Summary

The article discusses finding one's true self during the pandemic without the need for travel, emphasizing the importance of experiential moments and cultural shocks that can be replicated through various triggers at home.

Abstract

The author of the article argues that self-discovery is not contingent upon geographical exploration, as famously depicted in Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Instead, the key to understanding oneself lies in experiencing 'satori' moments, which are instances of profound insight or enlightenment that can occur when the thinking mind is silenced. The article suggests that such moments can be achieved through simple, everyday experiences such as observing children, animals, sunsets, and the starry sky, appreciating art, and engaging in stream-of-consciousness writing. These activities can trigger a connection to one's inner being, which is the true self beyond the thinking mind and ego. The author posits that these experiences can lead to a deep appreciation of life and a reconnection with the universal being, without the need for extensive travel.

Opinions

The author believes that the cultural shock experienced during travel is not about witnessing happier, simpler lives, but about encountering different ways of living that challenge our preconceived notions and silence our thinking minds.
It is suggested that the pursuit of self-understanding through therapy and introspection often leads to an accumulation of descriptions about oneself rather than a true connection with the inner being.
The article implies that the head (intellect) often overpowers the heart (emotions and inner being), and that finding one's true self requires silencing the cognitive processes and engaging with the world more directly and emotionally.
The author emphasizes that anything that describes you is not the true you, highlighting the distinction between self-descriptions and the actual experience of the self.
The article promotes the idea that profound experiences and connections to the inner being are accessible without travel, contrary to the romanticized notion that self-discovery requires physical journeys to far-off places.
The author provides practical suggestions for triggering satori moments, such as observing natural phenomena and engaging with art, which can lead to moments of enlightenment and self-discovery.

How to Find Your True Self Without Traveling During the Pandemic

It’s a question of access, not geography.

Many 30-somethings are inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love and embarked on their own trips to find their true self in strange places: India, Bhutan, Thailand, Peru…

What they didn’t know is that Gilbert actually secured a $200,000 advance from a publisher to travel the world and write the book.

It’s romantic and enticing, but we don’t need to travel around the world to find ourselves.

All we really learn abroad is the basic fact that people with simpler life are sometimes happier than us, or in other words, money can’t buy happiness.

It’s true that maybe we will never truly understand this concept until we are among these people and witnessing this free-of-charge happiness. If you have the resources to travel, go. But if you can’t go, especially during this pandemic, finding your true self is not a lost cause.

I know how to find it, in case you’ve lost it (spoiler alert: you haven’t).

What traveling really does

It’s not the ‘poorer people with happier simpler life’ that changes our values and thoughts about our lives and the world. They are just shock factors.

A Londoner spending a year in New York is less likely to have a life-changing experience because the two cultures are too similar. But if we put the Londoner in rural Sicily, Italy, they might get shock factors as being in Machu Pichu or Burma.

It’s the cultural shock, how people live everyday life in such a different manner. We are all doing the same things but they do it so differently, even the squat toilets in Asia become mind-blowing.

When I first came to Wales from Hong Kong fifteen years ago, seeing people living by the sheep for the first time, bantering an answerless ‘how are you’ and walking so slowly, it shocked me and I fell in love with life again too.

What we need are questions that can’t be answered but only be experienced, experiences that take away our ability to think and make sense in the instant.

Japanese Zen Buddhism calls this the “satori” moment. When we have a deep comprehension of big matters or enlightenment.

Satori | Zen Buddhism

Satori, in Zen Buddhism of Japan, the inner, intuitive experience of Enlightenment; Satori is said to be unexplainable…

www.britannica.com

To truly understand something, describing it with words must come much later than the immediate experience. So yes, traveling creates experiential moments that shut down our brain and expose our heart to satori moments.

The battle of head vs heart

Frankly, this is it. We think too much. We try so hard with our therapist to go through our childhood trauma and life difficulties to see why we have become who we are now.

