The Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius: Practical Tips

hi everyone I think we may now be live let me just check okay so welcome to this webinar on how to think like a Roman Emperor and the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and I just want to say first of all hi from me here and Nova Scotia and if you just want to take a moment to say where you're from in the comment section and let me know that you can all hear me and see me okay cool okay so my name is Donna Robertson and I'm a cognitive behavioral therapist and a writer I'm the author of five books on philosophy and psychotherapy including stoicism they are of happiness which I've got here I'll show you this is narrative happiness and hold your resilience which is cane the bestest ISM and a bit third wave cognitive behavioral therapies are both apart for those teach yourself series and this was the first book I wrote on stoicism which is the philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy stoic philosophy of rational and cognitive psychotherapy with no water for longest title of one book on stoicism so all our stuff for the introduction basically I also run the stoic weak and stoic mindfulness and resilience training courses from modern stoicism which is a nonprofit organization that teaches people about stoic philosophy and I've just finished writing a new book on the life and stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius I also run an online course on stoicism of Marcus Aurelius as well called how to think like a Roman Emperor which is currently enrolling if you're interested share the link in the comment section for you and also let me know if you have any questions about that so I'm gonna say oh I agree deal about that today I want to focus on practical techniques that may be a benefit to you today but can I give you a flavor of some of the stuff that's covered in the course like I said a moment ago I'm because you hear it today from another school show in Canada where I currently love if you're just arriving please say hello in the comments section and let me know where you're from and get your questions ready so we've got a couple of people here appearing on radio I guess that means that you can hear me which is good okay so today's webinar is on the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and particularly about how people today might meet use of the various psychological techniques found in the meditations it should be roughly 45 minutes and lay another good at estimating these things give or take five or ten minutes so post any questions you have about the course or about what I'm seeing today and the chat section the comment section on the video and I'll try to answer those probably after I finish doing there in the video and I'll just pause occasionally to have a look at the chart and see if there's anybody commenting there I'm framed with Facebook or what people watch it the recording or the replay afterwards actually rather than the live event but I can see that we've got a few people joining okay so let me say a lot about the course first of all and then I'll give you an overview of some of the most important historic psychological strategies that we cover ideas and techniques from the writings of Marcus Aurelius I first got and historicism in the mid-1990s and gradually I started writing articles and talking about it to psychotherapists at conferences and workshops but 20 years ago and eventually I realized that the best way by far to teach people about stoicism is by looking at examples of real people who followed stoicism the meditations actually opens with a whole chapter in which Marcus reviews the ruptures of but 16 different people that he knew personally his family and his stoic tutors some of his other philosophy tutors and rhetoric users as well the stoic about him we know the most though happens to be Marcus Aurelius himself because he was dead famous he was a Roman Emperor so details of his life in character are known from several Roman histories and from a few other sources in particular his private correspondence with front or his rhetoric to talk so we have the meditation as we have some histories we've got better archaeological evidence evidence from coinage and stuff and we have this sense of his real basically from the private correspondence which was found in the 19th century if I remember rightly so the the Roman Emperor course took me about a year to create and it contains videos audio quizzes downloads discussions at last but for weeks it's all about how stories from Marcus's life anecdotes can help us put a human face on stoicism and better understand how to apply philosophical doctrines and psychological techniques up ourselves in our daily life to problems like fear sadness anger doing pain and illness anxiety there's a lot material on there so today I'm just gonna give it a review of some of the psychological techniques because that's probably the most common thing that I get asked about and it's cane of my petit here we are in this book the philosophy of CBT I listed a check today and I listed the 18 distinct psychological techniques I could find and the historical extra chart I can of how many there are Canada pain is how you carve things up obviously and the ten years almost ten years since I wrote that book I think I've only spotted one other technique that I overlooked at the time and it's tucked away in one particular passage and epictetus which I'll mention at the end as a kind of little added bonus for you so let us get into the guts of this and look at what some of the stoic psychological practices actually are so sometimes people ask me if I've read Marcus Aurelius or some other books and stoicism well I've seen all her stuff before and I don't maybe but in my experience