درسنامه اصلی

Pilgrimage – Audio

Hi, welcome to this month’s VIP lesson, our topic is Pilgrimage.

This is a favorite topic of mine, because we’re talking about travel. I love travel. I’m a bit of a nomad myself and whenever things are tough in my life, if I’m having a really hard time, if I’m feeling bad, my first instinct usually is just to get on a plane and go somewhere new. I find that often heals whatever ails me. A new place, a new experience and new surroundings.

Let’s talk about travel and how you can use it for this purpose and others, in order to make your life more meaningful. How can you make travel more deeply meaningful? First of all, what is the difference between a pilgrimage and just a normal vacation? A pilgrimage is a journey for a deeply spiritual or religious or other meaning. In other words, it’s deep. It has a deep purpose, a deep meaning beyond just laying on a beach relaxing.

Let me give you an example of this from my own life and then we’ll talk about you. A few years ago I went on a pilgrimage in Japan, the island of Shikoku, Japan. My wife and I both did the pilgrimage. This is a traditional pilgrimage. Meaning, it’s a traditional route that goes around the island of Shikoku. It takes about 30-40 days to walk the whole day, it’s a walking pilgrimage. This path is very old. Japanese people have been walking this path for over 1000 years, all the way back to samurai times.

This path is around the island and it goes to 88 different temples, so it’s called the Shikoku 88 pilgrimage and traditionally it was a Buddhist pilgrimage. Japanese Buddhists would start at one point and then walk around the whole island visiting every one of the temples. People still do this today. In modern times, some Japanese people do this by bus, which for me isn’t all that fun or interesting, it’s too easy, but there are still many people who do this by walking. So my wife and I decided that we would do this.

At the time I was struggling with some big questions in my life, what is my purpose and what is the purpose of my business, what am I doing and all these deep questions that I had. I wasn’t finding any answers I was just getting frustrated. So I kept these things in my mind and thought, maybe if I do this pilgrimage some things will come up. Maybe it’ll be a catalyst and it’ll cause some creativity to spark in my mind and help me answer these questions.

1. That’s the first thing, there was a purpose beyond just relaxing, something deeper.

2. Second, this was a journey.

By journey I mean it was a path. There was a starting point and you walked and walked and walked, we did it in about a month, so it was a 30 day journey from one point to another. This is an important element for most pilgrimages, so it’s not just going to one place and again, laying on a beach that’s more a vacation. So it had a purpose, but there was also a path and by path I mean literally, a physical path going from one point to another and of course, it’s also a metaphor. There’s a mental, emotional or spiritual path as well.

During this pilgrimage we started on the Eastern part of Shikoku, we started walking. Our routine each day is basically we would wake up very early in the morning, because we would spend the night at the temples. Most of the temples had accommodation for people who was doing this pilgrimage and walking this route. So we would wake up at like 5:00 in the morning with the monks. They would wake us up, we would have breakfast and immediately after eating we would pack our bags and start walking and we would walk all day long.

We’d stop at different temples. You do a little ritual at the temples and we would get lunch or take a break, but pretty much our lives consisted of waking up early in the morning, walking for hours and hours every day up and down mountains and then eating dinner at the next temple and then going to sleep. It was a very simple existence. It was physically demanding, because we were walking every single day, it was a lot more exercise than I was used to, especially with a heavy backpack and up and down mountains.

This had the effect of clearing my head, because all the complications of modern life just disappeared and suddenly my life became extremely simple. Sleep, eat, walk, that’s it. That’s all I did every day for one month. We slept, both my wife and I. We walked and we ate food. What it did is it psychologically sort of opened up my mind. It cleared out all the complication, all the junk, all the distractions and just let me, it was kind of a meditation really, a walking meditation that made everything open up and clear.

After about a week what happened is suddenly all these ideas started popping into my head, the mission of Effortless English, which I recite many times in our lessons, that popped into my head one day just walking along on the path during that pilgrimage and many other great ideas came to me, and many other answers to these deep questions I had also started popping into my head. It was a profound experience and it changed my life in many ways. That’s why I’m recommending it to you.

