The Trip to Your Truth: A Guidebook to Exploring Your Inner Self to Make Life an Adventure You’re Excited to Live

By Josée Perron

Use that adventurous spirit to explore within yourself and design a life you love!
This practical guidebook leads you on a journey to explore the depths of your inner self. In the format of a global travel adventure, you're brought to different areas of your life, both inner and outer, to assess, reflect, and choose your own adventure from a place of awareness and acceptance. 
In The Trip to Your Truth, we travel through different areas. 

• The deep caves of our inner selves are where we explore thoughts, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, identity, and much more. 
• The ruins of our past are where elements like habits, beliefs, and perceptions are created. We excavate the site and find buried gems hidden in the rubble. 
• This leads to the bridges that link us to others. It's from here that we explore our beliefs and habits about love, connecting with others, communication, community, and building a better world. 
• From there we take a break to reassess the tools we're carrying with us and see which way to go to find our own authentic life path.
• The adventure ends with a return home, to the garden within us.

If you're interested in creating a happy life that's authentically guided by your truths, this guidebook will help you find your way. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josée Perron
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777137113

Book preview

Josée Perron

The Trip to Your Truth

A Guidebook to Exploring Your Inner Self to Make Life an Adventure You’re Excited to Live

First published by Josée Perron 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Josée Perron

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-7771371-1-3

Cover art by Reynaldo A. Licayan

Editing by Denise Suarez

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

This book is dedicated to

all the adventurous spirits I’ve met over the years

who have inspired me to keep exploring.

This includes the wild world wanderers and

also, those whose journeys brought them inwards.

Mom, that includes you.

Contents

Foreword

1. Preparing for the Trip

Meet the Tour Guide

More Than a Travel Adventure

Our Itinerary

2. The Wild World Within

The Mind

Ladder of Inference

Thoughts and Feelings

Differentiating the Two

Thoughts

Feelings

Self-Awareness

Ego and Identity

Automated Responses

Perfect Imperfections

Assessing Our BS – Belief Systems

Remember the Tint of Your Glasses

The Map Isn’t the Territory

Expectations

Know That You Don’t Know

Put Your Mask on First

Acceptance

Suffering

Intuition

3. The Ruins of the Past

How Beliefs Are Formed

The Past ≠ The Future

Emotions Hidden in the Ruins

Forgiving Past Invaders

Habits

4. Bridges that Unite

Building the Foundation

A Healthy Definition of Love

Trust Others’ Intentions

We All Stand at Different Lookout Points

We Project Our Viewpoints Onto the World

Forget an Eye for an Eye

We Can’t Change People

Don’t Treat Them How You’d Want to Be Treated

It’s Not Personal

Bond Breakers

Finding the Sweet Spot of Interdependence

Power and Privilege

The Borders Around Our Bridges

Taking Responsibility

Choose Who Surrounds You

Don’t Be a Jerk

Communication

Listening

5. Repacking and Heading Out Solo

Redefining Happiness

Mindfulness

What Is Mindfulness?

How to Practice Mindfulness

Embrace Impermanence

Gratitude

How to Make Gratitude a Habit

Figure Out What’s Important

Values

Create Your Greatest Life Vision

Ditch the Beaten Path

Changes to Your Social Network

Pleasing Others and Their Expectations

A Lonely Path

Avoid Being Binary

Creativity

Culture

Accepting the Bumps on the Road

The Social Impacts of Living Consciously

All-Inclusive Packages

Yoga

Meditation/Mindfulness

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Recovery Programs

One-on-One Support

Choose Love or Fear

6. Coming Back Home

About the Author

Also by Josée Perron

Foreword

For more information about this book,

the author or to download a

free Trip to Your Truth workbook

visit youchoosetheway.com/the-trip-to-your-truth.

1

Preparing for the Trip

We trek to the top of the highest mountains, get drawn in by the mysteries of the deepest seas and find endless alleyways to meander through in foreign cities. Exploring the world is a quest many of us are on. We’re searching to understand others, understand cultures, to better understand life. Travel brings meaning to our existence.

