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The Wellness Trend We Are All Sleeping On
- ashyaligned
- Feb 17
- 3 min read
Travel
We read the books, we buy the supplements, and we listen to endless podcasts.
But why aren't we just buying the plane ticket?
Wellness trends have taken on a drive thru model. Which has me wondering, when travel will get its turn in the spotlight. There are innumerable quotes that highlight the ways in which travel changes you. As cheesy as some of them may be, they still annoyingly resonate. They don't make you roll your eyes or toss out a “ya right!” They make you want to travel. They make you want to search for that experience. Even if you have already lived it.
Because a good travel experience…well, there’s just nothing like it.
When are doctors going to start prescribing a two week vacation that changes your whole mindset, instead of nerve blockers and antidepressants? That may sound ridiculous. I promise you, it’s not.
Travel is not only the mindset shift you have been craving, but the feeling we are always chasing. When done with intention it is the most powerful tool in the tool box. To be clear, I’m not prescribing a trip to an all-inclusive resort where you try to drink your worries away in bottomless piña coladas. (Unless your girlfriends are there; then I am saying that.) But you're not checking work emails, scrolling your socials, or thinking about whether that message your co-worker sent on Slack was passive aggressive or not. The kind of travel where the only thing you have to worry about is where your morning cappuccino is going to come from, and what you are going to explore that day.
Why travel actually works as wellness
It’s so, SO easy to forget that in the grand scheme of things, we are very quite small, and our problems are even smaller. Even problems that feel cataclysmal in the moment can often be forgotten a month later. We become so wrapped up in our own worlds that we forget to think… bigger. But when we travel, we are forced to think bigger. Exploring an ancient temple in Bangkok, riding the streets in Asia in a small tuk tuk, people watching at a café on the cobblestone street in the middle of the day. Your passive aggressive boss, your stupid ex-boyfriend, and the ever-pervading “what am I going to do with my life” vanish.
In this type of travel, you can’t help but be present and find perspective, although your problems remain. That dragon will always rear its head, I promise you. The point isn’t to hide from your problems because your realities don’t just vanish. And they shouldn’t if you are using travel as a wellness tool. You are, however, able to look at it through a different lens. Without an emotionally fueled perspective, you are able to give yourself space, and when you give something space, you give room for growth.
At home, you're someone's employee, someone's partner, someone's friend who has responsibilities. But when you travel, especially solo, you get to remember who you are when nobody's watching. When there are no expectations! When you can be anyone, do anything, reinvent yourself over a bottle of wine in a café where no one knows your name.
Here's the Pitch
Wellness is finding joy in every aspect of your life: your career, your relationships, physical and emotional health, your finances, your environment, your home. And every single person at different times of their lives have different levels of how much joy they have in each category.
Travel touches every single pillar of health.
In the end, your head won’t pound with guilt about the meeting you missed that Thursday. You won’t bat an eye about the insensitive comment your co-worker made to you on the elevator.
But you will remember the feeling of the trip. The lessons you learned. The sites you saw. The incalculable impact it had on your life. Travel shouldn't be an afterthought, a “someday,” or a box to tick. It's the whole damn box, it's the whole point.
Your perspective will shift. Your life will expand. Your brain chemistry altered.
Just by going somewhere. Just by doing something. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s all up to you.
Astrocartography Insight
There are places in the world that our soul feels drawn to, without any reasoning. They feel magnetic and mysterious, like a story is waiting to be written there. And it is. In astrocartography, we can identify these places by examining your unique birth chart.
Helping use travel as a personal development tool.
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