Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Building Stoic Mindfulness (Episode 55)
968 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
In this episode, Caleb and Michael discuss mindfulness and Stoicism.
They start by covering two central definitions of modern mindfulness, move to comparing those accounts with Stoic mindfulness, and end by talking about different ways to become more mindful.
(05:47) What is Mindfulness?
(15:52) Stoic Mindfulness
(26:12) Comparing Mondern Mindfulness & Stoic Mindfulness
(33:27) What's The Purpose of Mindfulness?
(37:10) How to Build Mindfulness
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: https://www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
Remember – if you try it and find it useful, but truly cannot afford Stoa, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Conversations Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
What Stoicism does give you is some way to focus that attention and awareness. Attention and awareness are not all by themselves good. It's how you use them that matters.
00:00:15
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Mindfulness and Stoicism: Definitions and Integration
00:00:32
Speaker
In this episode, Michael and I discuss mindfulness and stoicism. We start by covering two central definitions of modern mindfulness, move to discussing how stoic mindfulness can enrich our picture,
00:00:48
Speaker
and end by discussing concrete ways to become more mindful in both the Stoic and modern sense. Before jumping into this episode, I'd like to give a shout out to everyone who has sent us a note recently. We read all of these and it's good to see the frequency of them increasing.
00:01:07
Speaker
So, if you have any questions, feedback, or recommendations, send us a note at stoa at stoameditation.com. In addition to sending us an email, the best way to help the show is to leave a review on iTunes and Spotify or share it with a friend. Thank you all who've done that. It's been great for Michael Dye to see the show mentioned in Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and different Discord channels as well.
00:01:34
Speaker
It really does help more people find the show, motivate us to keep on working on it and bring in excellent guests. Finally, if you want to take your stoic practice to the next level, if you want to start applying it every day, do check out our Stoa app, which you can find by searching Stoa in the App Store or Play Store. It has hundreds of hours of meditations, lessons, and courses for becoming more stoic.
00:01:57
Speaker
I also write the stoa letter twice a week. So if you'd like to receive two short emails from me on how to become more stoic, do check that out at stoaletcher.com. And here is our conversation.
Emotional Intelligence Through Mindfulness and Stoicism
00:02:15
Speaker
Welcome to stoa. My name is Caleb Montavarros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be chatting about mindfulness and stoicism.
00:02:27
Speaker
Sounds great. I'm excited.
00:02:29
Speaker
So both mindfulness and stoicism have helped people live better and they've both been useful tools with background philosophies that help people engineer their lives, both in the sense of theory and practice. A part of both is this focus on becoming mentally skilled, becoming more aware in a broad sense, becoming more emotionally intelligent.
00:02:59
Speaker
A lot of people see that they're both clearly related and the purpose of this conversation is can we dive deeper into how they're related, say exactly what mindfulness is, what stoic mindfulness looks like in order to come up with a
00:03:19
Speaker
good theory or practice for becoming more stoic. So we'll chat more about how people talk about modern mindfulness today, absent stoicism, and then we'll chat about stoic mindfulness and then how the two can come together in a meditation practice.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds great. I mean, a little bit of my own background, I come, for those listening to my or may not already know this, I would say came into philosophy through stoic philosophy and philosophy in general through academia. I did my master's and my PhD in philosophy on stoicism. And I've always been interested in this question of practice, but I definitely didn't come into stoicism from a mindfulness angle. And I definitely didn't.
00:04:04
Speaker
originally view mindfulness as kind of a key component of Stoicism. I think I originally looked at mindfulness and didn't really know what meditation was. I never really actively did any meditation and I viewed mindfulness as being associated with Buddhism or maybe being kind of an obscure practice that likes to get mentioned a lot where I liked Stoicism because it seems like very concrete. And I think you're really, you know, Caleb, you're probably one of the go-to people, if not the
00:04:33
Speaker
expert in the world, I would say maybe, at Stoic Mindfulness, you know, in terms of the work you've done on the Stoa app, in terms of really putting into practice what I see as Stoic Mindfulness, and then you also have your own background in mindfulness, just kind of tooting your horn here. Like, I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about, you know, what mindfulness is specifically, and then this question of like, well, what is Stoic Mindfulness? What does that look like when you put the two together?
00:05:00
Speaker
I have some thoughts on that, but really interested to see, to see, you know, what you have prepared for us. Yeah. Thanks. That's really kind. I think, yeah. So my background is that I heard about mindfulness before I heard about stoicism in high school. I got
00:05:15
Speaker
intrigued different forms of meditation, in particular mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. And it wasn't until later discovering stoicism that I realized that there was a strong conciliance between these two approaches. Immediately after discovering things like Headspace or other mindfulness programs, I wanted something like Stoa to exist.
