Meaningful travel can give you a taste of profound fulfillment. It is so due to a potential of incurring of palpable inner transformation, what we commonly refer as "growth" or maturation. This is the kind of adventure, where not only a thrill of a new experience causes multitude of sensorial stimuli, but it also leaves a long effect of changed perspective and conscious self-awareness.
What would constitute a travel journey meaningful? It comes down to how much it changes you. It can change you in so many ways, depending on your willingness to engage and leave what is familiar and comfortable for you. It may not always be something epic and grand like going up the high Himalayan peak, it could be a simple trail run in a rainy weather.
Meaningful travel will deliver its goods on internal plane of your existence. It will change your perspective on your relationships to others and the world at large. The biggest prize that you will champion for yourself is a gained insight. That's what makes therapeutic travel a soul-nurturing experience.
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Main feature of meaningful travel is that it expands your life experience rapidly. When you are traveling solo and crafting your itinerary, your day is anything but ordinary. Compared to the routine life that you left behind, it is full of decisions that are packed with experience.
You might be choosing where to have breakfast after you woke up. You might be learning a few words from a phrase book so you could order the food you like. After that you might be renting a motorbike, drive outside the city to the jungle where you would be ready for a ride on a back of an elephant. Your life suddenly is compacted with numerous events which require your absolute mindful presence.
Certain days might feel like you are alive in a dream, because references to your ordinary life are not around you. You may realize that your thoughts are the only references to the life you left and soon begin to think about what makes you who you think you are.
Compare it to the day's highlight of your life back home, where you depending on the position, might be wrapping up nice sales report for the company, or be looking forward to checking on a status of your Facebook page.
Imagine you've climbed some mountain, a notable geographic location and here you are back home. You probably had an extraordinary adventure on the physical plane, that required much strength and determination to accomplish.
That could've been a unique location that presented many barriers to overcome, which would not be known to an average traveler. And there is great feeling of accomplishment in that.
However, when you came back from the mountain, how meaningful was is for you? What did you learn about yourself, your beliefs, your life purpose, — it's meaning, priorities and value? Was it simply a box you wanted to check off your bucket list?
How meaningful the adventure was for you? What did you learn about yourself and the way you live your life? Was it something that allowed you to experience qualities of warrior soul?
Meaningful travel lets you connect to the very fabric of your unique human experience.
Meaningful travel can lead you to experiences and places where you could enter a blissful state of feeling the most alive.
You may transcend the set of definitions of who you are and fall into experiencing your present moment consciousness directly as a field of positive qualities, independent of concepts.
The feelings might be evoked by sensing the qualities of your true nature within a realm of perceptual senses. And the beauty of it is that it could be spontaneous or it could be cultivated with meditative concentration. It is like finding a treasure within deeply felt experience.
You may notice that meaningful travel could nurture you with moments of intense inspiration and intimate breakthroughs of your true essence, free from stories and containers reinforced by your job, relationships, things you own and where you live. Having removed yourself from direct influence of material attachments, you might even catch a valuable insight into relative shortness of your precious life, and ask: "what is my personal life purpose"?
It doesn't need to be anything grandiose, but the question will point to how much do you value your time. That is a realm of soul therapy, where you might be inspired to reassess your priorities and choose the ones that are aligned with your heart's desire.
While travel inspiration will prompt you to take actions and set the wheel in motion for your journey, accepting responsibility for the consequences of that impulse will let you feel empowered.
Personal power only comes from taking responsibility for the results; however small the decision might be. You decided to fly across the continent to a place that is not familiar to you, and you are on your way.
It is powerful fact that you changed the inertia of a daily life and ejected yourself from routine. You experience a contact with your own creative power. That is a feature of meaningful travel, — to experience direct connection to your decisions. Even if your decisions are on a small scale, the effect is felt and it is real.
Another important aspect of meaningful travel is the awareness and an immediate feedback from a practice of individual freedom. Nowhere else it is the most pronounced than on a travel journey. It is like being lifted from a chase of perfection in ordinary life into sublime state of being where anxiety of being self-conscious is relinquished. It is replaced by acts of spontaneous creativity, which is the journey itself.
This suspension of egoic structure of self-consciousness warrants a spur, or at least a glimpse into spiritual development. Provided you pay attention to the path of consciousness, perhaps you would edge towards an insight into a non-conceptual state of being. Some call it Advaita, Oneness or Primordial Mind of Buddha. Imagine that?
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