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 weekly. Start with the free 7-Day Stoic Challenge: https://www.stoicchallenge.co/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show-description&utm_content=global
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Reading the Stoics and being changed by them are two different things. You can finish Meditations and carry nothing into Tuesday morning.
A listener, Mike Slavin, asked how I actually fold ancient Stoicism into daily life. That question sent me into the reading methods I have landed on over the years, the slow, deliberate ways of getting these texts off the page and into how you live.
But what have been some of your favorite ways of actually taking this book knowledge? Something that you've picked up from reading about these characters of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, these almost superhero-like characters. How do you take some of those lessons from their lives and begin to bring them into your life? What are some of those practices you might recommend someone start to pick up?
SPEAKER_00
So I think that the inclination when we first start reading about stoicism is to find the practices, the kind of the exercises, and start just applying them. That's typically my approach. And that can happen. But if we go if we go back to the reading of Stoicism, I think the first step is to read as a wise person would read. I read that many years ago, and I just read through it, and I thought it was wise. And then I put the book down, and then I carried on with my life and felt like 5% wiser, and I felt good. But that was definitely not how that book is meant to be read. The book is meant to be digested, not just read, not just read as a collection of quotes, but digested. And how do you digest an ancient text like that? The first step is that you have a dialogue with it. You question it, you challenge it, you imagine that Epictetus is sitting right across the room from you saying, This is my argument, this is my proposal, this is my view. And then before you move on to the next, you contemplate it, you question it, you apply it to a reference experience of your own life. Does this hold true for me? Does this not hold true for me? And that's how you start to digest the work. And then you are meant to reread these works as well, because it's quite deceiving how a single paragraph by Epictetus can contain so many layers. I was speaking to Donald Robertson, who's an amazing stoicism author recently. And he said that he wrote a book on Marcus Aurelius' meditations, and he said that people will come up to him and tell him that Marcus Aurelius was quite cold and lacked compassion. Whereas Donald Robertson has been reading and rereading meditations for I think over a decade or two, and he's like every page of meditations has some compassionate view of Marcus on it. You just need to read it. But of course, people tend to, because of the reticular activation system, people tend to focus on what they value and delete from their perception everything else. And if you frame Marcus's writings as cold, you'll tend to miss the compassionate parts. So it's good to read Stoicism with an open mind and to really digest it and imagine that you're in a room speaking with the authors. The next stage, before you even get into any exercises, is to start imagining that your favorite stoic author, whether that be Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, is right with you. You have the spirit of them with you. And then you actually turn to them and you imagine that they're there, and you turn to them and say, What do you think I should do in a situation like this? And what you'll find is that you often already know the wisest possible answer. That's actually one of the first things that we do on the quest is you play an imagination game where you imagine that you are talking to a stoic and you get all of that advice from that stoic. And what you'll find is that you have already that advice inside you. I think Sam Harris said that wisdom is the ability to follow your own advice. How many people watching this now consider themselves to be quite wise and to give good advice? But how many of us actually follow through with that?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what what an interesting psychological phenomenon, right? Your friend shows up and is really having a difficult situation and you know exactly what to say to help them. But then taking that uh wisdom in turn and applying it to ourselves is so much more difficult. It's like this blind spot that makes it challenging for us to really um see those things for ourselves because we're so close to ourselves. So there's that sort of distancing of you know, treating it like a friend or those things that can help us begin to really encounter that wisdom and sort of bypass the all of these sort of identity structures that we've uh put in place that make it hard to see things clearly.
