Stoicism and mindfulness meditation

… or the surprisingly itchy way to getting started applying stoicism in your life

The promise of stoicism is amazing: Not only will you always make the decisions that are right for you, your family and the community, but you will do so while living a tranquil life in total balance with yourself and the world.

It sounds almost too good to be true. Especially if you’ve been lying sweating in the pitch black night having fought for the last 4 hours to fall asleep with raging catastrophic doomsday thoughts running rampant as wild horses in your mind.

The most frustrating thing about stoicism is getting started, this post explains why and then a solution to how to get started.

This is not a detailed introductory post about all aspects of stoicism. For those go here, here, here, here, and you should definitely read Ryan’s book, but I do introduce the first key discpline of stoicism in the next section.

The discipline of value-judgment

One of the first stoic disciplines you will encounter, when reading stoicism books from contemporary authors like Ryan Holiday, is the Discipline of “value-judgment” — or “Perception” [1] as Ryan calls it in his excellent introductory book on stoicism. This…