At some point in your life, do a solo road trip | #19

Don't invite friends. Do this alone

Hey all,

I have been working hard to distill how powerful this road trip was for me over the past week and while it is not newsletter day today, I was excited to share it with you all.

At some point in your life, do a solo road trip. A good time to do this is just past the age of 30 when you’ve navigated your Saturn’s Return. This is a period of transition between 28-30 years old marked by significant change and personal growth. You've had to stand the test of the universe asking if you are living your fullest and truest self. You’ve been reborn and it is a good time to get to know yourself anew. 

Bryce Canyon Hoodoos

My solo road trip allowed me to befriend my fears of driving, my thoughts when I have long stretches of time and surfaced my innate wound of not being enough. It made me ponder simple things like the sun rising and more in-depth things like the things that have taken place in my life. Yours will be the same and maybe more for you!

Important notes for the road trip

Don’t be gone too long but don’t make it a weekend trip either. Arbitrarily I’d say spend no less than four days and no more than two weeks away. 

Don’t invite friends. Don’t choose places where you know people. Do this alone. 

Don’t pack the agenda so much that you have to rush from one place to another. Give yourself space to have down time but not so much that you aren’t stretching yourself enough. This solo road trip should sit outside of your comfort zone, but it shouldn’t leave you feeling like you are running on empty all the time. 

Go somewhere you’ve never been before, the more foreign the better. If you find yourself in a place where you have to drive on the other side of the road, that is even better!

Angel’s Landing, Zion National Park

Planning Your Route

Make this an exploration, preferably, out of your own country and out of countries you know well. It is part of stretching yourself and this is so you can learn to observe, immerse and adjust to a new culture. 

You can start your trip with a ‘home base’ for a few days. I started mine in Salt Lake City. I went there specifically to work with the renowned coach, Kristen Ulmer. I spent three days with a small group in a workshop called The Art of Anxiety facilitated by Kristen. We learnt to be with fear in a totally different way. We got intimate with our fears by adopting a new language to fear and learning to feel fear thoroughly. I’d signed up for this workshop because I was thinking about the fears I am going to face now that I have left full-time employment into an undefined period of time focused on art. I knew many more fears were on the horizon and I heard Kristen could teach me how to befriend my fears.

The added benefit of starting your road trip with a ‘home base’ is that you can order equipment you couldn’t bring with you on the plane, if like me, you flew abroad and only had hand-carry luggage allowance. I ordered a cheap tent, sunscreen over 100 ml, face moisturiser and an Owala water bottle. 

You can do your road trip for the sake of doing a road trip, just make sure you have places you want to get to. You don’t want to have reason to ditch the road trip half way through. I wanted to get from Salt Lake City to Joshua Tree. I had four days to make the journey so I could arrive in time for Bhakti Fest, a festival focused on chanting Sanskrit mantras and Indian ragas. It’s a beautiful call-and-response meditation practice where you wear your heart on your sleeve and chant your heart out.  

Start your planning by looking at a map. Do some research on interesting places to see or fun things to experience along the way. You could even look up famous road trips, but make this trip yours! Or in my case, meet a woman from Las Vegas who implores you to make it to Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park and then Las Vegas before arriving in Joshua Tree. My road trip evolved out of this conversation!

Translating learnings about fear into the road trip

I didn’t intend for it to pan out this way but doing this particular workshop before my major solo road trip meant I could put what I learnt to test. A major thing that Kristen taught us was that intimacy with anything puts us in a state of flow. We learnt a four-step art of fear method starting with acknowledging that any fear or discomfort is natural. We then learnt to drop into the body and locate the sensation of discomfort to feel what it is, where it is and how strong it is. We were taught to notice our relationship to that discomfort, embracing any resistance that arises. Finally we are encouraged to feel it all the way through. If we get past that stage, there is a bonus step which is to start enquiring into it. We are to ask that feeling what is its wisdom!

View from Kristen’s

Throughout my trip, I noticed different sensations like feelings of urgency, panic with running out of time, fears of different things like impending rain or making a wrong turn or the sun setting. And as much as I could, I shifted my language to those discomforts and I applied the four-step method and bonus question. 

When I am in a rush and want to wear contact lenses, I notice that I usually get quite panicky with the lack of time which then impacts how well I put my contacts on. During the trip I had a moment like this where instead of falling into my habitual pattern of panicking, I felt it all the way through and it put me right into the zone. I knew that time was running out but I was focused and leveraging that fear of time running out to put my contacts in right rather than to fumble over myself. 

As I was doing the lengthy part of my road trip across four short days, I also noticed how urgency and the feeling of a lack of time kept arising in my body. I was also able to feel into those. I realised that beneath a lot of my fears were actually a desire to live, to see things, to not miss out on life. It turns out that brimming beneath almost all the fears I experienced on the trip was this deep desire to engage deeply, fully and truly with all that life had to offer me! Turns out my fears and anxieties weren’t there to wear me down, they were there because I so desperately wanted to live and take part in life! This was a beautiful realisation. 

Mode of Transport and Where You Get Transported

It goes without saying that for a road trip you are gonna need a car. You could drive your own car but if you are going for the full blown experience, you’ll be flying to the place where your road trip begins so you won’t have your car with you. And remember driving on the other side of the road adds complexity that will let you reap more rewards later. The pain is worth the gain.

You want to drive long enough so that you have a good amount of space to reflect. You want the drive to have enough silence so it mirrors the space for reflection like a Vipassana or a vision quest. But you don’t want the entire road trip to just be about driving. Across eleven days I drove about fifteen hours and around 900 miles. I drove around three to four hours on driving days. Make it so that you are at a new place every day or two. 

