Travel Soul Therapy

Facing Travel Depression After A Trip.

Don't let travel depression eclipse your experience, learn its causes and transcend it. You might be still on your amazing trip, but deep inside you know that one day it will end, it will have to be wrapped and you will be facing a return home. 

It could remind you of pending task of immersing back into society you left behind and a duty of finding your place in it. It will be a task of bringing your mind from boundless world of imagination and relatively timeless existence of solo explorer into a world of rigid time frames of appointments, job performance and other conceptual measurements. 

It might appear extremely antagonistic, repressing and repulsive. Compared to the boundless world you experienced on your trip, the world you coming home to might appear meaningless. You might be asking yourself: I travelled, now what? It might be as you external travel is about to end, your travel within is about to set sail. Travel within sometimes is crossing a more difficult terrain of unknown parts of yourself.

Ithaca poem about inner meaning of travel.

It is important to understand that this kind of travel depression is an indicator of your growing awareness of your inner journey of growth and meaning. Internally you are realizing the value of learning experience and freedom of being over mundane cycle of existence. 

Subconsciously you compare routine of sustaining your life to exhilarating experiences of spontaneity and leisure of your trip. You may prefer one and resist the other. 

Even if your trip was just a short getaway from stressful lifestyle, coming back home, you might be feeling dread of stepping back on the "treadmill". In your mind you divided your life experience conceptually on "this" and "that", usually positioning them diametrically opposing each other.

Again, separation caused by preference results in attachment to blissful experience of freedom of the trip and aversion to the idea of trading your living energy for survival in ordinary life. Anticipating or facing the latter will cause drop in emotional vitality and enthusiasm.

Be vigilant about thoughts that give rise to negative emotions, even it may seem very natural. Be clear that while one stage of your experience coming to an end, it will give rise to another one. Recognize when you subconsciously blocking the flow by clinging to the "sweetness" of the past. Keep the value and let the clinging go! 

Do not destroy preciousness of your travel experience by longing for it after you come back by making a mental delusion of conceptualizing it into a "thing" to crave for and wishing to "possess" or "keep" it. Merge with the flow of reality of change by bringing your awareness to the present moment. Joyfully!

By wistful longing for enjoyment of travel to remain, you will continue to resist appearing "banality" of ordinary life. By focusing on what you resist, you will bring more of it, — you will amplify the feelings of resistance. 

Travel depression will set in deeper if mental structure supporting it is left unexamined. Prepare a plan of integration when returning home. To transcend the dread of coming home after travel choose consciously see a continuum of your life as a whole.

Choose to see before trip, travel journey and after trip together as different acts of the same play. They are flowing from and into each other where you perform and enjoy the act.

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