From Yoga Mat to Backpack: My Midlife Mission to Keep My World Expanding

Perhaps like me, you travelled a lot when you were young. Many of us have fond memories of backpacking adventures and cheap-and-cheerful digs. I once saved money by staying with a group of nuns in a convent in Florence, setting off without quite knowing where the convent was – or how I’d get there. At the time, that kind of freewheeling felt natural.

The idea of travelling like that now doesn’t appeal in the same way. And for many women in midlife, travel can start to feel not just less spontaneous, but actively stressful. We wonder whether we’ve simply outgrown it, even as we long for the enrichment it brings.

And yet here I am, preparing for a month-long, multi-stop trip through Chile and Argentina. There will be flights between cities, a long bus journey through the Andes, and plenty of moving parts. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of trip many midlife women would look at and think: too complicated, too tiring, too stressful.

So why am I doing it – and why would I recommend something like this?

For many of us, midlife follows decades of responsibility: caring for children, elderly parents, partners, workplaces, and households. We become highly skilled at holding everything together. And then, often without warning, there comes a moment – mine happened standing at the stove one evening, plonking a pan down a little harder than necessary – when the question bursts out: I’m looking after everyone else. Who’s looking after me? 

As responsibilities begin to thin – children leave home, caregiving shifts, space opens – we have room to do things for ourselves again. Travel reappears in the imagination as something deeply enriching yet, at the same time, overwhelming. We want the experience, but we’re daunted by the logistics, the uncertainty, the sense of being out of control.

This trip is about choosing an experience that stretches me just enough to widen my life, without tipping me into overwhelm. It’s about moving toward uncertainty with steadiness rather than avoidance. And it’s about rediscovering that midlife isn’t the moment to contract our lives. It’s often when we’re most capable of widening them.

This is about what happens when we stop ruling ourselves out of experiences that still call to us.

If I can open myself to this trip with confidence, you can too.

Let’s be honest about what makes a trip like this feel overwhelming. It isn’t just the distance.

And that can feel surprisingly disorienting.

We want something more expansive – time, enrichment, experience – but we’re not always sure what that looks like yet or even whether we’re allowed to want it. When travel enters the picture, it often arrives tangled with overwhelm: the sense that it might be too complicated, too tiring, too much.

So when we imagine a journey we can’t fully plan or control, the nervous system reads that as danger. Not really because it is dangerous, but because it’s unfamiliar. And the longer we avoid that unfamiliarity, the louder the internal alarm gets.

I’m not approaching this journey by trying to eliminate stress. I’m approaching it by changing my relationship to it.

Yoga has taught me something unexpectedly useful… how to be more comfortable with not being in control.

Not in a passive way, but in a grounded one. Less forcing, more responsiveness. Less bracing, more trust that I can meet what arises.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be calm all the time. It means I’m less afraid of losing my equilibrium – because I know how to find my way back. Over time, yoga and mindfulness have made uncertainty feel less like a threat and more like something I can move with.

Practically, that shows up in small, familiar ways: simple breathing practices, steady routines, moments of checking in with my body before my mind runs ahead. It’s noticing when I’m tightening and choosing to soften instead. It’s moving through the day a little more open – letting curiosity replace the need to push or force. Remembering that discomfort isn’t the same thing as danger, and that things often unfold more easily when I allow myself that extra bit of space.

When you regulate first, the same situation reads differently. A long bus ride becomes time to rest, read, or watch the landscape change. A missed plan becomes something to respond to rather than fight. You stop trying to control the experience and start moving with it.

There’s something intoxicating and deeply affirming about doing something that once felt too much – and discovering it isn’t.

Trips like this build confidence. Not the performative, ‘look what I did’ kind, but the internal knowledge that you can navigate complexity and thrive. That you don’t need perfect conditions to feel capable.

Avoidance has a way of shrinking our sense of possibility. The more we sidestep things that feel uncomfortable, the more fragile our world can become. A journey with moving parts – taken at your own pace, with support tools in place – can reverse that process.

You come home with what travel uniquely gives: new reference points, sharper senses, a changed relationship to time. Days feel lighter for having been interrupted. The awe-inspiring places and the smaller moments – food, light, conversation – carry more interest. Every day, stresses lose some of its grip. You trust yourself more, not because everything went smoothly, but because you moved through complexity and came back with more in you than you left with.

Five tips if you’re tempted – but hesitant to travel solo

If a trip like this is calling to you, here are a few things I’d suggest:

Before obsessing over logistics, find how you ground yourself when things feel uncertain. Build that muscle first. It might be a walk in nature, it might be a bath, it might be your morning ritual. For many, including me, it’s breathwork.

Stretch yourself, but not to the point of overwhelm. You don’t need to do everything at once or go to the most popular places Right Now. In fact, staying in one place, in one part of the world or your own country and making it your place to expand can give you the best way to bask in the rhythms and the feel of somewhere new.

Familiar routines – tea, movement, music, your favourite shawl – create a sense of home wherever you are.

Some moments will feel awkward or tiring. That doesn’t mean you’ve made a mistake.

Don’t rush to ‘tick things off’ or ‘get through it’ it. Let your experiences work on you a little.

I don’t know exactly how this trip will unfold. What I do know is what I’m hoping for: not transformation in capital letters, but to come home carrying more with me – more stories, more reference points, more life experience to draw on. To have a reminder that I can move through the world with curiosity instead of caution.

When I return, I’ll write again – about what surprised me, what challenged me, and what I’d do differently next time.

My hope is that this ‘before’ story makes you wonder not just where you might want to go, but how you can enjoy it while you’re there.

Perhaps it nudges you towards a journey you’ve been postponing.

Antonia Balazs is a yoga teacher and writer who’s built a grounded, contented life in midlife. Now, she’s setting off on a month-long, multi-stop trip through Chile and Argentina – not to escape or reinvent herself, but to see what new experiences can offer when you’re already settled and thriving.