Yes, keep your meditation practice going. It's harder when you travel, right? Or it's easier when you travel, right? It's different, it depends on the busy part of whatever. However, what stops you in the airport, if you have a stop over for two hours, what stops you from doing walking meditation? Your own brain, Mara? Mara says, sit down and goof off, do whatever, do this, do that, run here, run there. But airports are great places for walking meditation. Everybody is walking everywhere. Nobody even knows if you are walking back and forth. They couldn't care less because they only pass you by once, so you are walking and they are walking, that's all. Sure the people in the shops may see you but so what? Your walk doesn't have to be a short section, it can be a long section.
Rosemary and I used to sell candles in shopping malls. When it wasn't busy we would take turns, walk the whole length in the mall then walk back, it was great. We were doing walking meditation. Nobody there knew us at all. So when you are traveling, what stops you from doing some formal practice at odd times?
The morning after you wake up? Sometimes you have the airplane at four o'clock in the morning. I know what it's like. So maybe you don't get to do it then but what stops you when you are in the lounge room, you already handed in your boarding pass and you are sitting there, it's another half hour before they open up the gates. What stops you? CNN on TV? It stops a lot of people. Travelers, why is it so hard? People traveling, "Ah, I don't have time, I don't have time, I'm so busy traveling." Even in the airplane. I mean you are stuck, right? You are sitting there and you are stuck. Maybe you have the little box, your little TV there and your own channel or 200 of them. But you also have time if you want to turn that thing off, shut your eyes and do some formal practice.
So if you can't regularly do morning and evening, what about other times during the day?
Now specifically this person was saying long-term travel. Okay, if you have a few months of travel, it is absolutely essential to get some sort of pattern doing formal practice in there. Otherwise it's two or three months where you do basically nothing. So two or three months without doing any practice! Would you travel for two or three months and never brush your teeth? Go ahead do it. You don't need your teeth. You can always get new ones. You brush your teeth because you know how important it is. Nobody goes to a tooth brushing camp once a year for ten days and brushes for ten hours a day, then after the camp is over, stops brushing. You know the importance of your teeth, you know the importance of your body, you have to apply that to your mind and your heart, you have to get that in there so you don't want to miss a single day. You don't want to.
You want to develop a type of true love for yourself. You want to develop a love of just meditating. If you haven't got this yet, if meditation is something you do because you have to, try to reflect on the benefits of it. If you develop a love of just meditating, you are not going to want to miss a single day.
If you miss the morning though, okay, you are going to catch up later somehow. There is almost never a day that you can't do five minutes. If you ever experience a day you can not do five minutes, write me an e-mail, tell me what happened. I would like to know.
So, long term travel and any travel, it doesn't matter, try to get your formal practice in there as something you wouldn't miss.