These Stoic Practices Will Change Your Life
The bigger picture of life.
Good morning everyone,
Being calm, cool, and collected no matter what life throws away is an undervalued/ under learned life skill. But the stoics have it mastered; they know the importance of having death look you in the face and you looking right back.
If you don’t know what Stoicism is, I’ll provide a brief definition for some context.
Stoicicm:
the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint.
an ancient Greek school of philosophy founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium. The school taught that virtue, the highest good, is based on knowledge; the wise live in harmony with the divine reason that governs nature, and are indifferent to the vicissitudes of fortune and to pleasure and pain.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the first stoic practice that can change your life.
Negative Visualization
On the surface, this seems pretty counter-intuitive. I mean, for most of my life, I was always told to “go to your happy place” as if that would make everything better.
This exercise shows us how lucky we are and to be grateful for everything in our lives. You decide the scale of negativity.
Here are some examples of thought trains:
Losing all of your possessions
Losing a spouse or loved one
Losing one of your senses (sight, hearing)
Thinking about everything can go wrong, going wrong.
When we visualize the worst, like losing your loved ones or all of your possessions, it becomes much easier to gain perspective about our current situation. You might find that whatever you were stressed about before is just not as big of a deal now.
View From Above
You’ll notice a common theme throughout the stoics’ work, and that is that they really value perspective.
This next exercise is designed to show you how small you really are in the world.
You can either start a meditation session and get a played-back version, or you can read this script.
In essence, the script goes through a journey of being lifted higher and higher in the air, seeing the earth from every perspective and all the realizations and things you would see along the way.
Like the fact that out of the 7 billion people on planet earth, you are just one singular no-important person comparatively.
The Ideal Person
This last exercise is personally one of my favorites. It entails visualizing whatever qualities you believe a perfect person would have and then simply trying to emulate that behavior.
It’s straightforward. However, it’s surprising that more people don’t perform this exercise. It’s not difficult, and the changes you can make to your life are monumental.
Before trying this practice, you must remember that this perfect person you visualize doesn’t exist. There are no ideal people on the planet. The objective of the exercise is to emulate the patterns and behaviors that someone who is perfect would do.
At first, when trying any one of these exercises, it may be disheartening, and that’s okay. If you’re new to these kinds of exercises, it’ll take time for your brain to adjust to this new way of thinking.
But, over time, the more and more you do these exercises, your brain will notice and adapt the way you think.
Patience is a virtue.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider following me on Medium!
Have a great day, and remember to live in the moment.
