Submitted by Johanna, 32, London

We are often told in the West that we can have anything we desire as long as we want it enough, and strive hard enough for it. The problem is often knowing what we want, because our desires are so mediated by all the advertising and marketing we are bombarded with.   I knew I wanted something, I just needed to find out what it was. I was ready to quit my stressful job in mental health work and 'Do Something Else.'

To me, buying an open-ended ticket to India and going with absolutely no agenda was a very uncharacteristic, symbolic thing to do. I wanted to strip away all my safety nets and anchors and find out who I was, and what I was capable of.

The usual question people ask me now is, "Didn't you feel unsafe being a single girl traveling alone in an alien country?" The worry in their voices makes me think that I should have been worried after all.   But, actually, I had been far too preoccupied with important matters such as whether you could buy guitar strings in India -- or indeed string in general - to worry about trivial matters like personal safety.  

The night before I left London I had a farewell party and lost my credit card.   My dad ordered a new one on my behalf and forwarded it to me at the Post Restante in Rishikesh. Ten days later the card arrived, only to be stolen by a monkey ten minutes later along with a bag of mangos outside the Post Restante. It was another two weeks before a replacement card arrived. I filled up the time with small journeys. When your fate is decided by monkeys you become somewhat humbled.

For me, the key to successful travel in this strange place was to trust my intuition. If a drew you a diagram of my route around northern India during the first three months of my stay it would look something like this:

Hmm, not a very planned, structured, Westernized route to me, I'd say. In fact, the idea of treating my journey like a checklist seemed wrong and stupid. No, I was doing my own endless, limitless, kamikaze spider of a journey; round and round until I was happy! 

I found logic works slightly differently in India and events carried their own kind of magic.  

I met a woman at the station in Amritsar who had bought a train ticket to Dehradun (neighbouring town to Rishikesh) to do a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I really wanted to do a retreat myself, but I had been procrastinating. She, however, was apprehensive about her trip because she had agreed to meet another girl who had begun to get on her nerves.   I had a ticket to the Great Rann of Kutch and the woman seemed very excited about where I was going. At some stage during the conversation my instinctive self, which I had been unknowingly nurturing, decided to take control of events.   "OK, let's swap," I said.

So we did it. We swapped tickets, we swapped fates. The woman got on the train to the desert and I got on the train back towards Rishikesh one more time to become silent roommates with the other girl and to do what I had come to India to do:   sort out my head. I spent ten long days without speaking, gesturing, writing, reading, or drawing, as I engaged in structured meditation.   Temporarily stripping away another layer of "stuff" took me inside to where I could do some much needed mental housework and healing.

For those first three or four months I was very free, but I found out it couldn't last forever.   Soon afterwards, I settled into a nice, Western, box-ticking kind of route.

In the end, I returned home for a friend's wedding, but I came back a different person. The trip allowed me to become better able to listen to to and act on my instincts, which had been so muted pre-India.

Seven years on, I'm still ticking boxes, but with a more certain sense that they are the right ones for me to tick.

Johanna Miflin graduated in 1993 from New College, Oxford in Psychology and Philosophy and trained in non-directive telephone counselling and therapeutic massage.   She ran a creative writing group for MIND for adults diagnosed with mental illness and also worked with a theatre group for adults with learning difficulties including autism.

She is now a Studio Manager for BBC Radio & Music, recording, balancing, mixing and editing live and recorded radio programmes for national BBC radio.   In her spare time she is kept on her toes by a small accident-prone black and white cat called Friday.

previous story / next story

(c) Johanna Miflin 2005
WWW.2DOBEFOREIDIE.COM