Me and my monkey mind

I had this idea of travelling by myself for a few years. But one of my biggest fears before going was actually to travel with me and my monkey mind! What if I feel sad? What if I’m not motivated to do anything? What if I start diving in my dark places? Usually, when this would happen in Berlin, I would, after a few hours of turning it in my head, call a friend, we’d meet, we’d talk and I would very often feel better about it afterwards because I have awesome friends! But I was thinking, ‘how will I then do on the other side of the world’?

Before booking my plane ticket, I made a list of all my fears concerning this travel – feeling lonely, missing my friends, not feeling safe, being sad…
Writing them down already helped me to feel lighter. I also did some meditation to work on it, welcome them in my heart with no judgment, hug them and heal them with the only thing useful with fears: love.

Once I announced to my friends that I was leaving, they all congratulated me and told me I was very brave. But as excited as I was, sure about my choice, I was terrified too! I also had moments where I wondered if I was crazy to leave this beautiful life behind for I-did-not-know-what-yet…

So until I left, I kept balancing between crazy excitement and pure fear. Every time the fears came up, I tried to work on them with as much love as I could, with meditation, writing in my journal, sharing with trusted friends…

Eventually, I left Berlin and arrived in Peru, my first destination. For my first weeks there, I was getting used to this new freedom, finding my rhythm. I was enjoying the new discoveries but still had a lot of insecurities. My fears hit me again strongly in the middle of a beautiful trek, even though I was hiking in an organized group: I was alone, afraid not to meet nice people on the way… So I took time again to listen to them and reassure them I had to trust the travel and it was all going to be ok!

After a few weeks, I noticed transitions between places were always the tricky moment when you leave a place you got used to, people you had connections with, for again The Total Unknown. But I had beautiful-experience after beautiful-experience, always met new people after leaving the others and also had beautiful days just by myself. And when something was not working out, it always led to another unexpected nice experience. This gave me a lot of trust in the journey and taught me to believe there is always something nice coming, even if it’s not perfect now.

After 3 months travelling by myself, here’s what I learned/what changed:

– I gained a lot of trust in the journey
– I’m very careful about self-care: enough sleep, healthy food, enough water. I know I tend to be more emotional when I’m tired so on those days I’m very patient with myself and avoid any deep thinking about anything!
– I developed a bigger self-love practice and I’m really careful that the little voice on my head, to stay loving and caring. And it has been very beautiful!
– I discovered that I’m a nice travel buddy, for myself. I’m mostly positive, curious, full of joy and open. And I keep cultivating those sides of my personality.
– I already had a journaling practice for years but never very regularly. Since I’ve been travelling, I write almost every day and it really helps me to keep track of how I feel and use it as an emergency tool when I don’t feel good.
– It didn’t reassure me to read this before I left but it happened to be true – ‘if you don’t want to be alone, you can almost always find company while travelling!’

by Elise

Featured photo by Jessica Papini.
Supportive comments are welcomed.

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