The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. An unwelcome event doesn't always turn out for the worse. A bold statement, but one that's hard to deny. Although things like loss, illness, arguments, and other challenges can automatically seem detrimental to our lives, it's not easy to actually predict where they'll lead. Events can seem terrible when they...
1 day ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Is there a warmer feeling than being welcomed? From the moment we're collected from the womb into a careful cradle, we chase and chase, for the rest of our lives, that familiar feeling. We left comfortable confines to enter the cold outside. Most of us would've been lucky enough to have been received with warmth, as...
3 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Bluebeard is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that takes the form of an autobiography, written by the fictional artist Rabo Karabekian. About half-way through, the “author” reflects on what the most pleasing part of his career as a painter had been. He suggests it could’ve been having has first one-man show, getting a lot...
4 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. There's a beautiful passage in Seneca's 107th Moral Letter that vividly conveys the Stoic's practiced attitude toward adversity. That attitude can be summed up in a couple of words: preparedness and acceptance. The passage is this one: “ Winter brings on cold weather; and we must shiver. Summer returns, with its...
7 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Throughout Stoicism, we find many references to the impermanence of, well, everything. We're encouraged as students of Stoicism to make it a personal credo that nothing lasts forever. The sun is expected to engulf the earth in about 7.5 billion years, after all, so anything that seems permanent now will eventually...
8 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. The ancient Greeks may not have had to worry about the distractions of social media notifications, emails, and breaking news alerts, but that doesn’t mean they found it any easier than us to focus on the present moment. Pierre Hadot states this clearly in Philosophy as a Way of Life: “ People in antiquity were just...
9 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Ancient Stoic philosophers weren’t just philosophers. Epictetus and Musonius Rufus were teachers, Seneca and Cato were statesmen, Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. They all had important responsibilities beyond philosophy. And yet philosophy, to them, remained of the utmost importance. Philosophy was the...
10 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. There are many ways in which Stoicism can help us in our personal interactions. If we apply the virtue of Justice, we’ll treat others with respect and fairness. We’ll work for the common good and understand that what benefits humans as a whole benefits us too. When we start to think about how the Stoic...
11 days ago • 2 min read
The Micro Morning Meditations Your 3-part Stoic morning routine. Allan John @whatisstoicism 1. Contemplation 🎧 Listen to today’s audio reflection below. 🔈 Listen Now Good morning. Stoicism as a philosophy doesn’t profess to eliminate emotion. It doesn’t even encourage us to try to achieve such a thing. It would be unnatural for us to be unfeeling. As humans, we feel. We’re subject to impulses: sudden jolts of fear, grief, surprise, tears, desires, repulsions. These instinctive reactions can’t...
14 days ago • 2 min read