as the most of the people I speak to aren't very familiar with the full range because the armamentarium and medicine and psychotherapy and the toolbox of techniques are available in stores ism there very few people would be familiar with all 18 of those because it takes a little bit of analysis a lot of our study to kind of identify what they are the Stoics often doing spell this is a technique is sometimes a lot more subtle than that and you have to kind of look closely and conveying passages together from different authors and also often look at the original Greek to really identify some of the actual practices that are describing in other cases it's fairly obvious Marcus will say regularly imagine this thing is fairly clear he's describing a visualization table there are particular techniques there are a lot of the philosophers and classicists Arabia stoicism haven't identified I noticed that's why I wrote my first book because it would take a psychotherapist to spot that some of these things are familiar psychological exercises and the first one is a beauty like that I call it Stuart catharsis so you'll notice I'm using jargon here I'll be unapologetic about that because over the years I found that people and although they may call it psychobabble people like the jargon and they memorizer and the user so it's kind of just something that's evolved some of these terms come from the Greek some of them are terms that classicists have used scholars have used to describe stoic techniques and some of them are terms that I find myself using because the terms that we would use in modern psychotherapy for some more techniques the Stoics very seldom tell us the name of the technique that they're using or describing so the first one I would cost to it catharsis because Marcus describes it as catharsis and catharsis in the true meaning of the word the original meaning of the word is which is absolutely nothing to do with Freud's total misinterpretation of the meaning of the word so forget what Freud we're talking about the original meaning of the carpet of catharsis here and catharsis is a cleansing or a purification so I'll explain in a moment why Marcus uses that term what it actually means but first I want to say that the other term that I use interchangeably is cognitive distancing because that's the modern term the used in cognitive behavioral therapy to describe this technique which i think is probably the most important the most fundamental psychological technique in the stoic armamentarium and it should be familiar to you in some ways but there may be aspects over there that aren't familiar to you there are many people that read the Stoics and don't even notice that this is what they're describing thoughts the best way to describe it is to say Albert Ellis one of the pioneers of cognitive therapy the guy who developed rebt rational emotive behavior therapy and the 1950s he used to teach many of his clients a quote famous quote from the handbook of epictetus and that was kind of one of the things that introduced me to stoicism was that I was very familiar with as a cropping up all the time and the CBT literature generations of other corporate behavioral therapists subsequently would tell the clients it's not events private ah that upset us but our our judgments about events and it's a quote from epictetus it would be given in handouts or just talk to clients verbally and its partners what we called the socialization phase at the beginning of cognitive therapy for half a century right so it's actually a very important technique more so than was originally realized some people with that's just an idea it's kind of description no and there's a strategy they are the learning this concept in itself is a technique so it's important to fully appreciate that I emphasize that because cognitive therapist themselves didn't fully grasp that they had said some bank aren t Beck who founded cognitive therapy he would also teach this to his clients and he introduced a number of other techniques for teaching the skill to clients he called a cognitive distancing and behavior therapists know these use a similar technique and an acceptance and commitment therapy they call it variable diffusion so there's a bunch of different techniques used to describe the same thing Marcus has we've seen groans catharsis also the separation or withdrawal of the mind from external things he describes it as circumscribing or drawing a lane around the main separating our judgments from external things so let me explain what that really means essentially Shakespeare has Hamlet see there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so now this would almost agree with that they would say there's nothing external that's intrinsically good or bad in the strong sense of the word but we impose those value judgments on external things those always don't exist in nature we project them onto external reality but when we do that we kind of naturally blend our judgments with our perception of external events we if we think that this guy is a bastard that woman's a [ __ ] this is a catastrophic shitty situation that we we see the situation we'd perceive it as being shitty catastrophic we see that guy's a bastard that woman is a [ __ ] and we don't really make a clear distinction often between the aspects we're perceiving and the judgment the very judgment we're imposing on external events we're forgetful of the fact that this is a psychological projection if you like it comes from within us no storks refer to this is a mangling or a blending of the mind with external events and they think that we need to peel off that veneer and separate our mind in that sense and that's what Marcus means by catharsis or cleansing a purification this kind of separating out of the internal and the