mountains are the medicine
I woke up at six this morning and was on a train by seven, headed to a sacred hike—one that’s become ritual for me. From Haut-de-Caux above Montreux up to the ridge of Rochers-de-Naye, a long sweep of mountain with views spilling out over Lake Geneva, the French Riviera of Switzerland.
I’ve done this hike ten times or more now. I started it in 2019 during one of the hardest periods of my life, and I’ve returned at least once every year since.
There’s something about working through demons on a mountain that’s hard to explain. It’s the nature, yes. It’s the arduousness, yes. But it’s also the way the climb mirrors what’s inside—the struggle in your legs echoing the struggle in your mind.
Somewhere along the trail, things surface. They come up because the mountain makes space for them.
I think of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, who spent almost every day in Switzerland climbing near Interlaken. His hikes were part of his spiritual discipline, a purification and preparation for the immense responsibilities ahead. For me, it’s less formal, but I can feel a parallel: something happens up there that can’t happen anywhere else. A transformation. A cleansing.
Today was no exception. The stressors and frustrations followed me up the trail. The berating inner voice. The old knots of unforgiveness. Anxieties about worth, value, enoughness. The physical climb mirrored the internal one: steep, uneven, demanding.
Mountains are the medicine. Not a cure in the clinical sense, not something you can prescribe. But a remedy for the soul. The slow burning of legs, the lungs working, the view widening—it does something to the inside.
Two to three hours of ascent. Chains to grip on the way down. Cold air hitting me as I passed by caves. The sting of my toes jammed against my shoes. Then climbing again—up the Dent de Jaman, “the tooth,” smaller but still a climb.
The inner pain never fully left. But it was braided with beauty:
- The blueness of the lake below, mountains mirrored in the water.
- Black birds with yellow beaks riding the wind with perfect grace.
- The surprise of a single house, perched alone in vast patches of green.
- The spirals of textured water, light refracting in ways I couldn’t explain.
By the end of five or six hours in the sun—on what might be one of the last warm clear days of the Swiss summer—I was exhausted. But lighter. More self-aware. The narratives inside me had surfaced. They’d been unearthed because the mountain gave them safety to rise.
At one point early in the climb, looking up at the ridge I’d walked so many times before, I cried. The beauty hit me. The memory hit me. Even the thought of a future me, eighty years old and still able to walk this path, reflecting on a whole life behind me.
The mountain isn’t medicine in any scientific sense. I can’t point to a measurable result. But something always shifts. A kind of pilgrimage, a hajj of the heart. An alchemy I can’t fully explain.
Even if the struggles remain. Even if the only task is to sit with them. To treat them as Rumi’s guests: to welcome them, honor them, and eventually let them leave.
If nothing else, the mountain path gives a way to feel.
A way to heal, even if just a little.