00:05:45
Speaker
which is why it does. What is modern mindfulness? It's actually a term that gets thrown around a lot and used in a variety of different ways. I think there are two modern interpretations of the term. But before I hop into that, there's also this
00:06:05
Speaker
Other discussion that I should note that is, you know, what is Buddhist mindfulness? And that's a whole nother arena that one can enter into. I have a forthcoming chat with Greg Lopez where we touch on that a little bit, but I'm not a expert in Buddhism as such. So I don't think we'll touch on that. But really what we'll be talking about when we talk about mindfulness is mindfulness
00:06:33
Speaker
as it has entered the Western discourse, which of course is heavily influenced by Buddhism, but I won't be saying too much about Buddhism in particular.
Understanding Modern Mindfulness: Nonjudgment and Awareness
00:06:44
Speaker
So there's really two main ways it gets used. I'd say first we have this idea from the pioneering meditation teacher, John Kabat-Zinn, who defines mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness.
00:07:03
Speaker
in the present in a non-judgmental way. So you can see this in many meditation type practices where you might pay attention to sensations in your body. There's tightness, there's an itch that you notice feeling of pressure at a particular point. And the purpose is to be present with those sensations
00:07:29
Speaker
Note them, but see them in an objective way or a nonjudgmental way. That's one account of mindfulness. You're present and you're aware of things without adding a story like this pressure is uncomfortable or bad or something of that sort.
00:07:52
Speaker
Okay. So that was my question is what is meant by judgment here? Because, you know, in the stoic account, we can look at that as something like a scent, like belief formation, but then there could be this non-judgment where, you know.
00:08:05
Speaker
Well, I can have beliefs, but they can only be descriptive beliefs. They can't be value beliefs. Like I can be like, there is pressure here, or I am feeling upset or agitated, but just not the value belief of, well, that's a bad thing or that's a good thing. What are we talking about? Are we talking about suspension of belief or only descriptive beliefs?
00:08:25
Speaker
When we talk about non-judgment, we're talking about descriptive beliefs. We're talking about not thinking of things as good or bad, not so much suspending belief, but the idea would be to see the sensations as they are in the present without adding an unnecessary value judgment. So that's the kind of judgment we're concerned about here. That's a good clarification.
00:08:54
Speaker
So another way to think about this is you call it sort of objective judgment in the present. I don't think that's how John Cavinson would use the term, but I think especially for a Stoic that might be a helpful way to think about it since the Stoics of course talk about this notion of judgment often.
00:09:14
Speaker
All right, so then we also have this second account of mindfulness. We've got objective judgments, nonjudgmental awareness on one side. And then we also have a distinction between attention and awareness.
00:09:30
Speaker
which is, I think, very important to understand and the first thing to understand in this other account of mindfulness. So basically, we can think of an analogy, consider the visual field. We have focused vision, you know, when you zoom in on a given thing in your visual field, and then we also have peripheral vision, what's going on at the edges of your site.
00:09:54
Speaker
You are aware of what's going on in a sense, but you're not focused in on it. You're not paying attention to it. And the idea is, is that attention is like mental focus. It's what you are zoomed into, whereas awareness is the broader mental field, what you can notice.
00:10:15
Speaker
And the thought here then is mindfulness is the power of the consciousness to notice things. As you become more mindful, you're more aware. And what that means is that you have more conscious abilities. You can notice more stuff that's going on in your mind and you can hold your attention for longer periods of time.
00:10:40
Speaker
So the idea is on this account, it's more of a capabilities definition. To be mindful is to strengthen your capabilities, awareness and attention. Yeah, because I feel like sometimes in the mindfulness practice that I've done, I'm still building that practice myself. There's sometimes this thing of focus on the breath.
00:11:02
Speaker
for example, and that seems to me very focused on attention. Or you think of these Buddhist stories, whether they're correct or not, or I'm bastardizing a tradition here, but about this kind of attention on maybe a single phrase or a single, do you remember what it's called? It's like a single word or phrase. Yeah, that would be repeated. And so that seems to me very attention-based.
00:11:28
Speaker
But then this idea, another type of practice will be, okay, kind of let your mind wander, pay attention to the impressions that are coming up, pay attention to the sensation of your body. That seems very awareness-based. I think both are really cool. I think that's a really cool conception of it.
