What's Your Next Trip?

From Jaded Journeying to Trips of Wonder
Joseph Dispenza

When the travel media invite us to take a trip, the invitation invariably appeals to our physical needs and desires -- unwinding in the sun, for instance, or dining on exotic cuisine, or sweating through vigorous sports activities.

But choosing a travel destination doesn't always have to be about just reducing stress levels or gratifying our physical senses. Travel can be a tremendous opportunity for spiritual expansion -- if we approach our time away from home with the awareness that every trip holds within it the seed of a sacred journey.

Reframing a mere trip into a journey of the soul is not difficult, but it does call for a different way of looking at travel. We have become terribly jaded about our journeying. Two hundred years ago, most people who traveled more than fifty miles or so from home would have been considered explorers on a level with Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. Today, transportation technology has advanced to the point where we can leave home and knock about the world with relative ease and at speeds that were unthinkable even half a century ago. Last year, 600 million of us took to the sky in airplanes. In other words, a tenth of our species was away from home, flying through the clouds on the way to, or on the way back from, another place. The occasional delays, disruptions, and dislocations of modern travel notwithstanding, going from one place to another and returning to our home base has become routine, and practically effortless.

It's no wonder we take travel for granted. Whatever else we might do to turn an ordinary trip into an extraordinary journey that feeds the soul, we first need to bring a sense of respect, wonder, and reverence to travel itself.

Once we have established in ourselves the attitude that travel can be a door to spiritual enrichment -- that it can be, in fact, a spiritual practice -- we are ready to decide where to go. Before making that decision, it is useful to ask right up front, "Where do I need to go to enrich my spiritual life?""How can this trip serve the needs of my soul?"

Making a spiritual journey does not require a trip to a well-known sacred site. Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, and the Pyramids are important traditional destinations for the spiritually-tuned, but anyplace in the world can be spirit-expanding, if we choose travel with the intention of being nourished at the soul level.

Let Spirit take you

Allowing the higher part of ourselves to choose a destination that will foster our spiritual expansion is not only sensible, it is a marvelous way to embark on a sacred journey. Here are three practical ways to help decide where to go when the soul is yearning for growth:

Ask -- then listen... Asking for a journey that will stretch us spiritually is an essential first step toward choosing a destination. A simple request to our Higher Self (or Power) locks in our intention to travel, and to make the proposed journey meaningful in a spiritual sense. Upon rising, before retiring, or any quiet time in between, I ask for guidance in choosing a place to travel to that will expand my spiritual horizons. Then, of course, listen for a reply -- which might come in a hundred ways from wildly unexpected sources.

Play with globes and maps... It may sound like play day at school, but it's exactly what is called for when we are tapping into our intuitive storehouse for guidance. Closing your eyes and letting your fingers find a location for travel is another way of surrendering to Spirit for help with a destination. Remember that you don't have to go to the places your finger points out. But if you end up in an ocean three times out of three spins of a globe, seriously consider getting yourself near water.

Look at others' soul journeys... Bookstores and libraries hold rich records of other travelers' journeys of the spirit. Travel literature -- as apart from simple travel writing -- has a tendency to nudge our own life of the spirit in the direction of seeking the sacred.  Thoughtful, soulful writers can ignite our travel plans with a spiritual spark -- not necessarily in the destinations they speak so eloquently about, but in the conscious way they travel.

Sometimes our destination is already chosen for us. If that is the case, we have another kind of opportunity to turn our trip into a meaningful spiritual journey. We can allow Spirit to plumb the meaning of the place to its growth and expansion.

Ask why you are being called to this place...

There are no accidents in this benevolent universe. Everything exists for a purpose -- even a summons to attend a family gathering in a neighboring town or a request to attend a conference halfway around the world. Just as in choosing a destination on our own, a useful exercise in elevating this trip to a higher level is to ask in your contemplative moments why you are being drawn to this particular place. Why this place? And why now? Keep me open to the discoveries I am about to make about myself in the place vou have chosen for me.

Apply dream interpretation to the situation...

A wedding invitation arrives in the mail. The wedding will take place in a city two thousand miles away. If this happened in a dream, how might you interpret it? This is not as difficult as it sounds; in fact, it can be quite entertaining. Since in most dreams all the people are aspects of ourselves, could it be that you are being summoned to witness the love you have for others? Or that you are being pulled all those miles to experience how all the parts of yourself are integrated in a marvelous union?

Accept the "sealed orders"...

The philosopher Kierkegaard, describing the human condition, wrote, "We all are sent here with sealed orders -- it is left up to us to discover our role in the world.''When the destination for a journey is presented to us, we can regard it as special "sealed orders" from the universe. Seen in this way, our trip to the destination that is handed to us takes on the significance of an important mission -- in this case, a mission of the soul to expand the boundaries of our spiritual landscape.

Undertaken with awareness, travel surely is one of the most available and most effective means to nourish and quicken the soul. The destination does not matter as much as the attention we give to the stages of travel -- the preparation, the encounter, the homecoming -- how well we remain conscious of the trip as a metaphor for the journey of life.

In this way, all travel has a spiritual character -- and every place we go is sacred.