Philosophical Meditation– How It Paves a Clearer Path to Self-Knowledge
Meet the daily practice that gives you the emotional clarity you need to know yourself better.
How well do we know ourselves exactly? A question that’s stood the test of time and perplexes us on a day to day basis, sometimes throwing us off track with how much it rings true. We can all look back at days where something feels extremely off, and we find ourselves acting in a manner that’s “out of character” for us. Those are the days when we are genuinely taken aback by the realization of just how little we know ourselves and the ins and outs of our minds.
So how do we approach this seemingly impossible mission of getting to know oneself? The book of Self-Knowledge by The School of Life argues that getting to know our daily emotional state is the best way to start, and it often leads to interesting revelations.
This practice is called Philosophical Meditation, and it consists of asking ourselves some pointed questions that are meant to probe the depths of our emotions. In this meditation, we explore three fundamental emotions beyond the surface: anxiety, upset, and excitement.
The first step of this exercise is tackling our anxiety. While exploring our daily grapples with this emotion, we must ask ourselves: What am I presently anxious about?
The purpose of this question isn’t to completely relieve us of all anxieties, but to give them a fighting chance to be seen, so they can be understood and, ultimately, defused. The first step in draining our anxieties of their intensity is to acknowledge their existence. Here’s how:
- Write rapidly about various anxieties you’re feeling currently.
Come up with at least eight topics. It’s better if they’re shorter answers at this stage. Heads up, you may feel a weight lifted off your shoulders just by creating this shortlist.
2. Practically unpack your anxieties.
You have to take yourself through the practical challenge. Turn this intangible anxious feeling and create a set of steps. What steps do you need to take? What do others need to do? What needs to happen, and when? This step helps you puts you in action mode as you become clearer about how to approach the anxiety at hand.
3. Talk to yourself about each topic on the shortlist on an emotional level.
We call this an emotional unpacking. Talk about these feelings of anxiety in-depth, as if you’re speaking about them to a compassionate friend. The result we’re looking for in exploring our anxiety is to neutralize our untapped or unseen anxious feelings.
After exploring our anxiety, we move on to the second step of our Philosophical Meditation: What am I presently upset about? The purpose of this step is not to wallow in our sadness and misery, but to acknowledge the fact that most of us probably get upset on a day-to-day basis, about things big and small. And to accept that as the most human thing there is. The premise here is to let ourselves acknowledge the reasons for our upset without putting the pressure or judgment on ourselves about what is right or wrong to feel upset about.
All we need to do in this stage is to write a list of current upsets quickly and without judgment. And then ask ourselves: If this happened to a friend, how would we advise them? What might we say?
Again, the key takeaway is to let our feelings be seen and acknowledged and become clear about what’s troubling us.
In the third and final part of the Philosophical Meditation, we explore our feelings of excitement by asking ourselves: What am I presently excited about? The purpose of asking this question is to give our various excitements a place to live since they often are signposts of where we should end up, or how a better, future version of us would operate.
Rapidly list various things that have caught your attention and excited your interest since the last Meditation.
This list can consist of words or brief phrases at this stage. Some good things to try to include in our list would be moments of envy, daydreams, and how nice someone or something was. Now, we can pass these through another set of questions to get more in-depth answers from our subconscious.
- Describe your excitement as if to a sympathetic friend.
- If you could change your life in certain ways, what would it be to change in the light of this?
- This exciting thing holds a clue to what is missing in your life; what might that be?
- If this thing could talk, what might it tell you?
- If this thing could try to change your life, what changes might it advise?
Philosophical Meditation doesn’t magically solve problems, but it does help us become more comfortable with the contents of our minds. We grow calmer, less resentful, and clearer about our direction in life.
The truth of the matter is, the more we get to know ourselves, the more we realize just how little we know ourselves. It’s an endless endeavor that will last all of our lives, but, somehow, the drive to learn more about oneself never really goes away. The philosopher Socrates had this answer when asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to: ‘Know Yourself.’ And try we will.