00:11:47
Speaker
In your view, I guess I'm curious, is there a benefit to one to the other? Maybe I'm jumping ahead. What does attention give you versus what does awareness give you? Why would I want to train these things?
Stoic Mindfulness: Attention and Impressions
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, great question. So I think the attention is useful because it allows you to have sustained focus on the object, the matter at hand. So someone with a lot of attention, if you're playing
00:12:17
Speaker
chess, they are not going to be distracted by other thoughts about their day, but they will be more likely to be in the zone completely focused on the matter of hand, which is a chess game for them.
00:12:33
Speaker
Whereas awareness is the ability to pick things up in one's environment and one's mind in a way that perhaps maybe renders you less surprised. So another idea we chatted about a while ago now during our episode on
00:12:53
Speaker
stoicism and martial arts is Josh Waitskin has this distinction between hard zone or soft zone or hard focus and soft focus.
00:13:05
Speaker
Where hard focus is really too much attention. Like you're so zoomed in on the given thing that you've lost sight of what's going on around you. And soft focus is the combination of attention and awareness. You're zoomed in on what's happening.
00:13:25
Speaker
and you're present in the chess game, but you're able to handle distractions without being surprised by them. Your attention isn't so focused, so hard that it, you know, breaks as soon as you hear shouting. Instead, you just notice a shouting in your peripheral vision and are able to either attend to it if it needs attending or gently refocus your attention back on the matter at hand.
00:13:55
Speaker
Cool. I might be slowing you down here, Caleb, but I think this stuff is so interesting. I want to follow up on it. I guess my two follow up questions would be, are there any sort of mental faculties you think are missing here? Like, is attention and awareness it? Or is mindfulness focusing on a subcategory?
00:14:15
Speaker
That's question one. And then I guess question two is something like, are there any sort of, which might be related, are there any sort of criticisms of this conception or any sort of weakness of this, of either of these conceptions of mindfulness that you would identify? Let's see. So there's a sense in which attention and awareness can be thought of as
00:14:40
Speaker
good enough for what they're attempting to explain. Of course, there are other powers of the mind. We have symbolic reasoning abilities, abilities to conceptualize particular things, draw inferences. And there are other mental faculties that are essential to human nature, not just beings with attention and awareness, of course. But if you think about one other angle in that question, is this, are these theories complete, is I think that
00:15:10
Speaker
The very first account that just focuses on nonjudgmental awareness does miss some of the useful details from dividing up attention and awareness and thinking of those two capabilities. What this account of objective judgment adds is this idea of seeing things as they are and avoiding unnecessary value judgments. And we'll get to this later, but now there's the question, of course, well, what makes a value judgment unnecessary?
00:15:39
Speaker
And I think that's a place where having that stoic background can enrich your mindfulness practice because it gives you an answer to that question. Great. Yeah. So I think we'll get more into that as we talk about stoic, stoic mindfulness. Awesome. Let's do it. Ready and move on to that? Sweet.
00:16:01
Speaker
Stoic mindfulness is sometimes grounded in this Greek term brusoke, which can be translated as attention in the discourses. Epictetus has a section or a chapter entitled on attention. And a number of people have argued that this term is a technical term for stoic mindfulness.
00:16:30
Speaker
You know, there's an interesting debate about whether persoke is technical in the same sense that some other terms like prohyresis or ocheosis are these fundamental technical terms for stoics.
00:16:48
Speaker
I'm not sure personally if the case for it being essential to understand in stoicism at the same level as these other foundational ideas is that strong, but what I am convinced of is that
00:17:03
Speaker
Nonetheless, this general idea of attention, mental vigilance is something you see again and again in the Stoics and is clearly important to how they thought one should be Stoic.
00:17:20
Speaker
All that to say is stoicism is about making excellent judgments, managing impressions. It's about responding, not reacting. And that requires building or at least having sufficient mental powers. And you can talk about that in terms of mindfulness. You can talk about that in terms of
00:17:43
Speaker
building your ability to sustain attention and increasing your ability to be aware of what's going on. When I think of this, so when we say something like stoic mindfulness, the question is something like, were the stoics practicing mindfulness?
00:18:01
Speaker
Or are we trying to shove, you know, what the stoics were doing into this box that we've come up later, or we've brought over from other traditions? And I think it really does come down to that framing you were talking about before, right? If you look at mindfulness as the training of attention and awareness,
00:18:19
Speaker
then absolutely the Stoics were doing mindfulness. I think if you look at it as objective judgment, practicing active objective judgment, so not succumbing to value, not adding stories, or ascending to kind of value
Role Ethics and Practical Mindfulness in Stoicism
00:18:34
Speaker
judgments right away, then the Stoics were absolutely doing all three of these things.
