Making the Most of Your Time Away

Why is it important for us to go on holiday every so often? There are a few different reasons: to relax and recharge our batteries, to drink and have fun, meet new romantic partners, to take ourselves away from the chores and problems of our daily lives.

But perhaps the main reason why holidays are so important to us - strange though it might sound at first - is that they heighten our awareness.

For the most part, we live our lives in environments that are completely familiar to us, and our lives largely consist of experiences which we have repeated many times before. But when we go on holiday, all this changes. The foreign buildings and streets and the different food, language and culture are more real to us. They're so new and different that we pay them much more attention. As a result we become more present than we are at home. We spend less time immersed in the ‘thought-chatter' in our minds, or giving our attention to distractions like TV or the Internet. Why would you want to stay in your hotel room and watch TV when you can sit in a beach café and watch the boats going by, or go for a walk along the ancient city streets? Why would you give your attention to the chattering worries inside your head when there are so many stimulating and beautiful sights to take in outside you?

As a result, when we're on holiday, we often get into a state of natural mindfulness - the state of paying complete attention to our experience. We develop the kind of fresh, ‘first-time' vision which young children experience. As the child psychologist Alison Gopnik remarks, ‘As adults when we are faced with the unfamiliar, when we fall in love with someone new, or when we travel to a new place, our consciousness of what is around us and inside us suddenly becomes far more vivid and intense, like children's.'

To some extent though, this depends on the type of holiday that we you on. If you want to experience this ‘awakening' effect, it's best to avoid holidays in tourist complexes, where everything is similar to your home environment. Choose a more unfamiliar type of holiday, such as an adventure or backpacking holiday, even an activity holiday which you've never done before (like cycling, walking or singing), or a few days in a foreign city.

However, it's also important not to make your holiday too busy and hectic. Newness is important but too much newness can overload our minds. If you spend your days rushing from one museum or monument to the next, your mind will quickly grow tired and begin to recoil from your experience. Personally, I'm a big fan of slow holidays. A slow holiday usually means staying in the countryside, not travelling around too much, and avoiding the tourist trails. It usually means eating locally grown food, going walking or cycling, and spending a lot of time relaxing and taking it easy. Perhaps ideally, we should combine some aspects of ‘slow holidays' with some unfamiliarity, staying in a quiet area and spending some time relaxing but at the same immersing ourselves in a foreign culture. In this way, your relaxed state of mind will increase your ability to be fully present to all your experience, and enable you to take in even more unfamiliarity.

This will have a big effect in terms of time too. People often complain that their holidays go by too quickly, but to some extent, again, this depends on the type of holiday that you go on. As a part of the research for my book Making Time, I went to Manchester airport with a colleague and asked returning holidaymakers two questions: ‘What type of holiday have you been on?' and ‘Do you feel that time has passed quickly while you've been away?' I found that there was a strong relationship between how adventurous or unfamiliar a holiday was, and the speed of its passing. The holidays which passed most quickly were in tourist complexes, while those which passed slowest were adventure holidays, or those in completely unfamiliar cultures. In the latter case, people often made comments like, ‘I've only been away for a few days but it seems like weeks.'

Approached in the right way, then, holidays can be a kind of low intensity spiritual experience. With the right degrees of newness and relaxation, they can help us to live in the present, and open our minds to more reality.

Steve Taylor's new book Waking From Sleep - described by Eckhart Tolle as ‘One of the best books on spiritual awakening I have come across' - is published by Hay House UK. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com