In order to glean benefits of travel, opportunities for inner growth and discovery along the travel journey, it is important to set an intention to observe your experience.
If the trip is intended not solely for consumption of pleasure or as escape from unpleasant reality, the opportunities to increase self-knowledge will manifest in proportion to the skill of being an observer.
Harvest benefits of travel journey by adopting a mindset of a student to learn as much as possible from life's curriculum. To learn from travel use power of observation and pay attention to:
Flow of Inner Events.
It is where benefits of travel therapy could blossom into revelation of beliefs and patterns that shape your world.
Start a travel workbook where you record your inner life developments. Travel workbook is very helpful not only to remember thoughts and feelings occurring along the trip, but to formulate feelings and observations with increased clarity.
By writing down of observations of inner events during the trip, you're not only seeing or thinking something, you're taking a step beyond.
When you're writing it down, you're exposing to yourself your point of view which is usually hidden as "assumed reality".
Specific areas of inner events that provide an insight of self-inquiry could be:
Recording those can help uncover your own projection mechanisms that disempower you, reactions holding you hostage by irrational beliefs, self-judgments that limit your spiritual progress and success in the world.
Observe world around you.
Notice a flow of time and sequence of your travel experiences. Be open as much as possible to learning from everything — a tapestry of symbols that constantly unfolding around you as you move along your unique travel path.
Observe and listen to other people.
Stay open to what you can learn form other people. Even if they don't fit directly into a pool of traveler stories you can find some treasures. You can gain benefits of travel learning and discovering in their stories something about life's meaning, individual strength and wisdom, coincidences and synchronicity, manifestations of the unexplainable - the "miracles".
Use your authentic journey to the full advantage as a school of participatory observation to gain self-knowledge — true benefits of travel.