00:18:40
Speaker
means that or graphs onto that exactly. I think I agree with you that it probably doesn't. That's probably too much of a leap. But the Stoics were absolutely inculcating these skills or encouraging the development of these skills, which are the same targets of contemporary mindfulness if I understood you right.
00:19:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think it's useful to look at what Epictetus said here and then what a French philosopher expert on the Stoics, Pierre Hadeau, said. So from Pierre Hadeau, we have
00:19:13
Speaker
Attention is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher is fully aware of what he does at each instant, and he wills his actions fully. So here we have this idea of
00:19:39
Speaker
awareness for one's actions, how one is managing impressions, a kind of awareness and attention that's required to will one's actions fully in Hadeau's language. Yeah. And then, okay, go ahead. Just to add to that, you know, the Stoics were committed to the view that the sage, the perfect person, the virtuous person would retain this kind of this virtue, this character, even if they were drunk,
00:20:08
Speaker
even if they were on drugs, even if they, I mean, there was some debate about this, but at least some of the Stoics believed that they would, even if they were like, I don't know, maybe not literally sleeping, but at least like coming out of that moment of sleep. So there, there was this idea, you know, when he says self-consciousness, which never sleeps, constant tension of spirit, not how I was pointing to the Stoics, like we're committed to that. Yeah. Even if you get the sage totally drunk, even if you get the virtuous person, you know, totally out of it, their, their kind of mind is going to be so strong at these skills.
00:20:38
Speaker
they're not going to drop it even in those cases. At least at least some of the early Stoics were committed to that.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah. And you have that idolized in a figure of Socrates who he goes to a symposium and, you know, of course there's some amount of drinking, but also deeply intellectual speeches. And what does Socrates do as soon as that symposium ends? He immediately goes to the marketplace to discuss philosophy some more. That's how he's, you know, he's portrayed. He's at the level where
00:21:12
Speaker
He has sufficient control of his mind to be intellectually involved at the highest level, regardless of any distractions that might come from either alcohol or intellectual debate. I have another line here from Epictetus that's worth talking about on the importance of attention, which is that
00:21:37
Speaker
When you relax your attention for a while, do not fancy you will recover it whenever you please. But remember this, that because of your fault of today, your affairs must necessarily be in a worse condition in future occasions. That's from Discourses 4-12. That's the chapter on attention. I picked this one out because it highlights how
00:22:02
Speaker
It's important for the stoic to build this capability of mindfulness, this capability of attention, and that it's useful to think about it in terms of a capability, something one can get better at or worse at. It's like any other kind of skill, and that's why Petita says that
00:22:29
Speaker
If you fail to pay attention, even for a little while, you're failing to build that muscle. You're skipping out on attention day, the same way some people might skip out on life day or whatever. So the consequence there is that we often think about the consequences of losing our attention.
00:22:50
Speaker
You know, I didn't pay attention in school, so now I didn't learn the lesson. And now the consequences that I didn't remember for the test, right? But Epictetus's point here is that
00:23:02
Speaker
You know, there's both the content that you're missing. There's both the passion that arises from poor attention. There's the faulty judgment that arises from poor attention. And then there's the mistake of your, your kind of meta skill of attention itself, which has been weakened as well. That's a, that's a nice reminder from Epictetus in the time before, you know, smartphones and social media, when you think there'd be more attention. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then.
00:23:29
Speaker
Something that Epictetus does well here, which is a something that socialism adds to the modern mindfulness movement or philosophy or practice, whatever you have, is that he defines what's important to pay attention to. You know, he asks to what things should I pay attention then?
00:23:56
Speaker
And he answers in the first place to those general principles, so the stoic maxims, the items you should always have on hand, these ideas like it's not things in themselves that harm me, but my opinion of them.
00:24:16
Speaker
And then he continues, and next we must remember who we are, what name we bear, and strive to direct our appropriate actions according to the demands of our social relationships. So here there's this idea of role ethics.
00:24:31
Speaker
paying attention to who am I, what's my social role here, and using that to guide your actions as opposed to something else.
Modern vs. Stoic Mindfulness: Intention and Ethics
00:24:42
Speaker
And then finally, he has how we should preserve our proper character when doing so.
