Mindfulness and Enriching Your Travel Experience

By Piers McEwan

For many, travel as an experience is a precious commodity, often guarded by time and budgetary constraints.  It seems clear, then, that it is an activity to treasure and to savour to the best of one’s ability.  But how might we look to do that; how might we look to enrich our time travelling in order to squeeze the most out of every second we have available?  With so many potential obstacles, worries and distractions in our way, it boils down to one concept, mindfulness.  In short, mindfulness involves being wholly in the present moment; not in past thoughts or future worries, but just the here and now, from one breath to the next.  It allows us to objectively deal with our thoughts so that our full attention can be brought to the present moment, a trait very useful to those on their travels be they big or small, long or short.  Let’s look at how we might use mindfulness techniques the next time we’re setting sail and jetting off to faraway lands.

Noticing the small things

With the sensory overload that often occurs when exploring new destinations for the first time, it can become easy to lose sight of what is actually right in front of us; our minds might well be elsewhere and not fully in the present.  Actively practicing mindfulness, though, allows us to bring our attention to exactly what is unfolding right now in the present moment.  Instead of taking your surroundings for granted, ask yourself questions in order to bring your focus to the now; What can I see around me?  What colours do I notice?  What noises do I hear?  Are they loud or soft?  What is the texture of the road I am walking on?  Where do I feel the morning sun on my body the most?  Such questions all attempt to do the same thing, to bring your undivided attention to the here and now.  Through adopting this framework you’ll notice how you start to discover the little things that you might not have done beforehand and you’ll have a greater ability to recall the day’s events at a later time.  The more you practice, the more you’ll be able to do implement these mindful methods automatically in day to day life, without the need for cues and reminders.  To start with, though, give yourself prompts which remind you to put on your mindfulness cap; have a screensaver set on your phone with a mindfulness based quote, keep some literature on the subject handy or simply wear a piece of jewellery or clothing to act as a symbol for returning your mind to the present moment.

Letting go of problems, annoyances, anxieties

More often than not, travelling manages to throw up curveballs and issues which at the time can seem insurmountable; a lost credit card, a missed flight, a wrong turn taken, an altercation.  We’ve all been there.  But rather than reacting to such situations, and letting them drag you and your experience down, harness your mindfulness practice to realign your perspective.  Instead of the ‘what ifs’, the guilt and the worry, actively bringing your awareness to your breath and to the present moment can help to soften these anxieties.  Mindfulness is not necessarily about forgetting a problem but just having the capacity to view it objectively so that your attention can be brought back to the present.  Start to see your worry as a leaf on a stream, just gently passing by; you have the ability to watch it approach, recognise it for the thought that it is, and then let it pass.  You do not have to consume yourself in the thought itself by jumping into the stream!

Challenging our preconceptions

The planning and the anticipation of travelling is unambiguously one of the most exciting parts of the whole process.  But due to our accessibility of information via the internet, we often paint a picture of our destination in our mind’s eye months before we’ve even arrived.  A friend of a friend who visited our destination last year told you about this neighbourhood that you most definitely want to avoid and on an online review site you saw one terrible review about some lodgings in and amongst all the good ones.  Whatever they are, we are constantly hit by this steady stream of messages which are all hitting the brain at a conscious and subconscious level and building up our preconceptions and ideas.  Though you may have these, start using your mindfulness practice when on the road in order to avoid surrendering to preconceived ideas all of the time.  Instead of bringing in past thoughts and idle hearsay when visiting somewhere, bring your own mind and body into the present moment and objectively view and experience exactly what is inside of you and in front of you.  This way, your experience will be pure and real to you, and not influenced by the thoughts of others and the wider mass culture.

Managing our expectations

Travel envy; the grass is so often greener when it comes to travel and visiting new destinations.  You’ve heard stories from someone in a better financial predicament than yourself and now you’re upset and concerned that your experience will fall so far short of this due to your limited budget or time.  As we’ve already noted, though, mindfulness has the power to turn the seemingly ordinary into the extraordinary, simply by paying closer attention, and can thus help us in addressing such fears through reimaging our perspective.  Sure, that 5 star penthouse suite with views over the ocean that you’ve been dreaming about would be good on the eyes, but so what?  That place exists only in your mind and is not a part of the present and what is in front of you.  Take time to appreciate the place that you are staying in by bringing a curious attentiveness to your surroundings.  Soften those preconceptions of what something is supposed to be like or whether it is nice or not and remember that such thoughts are just that; thoughts and not your reality.  You’ll start to feel more comfortable and at peace with your current circumstances instead of fretting over all the things and places that you think you are missing out on.  This framework can be applied to so many aspects of travel given that we are constantly surrounded by those different to us, but it can equally be applied to all aspects of your life, too.

The Newness of it All

We travel to learn, to broaden our perspectives, to engage and interact in cultures and customs so far-flung from our own; all the while hoping that the experience will rub off on us, altering and bettering our understanding of our world and of ourselves.  What makes this all possible and so intriguing to us is the newness of it all.  Being somewhere for the first time means that everything is new; the fauna, the way people say hello, the humidity, the driving customs, the tastes…  This newness is what gives somewhere that indescribable magical feeling, that sense of awe that hits us in the pits of our stomachs and makes us feel truly alive and connected.  To get the most out of our experience it’s vital that this newness is given significant attention above all else.  To let it pass us by whilst we distract ourselves is easy, but to start embracing and pro-actively participating in the now is the harder but ultimately more rewarding part.  Cultivate your mindfulness practice to pick up on all that is different and new in foreign lands so that it stays with you forever.  The last thing you want from your trip is a haze of indiscernible memories; let your memories of everything new be vivid, colourful, precise and full of life and movement.

Serendipitous discoveries

These days, we’re so often in a rush or checking our Twitter feeds that we have the potential to enter some sort of semi-permanent auto-pilot mode a lot of the time.  With so many distractions around, it is harder, perhaps, than ever before to turn off this auto-pilot setting and just slow things down a bit.  Were you to do this, though, you might surprise yourself at what you notice when you tune into the frequency of the present moment.  Indeed, start travelling mindfully and you’ll have the added advantage of spotting things that you wouldn’t necessarily have done beforehand; the fog which descended on a disguised side street which led down to a bar that served the finest mimosas, the symmetry of the terracotta colours on the side of a church and how the sun pierced the middle of the pattern, the elderly frail lady selling bread where two roads met and how she smiled delightedly when a young boy came up to speak to her.  All fleeting precious moments in their own right, but so often missed when we do not slow down and make a conscious effort just to be here, now.

Find more of Piers’ writing here: http://www.onethinkingman.com

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