The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks
You've read the books. You know what Marcus Aurelius would do. But when life gets hard, the philosophy disappears. This podcast is for people who want to close the gap between knowing Stoicism and actually living it. New episodes every Monday.
The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks
The Stoic Reframe to Deal with Loss of Any Kind
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The Stoics had a hard but freeing way of thinking about loss. Nothing is really yours. Everything you enjoy is on loan, and grief hurts less when you stop treating what was taken as something you owned outright.
This episode works from one of the more confronting lines in Epictetus:
“Under no circumstances ever say ‘I have lost something,’ only ‘I returned it.’ Did a child of yours die? No, it was returned. Your wife died? No, she was returned. ‘My land was confiscated.’ No, it too was returned.”
It is a lot to sit with. I try to take it seriously without pretending it makes loss painless.
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