00:24:49
Speaker
We have our particular social roles in a moment and then a general consideration of our proper character. What are the virtuous actions? How do I realize virtue in a moment? And that's what we're supposed to pay attention to. Anything to add on that line?
00:25:08
Speaker
You know, just to rephrase that, there's, you know, the basic stoic principles, as you said, you know, that things in themselves don't harm us. Maybe that virtue is, is the only good. Maybe that we should try to live in accordance with nature. Maybe memento mori, you know, recognizing the fact that we will die or recognizing our own nature. Then those, those, those basic principles that apply to everybody. This is the way I read the passage. Then there's our kind of.
00:25:36
Speaker
relationships, the demands of our roles, things like that. And then there's the idea of, okay, now that you have those two in mind, how can I fulfill those roles without ever acting against those first principles? So it's those principles, those roles, and then a recognition of how can you fulfill those social roles?
00:25:54
Speaker
the navigating the world of indifference without compromising those original stoic principles, which is cool idea. It's a really short summary of stoicism in practice. What does stoists, what does stoic mindfulness look like? What does stoic attention looks like? Well, can you balance, can you balance those three things, I guess, in order? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:26:14
Speaker
So I guess this brings us on nicely to how does this compare with modern mindfulness? So we've touched on it a little bit already, but it aligns well with this idea of objective judgments on the first pass. So objective judgment, that's the definition of mindfulness is non-judgmental awareness. It's about seeing things as they are without adding additional value judgments.
00:26:41
Speaker
And that lines up nicely with psoasism, you know, from the discourses, you have this dialogue of Epictetus and Epictetus says in response to some news that someone was sent to jail, he was sent to jail. What happened? He was sent to jail. But he as unhappy is added by oneself. So that's one account of an unnecessary value judgment.
00:27:07
Speaker
this idea that you can just describe things as they are objectively. Someone was sent to jail, but remembering that the additional idea that that person was harmed is added by yourself and doesn't in fact align with what the Stoics thought was ultimately valuable.
00:27:27
Speaker
And another nice line about this that I love from Marcus is from meditation 749. Don't tell yourself anything more than what your primary representations tell you. I've been told so and so has been talking behind your back. And this is what you've been told. You have not, however, been told that somebody has done a wrong to you.
00:27:47
Speaker
So there you're paying attention to your primary representations the same way you might in a meditation practice pay attention to pure sensations and not jumping to making particular judgments based off of what people might call a cognitive distortions, catastrophizing, coming up with some narrative about why something is exceptionally bad or exceptionally good.
00:28:11
Speaker
Nonetheless, one key difference here with this mindfulness idea, this modern mindfulness idea is that the Stoics do hold that we can judge some things as good and bad. Not everything just is, but there are some fundamental aspects of the universe of ourselves that aren't good or bad. When it comes to humans, of course, it's all about the virtues. You know, does this.
00:28:39
Speaker
act does this decision does this judgment align with what the virtuous person would do does it align with my nature and this situation and necessarily you'll just come to some judgments that some acts some decisions do or don't align and those are not things one should shy away from
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's, I see this mistake a lot and people learn about stoicism and I know I made this mistake for a long time, but there's this tendency to
00:29:17
Speaker
You know, you hear these things, maybe Marcus or Epictetus is something along the lines of, you know, if you think you're not harmed by something, then you're not. But when Marcus is talking about that, he's talking about an external event, right? He's talking about when somebody insults you, let's say. If you don't think you're harmed by that, you're not, in a kind of subjective sense, in terms of you're not upset.
00:29:42
Speaker
But then you're not in the kind of moral sense because when you get upset about being insulted, when you put value outside of yourself and put value in the words of other people, when you covet your reputation or like really care what people think about you, you are harming yourself, not just subjectively by being upset, but also kind of ethically because you're making an incorrect ethical judgment about the value of what constitutes a good life or judgment about how you should live.
00:30:10
Speaker
You're harming yourself when you, when you judge something to be bad, it's not bad, both, both experientially, but then also ethically. But only when we're talking about external things that the Stoics, they're not relativists and there's this real push. I go, I'll go on Reddit, for example, and lots of people will just reduce stoicism to this kind of relativism. They'll take a recognition.
00:30:33
Speaker
that our bad feelings come from value judgments and then push that to the extreme and just say, well, make no value judgments. Nothing has any objective value. That's the way you get out of every situation. The Stoics aren't going to think that they are going to care about virtue and vice. They are going to care about character. And as we've seen living up to your roles, fulfilling your roles as a friend, a family member, a member of your city, a member of your community,
00:31:02
Speaker
So they are going to care about that. So I just, I just want to make that distinction and just to build on the point you were saying, which is, look, you can practice this skill of objective judgment, but.
