This is purely my experience, it may be different for others.
Feelings of bliss
On about day 8 of my 2 week holiday around Albania, floating and bobbing in the beautiful water of the bay of Saranda on one of those cheap Lilo’s we had bought, I felt perfectly at ease. A blissful feeling emerged, full of trust in all that is. Pure freedom, contentment and relaxation. The amazing sun shone, and showed no sign of letting up. Not a care.
But this feeling wasn’t easy to come by. It was paid for in spades. It was not simply the result of being on holiday, at all. The journey to this feeling was an ordeal in some ways.
Let’s retrace and see how this happened. A little context:
The need to escape
The thing that makes my experiences what they are is that generally speaking, these days I am much more aware of the behaviours of mine that may amount to escapism and distraction.
While neither of those things are necessarily bad in themselves, I know for my own self that many of the behaviours I indulge/have indulged before now that I would class as escapism or distraction have had negative consequences for me. I have had to see my behaviour in this way and still do because when I don’t, when I engage in distractions or escapism it usually leads to feeling out of sync or ill-at-ease. That’s the mild version. The exaggerated form of this is where anxiety, depression, loneliness and fear is well and truly dominant.
I have discovered for my self that much of my behaviour in the past, and some of my behaviour in the present is an attempt to avoid or escape these very feelings and is usually an incorrect motivation to act from. The sad irony is that the behaviours I indulge to suppress what is uncomfortable are the very things that produce more of those feelings further down the line. Distracting or escapist behaviour never achieves its desired intention – to release me from suffering. Ok…I suppose I have to confess that it has done, and even for long periods.
Let the good times roll
For example, in the past I enjoyed being drunk or high without reason to doubt it. However from much experience I now know that what is happening simultaneously is that I am suppressing something which at some point needs addressing if I want true, spontaneous and long term happiness. The root causes of the ill feeling that I would want to mask with substances need bringing into my awareness in order to overturn them in a true way. That was in the past and I learned the hard way but even now, each time I ignore or avoid feelings of dissatisfaction or downright unhappiness by using escapist or distracting behaviour I am pushing the true answer to happiness further and further away. It’s a ticking time bomb which undeniably results in misery of some kind later on somewhere. I’ve gone back and forth over and over with escapism and distraction, each time realising before its too late that I have been avoiding something, and inevitably I have to clean mess up later on.
Alcohol and drug usage are extreme examples from a whole spectrum of distraction and escapism.
‘Non-harmful’ behaviours?
At the other end of the spectrum, smoking a cigarette, or having a strong coffee, or gorging on chocolate cake, or ‘numbing out’ on social media, or consuming too much information, or working too hard, are all things which I know for myself are in some way an attempt to quell or divert me from a general sense of unease which most of the time is too subtle to notice. In fact, it’s not that it’s a subtle feeling, it’s more that its energy has been ignored for so long it has become the norm to feel that way.
I can have days that include all of the above things, and still be ‘ok’. Sometimes it’s innocent, it’s a deserved pleasure. But sometimes it’s not and when it’s not, when the motivation is to avoid something, I know from experience that I am emotionally static or blocked. There is something I am unwilling to know the reality of because it’s uncomfortable or painful to look at it, or means I have to change in some way.
So, the holiday. What exactly is a Holiday?
A time for fun? A break from stress? A time for relaxation? A time for escapism and hedonism? A time for enjoyment and good times? Making my skin brown in the sun? Time for leisure and recreation? A day to observe a ‘Holy’ day in the calendar?
Or just GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL.
Maybe I overthink….but I have to ask the question…what exactly am I trying to get away from?
It seems perfectly reasonable to want to get away from stress and responsibilities but they, and all the other reasons listed are two sided coins.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any them reasons to holiday, but for me, when seen in the context I laid out above, I have to know the motivation behind my actions. Without some diligence, I can quite easily fall into the trap of thinking a holiday is also a relinquishing of the responsibility to myself and my wellbeing. A chance to indulge some of the distractions I otherwise wouldn’t entertain as much. But these are not the things that sustain me. These are the things I do when I am trying to avoid my feelings.