Let’s talk now about this difference between a vacation on one hand, and a pilgrimage and how you can create a little pilgrimage for yourself. You don’t have to walk the Shikoku trip, you can do something that you create, that’s meaningful to you. First of all, when I think of vacation it’s really just about rest. Vacation is about resting. It’s a diversion. It’s a distraction from the challenges of your life right now. Vacations are great I love vacations. Usually the stereotypical vacation we think of is that you go off to the beach and you lay around and rest from all the work you’ve been doing.

But a pilgrimage is different. A pilgrimage has a deeper meaning, a deeper purpose, however you define that. It’s a wrestling with deeper questions. That’s another way to think about it, that pilgrimage pushes you to go deeper in your life. So let’s talk about how you go about creating a pilgrimage and why you should do it. • First of all, as you might guess, choose a purpose.

I find a great way to do this is to just find one or more deep questions that you’re struggling with in your life, about your life, about you. What should I do with my life? That’s a bit vague. What should I do in my career, I don’t know? I’m feeling bored in my career but I don’t know, should I change jobs or not? These big questions that you wrestle and struggle with. Or it might be related to your family or your health, who knows, but find a deep question and build your pilgrimage. Plan your pilgrimage around that deep question(s). • Second, choose a challenging journey.

Journey again, point to point, I find that works the best rather than just going to one spot and staying there. I find it works better when you’re actually traveling during your pilgrimage. You’re moving from one point to the other and you can be visiting meaningful points along the way certainly, but something about that path, that movement tends to open us up psychologically and emotionally. I can’t explain it but it works. Once you’ve determined that, the purpose of the question that you have that you want answered and you’ve determined a path, the next thing is to create some rituals, things that you’re going to do every day during your pilgrimage.

This helps to reinforce that question. It helps to reinforce the deeper purpose of your pilgrimage, so it doesn’t just become a big long vacation. Here are some ideas for some daily rituals you can use during your pilgrimage. Choose one or more or even do them all, or come up with others yourself, these are just ideas for you.

1. Have some questions for every morning when you wake up.

That’s where you write out the big questions you have and just review them every day. Every day you wake up during your pilgrimage what is my purpose? Those questions help to keep you focused on what’s important on the purpose of your pilgrimage. So each day reading those deep questions you have, whatever they are, keep you focused on making this deeper experience, a more meaningful experience, rather than just a vacation.

1. Another technique or daily ritual you can add to your pilgrimage, to your trip is the practice of giving offerings or meditations, prayers or gifts.

Especially if your pilgrimage has a more spiritual or religious element to it. For example, when we did the Shikoku pilgrimage, we were visiting temples. It was an old

traditional Buddhist pilgrimage, so we went to these temples and at each temple we did a little ritual, left some coins, some offerings and it was a nice way to keep us focused on a deeper purpose. It gave the whole trip a more meaningful feeling, a more meaningful purpose or atmosphere than just walking around looking at stuff.

1. Another great ritual, fantastic ritual that you can use every day during your trip is journal writing.

This is a good one for any kind of trip, whether it’s spiritual or not. Journal writing is just sitting down with a little empty book of pages, a notebook, and writing out your thoughts and feelings. Now, to make it most useful, focus your journal writing on those big questions. So you might write your big questions, the focus of your pilgrimage, write those at the top or at the top of each page and then each day let your feelings and thoughts about those questions pour out, and anything else that pours out of you, related to your trip. You’ll be surprised at all the creative ideas and insights you get, simply by doing this journal writing every day during this experience.

1. Finally, one that I’ve personally found to be really special, really emotional is drawing or sketching.

I’m not a great artist at all, but I find that drawing and sketching creates a kind of heightened awareness of my environment and especially of the thing that I’m sketching. For example, again I was in Thailand and I was doing a bit of a pilgrimage, a trip and one day I sat down outside a famous temple in Bangkok. I had already been to Wah Po several times as more of a tourist and in tourist mode I went around snapping pictures with my camera, point shoot.

