Changing How I View Travel
I loved this book. Taking me through the entire journey of travel, from getting the idea to go somewhere to sharing my experiences with others, the author suggests ways of deepening the experience into something life changing. His exercises can be used for those life journeys that don't involve leaving home as well. All in all it's a terrific read.

New age tripe
Have you ever met a person where every single thing that happens to them is a spiritual awakening? The kind of person that can't go to the bathroom without making some sort of journal entry of the new vistas they discovered? Well that is the kind of mentality you get with this book. You can't simply look at a sunset and be in awe of nature or God. No you need to relate to it and make it a part of you.

I am avery spiritual person and love traveling. I have traveled all over the world and feel complete when I do so. Reading this book did the one thing I never thought was possible, it put me off of traveling.

Fortunately, the feeling passed quickly. I will not make little travel shrines. I will not take little spiritual trips across my living room. I will not follow this persons advice. And this book is going nowhere near my rucksack. Sorry, I am too stoic for this book.

I would recommend people read books about the places they want to go. Learn their culture and a little bit of their language. Don't worry about the trip just go on it.

My passport is the only material possession I truly value.

Comforting and Unsettling
There's something both comforting and unsettling in Mr. Dispenza's book and I think that's the point. When we take a journey we learn about the world and we learn about ourselves. We leave the comfortable and we enter the unknown. What we do with this experience, what we come home with emotionally, determines who we are not just as writers, but as people. The Way of the Traveler helps you explore how you experience locations.

Mr. Dispenza's explores the traveler's changes by bringing in the classics through quotes and observations, exploring how writers have used travel and travelers in their texts. And, he creates some possibilities for travelers by offering suggestions and exercises to try during all the stages of planning a trip, taking your trip, and returning home. This mix of history and self-help discovery is a fun combination.

This is one of the reasons I recommend this book. As writers explore travel writing, which comes in handy when creating fictional settings and bringing physical locations to life in nonfiction, the true key to hooking a reader is creating an experience that makes them feel like they're in the place. We're able to bring readers a deeper experience by understanding how we experience a location. Ask yourself, which of your senses are stimulated and why, which of your emotions are stimulated and how. The Way of the Traveler helps writers think in these terms.

The text is written from a perspective that embraces armchair travel as well as physical travel. Self-discovery through exploration of both the outer world and our own inner world is the underlying theme. Mr. Dispenza writes: "Every time we leave home and go to another place, we open up the possibility of having something wonderful happen to us. When we move out of the familiar here and now, we set in motion a series of events that, taken together, bring about changes at the very root of our being."

Review - The Way of the Traveler by Carole of TravelSITE.com
The Way of the Traveler - Making Every Trip a Journey of Self-Discovery

By Joseph Dispenza
Published by: John Muir Publications
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Reviewed by: Carole Herdegen
Editor of www.travelSITE.com

In his stimulating book on the spiritual aspects of travel, Joseph Dispenza has given the reader a new look at the reasons on not necessarily why we travel but how we should travel. His is a not the typical travel book advising on where to travel and what to see or what to do once we reached our destination but a book of insight into the goals, rewards and preparations of travel from an intellectual if not a spiritual point of view. As far back as 500 BC, philosopher/travelers like Herodotus and Hieronymus of Rhodes traveled great distances recording not only what they saw but what they emotionally experienced. Generations of travelers ever since have proceeded to record their own traveling experiences.

This then is but the first example of a book devoted especially to the change in the way we travel from a spiritual perspective to the rewards in the concept of self-transformation. The very first sentence of his book, Joseph Dispenza writes, "All travel is inner travel." He asks the traveler to keep a journal, but not ordinary journal. The journal he has in mind is a written record of how we feel about the various things we encounter in our travels. In reality, it's a "journal of feelings" and not simply a photographic record of people and places visited.

Joseph Dispenza concludes that travel becomes so much more meaningful when a common trip of superficial discovery is elevated into a journey of "self-discovery". We should be challenged and changed by travel and this is a good thing. And, by doing so, we will discover a new way of looking at the world and everything it offers.

This sharing of feelings about certain places or encounters with particular individuals is something I frequently do by orally telling my travel stories. I diligently try to record events and places in a diary and then rely on my memory and recall to share with my audiences my own personal feelings and emotions that I experienced on my journeys. However, these feelings and emotions will diminish if not completely disappear in time unless they are duly recorded. This was the strong message I got from Mr. Dispenza.

I strongly recommend this book for everyone from the armchair traveler to the seasoned adventurer.

a true guide
This is a special book. It is a true guide in every sense.The author sites various examples in mythology and history as well as offering up his own personal experiences to illustrate how significant and important our journeys are and how much we have to gain and learn about ourselves if we simply focus and honor the process of the journey.I am very grateful for the insites and will put them into play in my next journey,which will now be sooner than later thanks to this wonderful and stimulating work.