Travel as Spiritual Practice: Creating a Shrine to the Gods of Travel,
by author Joseph Dispenza
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When you think of it, all travel is inner travel. Wherever we go in the outside world, we are present there in the moment, processing our adventures and expanding our soul’s horizons.
Travel is one of most accessible ways to enhance our life of the spirit. Last year, 600 million of us were up in the sky in airplanes. A tenth of our species, in other words, was away from home, flying through the clouds on the way to or on the way back from another place. Americans took an average of seven trips last year, and each trip lasted an average of four days — that adds up to about a whole month away on a journey for every person in the country.
Looking at travel in the outside world as a metaphor for travel inward — toward the spiritual heart of ourselves — these are encouraging statistics, indeed! They indicate that many millions of us are off on journeys of self-discovery and soul growth.
Consciously re-framing a mere trip into a journey of the soul is not difficult, but it does call for a different way of looking at travel. One of the most important ways to work spiritually with a trip is to create a travel shrine.
I created my first travel shrine a few years ago when I was traveling a great deal for my work. I began to feel a deep need to lift all those comings and goings onto a spiritual level. My first shrine was an open space on a bookshelf on which I placed a photo of my cat and my favorite coffee mug. As I left the house, I deposited my ring of keys in the coffee mug and whispered a prayer — Angel of Travel, keep everything safe at home while I am out in the world.
Preparing for subsequent trips, I gave more attention to my travel shrine. Eventually it became more elaborate and more meaningful. Now it works for me as a symbol of my intention to spiritualize my travel — to make every trip a model for the journey of life itself.
I encourage you to create a travel shrine. Shrines have been with us for untold eons. They stretch far back into antiquity, perhaps to the very dawn of human consciousness. Wherever traces of early civilizations have been uncovered, shrines and their altars, prayer panels, and sanctuaries have been found. Shrines are part of what it means to be truly human.
Your shrine to your journey is an incarnation — a presentation in the outer world of what has been going on inside you since you first dreamed of making a trip. It is a tangible expression of the journey in all its many manifestations, including your excitement, your hesitations, your preparations, and your expectations.
I create my travel shrine the moment I hear the first call to journey. I clear a shelf, lay down a plain white cloth, and install my first sacred article — a simple candle. For me, the candle is a symbol of the entire journey, from the period of preparation straight through to my homecoming. More, it represents my willingness to engage the journey: it says that I am answering the call of my higher consciousness to fearlessly seek new self-knowledge.
As the days and weeks progress toward my date of departure, I bring more articles of significance to my shrine. If I am going to a place I have never visited, I find pictures of that place and stand them up on my shrine. If I am going to a foreign country, I try to get a few bills or coins of that country’s currency, and place them on the shrine.
On one journey a few years ago, I was returning to the little town where I grew up. I had been gone from there for almost thirty years, and did not know what to expect. Would I even recognize the people and places I knew so well when I was a child growing up there?
My travel shrine for that journey was laden with class pictures from grade school – group photographs featuring a sea of innocent faces surrounding a half-remembered teacher. I placed other mementos on my shrine’s altar: a playbill with my name on it; a small sack of marbles; an essay written in pencil, which sported a small gold star; a mimeographed invitation to my eighth grade graduation; a get-well card from a beloved aunt, sent to comfort me when I had the mumps.
By the time I was ready to leave on that journey, the candle I had placed there when I started my shrine was surrounded by dozens of other articles of profound meaning.
The trip back to the past turned out to be a remarkably moving and insightful experience. I reconnected with the people I had known years before — like myself, grown older and wiser. They were mirrors for me of my own growth and development through life. When I left my hometown, it was with a heart brimming with gratitude and affection.
I had left some room on the shrine for what I would bring to it after the trip. When I returned home with new photos of former classmates and teachers, printed invitations to reunion parties, ticket stubs, and other fresh mementos, they went onto my travel shrine. Taken together, all of the articles represented the many facets of that journey.
When you create a shrine to your journey, you are entering the realm of the conscious traveler. You are elevating your journey from the mundane to the sacred.
Joseph Dispenza is the author of The Way of the Traveler: Making Every Trip a Journey of Self-Discovery and many other books about living a higher quality of life. He is the founder of LifePath Retreats in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lives and is in practice as a spiritual counselor. www.lifepathretreats.com.
Skye Wentworth is the Entertainment Editor for Wandering Educators. You can find her at http://www.skyewentworth.org/