There’s a little something that happens when you leave everything you know for an extended period of time… and then come back.
This is what I am continuing to move through after my two months in India and I can’t recall hearing anyone talk about this part.
I have heard about the planning, the traveling to, the profound transformations and breakthroughs people experience during a pilgrimage but what about the return? The return back to a life that used to be yours but because so much has shifted internally for you, it no longer feels like your life anymore.
When the Life You Left No Longer Feels Like Yours
It’s been remarkably disorienting to come back, move through familiar spaces, see familiar people and feel disconnected. Not because you don’t want to be connected, but because something so fundamentally true has shifted within you that what was, no longer feels like it fits.
If I am not the same version of myself I was when I left, who am I now?
I have had moments where I feel like a foreign exchange student in my own life. Not recognizing the rhythms of my life back “home” and also not recognizing many aspects of myself.
So where does that leave me?
Somewhere in between.
The In-Between Is Real — And So Is the Grief
The in-between has felt confusing and even a little lonely. I have missed many aspects of my time in India and even found myself approaching an older Indian couple in Old Navy stricking up a conversation just to feel the energy of India again.
Truth is, I miss India and all of the beauty it graciously and generously offered me. I miss sweet little Gracie girl, the street dog I fell in love with. There is grief and that’s ok.
Not trying to fix it. Not trying to rush myself into clarity. But allowing the process of reintegration to unfold in its own timing. Letting my body catch up to what is now while also letting go of what was. Giving my nervous system spaciousness to settle. Letting life meet me where I am, instead of trying to have what’s next figured out.
There is something very humbling in realizing a version of you has come to completion. There is sadness, grief and a surrendered acceptance.
When Grief Layers on Grief
In the midst of processing coming back “home”, I was also sitting with the one-year mark of Lola leaving her little body. Letting that land in my heart and feeling how this too is a clear marker for how much my life has changed.
And then, I remembered a friend of mine would be traveling to Turvanamalli and staying at the same boarding house I had stayed in. Which is where I last saw Gracie when I left India. I reached out to him asking if he had seen her and he responded with photos of my sweet girl.
Something in me softened.
Love Is Still Here — Even in the Disorientation
Not because the grief disappeared, but because I was reminded… even when we leave, the love remains. It may shift, change form or meet us in new ways, but it’s always here.
That’s been the undercurrent through all of this.
Love is still here.
Even in the disorientation. Even in the in-between. Even when nothing quite feels like it fits anymore.
You Are Not Lost — You Are Becoming
Coming back, life may not look or feel how I thought it would, but it doesn’t need to mean anything other than I am in the “in-between” of what was and what is to be.
Things are still shifting and that’s ok. When life doesn’t look the way it used to, I remind myself:
Sometimes it looks like deep breaths in the middle of the day. Sometimes it looks like letting yourself feel what’s there without trying to change it. Sometimes it looks like moving your body, not to fix anything, but because something inside of you is ready to move… and you’re letting it.
That’s what this time has been for me.
Listening. Allowing. Trusting.
Trusting that even here, especially here, life is still happening FOR ME.
Trusting that I don’t need to rush myself out of this space to get to the next one.
If you are here too, we are not lost…..we are becoming.
Out of what once was and into what’s next.
For a moment, think of all of the different versions you have been just in this one lifetime.
I trust this next evolution of us.
Take a breath.
Let yourself be exactly where you are.
Let life lead and trust it’s taking you (and me) someplace remarkably more wonderful than anything we could ever imagine or create on our own.
So trust, surrender and stay open to the magnificence of the Divine Design of your soul’s evolution.
Reverse culture shock after a pilgrimage is the disorientation you feel when you return home having changed internally — but your environment hasn’t. Familiar places and people can feel foreign because you are no longer the same person who left.
Yes. Grief after a meaningful journey is a sign the experience was real and deep. You are grieving the version of yourself that existed before, the place you left, and the life that no longer quite fits. That grief is part of the integration process, not a problem to solve.
There is no fixed timeline. Reintegration unfolds at the pace your nervous system can metabolize. Rushing it creates more resistance. Allowing it — with spaciousness, self-compassion, and support — is what lets it move.