First, the good. I didn’t med­i­tate this week­end, because I was away stay­ing with friends in Lon­don. Stay­ing away breaks my rou­tines, and it still feels a bit odd to be med­i­tat­ing in some­one else’s house. So, I didn’t. How­ever, instead I exper­i­mented with trav­el­ling meditations.

On the way home from work on Fri­day, I did a walk­ing med­i­ta­tion, about as long as my nor­mal seated med­i­ta­tion. And that really grounded me, and felt very good in places as I was doing it. I may try to do that again when I’m short on time, though I’ll be stick­ing with the sit­ting med­i­ta­tion where I can.

Then, on the way to and from Lon­don, I did a dri­ving med­i­ta­tion. I’ve dis­liked dri­ving long dis­tances — any kind of long-distance travel, in fact — for a while now. It always seems to take far too long, and I get frus­trated, and bored, and annoyed by the whole process. This week­end, I tried to stay in the present moment as much as pos­si­ble as I was dri­ving. I didn’t look at the clock. I kept bring­ing myself back to where I was, rather than where I wanted to be.

And it worked beau­ti­fully. Okay, I was lucky with the traf­fic, and nei­ther the jour­ney there nor the jour­ney back would have been awful any­way, but I really did travel and arrive in a much, much bet­ter frame of mind than nor­mal. I was awake, alert, and the jour­neys seemed to have taken much less time than I was expect­ing. It didn’t feel like two-and-a-half hours. I also didn’t feel the need to stop off at the motor­way ser­vices and give myself a break halfway. I was fine with­out it.

So, that’s the good. Now, the bad: I gave into desire every step of the way. My friend Kavey, who had invited me down for a birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, is a food blog­ger. And it’s Choco­late Week, appar­ently. So, I was giv­ing into desire left right and cen­tre, all week­end, from the take­away on Fri­day night, through the Choco­late Unwrapped event on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, all the way through to after­noon tea at the (com­pletely awe­some) Bob Bob Ricard in Soho, with cham­pagne pretty much on tap and more cakes than I could shake a stick at.

Jesus. I really, really over­did it. And that’s one thing I learned: I really don’t know how not to overdo it in cir­cum­stances like that. Where food keeps on arriv­ing, where I’m in com­pany who love good food and eat plenty of it. I just can’t stop. I mean, let’s face it, when I’m home alone, it’s hard enough, but out in a great restau­rant with a group of food blog­gers is really not con­ducive to delay­ing grat­i­fi­ca­tion or stop­ping eat­ing when you’re full.

So, that was bad, I think. A wasted oppor­tu­nity. Or maybe an oppor­tu­nity that came too early in my prac­tice. Next time I’ll maybe have to plan in advance, talk things through with my friends. Tell them that I don’t seem to be much like other peo­ple, in that I don’t process food as quickly, and there­fore need to eat less. And then attempt to have very small amounts of food while other peo­ple are eat­ing lots. (And stay­ing thin, many of them. Peo­ple who love food, who eat and cook and blog and live food are just as vari­able in their body shapes as every­one else…)

That’s not going to be easy. But if I want to prac­tice prop­erly, and have a healthy rela­tion­ship with food, then not tak­ing in more than I need is prob­a­bly key. I’ll try to work on that this week, and we’ll see how I feel. More than halfway through the “Month of Desire” now, and I don’t feel like I’m doing well. Maybe I need to switch tac­tics a bit, some­how. I’ll think about that, too.