain cells in a gel, where they formed networks as in an actual brain. They gave the neurons genes for Alzheimer’s disease. Within weeks they saw the hard Brillo-like clumps known as plaques and then the twisted sphaghetti-like coils known as tangles — the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease, The New York Times article stated.

Lead researcher, Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi of MGH Boston, is now initiating an aggressive project to test 1200 drugs that are already on the market in addition to 5000 experimental ones that have finished the first phase of clinical testing. With the petri dish system, Dr. Tanzi states, “we can test hundreds of thousands of drugs in a matter of months.”

What’s so special about this dish research? Consider the following.

Mice Be Gone
It is an apparent successful breakaway from the laborious and expensive laboratory work associated historically with mice. Transgenic mice are carefully breed genetically controlled mice that have brains similar to we humans. Similar but not the same. In the ballpark but not in the exact tier, row and seat that is crucial.

A More Accurate Model
The dish research brings it all home in that human neuron cells from the outset are what’s being tinkered with. Researchers are viewing exactly how human rather than mouse cells are behaving and reacting. Thus a more accurate and exacting model of how the mechanics of Alzheimer’s disease works in the human brain is now available for research.

Accelerated Testing Process
New drug testing can now be profoundly accelerated going forward with the petri dish approach. Up to now, each single drug test with mice can take up to a year. It has been the absence of new drugs coming to market that has acted as the dark black cloud hanging over the Alzheimer’s community for too many years. Millions of people worldwide are dying every year without the hope of any new significant drugs coming to market that will slow down, let alone stop the disease. The last new Alzheimer’s medication that was approved by the FDA was Namenda back in 2003.

A Key Enzyme
An additional bonus discovery in this petri dish work was learning how to block the action of an enzyme known as GSK3-beta, an active agent in the formation of protein tau aggregates and tangles.

Going forward, I’m keeping my eye on how this petri-dish AD work advances.

We are long overdue for a breakthrough of some kind with our dementia diseases.

Three of our four parents passed away within the past two years with Alzheimer’s as either their primary cause of death or a co-contributing factor.

It’s time for a turning point involving Alzheimer’s.

Jeff Dodson
November 7th 2014