But discovering foreign sights, people, and cultures, doesn’t give us the meaning we seek. It can’t make us feel whole or impart to us the truths we seek.

For me, the more I traveled, the more I searched. I’m not even sure what I was looking for, but it had something to do with feeling good inside. A perfect land where I could soar? A place with people who empowered and uplifted me? A home that made me feel gooey warmness inside? For the longest time, I didn’t know.

One day, it dawned on me, I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in any geographical location. I’d need to find these things within myself. If I wanted to feel peace, I wasn’t going to find it in some magical sacred garden. I would find it by cultivating peace within myself and carrying it around with me wherever I went.

Exploring the depths of my inner self became the wildest journey I’d ever embark on. Scarier and bolder than any international escapade. The beliefs and emotions that lay inside me intimidated me more than anything else ever had. Luckily, all those trips to far off lands did prepare me in some way for this inner adventure.

They gave me the confidence to explore by myself. They gave me insight into what leaving my comfort zone could allow me to gain. They gave me curiosity and a hunger to understand - understand truths - my truths, the truths of others and the truths of the world. Best of all, they helped me see that all those truths could co-exist.

Now, I want to lead the way so that you too can embark on this journey. I’ll show you where the trail starts, I’ll tell you where the signposts might be and where you might confront obstacles like wild beasts who’ll try to stop you. I’ll give you information about how to explore this route, tools that’ll come in handy and help you get your bags packed. I’ll even guide you through the first few stopovers of the trip. But I won’t be able to take you further than that. The real adventure will start there, as you walk forward solo.

Before we start, I want to take a bit of time to tell you more about me, the trip we’ll be taking, and stops we’ll be making. This first chapter will be like a pre-departure briefing. Like when you meet up with your group before leaving for a trip through the Amazonian jungle. We’ll discuss our expectations, our itinerary, our packing list and get to know the tour guide.

Meet the Tour Guide

The fences weren’t white and I’m not sure how many people had 2.1 kids, but my upbringing was as suburban as it gets. The norms of what the world expected of us were quite specific.

Finish school. Get a government job. Buy a house. Get married. Wait for retirement. Expectations were clear. We all knew what the road ahead held for us.

In my suburb of Ottawa, most people were white, had similar economic situations, ideologies, and dreams. Exploring the world wasn’t a common aspiration, nor was even heading west 20-minutes on the highway to spend the night in the city. It was like living in a small town but with the luxuries of a big city. The borders of our strip malls and giant supermarkets were as far as we went to expand our horizons. But somehow, the urge to explore was planted within me.

From my mid-teens, I daydreamed of exploring the world outside of my suburb. I wanted to see how people lived, what they thought about, what was important to them. I wanted to know people that had different lives than mine and understand their way of seeing the world.

It took me years to start watering those exploration-seeking seeds. In my early 20s, I did, and in the last years of college, they started to sprout. A few months after I got my degree, I left for my first solo adventure abroad.

The adventure couldn’t have gone worse. Five days after arriving in Dublin I got a phone call that would change my life forever. I’d arrived with the intention of staying a year to live, work and start my world explorations. Are you sitting down?, my friend asked while I stopped my sightseeing for a minute to answer her call. I hadn’t expected to hear from her so soon. I had only gotten there a few days before. I was still just arriving, exploring the city with folks I had met at the hostel. When she finally spoke again, I couldn’t believe her words. Gary died last night, she said. She kept talking after that. She must have been explaining what happened to my boyfriend, but I can’t remember anything else from that call, or the rest of that day.

In that moment, my life imploded. Everything I had imagined for my future vanished. As I stood in the middle of that cute Irish street with my new friends heading into a nearby pub it all goes fuzzy. The day I received that phone call is by far the worst day of my life, directly followed by the next day, where I had to pull myself together to get home.

