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Travelling can be hell. Why should it be?

I’ve just arrived in the beautiful Fairmont Empress hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, probably the most lavish room I have stayed in with its colonial style. The darkening sky tells me that evening is starting to settle in. But because I have not reset my watch as I have travelled Westwards across time zones, I can see that its exactly 24 hours since I climbed in a taxi in the darkness outside my mother’s house in Ruislip, Middlesex and had to put up with the driver’s spooky stories and inquiries all the way to Heathrow Airport – so, he asked after squeezing me for the information that I was an academic going to a conference, it’s the tax payer paying for your jollies is it then? The rest of the time has been in planes and, perhaps more tiring, sitting around in airports and being subject to huge amounts of questioning and x-raying. The constant security probes do start to feel personal and wearying. How I’m looking forward to next week’s (yikes!) ferry to Denmark, where you just turn up and drive on. Is it the tiredness, the air-conditioning, the anonymous space, or the body’s confusion over time that puts you into a dull trance? A kind of drugged alienation where you can’t really think or concentrate or be on edge, where you have to remind yourself five times to pick up your passport, where you forget things on the countless forms you have to fill in. A kind of passive mode.

RSI and Asus

Hmmm. Mysteriously (with my susceptibility to strange RSI type pains and fatigues) I’ve developed bad pains in my right forearm and an hour on the cramped keyboard of my Asus eeepc seems to have brought a flair up. Oh dear. Its time for an experiment. Lets seee if a week without eee seees it off.

a new home

Thanks to my friend Geoff my website is on the way to a new home. A couple of years of hosting it from my iMac in the garden shed has been enough and its time to move everything to Texas or wherever the hell this comes from. But its not sorted yet. New domain name is courtesy of dicount domain 24 with their nice slightly badly translated from German website. And the site is hosted by webfactions.

Buff review

I got a Buff ‘thing’ for Christmas. I’d never heard of them but being easily impressed was attracted by the packaging and the concept. After wearing it in the privacy of my own home as a kind of pirate headscarf I tried it on another icy cold ride on the motorcycle. As a balaclava it did a fantastic job of keeping the chill off my neck and chin. At £12 I recommend them. Details at http://www.buff.es/index.php.

Breathing in… breathing out

One meditation technique involves ‘breathing out’ unhelpful qualities and habits of thought and feeling, and ‘breathing in’ more noble qualities. For me I find it suprising how a range of mean attitudes that give rise to suffering and sabotage relationships spring from a kind of lack of confidence. So with this in mind here’s a meditation I’ve found useful. You time it with your breath and imagine the attributes:

I breathe in confidence
I breathe in health
I breathe in presence
I breathe in balance
I breathe in power
I breathe in equanimity
I breathe in generosity…

I breathe out resentment
I breathe out a sense of powerlessness
I breathe out victimhood
I breathe out anxiety
I breathe out fear
I breathe out anger
I breathe out despair