From The Beginning of Time, People Have Traveled To Sacred Sites for Therapy, Encouragement and Direction

Written by: carolyn.amsili.coac
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010

Why is it that people engage in a spiritual journey or spiritual retreats? From age-old stone circles and jungle-tangled pyramids to mountaintop shrines and gothic cathedrals, spiritual spots captivate us with a mystical energy. From the start of time spiritual tour has been common. Men and women have gone to sacred sites for cure, encouragement and direction. Typical American physicians may scoff at ideas that water from holy wells can treat diseases or that ancient megaliths can transport messages from the spirit realm, but the thought of mystical sites has been well-known to various societies for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The most ancient well-known pilgrimage spot is Mount Kailash in Tibet, which has long been a sacred travel destination for about 15,000 years. Trudging the 32-mile trail around Kailash can take roughly three days, at altitudes as elevated as 18,000 feet. Buddhists state the ritual circumambulation eliminates the sins of a single life time, and 108 times around Mount Kailash will allow you to make it to Nirvana.



South America's best known spiritual spot, Machu Picchu, is a mountaintop citadel around 60 miles northwest of Cusco in Peru. One can find several hundred stone structures, constructed on terraces and linked by a maze of stone notches and walkways.

Boosted by the breathtaking natural setting, the mood of Machu Picchu is as mystical and motivating as any cathedral. A few structures, like the Temple of Three Windows, are constructed from large stone blocks that weigh as much as thirty tons and fitted together with no mortar. It is totally amazing to contemplate how such structure could have been done by a so called "primitive" culture, a lot of people believe to be pre-Incan by centuries.

Nowadays you do not need to get out of North America to visit spots renowned for miracles. In Chimayo, New Mexico you can find an adobe chapel where 2,000 devotees gather every Good Friday, and 300,000 travelers are drawn each year. In a little room behind the chapel, referred to as the "Room of Miracles," is a floor hole by which devotees scoop out sand, believed to contain healing elements. The room's walls are coated with hundreds of pictures and letters from pilgrims appreciative for the cure they declare, they got.

Sedona, Arizona also has been a spiritual travel destination since ancient years to the current time. Not just the area's Hopi and Navajo, but people from as far as Central America and Canada traveled there for treatment and learning long before Europeans conquered North America. The site's spectacularly-shaped red sandstone rocks are believed to give off magical energy in a way due to their high level of magnetic iron.

Sedona was inhabited by natives from the four holy directions: Yavapai from the West, Apache from the East, Athabascans from the North, and the Hopi ancestors from the South. This appears to be the way with a lot of spiritual travel places. They are at first identified as sites of natural earth energy, then, over time, the land is transformed by placing shrines, cathedrals, monoliths, stone circles etc. As centuries passed, as visitors assembled to celebrate or worship at the locations, they put in their own human energies.

Spiritual Travel

http://divinejoyretreats.com

John Bates

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