external in that particular respect Aaron Beck used to explain it to clients as follows he'd say imagine you're wearing a pair of glasses and we're familiar with the concept of wearing rose tinted glasses and looking at the world through Rose tinted glasses but when someone's depressed we might say they look at the world through Shetty depressing colored glasses on someone is anxious they may look at the world through threatening anxious glasses or angry glasses if they're suffering from anger and Beck said look imagine this there's a difference between looking at the world through those rules tempted of shitty Cola the glasses and just assuming that's what the world looks like and taking the glasses often looking at them viewing them as an object rather than looking through them as a perspective or just noticing that you're wearing glasses and realizing that they're an object that's mediating our per se action and that's how Beck described cognitive distancing Marcus says something a little bit similar he describes our value judgments as being like beams of light our sunshine that are projected onto the external world and the many objects before us it's something we project or impose onto external reality in the stories think is absolutely fundamental that we need to remember that and be aware of the fact that we're doing it so that we can take responsibility our ownership for those value judgments and there's another good passage in Epictetus where he describes something that is clearly cognitive distancing so hey first of all if we realize it's not things up centres bird judgments about things we're you know that realization in itself remembering that in itself helps us to gain cognitive distance helps us to separate our value judgments from external events and Marcus refers to this passage and make it Epictetus many many times and lots of different contexts but is one is clearly one of his favorite techniques but there's another passage where epictetus clearly describes a slightly different approach to distancing he says the said his students that when the experience are troubling impression the impression that something's bad or awful or catastrophic ah someone's insulted them for example that they should literally say to it like literally speak to the impression itself we call that apostrophizing talking to something as if you were talking to a person we should apostrophized the impression and say to it you are just an impression and not at all the thing you claim to represent it's hard to translate that passage adequately from Greek it could also be rendered as you're just an appearance and not at all the thing appearing his point is to say this is just a representation all things not the thing itself it's just as kosnovski said it's the map not the terrain we shouldn't confuse the two things we should separate our thoughts from external reality and by talking to it it's like taking the glasses off and looking at them we gain cognitive distance from our perspective from our judgments by speaking to it often people overlook the literalness of some of these remarks and epictetus I find that with Marcus Aurelius as well people read the meditations and don't realize that he lay is literally just suggesting you should visualize something or say something they kind of gloss over in their mind somehow so another technique that's kind of related to cognitive distancing is postponement Marcus Aurelius I think he mentions us in passing epictetus talks about it about and it's familiar from other non Stoics or psa's as well particularly in coping with anger but really applies to any passion so when we're up saying we don't think rationally and people in therapy will often say well of call these perspective shifting techniques and stuff that I can do but I've just not the right frame of mind to do them it doesn't seem like the right time to do them when I'm really angry or really depressed and so Epictetus says look if your feelings are overwhelming you then take a timeout delay responding to them and tell your feelings have abated you've come down and you can think more clearly and that's a particularly common technique in anger management and also in the management of worry a particular type of anxiety the Stoics have this idea of fresh opinions causing anxiety and that when our opinions or impressions of aged the anxiety tends to be less powerful so the passage of time were more able to change perspectives problem-solve and think about things rationally and this is an important technique but it came requires cognitive distancing and cognitive therapist would say the ability to gain cognitive distance is kind of a prerequisite of many other therapy techniques and cognitive therapy Beck most famous questions where's the evidence for that he was encourage clients to question the accuracy of the thoughts and also maybe have helpful aware and to question and chef perspective in a number of different ways but to do that you have to spot that you're having certain troublesome thoughts and you have to be able to view them as hypotheses they have to be up for debate they had you have to be willing to question them able to question them if you fuse your thoughts with reality in fact that this guy just as a bastard then you're not going to be able to have the detachment required to evaluate how accurate that judgment is you have to first of all view it as a hypothesis as something that may or may not be true and that's also necessary in order to postpone responding to thoughts as well the other technique art I wanted to mention in connection with these two is called objective representation by Pierre hador a modern scholar of stoicism and it's very closely related to stoic catharsis or cognitive distancing the Stoics had discipline of rhetoric and stoic