“If your everyday practice is to open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that — then that will take you as far as you can go.”
— Pema Chödrön
What if the greatest gift of travel isn’t where we arrive, but what becomes possible when we step through the doorway?
When I first began writing this, I had been travelling for about two and a half weeks.
I had travelled through Lugano, Switzerland, Venice, Ravenna, San Marino, Rome, Naples and Sorrento, Italy before returning to what I often think of as my home away from home: England.
I thought I was writing about my travel discoveries and encounters.
Then I kept travelling.
The Netherlands. Belgium. Wales.
And somewhere along the way, I realised that the journey wasn’t simply giving me something to write about.
The journey itself was the teaching.
Wonder was in the seeing and imagining.
Embodiment was in the experiencing.
Becoming was in the moving between what I knew and what I had yet to discover.
I wasn’t just thinking about these ideas.
I was walking through them.
Every Journey Begins With a Threshold
In my most recent podcast episode, I explored the idea of the spaces in between—those moments when we’ve left one place, identity or chapter behind, but haven’t yet arrived at whatever comes next.
I’ve been thinking about those spaces a lot since I left home.
Because travel is, in many ways, one long threshold.
You leave what you know.
You cross a border.
You enter a new landscape, a new language, a new rhythm.
You don’t always know what the day will bring.
And perhaps that’s part of the magic.
In mythology, the journey almost always begins with a departure from the familiar.
The hero leaves home.
The seeker enters the forest.
The pilgrim crosses a threshold.
Persephone descends into the underworld.
The journey isn’t simply about reaching the other side. It is about what happens to you along the way.
You encounter challenges. You meet guides. You get lost. You discover things you didn’t know you were looking for.
And eventually, you return home—but you are no longer quite the same person who left.
Perhaps this is why travel has always felt so deeply connected to self-discovery for me.
It’s not simply movement across geography.
It’s movement through ourselves.
Travel Interrupts Autopilot
At home, so much of life happens automatically.
We know the roads.
We know where to buy coffee.
We know how long it takes to get somewhere.
We know the social cues, the language, the routines.
We don’t have to think very much about any of it.
Travel changes that.
Suddenly you have to pay attention.
Which train?
Which platform?
How does this work?
What does that sign say?
When do people eat dinner here?
How do I order this?
Where am I going?
Even the smallest things can bring us back into the present moment.
And this is one of the reasons I think travel can be such a beautiful metaphor for embodiment.
Embodiment asks us to become present to what is actually happening—not what we think should be happening, not what happened yesterday, and not what might happen tomorrow.
Travel does the same thing.
It brings us into now.
It asks us to notice.
To listen.
To adapt.
To feel our way forward.
When in Rome…
One of the things I’ve noticed most during this journey is how different cultures have different rhythms.
There is a familiar expression: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
I’ve been thinking about that beyond its usual meaning.
What if adapting to a different rhythm isn’t about losing ourselves?
What if it’s an opportunity to discover how much flexibility we actually have?
In some places, meals are long and leisurely.
In others, life feels faster and more animated.
Some cultures have a different relationship with time, conversation, personal space, humour, what is acceptable and what is not.
When we travel, we have a choice.
We can spend our time comparing everything to home, wishing people would do things the way we’re accustomed to doing them.
Or we can become curious.
What can I learn from this?
What happens if I slow down?
What happens if I stop needing this experience to look the way I expected it to?
That, to me, is embodiment.
Not abandoning who we are, but becoming present enough to meet what is actually here.
Wonder Changes the Way We See
I’ve always loved mythology and folklore because they remind us that the world can be experienced through more than one lens.
Stories of the fae inhabiting crossroads, doorways and forest edges.
Ancient pilgrimages.
Underworld journeys.
Sacred wells.
Standing stones.
The stories may be symbolic, literal, metaphorical—or something else entirely.
What interests me is what they invite us to do.
To wonder.
To pay attention.
To entertain the possibility that there may be more to an experience than what we can immediately explain.
Travel creates those opportunities everywhere.
A doorway that’s hundreds of years old.
A mosaic made by hands long gone.
A street where generations of people have walked before you.
A landscape shaped by centuries of human history.
A conversation with someone whose life has unfolded in a completely different cultural context.
You begin to realise how little of the world you actually know.
And strangely, I find that liberating.
Because perhaps we don’t need to know everything.
Perhaps there is value in knowing enough to know that we don’t know.
The Present Moment
There is something about travelling by train that makes this especially tangible.
You’re going somewhere, but you’re not there yet.
You’re no longer where you started either.
You are simply moving through the space between.
Watching the landscape pass by the window, I became aware of how little there is to do in that particular moment. The journey is happening whether I try to hurry it along or not.
So I sit.
I watch.
I breathe.
I wait.
And for a while, there is nowhere else I need to be.
As I sat there, I remembered something Janis Joplin once said:
“As a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day, man.”
It’s irreverent, but there’s something profound underneath it.
We spend so much of our lives travelling towards tomorrow—the next destination, the next achievement, the next version of ourselves.
But tomorrow never actually arrives.
There is always another tomorrow waiting beyond it.
The only place we ever actually arrive is here.
And perhaps that’s part of the gift of the spaces in between. They remind us that life isn’t only made up of destinations and milestones.
So much of life happens while we’re on the way.
One moment.
