Great travel deals
One way to tune in to your inner self is to explore your outer world in new and exciting ways. If you have the time right now, it is a great time to travel to new places, or revisit ones you love. A fax rolled out of my machine a few days ago, offering a 6-night, 7-day stay in a 4-star all-inclusive (3 meals a day) Mexico resort for $199 per person.
The cruise lines are offering similar amazing deals. With some of them, you can make a strong case that it actually costs more to stay home!
Another way to travel
If time and/or money are preventing you from indulging your exploration urge, don’t dismay. In her wonderful Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, Sarah Ban Breathnach advises women to “take a journey within to meet your authentic explorer.”
Visit the travel shelves at your local library or bookstore. Make a list of places you want to go, and collect the relevant illustrations and literature (the travel vendors are happy to provide them for free). Use these materials to inspire your imagination and visualization, and treat yourself to a virtual adventure. And don’t cheat yourself; assume that money is no issue, and go first class.
You might want to go on an African photo safari, or get up close and personal with the marsupials Down Under, or participate in an amateur archeological dig, or go white-water rafting, or immerse yourself in 18th-Century life at Colonial Williamsburg. At the top of my list of dream adventures is helicopter skiing on the glaciers up north.
Display pictures of a couple of your favorite dream destinations in your office, and revisit the places mentally when you take a quick break. The fantasy alone can be stimulating and self-discovering, and the photos give you a target to shoot at as you go about your work.
Visualize
While positive thinking typically doesn’t work and can even backfire on us, visualization techniques are one self-growth device that has been shown to be effective. In his groundbreaking 1960 Psycho-Cybernetics, the late Dr. Maxwell Maltz points out that our subconscious minds can’t distinguish between reality and a very detailed and realistic mental image. If we make a habit of seeing ourselves in vivid detail in ideal places and situations, they are more likely to manifest themselves in real life.
Have FUN!
So pick some new places and activities that really resonate with you, however unrealistic actually visiting or engaging in them might seem at the moment, and visit them often in your imagination, and get acquainted with your inner explorer!