rhetoric is odd it was known almost as the opposite of traditional rhetoric a kind of counter rhetoric or anti rhetoric so whereas traditional auditors would try and whip up the emotions of their audience and manipulate them they'd use evocative language the Stoics try to do the opposite and they try to remove the value judgments in evocative language that are affecting our own thinking because we're kind of victims of our own distressing rhetoric if I give a talk and it goes badly I may say I was shot down in flames while they tore a strip off me rather than just saying for example somebody said they disagreed with part of my presentation which sounds much more banal right and less upsetting so we often use rhetoric unintentionally unwittingly is like a loaded weapon that we're weaving around without realizing it to de-stress ourselves and the Stoics want us to train go away from that and describe things in more objective language an objective representation Beck describes something called the D catastrophizing script and cognitive therapy which is kind of similar to this in a way D catastrophizing in cognitive therapy is when we don't read the perceived severity of a threatening situation viewing it and more balanced and objective way when we are doing that is to write down a description on paper of an upsetting situation and a more matter-of-fact objective language and maybe also thinking about ways that we would be able to survive our cope with what previously seemed overwhelming sticking to the facts as aware now the Stoics I think view this in a sense is what a natural philosopher would if he was describing heavenly bodies are natural phenomena like an earthquake also what a physician might do if he was listing the seven terms of a patient and to get to they may we talk about a scientific detachment is slightly different concept but it's similar to what the student mind I think that's a good way of understanding what they're talking about Marcus Aurelius also compares this to the attitudes of an artist describing even something terrifying like the scowling face of a ferocious lion or the foaming mouth of a wild boar he says an artist viewing these things from an aesthetic perspective might see them as beautiful rather than distressing or frightening he's essentially talking about viewing things in different from different perspectives than normal and describing them in a more objective way also I'll come back to this in a moment but these changes in perspective are also releases of cainan broadening of our perspective which is known know to be very important to the psychology of emotions so another a closely related technique is the one that I call depreciation by analysis because that's the term that was used by an early 20th century psychotherapist called Charles boudin and he was influenced by stoicism wrote a book about it stoicism partially about stoicism and he used this term that I cannot struck me to describe one of the things that Stoics are talking about he says it's like a child depreciation by analysis is like a child who pulls a toy apart and then looks at all the screws and bets and pieces and then thinks is that all that was and that's cane up as a whole that was inside that so it's analyzing things into their components and viewing each and isolation so they seem less overwhelming Marcus is a good analogy for this he says it's like listening to a piece of music which casts a spell over our mind but then focusing on each note and isolation so that we cannot break the spell and we start to view it in a more detached way we spoil the effect that it has on a psychologically by doing that now the story only really want us to do that to unhealthy desires and irrational unhealthy emotions so we can break habits of thinking that might be counterproductive unhealthy or harmful and there's some good examples of that in the meditations the most famous one may be as Marcus saying that has Imperial purple robes are just sheep's wool dyed and fermented shellfish mucus just what the dye was made from tarry in purple or imperial court was made for it remains me also far saying attributed to the emperor napoleon who said the throne is just a bench covered in velvet so obviously these things make things seem trite my banal and the Stoics fingers a useful psychological strategy you know bringing things right back then to err by pulling them apart all it was just a pinch cover the velvet taking the king of veneer away from things that rhetoric away from them and also broadening our understanding so we know when people are upset particularly anxious there's a narrowing of the retention that happens and they tend to focus in on the most anxiety provoking or threatening views as we say in psychology and their environment and when people are more relaxed when they're happier their attention is more free-flowing more under the conscious control and it's broader and that's important because the best way to think of is this kind of like a piloting effect if you're anxious and you're just not only focusing on the best of the situation not threatening it's kind of like you've got this intense like the purple dye if you like it's just like a really intense like focused essence of of anxiety but then when you broaden your awareness it's like dropping that into a glass of water and suddenly it's not the Arbour it becomes diluted so our emotions aren't as strong that's a theme in stoicism many of the techniques involve deepening of broadening awareness increasing the range of cues that we'll have naturally have a diluting effect on strong emotions but the Stoics think that's more truthful the comprehensive view they sometimes call it is more accurate because when we narrow our attention we'll just focus on particular parts for situation it's selective