While providing tremendous experiences, personal growth and increased global awareness, travel can at times challenge the serenity of even the most seasoned trekker.
Security checks, line-ups, lost luggage, bad food, health challenges and cultural misunderstandings can all stoke feelings of frustration, anger and fear in spite of our best intentions to just take it all in stride.
It can be easy to become frustrated and although the ego may want to assert itself in some not so admirable ways it is important to remember that in this relative universe like energy attracts like energy. A negative response will usually illicit a negative result.
Remaining calm, centered and balanced takes practice and intention. Dealing with difficulties in life and travel is an art based on one’s experience for sure, but on a deeper level, our connection to a higher power (God/ Spirit/Soul) can help to clear obstacles from the path ahead.
When events and circumstances seem to flow, what may appear as coincidence is more often divine synchronicity, occurring as a result of an intuitive acceptance of direction through co-creation.
Maintaining spiritual fitness is not much different than maintaining physical fitness. It also requires regular effort and commitment and the results will be commensurate with our level of attention.
Scheduling some personal quiet time every morning regardless of where we are, to meditate, or at least contemplate the universe and our role in it, will help to set the tone for the day ahead.
Twenty to thirty minutes in connection with the higher self can enhance intuition, focus intention, sharpen our senses and help us to determine what is really important in our life. Practiced quiet time will also assist in developing conscious breathing, a useful tool in challenging circumstances.
Morning sessions are a great time to practice compassion toward ourselves and others. Recognizing our fears and releasing them, practicing love for mankind and all that we share on the planet will evolve into a true humility, contrasting the infinite complexity of the universe around us.
Taking a further step to consciously turn the day over to our higher power helps us to recognize that there is a bigger script detailing the play of life. We may not be the director but our role is still ours to perform.
Developing faith in the Divine allows us to relinquish directorial responsibility to our higher power so that we can do the best job possible in our role and focus on what is immediately in front of us in the here and now.
From that perspective it is much easier to live in the present keenly aware of what surrounds us. We can listen for direction through our powers of intuition, no longer needing to control people and events out of fear.
As our regular connection to our higher power improves, so will our intuition and we will realize that the unnamable is doing for us what we were unable to do for ourselves.
Throughout the day ahead, when necessary, we can reconnect to that infinite force to find our peaceful center and as time goes on, perhaps even that will no longer be required so frequently.
When challenged with a difficult situation that perhaps in the past might have baffled us, we will now move ahead with a new confidence, knowing how to handle circumstances in ways we could not conceive of previously.
The art of travel is the art of life, one in which our motto should be “preferences not expectations” all the while keeping in mind what Henry David Thoreau wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us“
By Francis L. Ross: Pathways to Perception
