6 Spiritual Reasons to Travel
When you ask people why they love to travel, you’re likely to get a few standard answers.
- The desire for adventure
- A break from routine
- To refresh and rejuvenate
- To explore new places
While all of this holds good, the reasons to travel includes innate spiritual reasons to have that passport and explore this unique world.
Travel holds deeper value for our lives because it is transcendental and allows us to connect with our innermost essence and experience what it truly feels to be human. Conscious travel is profoundly spiritual, and here are 6 reasons why.
1. Allows us to be Mindful
In life, most of us operate on autopilot. We wake up at a certain time, drive to the office, work, drive back home, watch television or relax, and go to bed. What we do every day gets monotonous and we become completely unaware of what’s happening in each moment.
Our minds and bodies are so conditioned to perform the daily tasks that we can be elsewhere in our heads and still get through the day. Almost like machines.
Traveling pulls us out of autopilot mode and makes us confront what’s happening at the moment. Every second is fresh and you’re a lot more likely to spend your time in the now, soaking up this new and thrilling experience. The exposure to new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, allows you to stay in the moment thanks to the ever-changing, ever-evolving landscape of experience.
You learn to live in the moment, to enjoy it, and to be truly thankful for the experience you’re having right now. When you’re constantly on the move you come to realize that nothing is permanent.
2. Reduces Attachment to Possessions
Religions and spiritual practices all over the world advocate the surrender of attachments to material things and possessions. And while it’s an easy concept, in theory, it’s a little difficult to put into practice.
In this case, travel gifts us, through firsthand experience, the vision to see the insignificance of materialism. By experiencing how little others live with and that they are happy with life and not things, you to can see less is more.
This profound realization can teach you how insignificant material possessions are and that they’re actually a tangible expression of your desire for permanence. In reality, permanence is an illusion and change is the only constant. It may sound scary, but it’s the very essence of our existence and can catapult your life into a much higher state of being.
3. Reveals Your Innate Unity to all Things
This unique world is full of people with vastly different backgrounds, spiritual beliefs, and ideas from your own. Interacting with such people can ignite major change in your life as you start seeing the world through different perspectives. This teaches you that everyone has their own definition of truth and their own idea of how life should be lived.
This fosters the expansion of consciousness, allowing you to understand others and even empathize with those whose outlooks on life are in stark contrast to your own. This transformation brings unbridled love and compassion into our lives, allowing us, in turn, to love others for what they are without judgment.
When this unconditional love has entered our lives can we experience our inherent interconnectedness to all living things on this planet. This can bring about immense change and infuse our lives with more meaning and purpose.
5. Identities are Shed
At home, your identity is defined by your occupation, what you earn, and what your social circles think of you. You (consciously or unconsciously) tend to stay in this ‘character’ 24/7 and your thoughts, actions, and habits are defined by this persona you’ve created for yourself.
This self-image keeps you caged; you are unable to pursue things that don’t fit your own idea of how you should be or act.
When you travel, these labels and pretensions fade, and for a duration, you get to be what you truly are - a spiritual being experiencing a human existence. Being away from work, family, and friends, your identity is not set in stone anymore and becomes fluid. You slowly come to realize that you were a certain way because of the people and situations around you and you can’t be defined by what you do or the sum of your past experiences.
In this elemental, transcendental state of being you come to know that a person is not fixed and can choose what to do or be at any given moment. This can be an immensely liberating feeling as it will free you up to try things that you may have previously avoided due to some preconceived notion of how you should act or behave.
5. You Learn to ‘Go with The Flow’
The term ‘Go with The Flow’ can have a negative connotation and be perceived as being synonymous with being irresponsible, lazy, or not serious enough in our high-pressure success driven cultures. Often seen as an opposite personality trait of high achieving individuals it doesn't align with views of successful people.
Travel infuses new meaning to this overused idiom and shows us how important this outlook on life really is. While traveling, you’re sure to miss trains or flights, be unable to locate your hotel, take a bus in the wrong direction, and run into other situations that seriously derail your initial plan. These setbacks will teach you that a change in plans (no matter how important) doesn’t mean the end of the world. Each setback can open up new opportunities, teach travel lessons, and maybe give you an opportunity to talk to a local and make a new friend. Life skills, like stress management and being positive, help you improve yourself along the way by simply going with the flow. You are able to improvise and reevaluate your plans to tackle the situation at hand.
This is an extremely important lesson to take back home as travel is analogous to life in certain aspects, and you never know what’s in store. By adopting this mentality, you are prepared to adjust yourself to any situation and deal with things as they come all without letting it ruining your day.
6. Slow Down
Perhaps the most important lesson you will learn while traveling is to slow down and really experience life as it happens to you. In today’s fast-paced world of instant gratification and ever-improving lifestyles, we tend to get caught up in all the noise and lose track of what’s really happening. By the time we even know it, years have gone by and we realize that we haven’t taken the time to savor the little things in life because we were too busy living in our heads.
Travel teaches us to come out of this hectic life we’ve created in our minds and live more existentially. This can bring immense joy and peace into our lives while banishing anxiety and fear.
The world is in dire need of a conscious revolution at the moment and society can benefit from individuals who think and live on a higher wavelength. So do yourself and the world a favor - pack your bags and get moving!
We wish you an awe-inspiring journey.
