The Call of the Road: Human Design and Spiritual Wanderlust

A tale of traveling to come home to yourself

As we embark into summer (and at time of writing having recently returned from 2 extensive trips), I’ll tell you a story about travel. If you’re not in the mood for a story, you can skip straight here to get the point.

I’ve always longed to travel.

Holidays as a child were a very limited number of destinations on repeat: First it was every summer in the same Austrian guesthouse. We would stay in the same family room and re-visit the same places we’d been to the year before, and the year before that.

When I was 11, I went on a class trip to the North Sea coast and came back raving about sandy beaches and salty swims. After that, we went to the North Sea coast, staying in A-framed holiday houses in the same area, doing mostly what we’d done before. In case you haven’t got the drift, it was predictable, mildly boring and entirely lacking the variety that fuels this globe-trotting manifesting generator!

Fasting forward to my itchy-footed teen years, I interned in a travel agency and dreamed of being a flight attendant. That dream got thwarted by an undoubtedly well-meaning teacher informing me I was “too smart to serve drinks at 30,000 feet”.

At 17, I campaigned to solo travel to Paris and hit the solid road block of the parental “NO”. Within a few days of turning 18, I was on a train bound for the French capital because I had earned my own money and no longer required adult approval.

My ambition as a flight attendant shelved but my lust for travel very much alive, I made a career in hotels that took me to Spain, the US, UK and Belgium.

Three decades on, I still love being on the move and experiencing new things. Some call it peripatetic, some call it the gipsy gene.

I call it me.

What travel and a career in hospitality have taught me is that I love creating experiences – experiences that both expand your sense of self and bring you home to yourself.

Of course, travel can be an escape. We’ve all thought that a holiday might fix us, our relationship or our family. But the inevitable truth is, you can never outrun yourself. After a few days of distraction or relaxation, you always come back to the same hard reality: you are still the person you were before you left.

Transplanting yourself to another location doesn’t “fix” you. Traveling or moving to a new country doesn’t make your problems, disempowering beliefs or self-sabotaging behaviours take a hike.

You take yourself with you wherever you go.

But travel can also expand you.

Travel can gift you external experiences that broaden your sense of self and stretch your comfort zone. Being away from your everyday surroundings allows you to play with different versions of yourself. Maybe at home you are focused and detail-oriented and when traveling you allow yourself to be more spontaneous and unstructured. Maybe you are naturally reserved but you challenge yourself to talk to strangers.

This is not about becoming a different person.

Done with the right intention and a healthy sense of curiosity, travel can create personal growth whilst simultaneously bringing you home to yourself.

I realised this year that the same is true for exploring your unique human design.

In many ways, I had long compartmentalised the version of myself that travels and the version that is building a business… that is, until I realised that, ultimately, both serve the same purpose: expanding your sense of self whilst coming home to who you already naturally are.

It doesn’t really matter whether you are an armchair traveler or a peripatetic soul like me.

Both travel and human design invite you to step out of your habitual routine and take a fresh look at who you really are and what makes you tick. To drop the performance and settle into your authenticity. To step out of habits or identities that you sometimes cling to so tightly that you almost forget that they are learned behaviours or coping mechanisms and not who you really are.

Both journeys take curiosity and courage, and both offer tremendous opportunities for self-discovery and growth.

So it makes sense that I travel, both physically and spiritually. I’m always desiring new levels of personal evolution, while at the same time being utterly at home within myself.

It’s like having Fernweh and Heimweh at the same time, and I rather like it, and who I’ve become (and am always becoming) along the way.

I hope you embark on some exciting internal & external travel adventures!

If you are looking for a travel companion, someone to hold your hand while you step into unfamiliar territory (especially your internal landscape), I’m always here to support you.

If you’d like me to travel to work with you, speak at your event or glow up the way you relate to yourself or your family, I’m always up for the adventure.

---

Curious?

If you fancy a journey into your unique human design, you have landed in right place!

Hop over here to run your human design chart and follow the links to discover the unique road map back to who you were meant to be all along… before life sent you on a wild goose chase of different (external) expectations around every hairpin bend.

There’s an easier way to navigate your life’s journey, and I’m here to help you discover it!