I went to the airport, bought my ticket, went through customs, boarded my flight, crossed the Atlantic, got off my flight and waited for my bags. All that to get at the arrival lounge in Ottawa and realize that this wasn’t a sick joke. He wasn’t there waiting for me. My family’s grim faces beyond the arrival gate told me that the road ahead would be gloomy.

I’d never gone so far from home before. But coming home from Ireland that day felt like I was coming home from a different universe. The trip home felt like it lasted a lifetime, even though I can’t remember one second of that blurry day. I was confused, numb, and couldn’t wrap my head around what had happened.

The next few years are a dark bubble of sadness, confusion, weight, despair, and pain. Forget finding another adventure, I couldn’t even pull myself together enough to stand.

Our early 20s are a time to discover our life paths, understand who we are, wrap our heads around life as adults. But at 23, I fell steps behind. My focus had fallen on managing (or trying to repress) the emotional rollercoaster of this loss.

When the darkness finally started to lift, the seed that had planted itself years ago re-started to spurt. It took me months to see it happening, but once I did, I couldn’t deny the desire for adventure blooming within me. But my fear of what might happen if I left again was paralyzing. For the first time in my life, I felt comforted by the swaddle of the suburb. It had become my comfort zone. But the desire to explore within me was germinating at an alarming rate and I couldn’t keep ignoring it.

I started researching ways to feed this desire, but without it being scary. As I brainstormed options, the world dropped the ideal opportunity onto my lap. It was a contract job to travel around Canada for a few months with a bunch of other confused young adults. We’d survey truckers and try to figure out life. We were pretty much like a traveling circus, but for roadside surveys. We worked, lived in hotels, hung out in restaurants, bars, or empty parking lots. It was the perfect context to help me take a step away from the cozy womb of the suburb, but without panicking. My nest was near, but I could restart trying to open my wings up. I wasn’t yet ready to soar, but my wings were starting to feel eager for a bit of air.

After the contract ended, and I wound up back in the suburb, it was clear that I was ready for the next step. But I still wasn’t ready to cross an ocean. So again, I looked into opportunities. I needed to keep venturing outside of my suburban nest, but without going so far that I’d feel frozen in fear. It was a very fine line that divided the two sides but I was keen on finding a way to walk this tightrope.

The line came in the form of an 8-month contract living and working in the Canadian Rockies. Although I wasn’t going overseas, it was still far enough to feel adventurous. The Canadian landscape I had grown to love had plenty of trees and rivers, but few mountains. I wanted to see what life in the mountains was like and how folks on the west coast of my nation lived. Not having to cross an ocean if an emergency forced me to get back home, gave me peace. As did staying in my homeland. Even if Jasper, Alberta was across the country, I was still in Canada; no borders to cross, new customs to adapt to, or plane trips to take. I’d be doing this 4000 km journey by road. I packed up my ’95 Ford Escort, filled up on snacks and burnt CDs, and hit the road. It was time I got to know the landscape of my vast country.

The experience in Jasper was everything I wanted it to be. I explored the world, met new people, saw new ways of life and different terrains, all the while keeping it safe.

As soon as I came home from being out West, I was ready to keep going. With every adventure that followed, I was eager to explore further places; farther from home and farther from the confines of my comfort zone.

The year that followed I went to Australia for a year. I lived and worked in a few different places around the massive island. After coming home from that, I got right into planning my next adventure: Guatemala. I felt drawn to learning Spanish and volunteering and it seemed like the perfect place to do both.

This was by far the scariest move I had made since Ireland. I was going alone to a country that people said was unsafe, especially for women. I was scared, but once there, I knew it was where I needed to be. The experiences, interactions, and things I was learning overshadowed the fear. Seeing people live with such simplicity, but such kindness, put everything into question.

With every new adventure, my mind was opening up in unexpected ways. I was better understanding the effects of my actions. The impacts my life had others, even those thousands of kilometers away, was becoming clear.

