Setting off to travel the world is the most experiential way for us today to initiate our own Hero’s Journey. Despite how saturated tourism is nowadays, and how cringy certain travel influencers may be, it’s an experience that is unparalleled for self-growth. It immediately thrusts you into the unknowns of the world, and forces you to come to terms with the darkened aspects of your own soul. In this blog, I will always recommend my personal style of travel: slow long term travel, rooted in volunteering jobs that truly connect me to the culture and people. More on that later, but it’s truly a traveling superpower that allows people to travel more cheaply and intimately.
Stage 1: Setting Out
The Hero’s Journey begins with a Call to adventure; it is when the Hero in the story first receives notice that something beyond his ordinary reality is summoning him forward. Let’s say you’ve felt called to go to a certain country or island for quite some time – that’s a call to adventure. If the call is true, you’re going to be – in a sense – “stuck” until you go there. In your ordinary life, you may be conventionally successful and appear fulfilled. However, there’s always going to be something missing internally when you’re ignoring your call to adventure. You’re going to be barred from certain psychic energies and layers of your personal development, until you venture to the place where your soul wants you to go.
The Hero’s Journey begins with a Call to adventure; it is when the Hero in the story first receives notice that something beyond his ordinary reality is summoning him forward. Let’s say you’ve felt called to go to a certain country or island for quite some time – that’s a call to adventure. If the call is true, you’re going to be – in a sense – “stuck” until you go there. In your ordinary life, you may be conventionally successful and appear fulfilled. However, there’s always going to be something missing internally when you’re ignoring your call to adventure. You’re going to be barred from certain psychic energies and layers of your personal development, until you venture to the place where your soul wants you to go.
Stage 2: Life on the Path
Once you embark upon your unpaved pathless road, you are immediately opened up to a new way of living. A new culture bombards your senses. In such new environments and atmospheres, life is unlike anything you had known it to be before; it becomes more real than anything you’d ever felt, more nearer to heart and more resonant. (Often, it can even be more demanding than anything you’d ever lived through before, calling forth faculties of your character which had been dormant in all your previous years.) This is one of the first infatuations travelers have with a life on the road: all sensory perceptions take on a fragrance unlike anything known before, all people they meet and sights they behold possess a wonder that’s beyond their dreams. It is a backpacker’s first taste of a freedom apart from the world they’ve known their whole lives, and so it presents a unique and potent opportunity for self-realization. As a backpacker, you are often so infatuated with the novelty of everything occurring to you, that your life may seem to sweep you up in a rush that is apart from you. In this initial stage of travel, life on the road may happen more TO YOU than you being the prime initiator of events. While that isn’t to say that you’re not in charge of your individual itinerary, lodging logistics, and day to day details, but more so that there is a certain momentum to these initial legs of the journey that seem to come from beyond yourself.
In Percival’s search for the Holy Grail, this stage is where he grows into a knight and steps into his greater being; he receives magically enhanced equipment to aid him in his quest, he meets lovers and influential people that offer him guidance, and he is also granted a first – albeit fleeting – mystical vision of that which his deepest depths yearn for: the Holy Grail.
Away from the conditioning of your past, you have a blank slate. You have free reign to explore whatever it is that really calls to you, and figure out your true passions and ideals in life that go beyond what you’d done back home. Use this time to explore it all; say yes to everything and find what it is that you truly enjoy doing in life.
Traveling with Purpose
Quick Tip: If I could offer one piece of advice to wandering travelers who find themselves in this stage – or also to people still nestled in their Shire – it is to not get too swept up in the enchantment of these initial soirees with the sublime. Of course, take it all in and savor the richness of everything; say yes to it all and live fully in the moment as it welcomes you in. However, it might be wise to begin considering your purpose for traveling. Even at the outset of your journey, it will do wonders for your overall development and trajectory if you keep in mind an overarching purpose for your adventure. Of course, it isn’t necessary to have a fully fleshed out mission sent from the mouth of God, but just try to keep in mind some underlying current that unifies it all together. Not only will it provide you with an inner compass of sorts, but it will also give you a much needed buoy, because I promise you, the enchanting allure will definitely turn sour at some point of your travels.
For me, this has been something that I’ve often obsessed over. Though it has changed and evolved over time, my travels are generally guided by a dream I have to improve the education of youth. I seek to guide kids in becoming wholly human in all facets, and to channel the wisdom I’ve learned into a paradigm that could be of benefit to kids growing up. And so, I’m seeking the magic and wisdom of different cultures, to experience and learn what I can, in order to pass that down to future generations. My goal/purpose is still very lofty and not quite tangible, but that’s the beautiful thing about it: it’s a work in progress, something in the process of molding that grows alongside you.
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