awareness in a sense it's kind of like a lie of a mission we can't deceiving ourselves in a way by ignoring the complexity the breadth of the situation so depreciation of analysis is similar to another technique in stoicism the Marcus is very fond of which is a kind of empathy so we can call it depreciation by empathy so rather than understanding people who upset us through analysis you could view as understanding them imperfectly Marcus says entering the mind putting yourself into their shoes but also asking yourself a number of questions about them so he'll say well trained imagine a daily routine imagine their life as a whole imagine what their underlying values and goals are even think of the other people that they're trying to impress in life and again by doing that we're kinda broadening our perspective so the insult alone kind of gets diluted by a broader appreciation a broader perspective on the on the other person and Marcus thinks this is a very useful strategy for dumping down anger and frustration with other people so another technique is kinda related to these are called the contemplation of transience it's a bit like impermanence in Buddhism it's a big theme in Marcos he the two authors that Marcus cites most frequently are Epictetus and Heraclitus and the pre-socratic philosopher and he's clearly very heavily influenced by Heraclitus he this idea of the river of time the transience of things just runs all the way through the meditations and I'll come back to the importance of that actually in a later in this presentation so the the idea that nothing lasts forever this too short pass it's a little bit like what we call tame projection and cognitive therapy and also like asking the client for next which is a simple very powerful technique and again it's got to do the narrowing of attention when people are worried or anxious they and they're thinking about a problem they tend to freeze frame mentally on the most distressing part of a sequence of events and everything in life has a beginning in middle and an end as Marcus would say so if you imagine something going wrong and life's a presentation and people like this it does go catastrophic like badly make a little mistakes everyone laughs at you they throw rotten tomatoes at you but then what happens and what happens after that and what happens after that life goes on things will inevitably move on there'll be a de-escalation a cat forever what goes up must come down and when we think what happens next what happens next and we start to see this anxiety provoking situation not just as a soul focus but as part of an escalation and de-escalation it gets diluted and our anxiety response tends to become less severe I also encourages people to think about ways that they would cope with something bad that happens rather than just getting stuck on the fact that it's happened so the Stoics often talk about thinking about the beginning middle and end of events you know how they'll eventually be over another technique that's really powerful that they I don't think they really explicitly mentioned it's very similar and I would call for Matane projection and cognitive therapy and it involves for example if someone has a relationship break up and they're very upset about it naturally upset saying well how would you feel in five years time at 10 or 20 years from now looking back on this event so they may say well you know that's nothing is bad but obviously I wouldn't be as upset but it wouldn't be as raw it wouldn't be as fresh but why should you feel anymore observer to know than you would ten years from now really what's chair this occasions the same why would gaining distance from it temporarily make any difference to the way you feel about it why shouldn't you if you're able to feel the same way now about it as you will in ten years time and I think that's just so useful question suppose to yourself and just even asking that question tends to help people gain a lot of mental flexibility a lot about cognitive distance helps them sit down with their feelings a little bit there's another technique that I guess you can compare to that in some ways in other ways I may have picked us first because I would normally do early in therapy I call it stoic functional analysis because it resembles what we call cost-benefit analysis and cognitive therapy so look it's a very simple form of what we may call functional analysis and behavior therapy the Stoics were a pure turbine influenced and finds Ino the guy who founded sources and was supposedly inspired to become a philosopher because he read a book that contained a famous very ancient parable that Socrates was retelling and it's an Xenophon's memorabilia of Socrates and Socrates is portrayed talking about his friend a sophist called Prodicus and socrates repeats a story that prodigious was famous for telling about the math of Hercules Hercules is a young man and he finds himself lost in a forest facing two paths ahead of him fork in the road and the Stoics are very keen on this idea of deliberate dichotomous thinking because in some situations it helps of decision making if we say let's keep this simple by either we do this or we do this think of it in terms of a simple binary choice sometimes it can be helpful to do that there are many examples of that in this story about a child and this is kind of one of them lay the fork in the road it's also called the path the Pythagorean later why our Upsilon and the the choice is in a sense between the life of vice and the life of virtue but the story it's also described it and I think this is more contemporary in a way as the the choice between following are irrational passions going with our anger going with our fear or taking a step back from LA and following reason instead and the idea behind this is that if