06.16.2023 Travel Afar, Journey Within On a recent episode of The Lion’s Roar Podcast, Lion’s Roar editor-in-chief Melvin McLeod sat down with essayist, novelist, and travel writer Pico Iyer for a conversation on the spiritual experience of travel. “I’ve always seen travel as a means of transformation,” said Iyer. “I think part of the beauty is not just leaving your home, but leaving your habits and the self that you recognize at home.” “When you’re in a foreign place — and it could even be on the other side of town — you can’t define yourself in the ways that you used to,” he said. “There’s a chance to become a slightly different self.” This year, Lion’s Roar is proud to offer our own opportunities to travel to some of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world, including a pilgrimage to Bhutan and Nepal, as well as a transformative journey through Vietnam to honor the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s legacy. As the travel stories featured below show us, a journey afar can help us journey within, freeing us from the illusion of knowledge and control as we orient ourselves in a new place. As Iyer says, at the end of our journey, we’re sent back a slightly different person from the one who left home. It both humbles and liberates us as we find our footing, wandering into the unknown. What will we find there? No one can know — but it’s worth the journey to find out. —Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar           The Lion’s Roar Podcast: Travel as a Spiritual Experience with Pico Iyer   Pico Iyer talks to Lion’s Roar editor-in-chief Melvin McLeod about the profound wonder that travel invites, how he came to cherish the feeling of wandering in the unknown, and how he came to find a home within himself.   Melvin McLeod: When we come home from a transformative trip, in what specific and positive ways might we find ourselves transformed? Pico Iyer: It’s really like when the Buddha left his gilded palace to confront sickness, old age, and death head on. For me, travel is confrontation with reality. When I’m at home, I’m living in my head to some extent. I’m living to plan and I can easily be in a kind of bubble, living within my preconceptions. Put me down in Jerusalem tomorrow and reality is coming in at me from all directions. I’m having to navigate it — travel cuts through projections and illusions very quickly. It’s so easy to experience the world second hand and through small screens — in two dimensions. I think there’s a greater need than ever to encounter the world in all of its confounding intensity. It takes me out of my head and into something I can’t begin to get my head around. It strips me of the comfortable notions that I hide behind. ADVERTISEMENT Waking Up to the World   Travel broadens the mind and opens the heart. Here are three personal stories of transformational travel in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Yemen. Travel is a meditation because we must constantly inquire: Where am I? What is this? And this? The jolt of foreignness can spur awakening—flooding us with change, that mark of existence we often don’t notice in our daily lives. The truth is, we’re always traveling, always in flux. We just don’t realize it most of the time. So when I returned home, I thought we’d pick up where we left off, but it’s impossible to enter the same river twice. The world had already changed. Walking In the Footsteps of the Buddha When we visit the very places where the Buddha lived and taught, we discover deeper meaning in his teachings. Shantum Seth takes us on a sacred pilgrimage. Crossing the expansive Ganga river with its sandy islands, we come to Vaishali, where the Buddha met the courtesan Amrapali and accepted a meal at her mango grove. She then gave the grove to the Buddha. It was also here that he overturned his earlier decision not to admit women and welcomed about fifty nuns into the sangha, led by his stepmother, Queen Maha Prajapati Gautami. A hundred years after his death, the second Buddhist council was held in Vaishali, and much later—in 1958—archeologists found here the remains of a stupa that housed relics of the Buddha. They are now at the museum in nearby Patna. The Buddha had his last rain retreat in Vaishali, and it was during this retreat that he confided to Ananda that he would die in three months. Then they started to walk north. LION’S ROAR PROMOTION Sign up to watch a free teaching from Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman!