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January 28 - April 8, 2023
we should welcome criticism from others as one of life’s inevitabilities and turn it to our advantage by making all men into our teachers.
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Being observed can help us develop greater self-awareness and correct our behavior, especially if we’re in the presence of someone we admire, such as a trusted mentor.
The very notion of someone else observing your thoughts and feelings can be enough to make you pause and consider them. Of course, if you occasionally talk to a mentor or therapist about your experiences, it’s much easier to imagine their presence when they’re not around.
The term “mentor” comes from Homer’s Odyssey. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and virtue, disguises herself as a friend of Odysseus named Mentor so that she can counsel his son Telemachus, who is in grave danger.
Your first step is to write down the virtues exhibited by someone you respect.
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Writing things down will often make the image more vivid and memorable.
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With practice, you will be able to visualize the character traits you’re describing more easily.
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Writing down the virtues possessed by a hypothetical wise man or woman, or those we aspire to ourselves, is usually a very beneficial exercise.
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The important thing is to process the information by reflecting on it and revising it where necessary.
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During your evening meditation, review how things actually went, perhaps going over the key events of the day two or three times in your mind’s eye. What would your imaginary mentors say? What advice might they give you about doing things differently next time?
“The Golden Verses of Pythagoras.”
1. What did you do badly? Did you allow yourself to be ruled by irrational fears or unhealthy desires? Did you act badly or allow yourself to indulge in irrational thoughts? 2. What did you do well? Did you make progress by acting wisely? Praise yourself and reinforce what you want to repeat. 3. What could you do differently? Did you omit any opportunities to exercise virtue or strength of character? How could you have handled things better?
Evening meditation
“What use am I now making of my soul?”
What’s ultimately the most important thing in life to you? • What do you really want your life to stand for or represent? • What do you want to be remembered for after you’re dead? • What sort of person do you most want to be in life? • What sort of character do you want to have? • What would you want written on your tombstone?
Values clarification
Remember: the fundamental goal of life for Stoics, the highest good, is to act consistently in accord with reason and virtue.
As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
What we’re all really seeking in life is the sense of authentic happiness or fulfillment the Stoics called eudaimonia.
For Stoics, in other words, the tale of Hercules symbolizes the epic challenge of deciding who we really want to be in life, the promise of philosophy, and the temptation of giving in to pleasure and vice.
the goal of his life is not pleasure but action.
pleasure, and its sources, is morally “indifferent,” neither good nor bad.
Some of our most persistent habits may be ways of avoiding unpleasant feelings, which leave deeper problems unresolved.
Keep a written daily record of the situations in which you notice the desire emerging.
It could also be a more detailed record sheet, including rows with columns for the date/time, the external situation (“Where were you?”), the early warning signs you notice, and/or a rating from zero to ten of the strength of the urge and possibly also the level of actual pleasure you experienced if you gave in to
Your first goal should be to study yourself and identify the trigger or “high-risk” situations where the problem tends to arise.
cognitive distancing from modern psychotherapy. It provides a way of understanding one of the most important psychological practices in Stoicism: that of “separating” our values from external events.
You might also adapt Epictetus and say “It’s not things that make us crave them but our judgments about things.” We are the ones who choose to assign value to things that look appealing.
One is to imagine how a role model might perceive the same situation differently.
“depreciation by analysis.”16 That means breaking any problem down into small chunks that seem less emotionally powerful or overwhelming.
The Stoics thought that if we want to improve ourselves, we should be guided more by the qualities we admire in other people and our true values and principles than by avoiding pain and seeking pleasure.
We aim for wisdom and strength of character not because we’re hoping to gain something else but simply because that’s who we want to be in life.
They don’t crave these pleasures or feel addicted to them. They place more value on their own character and integrity.
Finally, remember what Marcus said about feeling gratitude instead of desire. In a sense, to desire something is to imagine having what you don’t have, the presence of something that’s absent. Gratitude, on the other hand, comes from imagining the absence of things that are currently present: What would it be like if you didn’t have this?
external things, and other people, are not entirely under our control, and one day they will be gone.
The wise man is grateful for the gifts life has given him, but he also reminds himself that they are merely on loan—everything changes and nothing lasts forever.
Perhaps he also wanted to become less like Fronto and the other Sophists, whose love of high-flown rhetoric risked amplifying their complaints by turning common misfortunes into personal tragedies.
remain focused on the pursuit of wisdom even in the face of illness, pain, or any other hardship. This advice, he says, is common not only to Epicureanism and Stoicism but to all other schools of philosophy. Our main concern should always remain the use we are making right now, from moment to moment, of our own mind.
Epicurus said, that pain is always bearable because it is either acute or chronic but never both.
remember that our attitude toward it is what really determines how upset we become. It’s not our pains or illnesses that upset us but our judgments about them, as the Stoics would put it.
Everyday tolerance of minor physical discomforts can help us build lasting psychological resilience, in other words. You could call this a form of stress inoculation: you learn to build up resistance to a bigger problem by voluntarily exposing yourself repeatedly to something similar, albeit in smaller doses or a milder form.
Marcus described several different Stoic strategies for dealing with pain and illness in The Meditations. The most important thing he observed in those individuals who coped well was their ability to “withdraw” or “separate” their mind from bodily sensations. We’ve already introduced this Stoic technique, which I’ve called cognitive distancing. It requires learning to withhold value judgments from unpleasant feelings, viewing them as morally indifferent, neither good nor bad in themselves, and ultimately harmless.
Epictetus tells his students that it’s one thing to have a pain in the head or in the ear, but they should not go a step further and say, “I have a pain in the head
the pain isn’t what upsets us but rather our judgments about it.
We should keep our ruling faculty undisturbed by external things, including bodily sensations of pain and pleasure.
when we allow ourselves to make strong value judgments about external sensations such as pain, we merge our minds with them and lose ourselves in the experience of suffering.
you should not try to suppress the sensations, because they are natural, and you should not assign judgments to them as good or bad, helpful or harmful. This delicate balance is central to modern mindfulness and acceptance-based cognitive therapy,
Epictetus stated this very succinctly: “For death or pain is not fearsome, but rather the fear of pain or death.”
The concept of radically accepting unpleasant feelings has likewise become central to modern cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
Diogenes the Cynic reputedly taught that we should treat painful sensations like wild dogs. They will bite and tear at our heels the more we try to flee in panic but will often back down if we have the courage to turn and face them calmly.
Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus, compared the Cynic to a boxer who fares better if he prepares himself to be struck and to accept it with indifference. If, on the other hand, he shrinks anxiously away from his opponent, he will expose himself to a worse beating.
