Meditation for Stoics

Mindfulness meditation is a gym for practicing the core Stoic disciplines.

It has been growing in popularity over the last few years.

Books, companies, therapeutic approaches and research initiatives have been built around the notion of sitting and quietly watching the mind. Happily, there is a substantial amount of evidence that mindfulness meditation is beneficial.

The ancient Stoics wrote meditations, but as far as we know, they did not meditate in the same sense. Ancient Stoic meditations were were more cognitive, which means they involved explicit reasoning, often through practices like journaling or reflection. Mindfulness meditation is less about explicit reasoning and more about training the mind to behave in a particular way, it is non-cognitive. See more on this distinction here.

Despite this, there is a strong case for the contemporary Stoic to add the tool of mindfulness meditation to their toolkit. Consider the following quote from Marcus Aurelius:

Don’t tell yourself anything more than what your primary representations tell you. If you’ve been told, “so-and-so has been talking behind your back”, then this is what you’ve been told. You have not however been told that “Somebody has done a wrong to you”.

The primary representation is our initial sensory experience. To this sensory experience, we often add stories and unnecessary value judgments. Quoting Marcus Aurelius again.

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, “Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?”

Questions like “Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world” belies a story — that things like this should not exist. But why think that? One can view things as they are without any such unnecessary value judgement. This is one of the core Stoic practices, the discipline of judgement.

With meditation, we can train the ability to step back from our unnecessary judgements and stories. We can pause before becoming completely wrapped up in them and becoming distracted from what is important.

Moreover, not only can the Stoic benefit from mindfulness meditation, mindfulness meditation practices can benefit from Stoicism.

You can practice this with Stoa for free here.