Spiritual travel column by Cameron Karsten

You're at home. Priorities, concerns, handling of money and dealing with the collection of concrete accoutrements are placed before y'all. You lot detect life, you fall into it, and then of a sudden one day a choice presents itself.

You lot feel a desire to exit everything: your work, your friends, your life behind. It is the inevitable moment of pick: shall you cull the same rigorous routine, or a whole new dream, unknown and only imagined.

Which will y'all push aside?

There was the time in my life when the pick arose. I remember information technology specifically: I could have shrug my shoulders and assumed that playing the function of a "normal" life is what I had been selected to play; or I could instead driblet everything and condone the responsibilities that beckoned me into a deepening well of aloofness.

I regarded the two choices (go with information technology or change information technology) with all my senses, so I threw them aside. I decided to follow the pick presenting the illimitable possibilities within this world.

I listened to my heart and soul and overlooked the insignificant. I dreamed of travel. I yearned for the liberty of exploration. My heart and soul whispered of tales away among a new life of transformation.

It was simple.

I packed the few possessions I thought I needed and left with a flexible ticket to the Orient.

In that location, I realized I didn't need annihilation I had outset suspected, and and so I emptied my sack of all the perceived necessities and placed myself in the hands of my new surround.

With my mind lightened and my worries virtually necessities eased, my awareness expanded away from the pack upon my shoulders to my surroundings. This observance immediately came full circle, returning me to an original recognition of the potential that rested inside me.

Suddenly, traveling became an immersion into inner experience.

My lifestyle transformed from the ordinary railway line of dead-ahead tracks that began with my birth (ending with my inevitable expiry) — to that of something entirely different.

Prior to my traveling transition, I longed to see every bit far ahead into the futurity every bit possible. From every bit early on as I tin call up to as contempo as the present day, society told me what to do, where to go and what to aspire towards.

I was assured through this dependence that the highest education and the well-nigh respected career would bring me happiness. The futurity was what I needed: that was where my happiness lied, and subsequently, would forever exist. I sincerely believed information technology.

Only then my lifestyle became an inner journey.

I no longer strained to peer into a remote future, only stopped far brusk and inhaled. I breathed in the present moment and realized that in this very slice of existence-right before me, existing nowhere else-happiness prevailed and awaited inside me.

Travel, and the immersion into an inner experience, begets more and more-and more-travel. It's non an habit. Nor is it a addiction of escapism. It is a transformation of lifestyles. True travel is a place of opening yourself to the processes of inner journeying.

It is laying down the artillery of ordinary life and undertaking a new mode wholly involving oneself and the world abroad. Information technology is a return to the recognition of who you are, where yous came from and where yous're going inside the mass of global evolution.

I was traveling and this was my dream. With this simple decision to follow my heart, I reclaimed my ain destiny. Without it I was non myself, and with information technology I could practice anything.

My life became a spiritual journey.

Cameron Karsten is the new spiritual travel editor for Brave New Traveler. Each week he will explore the emerging art and practices of spiritual travel.

Have you ever been faced with a similar option in your life? Delight share your thoughts in the comments.