A Surprisingly Effective Stoic Technique For ...

This episode examines wealth, desire, and the freedom that comes from needing less.Seneca warns that fortune’s gifts often become traps, because external success can deepen dependence rather than satisfy the soul.Anthony de Mello sharpens the same insight: many of our chains are ...  Show more

This episode reflects on what happens when life interrupts our carefully arranged plans.The Stoic reserve clause—“if nothing prevents me”—helps us plan without pretending the future belongs to us. Shakespeare, Seneca, and Suzuki Shōsan deepen the point by bringing death into view ...  Show more

Donald Robertson describes Stoicism as "a kind of psychological toolbox", full of strategies for handling anxiety, anger and pain, and that framing runs through this whole conversation. We trace the history of the philosophy and pull practical use out of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetu ...  Show more

I lived with intense anxiety for the better part of a decade. It sent me down a lot of rabbit holes in personal development and philosophy, and most of what I now teach came out of trying to find my own way through.Anxiety is hard to escape in modern life. The news is built to ma ...  Show more

It is easy to read a lot about Stoicism and mistake that for actually practising it. I put this to Donald Robertson, and we get into the gap between knowing the ideas and living them, what he calls the illusion of mastery.We also talk about the view from above as a practice, and ...  Show more

An insult only lands if you agree with it. That is the Stoic claim, and in this lesson I turn it into something you can actually use. I walk through a step-by-step way of meeting an insult so it loses its sting, drawing on how the Stoics thought about other people’s opinions of u ...  Show more