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How enjoyable was your last vacation tour? Did you travel for sightseeing or just to relax? Was your trip exhausting or did it keep your energy level high? Did the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions encourage you to undertake an adventurous trip? Holistic tourism is all about exploring unknown places, people, and cultures that can energize you for self-transformation.
With holistic tourism, you can enjoy a different and satisfying experience that goes beyond the scenic beauty of places and landscapes or tasting new cuisines. It focuses on people understanding more about themselves to revive their lives with enriching thoughts and activities.
If you have read my article on the 8 Dimensions of Wellness, you may agree that sedentary living with the same routine activities would rarely bring you complete contentment. You can unleash your suppressed emotions and desires when you travel to places that can enhance your intellectual wellness and help you understand the world better.
A holistic journey can become a life-changing experience when you understand how people live happily in other regions with different lifestyles, needs, and resources than yours. You can broaden your avenues with more options for wellness to transform yourself for the better.
Here are 8 practical reasons for exploring holistic tourism:
Holistic Tour Rejuvenates Your Health
Did you know that wandering in an unknown land can put your stress and anxiety far behind? It can help you offload the everyday pressures of life and release the stress from your workplace. The magic happens when you get engrossed in exploring the beauty of a foreign landscape and capture it on your digital camera.
Traveling to a foreign land can satisfy your gastronomic urges with a new dish of organic food, hygienically cooked and served on a different platter than your usual house crockery.
Imagine having a relaxing massage from head to toe, easing your stressed muscles and lifting your mood to forget all your worries. Then a calm and quiet session of meditation, followed by a refreshing bowl of hot soup and a Mediterranean salad made of fresh vegetables with added chunks of mildly spiced chicken or meat.
The experience is simply energizing!
It energizes you for a pleasurable trip to appreciate the beauty of the land spiritually.
So, next time make your travel plans that include your physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness. You will surely have an enlivening travel experience thereafter.
Traveling Defers your Daily Chores
How would you escape from your daily chores that have become an emotionally draining routine with no end to them? Breakaway from the agonizing work schedule that has enchained you. It simply sucks all your energy just to keep your joyful moments away from your family and friends, or at least to be alone for a while.
Take a flight to a delightful destination. It will surely make you feel liberated!
It is normal to feel exhausted and less productive if you monotonously continue your daily activities for a prolonged period. But how long can you carry this burden before everything falls apart? Traveling at regular intervals not only disrupts your mundane life but also reloads you with ample energy to focus better and be more productive.
Plan your absence from work as soon as you can and enjoy a holistic trip.
Go Places to Understand Cultures Better
One of the best advantages of traveling is the opportunity to experience different cultures around the world. Although your workplace may provide a multi-cultural environment, it provides hardly any insight. The willingness to learn and understand a foreign culture is indeed a holistic approach to improving your social wellness.
Learning a foreign language, trying out new cuisine, or studying their approach to resolving a problem can all be enriching experiences. And traveling to understand cultures in their country is the best way to experience and enjoy life better than reading about it in books and magazines.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
– St. Augustine
What are you waiting for? Which culture attracts you the most? Read about those places and plan to be there with your backpack soon.
A Tourist is an Interesting Person
By traveling to different places, you become an enlightened person. The bliss you can enjoy by actually traveling to a foreign place and reading about it in a book or a blog are two unique experiences. A real-life experience makes you smarter than your colleagues and friends who remain static in their lives.
The good things that you observe, learn, and practice when you travel to a foreign land, can help you in your life to transform into a better person. This may not be possible while you remain wherever you live. Good practice can also be an inspiration for others to follow and transform their lives.
It is unlikely that you get bored conversing with a person who has traveled a lot. You can be that interesting person, too. Share your rich experiences with friends and family to motivate them to take a holistic trip.
Master New Culinary Skills
Don’t tell me you wouldn’t try the local gourmet in a foreign country and would eat only the usual meals that you always have at home. That would be a wasteful trip! You would be better off staying home, right? Are you afraid of trying sushis or unsure about Confit de canard or a Chiles en nogada? Stop kidding, there’s nothing to fear. Splurge on the wonderful variety of food your travel destination is serving.