we ask ourselves what the consequences will be in the short term and in the longer term will tend to find that those two paths like the letter Y diverge father and father father as time goes on and that will amplify our motivation for choosing one over the other so this technique is sometimes use the beginning a therapy to help clients understand the consequences of different options not as a help about motivation for making well sometimes difficult therapeutic changes that require self-discipline or courage even to do so the this idea of stoic functional analysis occurs throughout epictetus Marcus alludes to a number of times and it can be it can be a very powerful technique and also a good basis for then motivating ourselves to apply our stoic techniques another technique I wanted to talk about just touch on it briefly is the Restorick reserve clause this is a term that's hard to translate from greek opec services and it had all translates as reserve clause which i think is good enough I'll stick with that it's easy to explain what it means though because it means undertaking action and as if we were thinking I'll do this if nothing prevents me I'll do this God willing or fate permitting it's acknowledging that the outcome of our actions isn't entirely under our control and preparing in advance to meet failure with equanimity and the Stoics happen to have handed us down a really good metaphor for understanding that's Cicero who was not a stoic but was friends of his some of his best friends of Stoics Cicero leaves us a description which he puts in the mouth of key to a Loutre car the late very stoic hero of the Republican period and Keitel indefiniteness tells a story about a stoic Archer I think also he says Spearman and the stoic Archer has to have a target to fire up so he needs an external target but unusually he only really cares that he fires the ball to the best of it refers a heroine to the best of his ability and once it's flown in the ball he's indifferent to whether it hits the target or not he does what's under his control to the best of his ability it takes complete responsibility for behaviors that come with relative detachment like as an archer I think perhaps it's a curious passage but that perfectly explains one of the fundamental concepts and stoicism this idea of undertaking action with a reserve clause so being committed to action while at the same time being equally willing to meet the success or failure in terms of the outcome that in some ways can be seen as related to are not a very famous stoic technique called the premeditation of adversity so the Stoics tell us everyday to imagine exile poverty disease death betrayal Seneca tox bizarre law Epictetus talks better Markus touches on a couple of times and some of the most famous passages of the meditations it resembles what we call imaginal exposure and modern therapy which is a broad term encompasses really a bunch of different visualization techniques that involve picturing fear the veins as if they're happening now and there are at least half a dozen different ways that you can use that technique so it's quite a broad concept but the most important one is as as follows the most robustly established process technique in the whole field of psychotherapy research is emotional habituation exposure therapy so we know that when people expose themselves to anxiety provoking situations for in a controlled way for a prolonged period of time and repeatedly that anxiety will naturally abate we know that with more confidence than virtually anything else and in time feel the psychotherapy session there's tons of research on psychotherapy the Stoics I think we're aware of this the the sense that they were aware of the mechanism but there are actually other authors non-story X who explicitly allude to this habituation effect the wearing off of anxiety and as I mentioned earlier precise says that it's fresh impressions that provoke anxiety or distress and when they grow old that naturally obeys so I believe that must have been something they understood to be a play and the technique they called premeditation of adversity this is their name for our Senecas name for actually so they asked us to visualize exile and other anxiety provoking events as if they're happening now but emotional habituation wouldn't be the most important aspect for Stoics an actual fact they would place more emphasis on stoic catharsis on cognitive distancing so visualizing terrible things happening in the future as if they're happening now like an emotional fire drill is how we sometimes describe it in therapy is a way for the story to rehearse catharsis being indifferent to us in different things suspending his value judgements that's the most important aspect for slaves another famous story technique is what had or calls the view from above whether the stoic visualizes advances have seen from very high above there's a very famous description of that again and from Cicero and the Republic called the dream of skippy or and obviously this is another awareness broadening exercise so if there's something that's stressing as or upsetting as we imagine viewing it from our helicopter view or a hot air balloon like the gods looking down from Olympus we're broadening our perspective to take in lots of our stimuli or cues and that will have a dangle it in effect and the Stoics thought we're we're deceiving ourselves in a way if we don't do that there's another way of using this technique which is more cosmological and involves thinking about the vastness of space and cosmic time Universal Time so the whole discipline of cosmology can be seen as a contemplative exercise in that respect and there's so much I could say just about that one technique but I want to just touch briefly on a few others the contemplation of