Is that what a holiday is? An opportunity to indulge even more of the escapist, distracting behaviours that block out my truth, and divert me from true wellbeing?
You may say I’m being hard on myself. For goodness sake, why can’t you just enjoy your holiday, your time away, relax a little, let your hair down?
They are very valid questions. Trust me, I have tried this. But fun and relaxation, if we equate that with a sense of wellbeing, for me looks different than simply blocking out my stress or feelings of dis-ease with hedonistic pursuits.
Fun and relaxation for me actually means the ability to truly experience and be present for as many moments and experiences as possible, without distractions getting in the way.
In a way, a holiday for me is an opportunity to actually be FREE OF DISTRACTION.
Free of distraction you are faced with your true self
However just like a meditation or mindfulness practice, being distraction-less is not all happy camping.
Without distractions all of a sudden you are faced with the things that all the distractions of home were covering up. It seems to me that a holiday can actually be a reason to go from one set of distractions to another more intense and plentiful set of distractions! Ha!
When we go on our holiday, we may be able to leave behind responsibilities but we don’t leave behind our mind and how it works.
Cue my holiday and my experiences:
While I was away. I had more than one occasion where I felt I was going through an intense emotional and mental ordeal. I was brought face to face with some old familiar friends. Anxiety and fear. A few too many cocktails during the beginning, plus the mental baggage I had brought with me, plus a willingness to forget to do the things that keep me in good form, were not a good start. I have also discovered recently that for all my adventurousness I have something deep rooted about being away from home and family that unsettles me. For reasons I can’t explain fully but maybe it’s from a childhood experience. On another note, I inexplicably received a very strong memory of my Nan telling me about when she was moved to Scotland during the war. I’ve never looked into anything of this nature but I wondered, is there something in that experience of hers that became encoded as a memory and passed down? But i digress….
What added to the problem were all the thoughts that looked like ‘I’m supposed to be on holiday enjoying myself, why am I feeling like this?’
These thoughts spiralled and made me feel worse. A sense of depression was looming. Maybe it’s my relationship? Maybe it’s the wrong one! I should be enjoying myself! What’s going wrong! All fear-based illusions of course.
A pilgrimage into the soul
My holiday, at that point, became about being truthful with myself. So rather than blotting it out with alcohol, food, sun and fun, it was about saying ‘ok, here is the reality of my experience, I can either escape it, distract myself (basically lie to myself) or I can go headlong into it and do whatever’s necessary to understand it and accept it.
Thankfully, I’ve had many years doing just this. I have a general formula that includes;
the reading of my favourite spiritual literature, a meditation/mindfulness practice, prayer (subtley different to meditation), journalling – the opportunity to be explorative with thoughts, feelings and
emotions and an opportunity to be honest, and maybe some physical mind body practice like yoga or qigong.
Without a doubt, every time I feel this way, my tried and tested means of ‘recovering’ hits the mark. The anxiety is understood, seen for what it is (illusory fears I am projecting and attaching to), and an authentic sense of trust in all that is, is restored. It’s unfortunate that I have taken my foot off the pedal to a degree that I have all that work to do to get back on track, but you know, it’s a work in progress being disciplined, and I can get a tad excited on my first holiday for a long while.
What at first seemed like a miserable experience during certain parts of my holiday ended up being a very real and needed insight into what was lurking beneath, with a very real solution. And then, the fun could be had. I could enjoy the laughter with my partner, the food, the travelling, the sunbathing, and everything else.
It was exactly what I actually feel my holiday would be about – an opportunity to be ‘distraction-less’ an opportunity to come closer to my true self, an opportunity to grow, as well as the opportunity to relax a little and enjoy the freedom of the less responsibilities I have when at home.
It’s very likely you will have at least some cloudy skies
So from within the clouds of debilitating and upsetting anxiety I was thankfully able to rise above and feel the peace and freedom which is always waiting for me when i am willing to acknowledge how I feel and work through it.
A holiday is recognised as the time where one can be relieved of one’s duties and rightly so, but the rest, recreation and leisure we are entitled to enjoy can for me only come about once I am in alignment with, and not in confusion about, my true source of wellbeing, which requires daily attention which produces correct motivation.
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