Why travelling is good for your soul

Why travelling is good for your soul

Even though this is still a blog essentially consisting of personal thoughts, I do feel the need to add a disclaimer upfront. Travelling is a unique experience for everyone, and we all have our own mind-expanding, ever so wonderful takeaways from it. The following words are just thoughts that ran through my mind and are my attempt to shed light on this wonderful mystery. So bear with me on this.

If we argue that all negative emotions are self-imposed or that your limiting beliefs are the only thing that keep you from allowing your state of happiness or manifestations for that matter, it makes sense then why travelling or new experiences in general have such a liberating effect. It forces you to be present, which can be compared to an active state of meditation. Your mind is so beautifully stimulated and preoccupied by the unfamiliar surroundings that it often finds no time to linger in the past or worry about the future. 

Since you are travelling and thus are not bound to a specific location, you gain so much more appreciation for the present moment as you are constantly reminded that connections come and go, you might never get to try the delicious meal you're eating in this exact setting and that you probably never drive on that same highway again to move from one place to another. 

As for the life you left behind, you naturally gain a healthy distance, allowing you to evaluate your overall life-settings. Am I proud of the person who I’m becoming? Do I live a happy life, or am I struggling to get by more often than not? Do I live up to my full potential and if not, what is holding me back - really? What are the things that I regret, and what can I learn from them?

I found that when I free up my day and allow myself not to have any plans whatsoever, I naturally get drawn to the things that spark my interest or lift me up. It’s such a privilege to wake up and simply pay more attention to that inner voice of yours. I’ve had a number of serendipitous interactions with people because moments before, I stopped and asked myself, where do I feel like going right now?

Speaking of inner voices; I don’t remember any other time in my adult life where I had so much room for my own thoughts. Although this can get overwhelming at first, being alone filters out the surrounding noise quite a bit, allowing you to listen to your thoughts more mindfully.

Ironically, it also made me realize that thoughts should be handled with certain care. I’ve had very challenging days, where my mind was seemingly plotting against me. I felt trapped in a reality I couldn’t escape, since my mind was directing my self-destructive thinking and tainted every releasing thought I tried to form. In its beginning stages, I found that it’s possible to consciously redirect my focus. If it gains momentum, however, it’s very hard to snap out of it. Abraham Hicks uses the analogy of a car rolling down a hill. As it gets faster with every second, trying to stop the car at the end of the hill as opposed to the initial rolling-off is a much harder task to do. Same goes for your thoughts. This probably also explains why telling a severely depressed person to “just focus on the good” is the equivalent of attempting to stop the rolling car at the end of the hill with your bare hands.

In his book “The Power of Now” Eckhart Tolle once wrote:

“The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately... you usually don't use it at all. It uses you.This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”

If you look at this from the standpoint that your mind is not you or that your thoughts can be separated from what you believe to be you changed a lot for me. As much as you can shape your biceps with certain exercises to an anticipated physique, we should also start looking at our mind to be this thing that can be trained to work in our favor.

Gaining distance, in my case by travelling, taught me a lot about what it truly means to be in the present moment, treat my own mind with certain care and the power of conscious thinking.