Travel is where my heart is…

“My soul only knows you through the eyes of your soul”.

I never knew what it meant when people told me that they loved to travel, that it opened up their soul. I always throught this was just another person bragging about their means, their ability and their financial capabilities, to be able to travel whilst others couldn’t. It was a way of lauding it over the person on the other side. That was the small minded mentality that I had growing up.

As a child, I never knew much about travel, the only place we used to travel too was Johannesburg to visit my mums sister who lived in Lenasia at the time. I remember it fondly as if it was just the other day. We would all put our blankets in the back of an uncles truck and we would sleep through the night and in the day we would stop at those lovely little picnic tables along the way to have a quick bite. We all would commune with nature and life in those days was so simple. In those yonder days we could stop anywhere, the places were well taken care off, there was no crime and the route from Durban was set up for stopping and having picnics. So the memories of those travels would forever remain special in my heart and mind.  Mind you that trip which takes us now 6-6.5 hours to travel, used to take us an entire day to complete in those days. So the journeys were long but were meaningful and exciting.

When I was younger a close cousin of mine asked me “wouldn’t you like to travel and see the world”, I replied, “I want to stay here at home, I am happy and content and cannot bear to leave” She replied, “is that it, you have no ambition, no dreams, I want to travel the world and see new things, don’t you want the same? I want to get out of this country and live in a cosmopolitan city”. This cousin, still lives here in South Africa by the way. But what I want to elucidate from that conversation was that, in her young 10 years of age, something within her woke her soul up to not settling for just what the eye can see. It woke a soul up to what is beyond, what we find in another city , another country another dimension. Yes, travel opens up the soul. So my dear cousin, you hit the nail right on the head, I just wasn’t ready to hear it then, but I am ready now, wide awake and I understand what it means to travel.

For me, every time I travel, I open up my soul and  I am reborn once again. I enrich myself to something brand new, allowing my mind, body and spirit to become one with the place I am in. Indulge in what that place has to offer and experience the culture. Travel does not have to break the bank, it is about visiting somewhere you have never been to before. It’s about visiting a new town in your city, a village that exists within your community or a new province within your country. It’s about learning, absorbing, integrating into that culture. Seeing how people who are all human, love, behave, dress and act differently. It’s about a culture that we weren’t born into, but a culture that shakes us out of our comfort zone and allows us to embrace the new, different the scary and the challenging. It’s about you becoming humbled to something other than what you know.

In my blogs, I want to take you all on my inner spiritual journey of my travels to places far and wide, near and dear. I will show you through the eye of a psychologist how travel has impacted me on a soul level. For me its not all about ticking the “tourist” boxes, its about knowing, understanding, grasping and living somewhere that I am not familiar with. Its about taking me far away from my comfort zone personally, professionally and spiritually.

                              Come along, pack your bags, it’s time to travel.