The Healing Power of Journeying

Restore yourself through wonder, curiosity, and new adventures.

Source: tekhnika / pixabay

Journeying can be inward or outward, a deep dive internally or an adventure afar.

It can be as simple as taking a walk and stopping to watch the fall leaves twirl down in the luminescent light of morning, turning your face toward the sun and asking: What is it that my heart most longs for me to know?

It can mean answering a creative call—shaping clay into pots, writing poetry, setting time aside for journaling, joining that literary book club, meditation class, or knitting circle.

Or it might be the nudge you feel to finally plan that adventure you've been putting off to go hike that National Park, or visit the best friend whom you haven’t seen in years.

So often, we put journeying on hold. Life intervenes. But the less we journey inward and outward, the smaller we feel ourselves grow.

I’m here to tell you what you already know: Your journeying matters. Because it is in our journeying that we unfurl in ways that change us.

Impact of Childhood Stress

This is all the more true if you have a history of childhood adversity. Studies show that when individuals who faced adversity in childhood face periods of stress in adulthood, their levels of inflammatory chemicals and hormones rise faster and higher than among those without a history of childhood adversity.

Those of us who faced chronic childhood stress have a lower set point at which our stress-response gets flipped on, and stays on.

The fancy term for this is stress sensitization: You react to stress more quickly and with more oomph, and it’s harder to turn that stress response off after the stressor has passed. The longer you stay in an elevated state of stress, the harder it is to re-find yourself, to know what it is you need and want, what it is your heart most longs for.

Answering the Call to Journey

Healing often begins in quiet moments like this, when we step outside our routine and allow wonder, awe, and beauty to settle our nervous system.

Source: Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Recently, my husband and I, who hadn’t traveled together in four years (we’ve been caregiving for three elderly parents), took a brief trip. The timing was poignant: my husband’s mother had recently passed away, and we were full of grief. We needed to find a moment of healing, peace. We used our frequent flyer miles to go to Scandinavia and journey through areas of Denmark and Sweden where my grandparents had emigrated from during the great famine of the late 1800s, before they settled in the U.S.

In Southern Sweden, we hiked over rocky terrain through a land of small blue lakes and peaceful seas. In the Northern Lapland, we hiked through a fairytale-like world of forests and moors edging up against enormous fjords. I thought – no, I felt in my DNA – that this was perhaps why I was such a water person – my ancestors had been, too.

One day, as we hiked, we looked up and found ourselves standing under a double rainbow. One night, while on a dock on a lake, we looked up to see the Aurora Borealis bursting across the sky in enormous swaths of green and pink, in the center of which shone the brightest dome of stars I have ever seen.

We stood, it felt to me, inside a cathedral. The whole world, seen and unseen, felt impossibly close and bright. These brief moments filled me with such an all-encompassing sense of grace, it was all I could do not to fall to my knees. Tears streamed down my face as my husband and I reached for each other.

Answering the call to journey.

Source: Donna Jackson Nakazawa

I sensed my mother-in-law and my own father, who died when I was 12, right there with us. Perhaps you, too, know that feeling, when some veil lifts, and you suddenly sense the expanse of something so much bigger and more powerful — the connection between all things.

I felt the alchemy of release of the ache of loss and the losses to come that I had been shouldering, resisting, for so long.

Stress Essential Reads

Breathing for Stress Relief

No, It's Not the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

We are home now. Caregiving and deadlines are doing their usual number on me—stealing me from myself, interfering with my inner and outer journeying. But remembering this bigger journey reminds me to stop and wake up, no matter how busy the day, to take the smaller, interior journeys that are always beckoning. In a high-stakes stress moment, all I need to do is stop, close my eyes, and recall those elongated seconds in which my body became flooded with wonder and relief. I stop and breathe in all the way down to my toes. I reset.

Journal Prompts to Help You Reconnect with Your Inner Voice

If you, like me, have been caught up in caring for the needs of others before your own, I hope this list of prompts will help you to think more deeply about what you need to put down and what you need to pick up. I hope they will help you, too, to reset.

Before you begin, get out a pencil and a piece of paper, or your journal. After you read a prompt, put the tip of your pencil on your paper, close your eyes, and let your inner journeying begin, as you write whatever answers come to you down on the page.

• What have you not done for yourself that you know needs doing?
• What journey do you know you need to take that you haven’t yet taken?
• What is it that your heart most longs for you to remember?
• What is one very small step you can take to help make that a future reality?

Here’s what I can promise you: by engaging in this inner inquiry, more moments of journeying will open up for you. These may be small interior journeys, or bigger exterior explorations and adventures. Either way, from here, more layers of self-understanding will emerge.

I can also promise you this — you deserve this wild gift.