Travel
Along the journey Spiritual Travel by Joanna Kujawa When, in my mid-thirties, I undertook my first bout of spiritual travel I was unaware I was doing something that 100 million of other people were also doing every year. Spiritual seekers were not a part of my social milieu – which was primarily academic. And prior to that journey I held no spiritual ambitions – all my goals back then were either literary or academic. Although I had a deep – but largely subconscious – desire at the time for some form of spirituality, I could not place this within the religion of my upbringing, which seemed
had written about, not what people of the past had experienced, but my own face-to-face, soul-to-soul experience of the spiritual. I have since learned that this pull towards an original experience has been explored and coined by many scholars as a personal ‘search for meaning’ – or the desire for connectivity or transcendence through travel experiences as a response to the loss of meaning in our often mechanistic modern lives. I traveled extensively through South-East Asia, went to many yoga retreats, including one in the jungle, but the most memorable experience I had in Asia was in Cambodia in the ruins of an old wat, or Buddhist temple. In those days, traveling to Cambodia was a bit of an adventure as fields riddled with mines remained largely unmapped and mainstream tourists traveled in groups, limiting themselves to popular sites such as Angkor Wat and Siem Rip. I was traveling solo. I rented a motorcycle and rode in search of the temple,
very dogmatic and focused on external worship. But some time in my early thirties I began reading about the great gurus of India as well as digesting basic books on Buddhism by Western authors and suddenly that tiny flame of spiritual desire woke in me again. I found myself a job as a university lecturer in Asia so I could explore Hinduism and Buddhism not only through reading but also though traveling. But that decision was not a calculated one. It was made out of an irrepressible desire to encounter an original spiritual experience. Not an experience other people 52