death Mellott a thany - goes all the way back to Socrates who said the whole study of philosophy is like a contemplation of death or a preparation for death this is central to stoicism Seneca says every morning we should tell ourselves that we may never go to bed again it may be our last day and every night as we prepare a head on a pillow if you tell ourselves it may be the last time that we go to sleep we may know how we can and Stoics are desensitized to this they cannot get used to it and encourages them to make the most of life that's the part of the purpose carpe diem seize the day as Horace says you may be familiar with that saying from the Robin Williams movie the Dead Poets Society but you may not know the Horus was influenced by Stuart's Azzam and actually what about stoicism and you know you know that could even be an allusion to a stoic teaching it's very similar to the stoic or possibly epicurean teachings and so seizing the day not for pleasure but seizing the opportunity to live wisely to live according to our values the stoic virtues that's what they're talking about now that kind of takes me on to the contemplation of virtue Marcus tells himself in response in many situations to ask himself what virtue has nature given me to respond to the situation and asking himself what strengths you can draw on what capabilities he has that would allow him to meet the situation and another way of approaching that is to ask yourself see you're suffering from pain or someone's insulted you how would someone else respond to that virtuously or an appraise where they are admirable manner so becomes what we call a modeling exercise in therapy and the Stoics will explicitly asked what would Socrates do what Xena do or the Epictetus do we might say what would Marcos do or it could be a hypothetical ideal sage what virtues with someone else exhibit faced with the same challenge in life do I have similar capabilities that I can draw on and so it's a way of looking at alternative ways of coping and not bringing onto something I wanted to touch on briefly kiss is very important if we take more time to explain though it's called valued loving and it's central to modern cheek treatment of clinical depression and the studies don't really have a name for this but it can appear me it's the whole philosophy psychologists know make a distinction between extrinsic goals and intrinsic goals so we try to achieve outward things like wealth external outcomes but intrinsic goals are qualities of our action the type of person that we want to be and that's immediate happiness right now as soon as we make a decision to start trying you know we're being generous we're being creative pretty much as soon as we make it to start having a go acting in a certain way and some psychologists believe that many clients particularly depressed clients suffer from putting too much emphasis on external outcomes and neglecting these intrinsic goals and so their reward there's always at a distance eventually I'm gonna earn enough money eventually and you know one day I'm going to pass this exam is everything's kind of in the future and that fuels anxiety worry and depression and it means that the quality of our life here and now often deteriorates so the Stoics we've asked us to continually be aware of the present moment be mindful of what we're doing and try and live more in accord with our fundamental values which they call the virtues and doing that allows us to have a more fulfilled life and it really does is good evidence no the doing that will allow people to experience a greater sense of emotional fulfillment and life it counteracts depression you know people if you ask them what's your the most important thing in your life you know what do you what do you want to be remembered for you know what do you praise and other people what you admire and other people so someone may say creativity it's not something the stories we consider a virtue but they may say or being a good parent being good friend we can define also in terms of fulfilling certain rules well incidentally and you know then you may say to someone well how much time did you spend today living in accord with that value you know doing good parenting like being creative and often people saying none in my experience you know are very little that do the people that come for therapy will often say zero and you know usually we begin by making surprisingly small changes so I might say to someone you know what if you just even spent five minutes over the next we can sew five minutes a day doing something creative right even if you're a appointment and throw it in the bin you know at least you're spending time fulfilling that value in your life small changes make big differences and it's surprising how much benefit people can get just from injecting a little bit more valued living into their daily routine and we start small because people often say I don't have time I don't have the energy to make big changes but often we only need to start with small changes to get the ball rolling coping statements when we contemplate role models the one thing we can do is kind of extract attitudes saying slogans or Maxim's from that and therapy we call them coping statements are self instructions there's a good example in Marcos this is what I said I've returned to where Utah there's a passage where he talks about the idea of the impermanence of all things which is very important to him from Heraclitus and then he talks about this idea of Stoica Tharsis it's not things that upset us but our judgments about things from his other favorite philosopher Epictetus and then at the end of it he gives a slogan which in Greek is basically four words with the definite article as sex words and so it's as condensed as it could be when he's obviously you