India traveller Laura Attwood knows what draws people to this richly textured land. And, interestingly, it's women in their middle years who are now answering the call in large numbers.

Travelling, on the surface, is movement. But like music, it's the pauses, the breath between the notes that allows the song to sing forth. It's the stop points in life that provide opportunities; the stillness that facilitates openings, a crack in the armoury of daily routine that masks deeper oceans of awareness. Illness, having children, losing a job or a partner, emigrating, travel - it's different for each one of us, but it's often these major life events that touch us deeply and spin us in different directions. I believe it's not the life events as such that provide the change, rather the stillness that results from the enforced stopping that provides an opportunity for an opening, for some light to creep in.

India, it seems ignites this calling in people. Like an octopus, it sends out its tentacles of super awareness drawing people into the labyrinth of this flavourful subcontinent. Some jump at the calling, others turn their backs. In my own case, I'd long held a desire to launch myself into India. While living in London many years ago, it was my top travel destination, but somehow I never landed up there, always because I wanted to submerge myself in India for at least two months, maybe even six months and could never find that time. So, short European travel jaunts sufficed. But really it wasn't the outer journey and taste of new shores, even immersion in the riotous life that is India that was calling my nomadic self, it was the inner journey I yearned for. I was searching. My soul was calling out to me with the answers. Then, one day it was time - I simply booked a ticket and went.

Certainly, the journey there was an interesting one, travelling via Moscow on Aeroflot, a shuddering ancient Russian airbus where smoking was still allowed, and enormous fur clad Russians kept offering me vodka. But packed into the plane, bleary eyed after a night shift on the TV news beat, I got friendly with some other brave passengers bound for India, a pair of Bosnian Hare Krishnas off to Vrindavan, the seat of Krishna. Once landed in Delhi, I found myself sharing a cab with them and rode into the bustling city with the clash of Krishna bells and "hare hares" ringing in my ears. This is the kind of adventure India offers up. It is always unique and never dull with the unmistakable flavour of the spiritual wafting through.

Nearly everyone I met while travelling in India was having some sort of opening. Having travelled to many other places, the difference in travellers on the Indian subcontinent was vast. Here people seemed to be in a different space, on a different journey, open to a different experience. Even the opium smoking backpackers were revelling in an unfolding of an entirely different kind. So, what is it about India that draws the seeker?

Victorian-based Lincoln Harris runs tours to India. He started his own tour company 10 years ago after a life changing experience in India. His father had taken his life the year before and the teenage Lincoln felt he wasn't getting anywhere at school and just couldn't go on doing what he was doing. "I travelled to India as a 16 year old. I was a confused teenager in some ways and the only way I could see to move through that was to break everything. I wanted something new to stimulate me, so I decided on India because it seemed like the most different place I could find."

Lincoln stayed in Sai Baba's ashram for a month. "At the ashram we sat twice a day waiting for darshan. There were tens of thousands of people there and we'd wait three or four hours before darshan, in silence, just processing. I could feel these huge emotions percolating as I sat there, it was so powerful and overwhelming." He had several personal audiences with Sai Baba and some powerful experiences, some of them, he says, a question mark. "As a 16 year old, it was so overwhelming that I just shut down. So I thought it would be great if you could somehow regulate these experiences so they were still powerful but not a culture shock."

Homesick and a little overwhelmed by the intensity of the ashram experience, he eventually found the journey more than he'd bargained for and returned to Australia. "Ultimately, it was what I needed because it just changed me so positively," says Lincoln. " I got home and I was just a totally changed person. I went back to school eventually and I saw so much life here whereas before I had seen nothing."

He finished school and went on to study tourism, while making several more journeys to India. "Later on, someone said why don't you start taking people to India and show them what it is that interests you so much. That was the impetus to take people and introduce them to India."

He finds most travellers on his tours are women over 50 who have experienced significant changes in their lives, such as the transitions of menopause, divorce, or the empty nest . India seems to call them, luring them to live their dreams of adventure and travel. His experience is backed up by the Indian Consulate in Perth whose figures show women in midlife are the top group of travellers to India, after business people.

"There's a range of reasons for women of this age travelling. I'm 26 and a man so I don't really understand what motivates women of that age, but based on the people who have toured with me, I think it's because they've had kids and a family or maybe a career and are just getting to the point where everything in their world is a bit tried and tested and perhaps stagnating. The stimulus to move them forward in a personal sense is not there, so the natural thing is to go looking for that new source. Travel is one way to do that and India has this reputation and image through centuries of people going there and having moving, powerful experiences.

"People say that India is a mirror for you. It reflects back what's going on personally and that's a great thing for anyone, but particularly for someone who doesn't quite know the way forward in a personal sense. To have ourselves reflected back gives us perspective."

Lincoln also believes the Tibetan people and the Dalai Lama are an extra magnet for people seeking something beyond what our Western culture provides - that and the promise of self discovery. His two week North Indian tour spends most of its time in Dharamsala with the exiled Tibetan people, visiting Karmapa, the Dalai Lama and Tenzin Palmo, sitting in on meditations and visiting many monasteries experiencing, firsthand, this rich, vibrant area.
While Lincoln Harris says he doesn't know what the spiritual means for an individual, he markets his trips as an inner experience, not merely an experience of the outside world. Women participants are often leaving their partners behind and heading out on their own. He says some of these mature women travelling with him have found they've discovered parts of themselves through heightened emotions experienced in India. "People have said to me they've gained a fresh perspective, made subtle changes such as recognising what's valuable to them and what's not and gained a real feeling of self renewal, coming back feeling alive."

For me, India was a calling. I think I waited until I was ready to answer that call. It came with a spiritual opening and a desire to change my life. As women, we often spend our lives immersed in the lives of those around us, our families, children, parents and friends. Emotional and nurturing beings, we soak up those around us. As women, we hold the wisdom of the aeons, we are the feminine expression, the wise ones. We guide our children, we provide the base from which those in our life can venture out into the world. Like the sun at the centre of family and community life, our rays touch the lives of others, providing supportive encouragement to a partner and caring words to a friend.

Women at midlife are experiencing profound changes. With childbearing years behind them, emotionally many are looking forward to finding fruitfulness in previously unrealised ways. It's a precious time when life can flower into wisdom and self renewal. While the sage energy of the crone is not specific to women in their fifties, it seems this is often when women have the space to reflect and distil their experiences and brew their wisdom. For some, this can come earlier - there are even children who carry a strong crone energy. It is all about the richness of life, and a country like India reflects this richness back at you, validating your experiences, your innate wisdom and gifts.

Perhaps it's like delving into a Greater Self, which, once recognised, helps you embrace your Self. Peculiarly enough, I sought out the quiet of India. I found I experienced my deepest stillness against the incredible roar of people, the intensity and chaos of India. At the time I visited in 1998, I was living in London, enjoying a successful journalistic career working at the BBC. I loved my life in the fast lane, but something was missing. India certainly gave me perspective, the seed was planted, the greater truth of our existence sown. I could never return to the lie of my old life.