I've just walked in from my Pilates class and sat down with a cup of tea and yours, fortuitously, is the first post in my feed today. It was my first class with this teacher and after a long time. My previous teacher was very meditational, about stilling the external and internal noise and tuning into yourself and feeling what was happening inside you. Today, I battled with my internal voice, which was quite grumpy and put out and threatening to go home, and it took nearly the whole class to calm myself down and get into the now.

This tutor has more of a personal trainer approach, it's more about exercise and physical activity and fitness than it is about being in tune and aligned with yourself. I have a 1:1 with the same tutor on Thursday and your post has really helped me start thinking about the conversation I want to have with her.

Moving on from that, your post resonates with lots of different philosophical ideas (in which I'm an expert in none), so where you are talking about the separation of you and me, I was reminded of Cartesian ideas, which I think has been quite a damaging set of ideas, leading us to think about our bodies as separate from ourselves. It's also been quite damaging for women, allowing for the idea of "the other", so not the same as me, and therefore perfectly okay to treat as less than me (that applies to a wide range of people who've been colonised as well, I'm just thinking about women at the moment).

You also talk about taking a rational approach to meditation and I'm reminded of the Enlightment philosophers and their empirical approach to science and understanding the world and, actually, some of those ideas are changing a little now - much as you are talking about how our understanding in the future might be quite different.

And the third set of ideas that come into my head are about what you are saying about conspiracy ideas which reminded me of another post Sunday thoughts in the Quiet City by @phoenixwren which talks about the Puritanical work obsession (and I'm paraphrasing wildly) and Max Weber's ideas about capitalism and how society is ordered.

I was struck by how many very different ideas were encompassed in your post and how all of these, pretty much all of them centuries old, are resonating with all of us today.

The two big things I am attending to at the moment are running and knitting and, with both of them, what I'm interested in, the draw if you like, is the opportunity for meditation, or possibly, flow. Are they the same thing or different? I don't know, but it is about being in the now, and being. That's my story for today.