00:31:14
Speaker
At the end of the day, there are going to be some value judgments, the Stoics accept, which is I don't think a bad thing, but the Stoics are also going to provide arguments for those value judgments, right? They're not going to just assume them either. Nice. So that's the first account of modern mindfulness we talked about, objective judgments. The other account was attention and awareness. And I don't see any conflict here with Stoicism, even on the surface.
00:31:41
Speaker
What Stoicism does give you is some way to focus that attention and awareness. Attention and awareness are not all by themselves good. It's how you use them that matters.
00:31:57
Speaker
So, you know, you can imagine someone building up their capability of mindfulness for nefarious purposes, but for the stoic, when you're building your attention, your awareness, what you want to be doing is focusing on what Epictetus mentions, you know, paying attention to the stoic principles, always keeping those in mind, being aware of your social role and the impressions that you are presented with and judging those correctly.
Guiding Mindfulness with Stoic Principles
00:32:28
Speaker
That's the way in which I think stoicism really enhances modern mindfulness and then what modern mindfulness offers are these training programs for building up attention, for noticing of the judgments that you're making that you might be assuming and providing a gym, a way for you to practice things like non-judgmental awareness when it's appropriate to do so.
00:32:56
Speaker
So if you could sum up the main key difference, it's that stoicism provides a different direction for mindfulness than the modern account does. I think the modern conception of mindfulness is value neutral in a sense. You can plug it into a number of different worldviews. And what stoicism does is it provides a direction purpose for which one can use mindfulness.
00:33:27
Speaker
I have some questions about mental mind, modern mindfulness here, just to make sure I'm getting the difference down. I mean, I think that all makes sense. This idea that attention and awareness, these are tools. They're tools that you need to be a good stoic. So let's train them. The modern mindfulness provides a way to train them. It provides a set of exercises. What's the objective of modern mindfulness? So you were saying it's value neutral.
00:33:53
Speaker
But if it's value neutral, is it kind of subjective experience? Like in your experience, do most people practice mindfulness because they say, well, I'm stressed and I want to be less stressed. And when I practice subjective judgment, it makes me less stressed. Are people doing it to get better at focus? The modern mindfulness community, separate from stoicism, what are they doing their mindfulness for?
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think they're doing it for a number of different reasons. One is to remove negative emotions. People are anxious, they are angry or depressed, and they've heard that mindfulness is a useful solution for those negative emotions. And when it's incorporated in a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program, it can be for many people.
00:34:49
Speaker
That's one aspect to it. Another aspect is that you have this broad idea of mental fitness and mindfulness is something that helps you be mentally fit, more aware, engaged, energized. And some of those claims can certainly be overblown, but nonetheless, by practicing meditation, you can build up your focus, you can build up your
00:35:14
Speaker
Awareness and then the question is now what are you going to point that at? Well, it's sort of like physical fitness You can point it at all sorts of things for some people becomes an end in and of itself You know, i'm just especially mentally fit i'm an expert Meditator for other people they're going to put it in service of their career or whatever life philosophy they had previously Yeah, that makes sense to me. Cool. I mean i'm learning a ton here. This is this is really interesting
00:35:42
Speaker
I mean, there's something interesting to note here, which is that I think a common critique of what I've called modern mindfulness, it's called Western mindfulness, sometimes even called MEC mindfulness, is that it's removed the value structure, the religious and philosophical underpinnings of a
00:36:06
Speaker
real practice that came from buddhism in order to make it friendlier for people who don't have that buddhist background and but by doing so it's removed the moral aspects of buddhism it's removed some of these deeper spiritual insights that the a variety of buddhist traditions argue you come to through
00:36:36
Speaker
meditation practice yeah it kind of reminds me of yoga in a sense where the yoga is you know constructed as this or came about to my understanding as being deeply value-centric
00:36:50
Speaker
with a specific religious goal or ends. And now it's the kind of thing where, you know, some people are just like, I just want to work out. I just want to get more flexible. Some people still are using it for a value-based ends, but it's been abstracted out so that, as you said, so it's more approachable. The story about mindfulness you've been telling has been fit that exactly. My next question will be how would we, how would you build, what are the strategies for modern mindfulness generally and then stoic mindfulness specifically?
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So some of the strategies we've already gestured at, which are the things that Epictetus mentions, either memorizing maxims or having them on hand, being clear to define what your social role is in different circumstances and meditate on what fulfilling that social role would look like, or think through it and dialogue with others.