We want to know and reverse our inner criticism, low self-esteem, and post-traumatic self.

Over time, as spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle discussed in his book A New Earth, we accumulate a thick file of shit about ourselves. It’s addictive, we keep searching for our true self and all we get is a bunch of facts.

Remember, anything that describes you is a description, it’s not you.

We use too much of our heads. The thing that reversing is not our cognition but the tool that governs the cognition — our brain.

What we need to do is to find a trigger that switches our thinking mind off, and feel the world with our heart.

How to re-create experiential triggers for satori moments without traveling?

That’s a great question. Here are my top six triggers:

1.) Observe children

If you are able to hang out with any children, including your own, treasure the opportunities. The younger the better. Don’t disturb them too much, or continuously talk to them. Stay back and observe them with a smile, see how they play with each other, and just relaxed in their laughter.

Children have their own way to understand the world, through imitation and a slower rhythm. Everything is new to them, from a snail to gravity. When we don’t intervene (i.e. play with) the children, but to observe from afar, we will find the moment of comprehension you are looking for.

2.) Observe ducks, cats, or any other animals

I love to observe ducks and cats in particular because they are accessible and they really mind their own business. When I observe one particular duck for an extensive amount of time, I experience a strange joy in my heart. My heart is so excited and jumping out for a satori moment.

3.) Observe sunsets

My first ‘satori’ moment was in Turkey. I was in a place called Cappadocia, you might recall this place from some postcards with a lot of hot air balloons over a desert-like brown sandy town.

The beauty of sunsets will shut our mouths and brain up in an instant. It’s just too magnificent. I’m lucky to be living by the coast now to see the same sun dropping slowly into the blue sea. Every day I see something new in the sunset. If you are able to drive to somewhere on your own for sunset, do it and let yourself be totally enlightened.

4.) Observe the starry sky

This happened last night when I was throwing away garbage. It was a clear night and the stars were so elegant. I stood in the autumnal cold in my thin top, unable to move a bit despite the cold. My breathing became calm and I have faith and energy all of a sudden.

5.) Appreciate art

Painting, music beats, dancing, scriptures, unlike writing, are art forms without words. It requires your undivided attention to appreciate them and a good piece of art will take away our breath. If we avoid commenting and analyzing like a pretentious critic, we might truly be able to appreciate the energy of the artist. Especially if the artist is also out of the mind but deep in their heart, we will benefit a significant amount from it.

6.) Stream of consciousness

In the case your mind won’t shut up (which happens and it’s ok), you can change your body energy with exercises, walking bare food on mud, or take a stack of blank paper/notebook and write. Writing without thinking about what to write is an old writing technique called stream of consciousness. Our mind jumps from one thing to another so easily and quickly, what you do is to transfer the exercise from inside your head to the paper.

It doesn’t matter what we write, and language or grammar is meaningless. Just keep writing for 20 minutes, if you can, for a consecutive of 30 days. Then go back to the four triggers above. Here’s an expert talking about it:

The missing piece

If we stop thinking, will these shock factors really trigger a shock in your heart, bring us a satori moment to help us to find our true self?

Your heart is your true self. I keep calling it the heart, but that’s just figuratively as the sensation contrary to the thinking brain. It is simply the connection to the inner being.

The inner being really is not different from the universal being, but a question about the soul, God, and the universe is a topic for another day. Our inner being is our consciousness outside of the thinking mind, the “I” outside of our ego.

When we are traveling and experiencing shock factors, our thinking mind stops and we connect to a deep appreciation of life beyond words. This is the time we truly connect to something much greater than us through our inner being.

Our true self is non-describable. It’s always here, you just need to not try to find it with intelligence.

If you read the above and don’t like what I said at all, don’t worry, you might want to check out the sunset and the stars in any case. They are great pleasures for different time likes now, as I discussed in this article about the magic of small pleasures.

If you do, I hope you reconnect with your true self soon.