The Complete View From Above Stoic Meditation

Have you ever had a moment that made it suddenly obvious how much of what you worry about does not matter? For me it was the instant my son was born. The view from above is a way to reach for that clarity on purpose.

It is one of the most powerful Stoic practices. By stepping back from a difficult situation in the mind, you see it with more perspective and less stress, which makes for calmer judgement and steadier decisions. This is the full guided version. Find somewhere quiet and let yourself rise slowly above it all.

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Transcript

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The Stoics were very good at creating distance from their anxieties and negative emotions. This is now known by behavioral therapists as cognitive distancing. There are many different types of cognitive distancing. One could be talking in a way that decatastrophizes events. If you listen to someone who's anxious or depressed, they'll often catastrophize and exaggerate the negatives. Stoic would describe these events in very plain language so as not to fall into the trap of catastrophizing. This laconic speech would be a way to distance themselves from the event. There are many techniques like this. You could also, for example, make the event humorous in some way, or reframe it as if you were not anxious about the event at all. Perhaps one of the best stoic techniques for cognitively distancing yourself from anxiety is what's known as the view from above. Imagine for a moment the situation that causes you anxiety. See yourself in that situation. See that thing you fear happening. Now imagine this same event that you are seeing now, but on a screen in a movie theater with four hundred people watching it with popcorn. Now add a laughter track to the same event. See people chuckling. Imagine them seeing that same event, but knowing they are actors. Now I'd like you to replace yourself with some random person maybe you've bumped into on the street in the last week. Watch them going through the thing that makes you afraid. Go back and see yourself in the situation that causes you anxiety. Now zoom out, zoom out a couple of hundred feet up into the sky and look down on this event as if you were a godlike figure. You see you in this event, but you also see many other things going on down below. You see yourself as one node in a big network of drama, the drama of life? Zoom out even further now and see on this mapped area other people going through similar kind of situations. How many people experience this kind of anxiety? Is it unique or actually on this planet with billions and billions of people quite common? Do you want to be one of those people who gets the better of it or gets controlled by it? Zoom out even further now and see yourself as a speck on the globe, the bustling, busy, indifferent globe. Keep zooming out and see this globe now as a grain of sand on a beach of galaxies. That thing that stresses you out or makes you afraid from out here is nothing, is meaningless, is almost like quantum energy, barely traceable, barely has any signature in the universe. That thing, that event, that emotion that consumes your world is but the smallest fraction of anything in the actual known universe. Keep zooming out now. Imagine a planet full of other life forms, other types of intelligence and consciousness, other ways of thinking and communicating. How would they see your dilemma? Imagine these creatures are even more intelligent than us. Hundred times more intelligent, hundred times more wise. How would they see your anxiety? And why do you need to see your anxiety different from the way they see it? When I click my fingers, go straight back into the close-up version of the event that makes you anxious. At any time you like, you can zoom all the way back out and view things from above, just like you just did.