00:37:51
Speaker
that's one key aspect. You also have other meditation exercises like Marcus Aurelius' decomposition exercise where he breaks down the royal robe into its constituent parts. It's just some sheep's wool died with the blood of a shellfish.
00:38:14
Speaker
And by doing that, he is decomposing the story we tell about the royal robe, that it is sacred, that it contains a kind of power, or is allied with a kind of power, when in reality it's merely a fancy costume. So that's some way to come to objective judgment, is to decompose things into their parts.
00:38:43
Speaker
Alternatively, you can do the opposite and think of things in terms of the whole they compose. So that's the view from above meditation, where you think about your own life and situate it in the story of everything else. Think about it, viewing it from above.
00:39:01
Speaker
And when people do that, I think they also find that their initial reactions or judgments about the world, about matters that are trivial, often fall away, whereas the important is able to remain.
Balancing Attention and Awareness in Practice
00:39:17
Speaker
So that's a handful of stoic exercises that are focused on stoic mindfulness. And we can also talk more about mindfulness meditation as a stoic, but I'll pause there to see if you have anything to add.
00:39:30
Speaker
Well, when you were bringing those up, I guess now I'm maybe, I don't think it's an objection, but it's maybe a reframing. When you were bringing those up, it made me think, well, none of these are really working on attention. Maybe they're working on a type of awareness. Maybe the view from above is a type of kind of cosmic awareness and awareness that you're part of a larger universe, maybe memento mori, something like that too. It's a type of awareness. It doesn't seem to be a type of attention. I mean, it could be a type of attention, like you're trying to focus in a moment, but
00:39:58
Speaker
it doesn't seem to explicitly have the goal of training your attention. It seems to me that it's working on that objective judgment part, but it's not working on objective judgment. It's working on accurate judgment, correct judgment, judgment that's in accordance with nature. So sometimes, I mean, you hit on it. Sometimes there's stoic exercises that are, you did those perfect quotes, right? Sometimes the stoics just want objective judgment to start. I think that's advice they're giving to beginners or intermediates, which is just,
00:40:28
Speaker
When you've been told something, don't add any stories to it. Just say, look, I've been told something. You know, when somebody insults you, say, a human being has said some words towards me, right? Keep it at this objective level. Sometimes the stokes are doing that. When I think of something like the view from above, I don't think of that as objective judgment. So what should I think of it as?
00:40:47
Speaker
The goal there is to not get rid of stories. The goal is to get rid of false stories because there is still this story about you being part of the universe, you being connected to nature, you being a piece in something greater. Again, it's not objective judgment, it's removing the false judgments, removing the fake subjective stories, but connecting yourself as a subject, as a person to the stories that are true, which happened to be about
00:41:16
Speaker
your role in the universe, your, your nature is a rational human being. And so again, I just want to make that distinction. I didn't think is the interesting part is the stoics kind of take, they have that objective judgment exercise, which I think is something for beginner and intermediates and then intermediate kind of advanced that becomes, well, okay, move past objective judgment, which is about not making mistakes and move towards correct judgments. That's why we remember, we remember maxims. That's why we keep principles on hand. So we then want to move towards correct judgments as well.
00:41:43
Speaker
But my only thing to add to that is that think about awareness. One aspect that you can always be aware of is your place in nature and keep your focus on what matters once you've decided what your role is. And that's where attention and awareness are going to make the difference. So if you go back to
00:42:08
Speaker
the example of hard zone versus soft zone. You want to be in the opposite place that most people are that I find myself in at a lot of the time which is I have that hard focus on what matters right in front of me at that moment and I have forgotten
00:42:27
Speaker
where my true role is, where I fit in the larger scheme of things, that's just dropped out of my awareness. So that's something I think that the Stoics are reminding us to be aware of. And then by building that broader general capability, one can become better at keeping it in mind or reminding oneself of that without it dropping away.
