Why I Travel The World For My Eating Disorder
Traveling has been one of the most important tools I have utilized in my eating disorder recovery journey.
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Along with the Inner journeying with psychedelics, traveling has expanded My awareness.
I have always loved traveling. I remember my first-ever solo trip when I was 25.
It was the first time I felt mentally stable enough to travel alone. Unlike many people I knew who went traveling after school, I needed a few years to work through my eating disorder to feel capable to meet the wider world on my own two feet.
Right after finishing school, I went into an in-patient clinic, and thereafter spent a number of years finding safety and trust with food and my body.
When I decided to go traveling, I knew it was time to meet another layer of my eating disorder. I was ready to break down the routine, familiarities, repetitive patterns, and all what I knew in order to connect with the part of me that deeply feared change.
The eating disorder part of me didn't like change. It didn't like my body changing. It wanted food to be predicable. It desperately wanted certainty. It wanted to cling to the shores of the known.
When I decided to go traveling, I took a breath and consciously chose to push off the shore and figure out how to swim in the middle of the river.
When people ask me what helped me in my recovery, traveling is one of the things I mention.
By moving the literal ground from underneath me, traveling requires me to develop resources and practice tools that support in finding my inner ground and that help me keep my head above water regardless of where I am in the world.
Traveling is a tool that helps me clearly see where I am still gripping to the shores of the known.
It is a light that shines on the places that fear change - these places can often hide when I am in the routine of everyday life but are hard to ignore when I'm in the constant change of travel.
Through traveling, we meet our most tender parts. We also have a chance to meet our hearts in a new way. We can step outside of the habitual ways of perceiving ourselves and reality and connect with our deepest longings and what we care about on a soul level.
Traveling acts like a compass that helps us excavate our values and find our centered alignment that offers direction on how to move forward on the recovery journey.
Along with plant medicine, which is a journey within, the literal act of traveling expands awareness.
Since eating disorders and disordered eating are in a sense a narrowing of awareness by hyper-focusing on food and the body, inner psychedelic journeying and outer travel become tools for recovery because they help widen our focus and help us seeing wider, deeper, higher, and further.
Throughout all of my travels over the years, I am always reminded of this potent medicine of travel.
It hasn't been easy - I have been stretched in more ways than I could have imagined, but I am emerging with new perspectives, fresh eyes, refined resources, and a newfound compass, guiding me towards what I deeply care about.
Moving closer to what we care about brings us deeper into our aligned embodiment. And this is what eating disorder recovery is all about.
Download my free ebook, One Way Ticket To The Soul! It’s an eating disorder recovery handbook that was created for folks who are navigating an eating disorder or disordered eating and who desire to travel in a way that supports their recovery journey. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to download it.