know this is designed to be memorized although it may actually be a quote from another philosopher and the whole of the meditations are at a large extent can be seen as many attempts to formulate memorable aphoristic sayings in this way but this one passage in particular says cosmos change life opinion basically the universe has changed life is opinion and what it means is that everything is constantly in flux nothing lasts forever and life is opinion means the quality of our life is determined by our new judgments the word he uses for opinion actually means value judgment Marcus's meditations were originally called in the earliest manuscript we have the title used is to himself and that I think is significant because the first passage in book two of meditations he uses that phrase and in fact it recurs throughout the book and the second book in a sense is the beginning of the meditations proper many scholars believe that the first book of the meditations although is very important looks like it may have been written at after he'd written the rest of it and then put at the front as a kind of preface and and so the the beginning of the meditations opens with her to himself Seiler us to yourself so it literally consists of things that he would verbalize to himself in different ways in order to remind himself of his historic principles I believe that the meditations a we don't know exactly had when it when it was written but for reasons that I would explain in the course in more detail I think it was probably started round about 170 AD and probably finished by 175 AD which would make it coincide pretty much with the first marker manic war instead of like Marcus's he's just describing rating it towards the end of the Marco Malik war and the first mark of money war and that happens to be just after his main story mentor journey or asticus seems to have died so I imagine Marcus felt very isolated he was away from Rome for the first time as far as we know and distanced from his beloved main toes his right-hand man a true engineers rustic us he was probably writing letters to him like the when do we have between him and frontal and then when this guy died Marcus must have been left at sea and what he did I think is then take over the role of becoming his own therapist he became his own journey as rustic as his own mentor and he did that by writing a journal to himself and and maybe even there are a lot of snares of dialogue even in meditations some come from epictetus but some of them may come from conversations that Marcus had with his tutors that he's remembering possibly so that brings me to the last technique I wanted to mention which is the one that I noticed in epictetus after I had read this book and the students are known for writing what we call consolation letters Seneca wrote sex or seven all of them that we have today and other non storage ratin as well but the stories are particularly associated with consolation electric shock and these are letters written to friends to encourage them to cope better with things like bereavement by using stoic arguments stoic concepts and ideas and the same way Marcus is writing to himself they would write really more flowing more rounded letters longer letters not aphorisms essays to people to help them think about problem situations differently and we know that we've got good examples of those it's kind of like a form of therapy by later in a way but Epictetus tells us a strange thing about one of his heroes a member of the stoic or possession called Pecunia so crepiness the epic tease is clearly really admire as he talks about them at the beginning of the discourses and he says when a grepolis was faced with exile persecution other personal catastrophes he wrote letters to himself hepatitis even Kazem eulogies letters praising a situation not on a self-deceiving way but as an opportunity to exercise virtue so looking for positive opportunities even in seemingly terrible situations that's like a consolation letter presumably it must have resembled the consolation letters that we have today to some extent Retton to himself and so in a way it can be seen as kind of somewhere between Marcus's aphorisms to himself and Senecas consolation letters somewhere in between these things perhaps and there's a good kind of hint over in a story that Epictetus tells us about this guy a grepolis was exiled by the machine and he was having about to have lunch with his friends and a messenger arrived and said you've been sent into exile you have to pack her stuff and go no and a grepolis said she kind of shrugged and said well you know in that case we'll have our luncheon airasia which is the first stop along the road that they would have to travel to go into exile so he looked on the positive side of it he thought well we can have a nice picnic in the countryside then tomorrow and are we traveling into exile and I imagine that might be the sort of thing that he said to himself and these eulogies the epictetus says that he wrote ok so that's an overview of many of the stoic techniques there are many more I'd love to go into them with more and more detail with you guys if you're interested and doing the course thanks for coming along so I look forward to seeing some of you and how's the thing with the Roman Emperor if you're interested in enrolling there's currently 50 bucks off the normal price if you register now you also get three free ebooks about Marcus Aurelius and I'll be replying to questions in the comments thread for a while after this live broadcast as it ended but for now it's goodbye once again from me here in Nova Scotia so thank you everyone

Channel: Donald Robertson

Views: 15,419

Keywords: Stoic, Stoicism

Id: 1VspL5A5KGk

Length: 54min 2sec (3242 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018