How do we build faith in our ability to navigate the unknown? How do we learn to trust that descent won’t destroy us?

We practice.

Last week I left the realm of the familiar and landed in Placencia, Belize—a narrow peninsula between the Caribbean Sea and a lagoon, 16 miles of tropical unknown. Our family’s chosen Thanksgiving tradition: skip the turkey, leave the country, practice stepping into new terrain together.

We arrived late at night. I couldn’t see the shape of things yet, but I could feel and smell the tropics. Enough to know I’d departed my known environment and entered something else.

Recognizing the Pattern

Our first morning, we set out in search of the nearest grocery store. As we were greeted by uniformed schoolchildren and our mouths watered at the smell of fry jacks, I felt myself descend into familiar emotional terrain.

This low-key depression is my body’s response to the initial experience of otherness—a pattern I’ve learned to recognize from travels all over the world. It is an experience of disorientation as I am finding my bearings as an outsider, settling into the rhythm of ‘Bilezean time’, feeling uncertain of my welcome, and aware of the detritus of American culture that precedes me.

But here’s what years of travel have taught me: I can recognize this state, name it for what it is, and trust my soul to hold both the beauty and the difficulty. The sunrise and the litter. The big smiles and the jaded eyes. The discomfort and the vitality.

This is the first gift of travel: learning to stay present with disorientation instead of fleeing it.

Travel is Perspective Work

Travel literally shifts our vantage point—and in doing so, it shifts what we can see about ourselves, and how we perceive our world.

Standing on that narrow peninsula, I could see both the Caribbean and the lagoon at once. Two bodies of water, two horizons, held in a single view. The lifelong lesson in this was nearly screaming at me: You can hold multiple truths simultaneously. You do not have to collapse into either/or.

Back home in Petaluma, I’ve been wrestling with my professional identity, and whether I have truly stepped into the space of transformation. My hypothesis has been that as long as the familiar is available, I have not entered The Sacred Dark. I have made myself wrong for clinging to known roles and titles. But here, surrounded by locals who move fluidly between Creole and Spanish, share stories of Mayan culture and corrupt governments with equal enthusiasm, and ride the seasonal waves of agriculture and tourism, I could feel my either/or thinking soften.

This is the medicine of perspective work: not just seeing differently, but being changed by what we see.

The medicine is available without getting on an airplane—in the sacred container of prayer, under the night sky, wrapped in the arms of a fleeting life, from the depths of a visualization, or in an altered state of consciousness.

But travel offers something particular: it expands the terrain from which we can see.

The Structure of Initiation

The book that accompanied me on this journey was Francis Weller’s latest series of essays, In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty. In the first essay, titled “Rough Initiations,” he outlines the circumstances that occur in any genuine initiatory experience:

We leave the world that was known. The diagnosis, the accident, the death of a beloved, all shatter the world we once occupied.

There is a radical alteration in our sense of self. The familiar self is shaken and disrupted. We don’t know who we are anymore.

There is a realization that nothing will ever be the same. We can never return to the world that was. We are left radically changed by the encounter.

The stakes of my tropical vacation are not the same as the death of a beloved—but the structure is identical. This is precisely why travel matters as practice.

We leave the world that was known. In Belize, I left my routines, my roles, my pace, my familiar coordinates. Just as divorce or diagnosis forces us to leave the world we once occupied.

There is a radical alteration in sense of self. Without my usual identity markers—community member, coach, teammate, school volunteer—I had to discover: who am I here? Just as involuntary rupture forces this question.

There is a realization that nothing will ever be the same. Even now, back home, something has shifted. The part of myself that knows how to hold multiplicity is awake again. Just as we can never return to the world before the rupture.

Travel is low-stakes descent for high-stakes transformation. We choose the disorientation, knowing we’ll return home in a week. But our nervous system doesn’t know that. It experiences the uncertainty of the unknown. And in doing so, we build our capacity to stay present when the real opportunity to transform presents itself.

Required vs. Optional Transformation

Life presents us with two kinds of transformation: required and optional.

The required ones come for us all. Death. Diagnosis. Divorce. Job loss. These threshold moments won’t take no for an answer. They force us into the unknown whether we feel ready or not.

But there’s another kind: the optional transformations. The ones we choose to enter. The sabbatical. The vision quest. The entrepreneurial leap of faith. The travel that’s more than vacation.

These optional descents are how we build faith in our ability to navigate the unknown.

They’re dress rehearsals for the inevitable ruptures. When we choose disorientation—whether it’s a week in Belize or two hours at yoga—we teach our nervous system: I can leave the familiar. I can tolerate not knowing. I can trust the unfolding.

This explains why I keep getting on airplanes with small children. Not despite the cramped legroom and the exhaustion, but because of it. Every voluntary descent builds my capacity for the involuntary ones that will come.

And they will come. For all of us. The question is: will we have practiced?