Spiritual travel column by Cameron Karsten

Y'all're at habitation. Priorities, concerns, handling of coin and dealing with the collection of concrete accoutrements are placed before you. You lot observe life, you autumn into it, and then of a sudden 1 mean solar day a choice presents itself.

You feel a desire to leave everything: your work, your friends, your life backside. It is the inevitable moment of choice: shall you choose the aforementioned rigorous routine, or a whole new dream, unknown and only imagined.

Which will you button aside?

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

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

I listened to my center and soul and overlooked the insignificant. I dreamed of travel. I yearned for the liberty of exploration. My centre and soul whispered of tales abroad amid 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 anything I had first suspected, and then I emptied my sack of all the perceived necessities and placed myself in the hands of my new environment.

With my mind lightened and my worries about necessities eased, my awareness expanded away from the pack upon my shoulders to my environs. This observance immediately came full circle, returning me to an original recognition of the potential that rested within 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 (catastrophe with my inevitable death) — to that of something entirely different.

Prior to my traveling transition, I longed to run across equally far ahead into the futurity as possible. From equally early as I can remember to as contempo every bit 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 future was what I needed: that was where my happiness lied, and subsequently, would forever be. I sincerely believed information technology.

But and so my lifestyle became an inner journey.

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

Travel, and the immersion into an inner experience, begets more and more than-and more-travel. It's non an addiction. Nor is information technology a habit 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 downwardly the arms of ordinary life and undertaking a new style wholly involving oneself and the globe abroad. It is a return to the recognition of who you are, where yous came from and where you're going within the mass of global evolution.

I was traveling and this was my dream. With this simple decision to follow my heart, I reclaimed my own destiny. Without it I was not myself, and with it I could do 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.

Take you e'er been faced with a similar option in your life? Please share your thoughts in the comments.