How to talk about travel (morning thought)

Going places! Marrakech train station.

After a trip to an exotic place, you are obliged to talk about it. Friends ask you about Your Trip (especially in New Zealand, where every country except Australia and home is considered exotic). Or you have an urge to talk about it anyway.

But how? Travel talk can be such a pleasure, but it can also go seriously wrong. Half your audience has already been to the same destination, and the other half has been there in spirit thanks to TripAdvisor and Facebook.

Is there a taxonomy of travel talk? I have been watching how others do it, and I hope to learn from their triumphs and mistakes.

A. Travel talk that I enjoy hearing

1. Personal experiences combined with insights into broader topics.
2. The person who respects your knowledge and adds to it.
3. A story steeped in joy or excitement or delight or drama or fear: strong frank personal feelings.
4. People who travel with a specific purpose: how did things pan out?
5. A story about people.
6. An amazing fact that I have never heard before.
7. Stories that grow and grow in response to the listener's questions.

B. Travel talkers who drive me nuts 
I wish you all the best, but I do not want to be you.

1. The bore who tells you 1,000 (dubious, random, context-less) "facts" about a place.
2. The know-it-all who believes spending 5 minutes in a place gives their every opinion the ring of authority.
3. The full-time cruise traveller who compares tours, not places. 
4. The relentless super-generaliser.
5. Mr and Mrs Cost-a-Lot, Mr and Mrs They-Can't-Make-Chips, and their friends.

I'd better get an executive summary ready so that I don't lapse into category B.

**
And by the way: jotting down morning thoughts is more demanding than I expected. On a train and planes, I did not jot. Now I'm home, there's a little problem of time. Well, that's just for the record: it's all good.

Mindfulness and meditation for beginners

Meditate for health and strength and relaxation and creativity. Meditate because it feels nice. Whatever. But if you meditate with the explicit goal of spiritual transformation, you lay yourself open to certain risks. Failure. Disappointment. Self deception.

Of course you may experience spiritual transformation while meditating. Sometimes you may drift into a delicious, quasi-mystical state. You certainly may find emotions welling up unexpectedly.

But if that's not your cup of tea, be aware that Just Doing It always works.

Be kind to yourself: your meditation is fine fine fine, just the way it is. Simply sitting still in one place for 10–15 minutes brings about a certain calmness and other physiological changes. If your mind keeps straying, so what? Noticing your thoughts and letting them go is a big part of meditation. There's no such thing as bad meditation!

6 misconceptions about meditation and mindfulness

1. Meditation is hard to learn: no way. I learned in a half-hour session with a visiting guru, after which I just did it. Later refresher courses were interesting and pleasant but not necessary.
2. It takes a lifetime to learn. Rubbish. You can learn how to meditate by doing a short course, which might take a weekend or six 1-hour sessions.
3. You have to meditate for 45 minutes twice a day. Says who? 
4. It's a deep and meaningful experience. Well, it may be, sometimes, yes. But usually it's just a practical habit with short- and long-term benefits, like brushing your teeth.
5. You can't go it alone. You need to commit to a guru, whether Buddhist, Hindu or California New Age. Ah yes, they would say that, wouldn't they?
6. Some types of meditation are better or stronger or richer or deeper or morally higher than others. Sure, there are many ways to meditate — breathing, focus, body scanning, mantras...  so experiment. Find a method or methods that you like: they're the best ones for you. 

Look around for courses and books that teach rather than evangelise. You may find them within the medical profession or online or locally.

The Five Minute Meditator: the best beginner's book I know. I give it away in handfuls and recommend it left right and centre. Even the title is calming and encouraging. Eric Harrison's other books give depth and perspective to the history and practice of mindfulness and meditation — but no dogma. His latest book, Mindfulness 101, welcomes the arrival of mindfulness as a new world-wide mainstream craze, because it strips the conventional monk's robe off this practical, useful tool.

The Perth Meditation Centre sells Eric Harrison's books online
Mindfulness Works: secular meditation and mindfulness courses in New Zealand
Guided Mindfulness Meditation Practices with Jon Kabat-Zinn