The home base part started on Thursday and finished on Sunday. I drove four hours from Salt Lake City to Bryce Canyon on Sunday night. If you’ve never been alone for long stretches of time, this is going to be challenging. Some days you are in a car for hours alone on a highway with no one else. The company you keep are the voices in your head, the images you conjure out of clouds, and road trip tracks you play on Spotify. On that note, have plenty of road trip tracks because mine got repetitive. 

Even if you have been alone for long stretches of time but have never travelled alone, this is still going to be challenging. You and only you are in charge of you. You and only you are responsible for you. You have to be alert and on all the time, there is no one to share that load with. No one is there to drive when you get tired nor help navigate the way nor pass you water or snacks from the backseat. 

There may be days when you are so tired you wished someone else was travelling with you so you could have a nap. And there is no saying where your mind can go over such a vast expanse of emptiness and freedom to roam. Thankfully mine was kind to me this whole trip, she isn’t always. She was optimistic, open, curious, wide-eyed without naivety, and an incredible force helping me power through the days I had to drive for hours and then hike for hours. 

Zion from Scout’s Lookout

These stretches of time by myself in foreign land with multiple stops along the way gave me so much calm and gentle space to reflect. I reflected on my life to date, my courage to quit my job to pursue full-time art, the fear workshop I’d just attended and as each part of the trip went by, I reflected on what that segment gave me too. 

I got to reflect on the beauty of the world, the awe that was Bryce Canyon and how it totally and absolutely took my breath away. I reflected on the hike up Angel’s Landing where I felt myself get into a deep flow state of hiking trance. I reflected on the gift that is the sun which rises each day so we may live. I reflected on the strength of my body, my health and I had much gratitude. I reflected on the simple things in life like nourishment, love, kindness, authenticity and care. I reflected on my choices, my bravado, me as a human being and I was proud of myself. 

Grinning ear to ear

How Driving Makes me Feel

The truth is that I was initially apprehensive about renting a car. I knew that I wanted to visit Bryce Canyon and Zion but I wanted to do it, if possible, without having to drive. I have strong fears associated with driving even though I learnt to drive when I was sixteen and passed the manual driving test on the first go. I used to drive in my final year of high school and all throughout university. But I’d gotten into two accidents. I was the driver, and the car had to be written off. I’d come to associate driving with my inabilities, with failing and with ‘Caryn’s done it again’. I didn’t want to drive because I was scared of getting into a car accident and I didn’t want to get into a car accident not because I was afraid of my safety, but more because I thought it would reinforce my innate wound -- that I was fundamentally not good enough. 

Realising that there was no way to get to Bryce Canyon and Zion without a car, I had two choices. I could either skip those parks and go directly to Joshua Tree where I knew there would be public transport options to get me there or I could face my fear, get to know her and rent a car. I chose the latter. 

The week before I left for my trip, I had a few nights of restless sleep where a sense of urgency and fear came up. It was always to do with driving. I’d built up this fear in my head of driving on the other side of the road and for hours to get to these parks. But as the days got closer, I kept feeling the fear rising in me. It was like my innate wound was activated and squeezing my heart until it popped. Unlike other fears I’d had before, where my gut was screaming for me to listen, I knew this one was out of proportion. I worked with this fear in the workshop and tempered it while I was being driven to pick up the rental car. 

As soon as I hopped in the car and turned onto the highway, I had this feeling of freedom and the trip ahead of me. I didn’t overthink and just began. I took myself to a big supermarket to buy all my food for the trip and after loading it into the car, I put Bryce Canyon on Google Maps and started the four hour drive down south. 

Facing my fears

There I was in a car hurtling down Utah’s highway after the sun had set driving on the other side of the road at a speed beyond what was allowed in countries I’d driven in. While my body was tense initially with all the fears of things that could go wrong, I slowly eased myself into it. By the second day of the road trip, I’d started to enjoy having the freedom of a car on big scenic byways in quite literally the middle of nowhere. 

It is quite often said that the only way is through and by doing this trip, I was able to feel my fears and still do the thing that scared me. As each day went by, I grew more and more confident on the road that I was driving faster and overtaking other cars. 

This is the thing about doing a solo road trip. Yes, you are by yourself, and yes it can get tiring trying to manage it all but you are getting to see all parts of you. I got to understand my driving fears more and I got to work with them. I got to see places I wanted to see for the length of time I wanted to see them. I got to make detours, I got to speed up and slow down whenever I felt called to. I got to know myself even more than I had before. And I had so much to be proud of. 

Most people will be taken aback when you tell them you are doing or have gone on a solo road trip. But they don’t know the awe it has in store, the rewards there are in place, and all that you will learn.

I implore you to do a solo trip

Around the age of 30, do a solo road trip. 

Don’t invite friends along. This is a sacred time.

Don’t choose places where you know people. This is a sacred trip.

Do this alone. This is a sacred rite of passage.

Be open to the possibilities, and let your inner wisdom be your compass. 

You will never be the same person you were before you left. Trust me, you won’t regret it. 

‘Transmission’ sculpture in Joshua Tree celebrating the divine that is in all of us

For those unfamiliar with Saturn’s Return, this is when the planet Saturn returns to the same sign and degree it was at in the sky when you were born. The first return typically marks a quarter life shift when you are between 27-29.5 years of age. This is a time of emotional upheaval as the universe demands you to reflect on who you are and whether you are living up to your fullest potential.

Love,

Caryn