From Anxiety to Intuition: Why I’m Leaving LA to Travel Southeast Asia

Unemployment is a fascinating state of being. It’s taboo, really: in our society, it it seen as improper to exist as a jobless person for very long. It feels almost rebellious.

One thing I appreciate about unemployment is its confrontational nature: it forces me to be honest with myself and others. Back when I had a job, it was easy to pretend like my life was everything I wanted and intended it to be.

Now, it’s very difficult to delude myself and others around me into believing I am where I should be in life.

The confrontational nature of unemployment can cause a lot of anxiety. The last two times I was unemployed, this anxiety quickly spiraled into panic. My primitive fight-or-flight survival instinct from our ancestral prehistoric saber-tooth-tiger-battling days kicked in in full force and shrieked DANGER!!! so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything else.

Fear completely took over, and I acted out of that fear. I accepted the first job offer I received without really thinking seriously about alternatives.

I don’t regret my decisions, because I learned a ton from those experiences. But as I attempt to be more intentional this time around, I find myself experiencing the same anxiety as before. This time, it’s just a bit sneakier.

For a long time now, it’s been my dream to travel internationally by myself for an extended period of time. What better time than now to go fulfill that dream, while I have no real responsibilities or commitments? It seemed like such an easy decision to make, and yet as I mulled it over, I kept coming up with counter-arguments as to why I shouldn’t, or why I shouldn’t go for very long.

There was anxiety, anger, and fear. And most of all, there was the guilt. Guilt for being in such a privileged position in the first place where I have the ability to make this decision at all, when so many people can’t. Guilt for not just appreciating what I have here.

I spent a lot of days completely consumed by these thoughts and emotions. It was paralyzing and fairly exhausting.

I wish I could pinpoint an exact turning point when I figured my way out of it, but life hardly ever works that way. What I do know is that starting to explore spirituality was a huge part of beginning to find clarity.

What is this spirituality you speak of?

I’ve never really considered myself a very spiritual person. In fact, I’ve almost prided myself on not being religious in any way – for being a follower of facts. For those of us who aren’t well-versed in spiritual things, the concept of spirituality is sort of suspiciously abstract, like a tomato with legs. People tell you it exists, but you can’t see it, so it must not be real.

But I like reading books, and at the recommendation of a few friends I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. According to Wikipedia, it draws from “a variety of spiritual traditions”. There’s a lot of Buddhist philosophy in it. The stuff he talks about is so simple, yet so difficult to grasp at the same time. Bear with me as a I attempt to explain some of it without being too boring or abstract.

You Are Not Your Mind

You know that moment when you see an incredible sunset over the beach, or a shooting star framed against the Milky Way, or a double rainbow all the way across the sky? And it’s such a breathtakingly beautiful moment that you can’t speak and you don’t even think – you’re just existing in a brief state of joy and wonder and peace, taking in all that the present has to offer?

What if I told you that that’s actually our natural state of existence? That the only thing stopping us from existing in a state of peace and joy all the time is our mind?

Minds are useful tools, for sure. But over the last few thousand years, humans have come to completely identify ourselves with our minds. We can’t stop thinking.

You know the voice in your head that’s constantly reviving the past, imagining possible future scenarios, picturing how things can go wrong, judging, comparing, complaining, commenting? The voice that takes up so much of our present to dwell in the past and future? That’s not actually you. That’s the mind, and you can actually free yourself from it. By watching the thinker, listening to the voice and being a witness to it, you get a sense of your own presence beyond your mind. And you can start to use the mind, instead of it using you.

When I started to examine what the voice was actually saying, I realized something incredible: these thoughts I was having were kind of ridiculous, because they weren’t real. I just thought they were because I was so identified with my mind. I was the one giving them power, and I could take power away from them by letting them go.

And when I did that and let go of all the worry, fear and anxiety that was being self-imposed this whole time, what was left was my intuition.

Intuition

Intuition exists beyond the mind. It’s our deepest nature, our deepest self. It always knows what’s up, basically.

A few months ago, I made a confession to a friend over “drinks” (it was actually weed but that doesn’t feel socially normalized enough to say yet):

“I think I’m too comfortable.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I lived in the Bay, I was constantly growing. It was a totally new vibe up there. I didn’t know anyone so I forced myself to go out and meet people. I was navigating public transportation for the first time, stopping strangers on the street every day for my job… even the weather was different. Now, I’m living near all my best friends and family, at a chill ass job, I’m running, going out in the beautiful sunshine… It’s nice, but I don’t remember the last time I really felt challenged. There’s no adversity.”

He nodded. “Start taking the bus to work.”

All talks of public transit aside, life is trippy. Right? I can’t get over the fact that we have the power to decide what we want to do with our lives, and that can look completely different from person to person. And that there’s no “right” way to go about it. It’s just this huge free-for-all.

But so many people decide to take jobs they don’t like or be with people they don’t like because they’re listening to the survival voice and acting out of anxiety and fear. And it’s easy to do that. It would be comfortable to stay where I am and get a respectable job and find someone to marry and settle down and settle into a routine… and…

And my gut, my core, my intuition that exists beyond my mind and worry and anxiety is telling me with the conviction of a million suns that I don’t want to actually do that. At least not now. Not quite yet.

When I let go of my anxiety, my intuition tells me that I want to be challenged. I want to be in a place totally different from here. I want to learn how to rely on myself, how to survive on the essentials and let go of materialism. I want to explore the world and be surrounded by natural beauty and live a completely different way of life.

That vision speaks so deeply to my core that it gives me chills. Do the thing that makes you feel alive.

So, I’m going to listen to my intuition. I’m going to move out of my apartment in LA at the end of August and head to Southeast Asia for a few months, until I am called back for my best friends’ wedding in mid-November. SE Asia is a good place for solo adventurers: it’s safe, beautiful, and friendly for the most part. It’s also a place where my savings will last me quite a while – longer than they’d last here in LA. And then after that, who knows where I’ll go?

I won’t have any expectations, really: I just want to embrace whatever experiences come to me. And to live in the present as much as possible, because the present is the only thing that’s real. Not the past, not some forecasted future we make up in our minds.

And when we let go of our thoughts to embrace the moment we’re in and find that inner peace – that’s when we truly start living.