All these amazing sights within the temple and that was okay, but one day during this trip I decided that I would just to go out there and I sat in a little sidewalk café, and you could hardly call it a café, it was a hole in the wall, this little small old place that wasn’t very pretty, but it was a little table on the sidewalk and I had some coffee. I got out my sketch book and I just looked at a little section of the temple from the outside and started sketching it. As a piece of art it wasn’t pretty, but what it did do was just the process of looking at it, carefully sketching everything, it made me hyper aware, super aware of all the little details of the temple.

It was a form of meditation. I can still picture that moment in my mind. Very clearly, I can relive it and that doesn’t happen to me when I just run around snapping pictures, so this process of sketching it’s really more for the psychological benefits. It’s a great thing to do as you go through your trip.

Let’s talk finally about the path that you’re going to take. How do you choose? Of course, there are no rules to this it’s just whatever is meaningful to you. I’m just going to give you some ideas. • You need to choose a path that you’re going to travel.

You can do it walking. You can do a cycling pilgrimage where you’re riding your bike from one point to another or you can take local transportation, buses and things like that, whatever you decide, it’s up to you. It’s good to choose a path that again, somehow connects to the purpose or the questions that you have. So if you’re having deep spiritual questions and struggles then maybe a spiritual path would make sense. In that case you might visit temples along the way or other spiritual sites, whatever that means to you.

You could do a creative, artistic pilgrimage. Let’s say you want to be a writer. You could do a path where you follow some famous path and visit the graves of the famous sites that are connected somehow to your favorite writers. Let’s say you love the beat writers from the 50s and 60s in the United States. Or, you could visit all the different places in the world that the beats visited or lived or that have some connection to those writers. If there are people who are alive who have some sort of connection to the purpose or meaning of your trip, you could actually go visit them or see them.

Or, you can go to natural sites. If you have a pilgrimage that’s more focused on the natural world or on something physical like getting healthy, then you could go do something like hiking the Appalachian Trail in the United States. That would be an amazing pilgrimage where you’re connecting with nature every day. Or, you could go do something that is actually focused on an event, a big event. For example, in India every few years they have a huge spiritual religious festival called the Kumba Mela, which his insanely large and intense. You could add that as part of your pilgrimage, which would be a very interesting experience.

What are the different types of pilgrimages you could do?

Religious/spiritual, the most obvious, because this is the traditional idea of a pilgrimage, is that it was a religious or spiritual journey. The Shikoku trip was a Buddhist trip within Japan. There’s the Camino de Santiago in Spain, which is a Catholic pilgrimage traditionally, a walk across northern Spain, which I’m going to do next year. Muslims have Mecca, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Hindu’s have the Kumba Mela and things like that.

So, if you are focused on something a little more religious or spiritual, you could do one of these very traditional ones, they’re very interesting. If you’re not super religious, and I’m not, it can still be quite interesting to do, just because there’s such a deep tradition built into and surrounding these very old spiritual or religious pilgrimages. They can be quite powerful and you meet some amazing people along the way.

Artistic/creative this is another one. You could focus your trip or journey on famous writers or writing or on art. I have friends who are artists and they’ll do this, they’ll go to Europe and visit all the art museums. They plan a journey to see all the museums that display their favorite artists. They’ll go there and sketch the paintings sometimes

themselves they’ll sit and do that. It’s a very meaningful thing for them. Whatever your art is. Nature/health is another. Any one of these pilgrimages that involves walking is going to help your health, so the Shikoku trip or the Camino de Santiago, it kills two birds with one stone. In other words, you can get two goals accomplished with the same trip and do something like that. Or you could do something that’s more out in the wilderness. You can hike the Himalayan Mountains for several weeks or the Appalachian Trail that I mentioned. There are many of these trips or journey’s as well, in the world.

It’s up to you. The point is, what is meaningful to you? Build a trip. Build a journey around that and I guarantee this will be one of the best experiences of your life. Try it, tell us your ideas and what you’re going to do on our forums. I look forward to reading about it.

See you then. Bye-bye.