One breath.
One conversation.
One unexpected turn.
One doorway.
We don’t have to know what comes next in order to fully experience what is here.
The Practice of Staying Open
This is where Pema Chödrön’s words keep coming back to me:
“If your everyday practice is to open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down…”
What if that is the real practice?
Not just while travelling.
Everywhere.
To meet the person who frustrates us without immediately closing.
To feel an emotion without needing to push it away.
To encounter uncertainty without immediately reaching for control.
To experience something unfamiliar without deciding that it is wrong simply because it is different.
Travel gives us endless opportunities to practise this.
A language we don’t understand.
A sudden change of plans.
A moment of loneliness.
A moment of profound beauty.
A completely unexpected connection.
We can close down.
Or we can stay curious.
We can resist the experience.
Or we can allow it to teach us something.
And sometimes, the most transformative moments aren’t the spectacular ones.
They’re the tiny moments when we realise we’re responding differently than we might have before.
Travel Isn’t an Escape
There’s an old idea that wherever you go, there you are.
It’s true.
You don’t leave yourself behind when you board a plane.
But something else happens when you travel.
Parts of yourself emerge that may not have had the opportunity to show up at home.
You discover how resourceful you are.
How adaptable.
How easily delighted.
How uncomfortable you are with uncertainty.
How much you enjoy solitude.
How much you need connection.
What makes you feel alive.
What drains you.
What you thought mattered that suddenly doesn’t.
And perhaps most importantly, what does.
Travel doesn’t necessarily reinvent us.
It reveals us.
It gives us mirrors we couldn’t find in familiar surroundings.
And sometimes those mirrors are beautiful.
Sometimes they’re uncomfortable.
Both are valuable.
Because true self-discovery comes from a willingness to see ourselves more clearly.
Coming Home to Ourselves
When I first started writing this piece, I thought I was somewhere in the middle of the journey.
Now, having travelled through the Netherlands, Belgium and Wales as well, I realise there is no neat middle.
There is simply the next place.
The next encounter.
The next unfamiliar street.
The next conversation.
The next moment of wonder.
Perhaps that’s what becoming really means.
We don’t arrive at a final version of ourselves.
We keep meeting ourselves.
Again and again.
In different circumstances.
At different ages.
Through different relationships, challenges, landscapes and experiences.
And maybe that’s the real mythic journey—not arriving somewhere and finally becoming who we’re meant to be, but remaining open enough to discover who we’re becoming along the way.
The destination will always be somewhere ahead.
There will always be another road, another horizon, another threshold.
But perhaps the most important part of the journey isn’t where we’re going.
It’s how we meet the path.
With curiosity instead of certainty.
With presence instead of autopilot.
With openness instead of resistance.
And, whenever we can remember, with wonder.
The journey is how we come home to ourselves.
🎧 Continue the Journey: Contain Her Magic, Episode 15
If this idea of thresholds, uncertainty and the spaces between has sparked something in you, I explore it much more deeply in Episode 15 of Contain Her Magic: The Spaces in Between: Finding Possibility in Life’s Thresholds
In the episode, I explore liminal spaces through embodiment, psychology, mythology, folklore, meditation and the question of what becomes possible when we stop rushing toward the next thing.
Ready to Create Your Own Space for Something Different?
You don’t have to travel across the world to step outside the familiar.
Sometimes the journey begins much closer to home—with a quiet feeling that something needs to change, a sense that you’re ready for something different, or the knowing that the way you’ve been moving through life no longer quite fits.
You may not have all the answers yet.
You don’t need to.
From Stuck to Clear is a 1 hour 45 minute mind-body coaching experience designed to help you slow down, tune into what your body is telling you, and create the space to hear your own inner wisdom.
Through guided embodiment practices, reflection and mind-body coaching, you’ll create space to:
- understand what’s really keeping you stuck
- quiet some of the mental noise and reconnect with your body
- recognise what you already know beneath the overthinking
- explore what you genuinely want or need
- identify the next step that feels right for you
You don’t have to arrive knowing exactly where you’re going.
The transformation isn’t about leaving with your whole life figured out.
It’s about moving from confusion to clarity, from spinning to sensing, and from feeling stuck to knowing what your next step is.
Think of it as a small journey inward—a chance to pause at your own threshold and become curious about what might be waiting on the other side.
👉Experience From Stuck to Clear
And leave with greater clarity, a deeper connection to yourself, and a next step you can actually feel good about taking.
Sonia Baillon is a yoga educator and mind-body coach who helps passionate women move beyond overthinking and into embodied transformation. She guides them to reclaim their light, restore their vitality, and reignite their creative fire without burning out.
Sonia invites you into self-care that actually works—so you can feel like yourself again and embody your joy and your magic.
She is also the host of the Contain Her Magic podcast.
Join me on YouTube at Embody Your Magic with Sonia— where I share grounded, mind-body practices and reflections to help you reconnect with your body, your truth, and the version of you that feels most aligned.
Share Your Thoughts
Have you ever had a journey that changed something in the way you see yourself or the world?
Maybe it was a place you travelled to, an unexpected encounter, a moment of wonder, or simply a time when you found yourself somewhere between what was familiar and what came next.
What did the journey reveal to you?
Share your thoughts in the comments. 💖 I’d love to hear what the spaces in between have taught you.