[Lucy Fleetwood]

What a deeply thoughtful thread. We are conditioned to think we are the owners of our thoughts and feelings, and so much of the challenges we currently face I think are due to this. That Tibetan practice is such a good one for creating some spaciousness around this.

I remember while I was training as a hypnotherapist, walking along the street one day, feeling some disturbed emotions towards someone and watching as my neural networks fired up. It was like a firework display of thoughts followed instantaneously by feelings. I really saw and experienced that I wasn’t these thoughts or feelings, there was a space in between them and my awareness of this. But this is a very mechanical way of expressing this, I think I like the ancient Greek way better.

Another time I was sitting by a lake, it was so beautiful and for a moment I wasn’t there, then suddenly I found myself thinking, what’s looking out of my eyes. This was also a very spacious feeling. It is such a shame that the classics were taken out of the education system at the beginning of the 1900’s.