This became especially true in Guatemala. It was here I realized what foreign companies were doing in developing nations. Their greedy tactics seeped into the economy, the local communities and into nature. Canadian mining companies were all over this small Central American nation. As a Canadian, I always took pride in how much my country and its people cared about protecting nature. During the six months I lived there, I realized the story of how conscious and considerate we were, was just a tale. The locals regularly referred to our mines as the worst. They said that our mines had the most negative impact on them, the surrounding nature and their communities. Their extraction tactics were aggressive, their business models were self-serving, and their contribution to improving the state of affairs was almost non-existent.

Listening to the local women tell these stories broke my heart. It shocked me to realize that my excessive, consuming-obsessed lifestyle affected them. Consuming useless crap back home created markets and industries elsewhere. These industries often weren’t managed in fair and sustainable ways. Living in such wealth, comfort, and excess came at a cost. And I was befriending those on the losing side of that equation. My eyes were opening to the reality of this formula.

When I was younger, I wandered through life with blinders on. You know, like the ones they put onto carriage horses. Their owners put them on so they can’t see into their peripherals as they chauffeur people around. They can only see what lies right before them. My views were as limited as those of these horses. But as I traveled, the blinders started to slide open. With every adventure, country, and connection I made, I started to see more clearly.

I could see through a wider lens. I imagined life from other people’s viewpoints. As they told me about their lives, I wandered to the ledge they sat on to watch the world. By changing the way I saw it, it changed everything that lay before me.

After Guatemala, I moved to Cusco, Peru. I found a two-year volunteer job, which would allow me to dive deeper into a culture than I had gone before. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about temporarily settling in a foreign city for so long, but I was keen to find out. It was in Peru that I started dipping my toes into exploring the mysterious world of my inner self. I struggled with cultural adaptation, relationship conflicts, an identity crisis, and a constantly changing social circle. All this chaos highlighted my need for tools that would give me more peace and balance. Yoga, meditation, and other personal growth practices started gaining space in my life.

After Peru, I stopped at home for one more attempt at living in Ottawa. It lasted six months before I was out the door again, this time heading for Madrid, Spain. I’ve been here for six years now, which feels shocking considering my wandering feet used to get antsy after a few months.

Being in one place for six years is a different type of experience. I’ve never done anything for six years. I’ve never been in a job for six years, a relationship, a home, a city or even doing the same hobby for so long. I like change, it lies at the base of who I am. Being settled in one city has been a whole new kind of adventure. I haven’t hung up my travel pack yet, but the adventures I do take have diverged into unexpected directions. They combine a more stable daily life, sprinkled with overseas travel, and a heavy dose of inner exploration. It’s that inner detour that we’ll be investigating together. It’s a trip that won’t require any international movement, but an adventurous spirit and keenness to explore will come in handy.

More Than a Travel Adventure

Although travel has given me great skills, it also made me think that what I sought could be found outside of myself. I became convinced that one day I’d find a city, town, or home where everything felt right. I just needed to visit one more place, live in one more country; always looking for that ideal place where it all fit. I was looking for a place that would allow me to feel inner peace and constant happiness.

My circular shape didn’t match the square peg hole of my hometown. Even if I love square peg holes, my lack of 90º edges doesn’t allow me to slide into these spaces comfortably. Hopping from one place to the next was my attempt to find my circular peg hole. A place where everything felt right. But no matter how much I searched and traveled, I couldn’t find it. A constantly blissful existence always seemed one more destination away.

In Peru one day, reflecting on this idea, I realized that this way of living was an escape. But it wasn’t Ottawa or my suburb that I was running away from, it was my own self. Although travel gave me a space from where to get to know myself better, it also became the tool I used to keep myself distracted. Like everyone, I needed a vice to drown out the pain within, and travel was my antidote. I felt dissatisfied, unhappy, and as though something was missing. Instead of finding a sense of wholeness within myself, I looked for it across the world. Some people distract themselves from inner unease with food, shopping, social media, work, TV, alcohol, drugs or other compulsive habits. My fix came through intercultural exchanges,