After a divorce, a Ball State professor decided to travel by herself for a year, seeking peace through meditation and self-care.
The Hawaii night is pitch black as Cheri Ellefson makes the trek along a trail cutting into the jungle. The rest of Hawaii sleeps, and no lights are allowed on the island during the night. This is a pure place.
She’s in a group, but they don’t speak to one another during the hike to the temple. Polestar Gardens on the Big Island, a meditation retreat, is meant to be completely silent during meditation hours so participants can focus on their thoughts.
As the group hikes to the temple, where they will meditate until the sun comes up and the rest of Hawaii awakes, birds and frogs call to each other in the distance.
Propping herself against a wall, Cheri finds the most comfortable spot. She kneels, pressing her knees against the floor. Some other retreat members wear thick, noise-canceling headphones, but Cheri relishes in the natural noise of the rain forest. She thinks about everything causing her pain at the moment: her divorce, issues with her family, and coming out. These moments gave her clarity on who she wanted to become.
At the retreat, she focuses on her breathing. Without any meditation prompts, she lets thoughts race through her mind.
In 2013, right before Cheri wound up at the retreat in Hawaii, she went through a messy divorce with her former husband. According to a blog post she wrote in 2015, she had kissed another woman and started to question her sexuality. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be married to a man anymore. She didn’t quite know what she wanted.
She started her year of solo travel in Hawaii in January 2014, but it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. She had just turned 30 and found herself questioning what she was doing with her life. She was also teaching online courses at the University of North Carolina and continued to do so while traveling. Today, she lives in Muncie, where she teaches women’s and gender studies courses at Ball State University and co-owns Queer Chocolatier with her wife, Morgan.
Before leaving to see the world, she didn’t have a house or car. Her parents adopted her dog. All of her belongings went into storage, and she began hopping from one place to another.
“Once I got divorced, I wasn’t tied to anything or anybody,” Cheri says. “I really did want to get away.”
She went searching for a way to heal from the pain of the divorce, from the messy way she came out to her family, and from moments in her childhood she hadn’t confronted, like kissing the next door neighbor girl and feeling ashamed when her Pentecostal family found out.
A survey of 500 American female travelers from Booking.com in 2014 found that 72 percent of them were taking solo journeys.
Colin Johnson, an associate professor of gender studies at Indiana University, says more women started traveling alone after World War II. Many men had already experienced travel as soldiers, while women stayed home doing jobs men had to leave behind. At the end of the war, global tourism spiked, and Johnson says many women have been enticed by opportunities for solo travel ever since.
Cheri traveled to 14 different places in the first 12 months.
After her month-long trip in Hawaii, she took a 17-hour flight to Bodhi Khaya, another meditation retreat in the countryside of South Africa. “I was sort of transitioning into a new identity, and, as cliche as it sounds, I did want to spend time on self-care,” Cheri says.
Bodhi Khaya is a small village surrounded by thick forests of rich, green trees and grass. There’s a garden of fresh vegetables and fruits to eat. The air is crisp and clean.
Inside, incenses burn in small bowls, sending up soft billows of smoke. Meditation cushions circle the room. The leader paces softly as the participants kneel.
Unlike the Hawaiian retreat, this one is completely structured, and the group is led into meditation with prompts and questions.
Why are you here?
What kind of transformation do you want to undergo?
What are you trying to deal with in your life?
Cheri thought she would answer these questions with moments that related to her divorce. Instead, she thought about her childhood. At that moment, far enough away from anyone who had known her as a child, her mind was still. She let herself unpack the anger and hurt she’d built up.
Sometimes, she couldn’t make it through 15 minutes of meditation. She would get antsy and try to block the painful thoughts from coming forward. Sometimes she would just sit and listen to the rain forest. But other times, she would let the tears stream down her cheeks.
For a long time, Cheri had felt like she couldn’t be herself. She wanted to love without shame. She wanted to face the conflict between what she learned as a child and what she had been teaching in her women’s and gender studies classes.
Cheri traveled alone, but she wasn’t trying to alienate herself. Throughout her year of solo travel, she met a lot of people from different cultures. She also blogged about her experiences and shared photos on her website, cheriellefson.com. Her Instagram, @willteachfortravel, is a collage straight out of an adventurer’s photo book, with shots throughout the years taken in places like Alaska, Rome, and California.
Through her travels, Cheri feels like she got to know herself. During the summer of 2015, Cheri was back in Muncie and reconnected with Morgan, whom she had met during graduate school in 2010 at Ball State. The two got married in December 2015.
She has continued to travel since 2014, though it’s usually with people now and much more sporadically.
In 2016, Cheri went back to the place in Hawaii where she meditated during her first solo trip. But this time, she shared the space and what it meant to her with her wife. Cheri loved her solo travel, but she says it’s refreshing to have someone with her.
When you’re alone, you can learn things you wouldn’t learn otherwise, meeting people who can expose you to a new culture. But when you’re with someone you love, you can share moments with them instead of showing them pictures later. Cheri loves both versions of travel equally.
This column was originally published in the spring 2019 print edition.
