Healing with hiking

It was 2018 and Sydney Williams had just quit two jobs and recently been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes when she decided to literally take a hike up Cushi-pi (Stonewall Peak). She wasn’t sure what to do next in her life, just that what she had been doing wasn’t working. When she got to the top of the peak, she expected the reward of a gorgeous view — it was May and totally cloudy.

“When it was cloudy and there wasn’t a view to take my attention, I turned inward because I found myself feeling really calm at the summit of that peak. I was curious as to why I was calm because I’d just quit two jobs in the span of five months, I was a newly diagnosed and now uninsured person living with diabetes — I’ve freaked out way more about way less, so why do I feel like I’m at the end of a yoga class right now?” she said with a laugh. “Before diabetes, I would eat my feelings, just jump into a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. I might drink my feelings and polish off a bottle of wine after work because I was stressed out. To be a good diabetes patient, I couldn’t do those things, so I was like, ‘I guess I’m hiking my feelings. What a cool shift in coping mechanisms.’”

That shift led to the eventual creation of Hiking My Feelings, a nonprofit providing a combination of online and in-person programming to support mental, physical, spiritual, and environmental health by connecting people with nature and each other. Part of her journey with h...