Try it once and you may end up becoming a connoisseur of globally popular cuisines.
And if you like it, try learning how to cook it. Come back home and show off your newfound talent to your less-traveled neighbors. Become a food blogger and share your culinary skills with your tribe. Let the world enjoy the tasteful journey of a holistic tourist. That’s you.
Adventures Explore Your Spiritual Wellness
When you make adventurous expeditions, it will thrill you to experience God’s amazing works in distant lands. With that spiritual vision, you will see your own surroundings in a different light.
The Grand Canyon, USA; Blue Ridge Mountains, USA; Oia, Santorini, Greece; Plitvice Lakes, Croatia; Amalfi Coast, Italy; Great Barrier Reef, Australia; Garden of the Gods, Colorado, USA; Moraine Lake, Canada; and many other astounding places in the world are simply a treat for your eyes, waiting to be explored.
How many of it are you yet to visit? Make a bucket list and start your adventure journey today.
If you live in a city, camping in the nearest forest over the weekend can be a wonderful experience and make you value nature differently. Just imagine the experience you can capture in the many beautiful lands, beaches, and mountains that remain unexplored.
Where are you?
Plan your expedition at the earliest and don’t forget to carry your camera. You need to capture those memorable moments digitally.
Travel Before You Are Too Old
What is the point of traveling when you are too old and weak to move around to explore new places or too sick to taste a new dish? Travel needs physical fitness to enjoy the trip to the fullest. Dragging your luggage across airport terminals, walking up and down subway and station stairs, climbing rocky mountains, or ferrying on a boat can be really exhausting for older travelers.
Your emotional wellness should maintain the desire to travel and mentally prepare you to withstand physical exertion. Ideally, you will be in a better position to travel when you are young (with some exceptions for amazing seniors). So travel the most before geriatric problems creep into your body, leaving you immobile, without appetite, and with poor vision.
A few adventurous journeys during your youth filled with interesting anecdotes from several countries will cherish your twilight years with memorable thoughts. Use your physical wellness when it is at its best and travel as much as you can. Research well to find places that suit your health and challenge yourself to be more adventurous.
That’s a life well-lived.
Homecoming is a Pleasant Thought
When you are far away in a distant land, enjoying its beauty, food, and people around you, it is natural to miss your home more. The yearning of your sweet home with that lovely garden, elegant furnishings, and a comforting bed is so soothing that you long to reach back sooner. This feeling of attachment may not be so intense if the traveling activity is not part of your holistic lifestyle.
Travel often and pick up souvenirs from your destination trip to fill your home with beautiful memories of your journeys. Write in your diary all the important happenings of your travels so you can enjoy reading it later, lying on a reclining chair when you are back home, with a glass of your favorite drink on the side table. Ah, that’s refreshing, isn’t it?!
What a blissful relaxation after a spiritually insightful expedition, isn’t it? Aren’t you already planning for your holistic trip?
Some of these statistics may give an indication of the growing trend of wellness tourism.
Wellness tourism is a $639 billion market in 2017, projected to reach $919 billion by 2022.
From 2015 to 2017, wellness tourism grew by 6.5 percent annually, more than twice as fast as tourism overall (3.2 percent annually, based on Euromonitor data). International wellness tourists on average spent $1,528 per trip, 53 percent more than the typical international tourist. Domestic wellness tourists spent $609 per trip, 178 percent more than the average domestic tourist. (Source: Global Wellness Tourism Economy).
Conclusion
Wandering to unknown places and experiencing different cultures, food, and people is the best investment that you can cherish for a lifetime. Your success and achievements in your workplace or institution may not really be a holistic fulfillment of your life. For optimum results, the 8 dimensions of wellness should sync with all factors.
Exploring positive experiences with holistic travels and adapting to better wellness techniques can bring greater happiness.