00:42:53
Speaker
So to throw that back at you, the idea is, look, you agree that the Stoics are moving past objective judgment towards true judgment, but
00:43:03
Speaker
You know, don't think that awareness is just this, you know, listen for the birds, listen for the sounds, feel your body. Awareness can also be this kind of awareness that, you know, you are one person among many. You are one living creature in a larger universe. Your life will end. Your life will extend over time. So there's these other kinds of awarenesses that we can
00:43:29
Speaker
keep up and kind of have in our consciousness when we encounter situations that will change the way we confront them and that's that's an awareness issue not really a kind of knowledge issue it's a knowledge issue in terms of do you believe it or not but once you believe it becomes an awareness issue about keeping it conscious and present in mind and maybe you can connect it with the
00:43:50
Speaker
explicitly Buddhist practice of the reason you train attention is that so you can build that focus on things like the breath until they reveal or until you can see their true nature, which is something without substance, something that is
00:44:15
Speaker
completely impermanent. And in that way, you are coming to knowledge or at least being reminded of these features of the world. I think so as can do something similar where if you focus on the breath is an excellent reminder of the impermanent nature of things. And if you can meditate on that for 10 minutes or even use that as something to pause during some moment in the day, I think that's an, you know, the breath and anchor that's always there. And it's at the same time impermanent.
00:44:46
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. That makes, that makes sense to me. I'm interested in this last part. So we don't lose it is digging into these, I guess these tools around the, the, the mindfulness part. So that attention and focus strategies, either, you know, maybe that some of the stones recommended or those that modern mindfulness use to build those faculties for those looking to flex those muscles. Yeah. So let's just talk a little bit more about mindfulness meditation. So I think
00:45:15
Speaker
You can train your awareness with mindfulness meditation. You can do that by noticing the sensations that are occurring in your body. Often you might start there noticing the sounds that are occurring in one's environment.
00:45:31
Speaker
And the thought would be to use meditation as a gym for building up that mental muscle of awareness and then taking that with you through your day so you can notice
00:45:47
Speaker
what's going on around you, what's going on in your mind, and from the stoic perspective, notice the judgments you are making, notice how other people are acting so you can do the right thing with respect to them.
00:46:03
Speaker
That's one aspect that you can train with meditation.
Resources for Building Mindfulness Skills
00:46:08
Speaker
And then of course, you also have attention. There's these practices of focusing on the breath or some other mindfulness object. You can do this while counting and noticing how
00:46:22
Speaker
it's actually quite difficult to count without any sense of distraction. So you often find that you become distracted while meditating and building the mental ability to just notice that that happens and then return your attention to the object at hand is crucial because that's the sort of thing that just happens again and again in all areas of life where
00:46:46
Speaker
you have something that you're up to that you think is important that all of a sudden your mind is elsewhere and you could make that judgments that sort of negative judgment that oh I got distracted that's terrible I'm bad at whatever this is and lose your way by doing that or you can build up the habit of noticing when you become distracted returning your attention to the matter at hand and just doing that over and over again.
00:47:15
Speaker
Yeah, to build on that kill, because I think that's such a great point. I feel like we could almost do an episode on what makes good attention. What does good attention look like versus bad attention? What does good awareness look like versus bad awareness? Because when I think of attention, I often think as someone who doesn't know as much about this as you, I often think of it as the capacity to stay focused for a prolonged period of time, the capacity to stay
00:47:43
Speaker
in the zone. But we've made a couple of distinctions now. One is between hard and soft focus or attention. And you're actually saying that hard attention or hard focus is bad because it's more likely to be broken. It's more likely because you lose sense of peripherals when things don't go according to plan or you're not expecting them, you're anticipating them, you're more fragile. So there's kind of a fragility of attention or robustness of attention. And then there's also this capacity to bounce back.
00:48:12
Speaker
So now you're saying, which is really interesting, is that, look, you might think that good attention is the ability to never have thoughts come up, but no, good attention is the capacity to be as distracted by those thoughts as little as possible, or to jump back into your attention as quickly as possible after those thoughts come up.
00:48:32
Speaker
Which is a really interesting way of reframing attention as being almost a fluid thing. Almost this thing of like, it's the best when it's able to withstand distraction, not be impervious to it or move around the distraction. That's just, that's a mental shift for me. I think it'll probably be helpful for people listening too.
00:48:52
Speaker
That's just what mindfulness is. It's the ideal balance between attention and awareness where you're able to stay focused but you have the awareness that's strong enough to not lose sight of anything else that might be important or have this fragile focus, as you mentioned.
00:49:15
Speaker
while maintaining sufficient attention to actually be applying yourself to something and not merely being aware of everything that's going on without applying yourself to anything. Awesome. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on? Well, I think we were, I cut you off. I think you were providing strategies for attention. Is there any kind of strategies for awareness?
00:49:36
Speaker
Well, on the awareness side, you start by noticing any sensations that might arise, seeing them as they are, not adding additional value judgments. That's what it looks like in meditation at any rates. But you just deviate between time. You just try that for five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Like, what does this look like if it's something you're trying to get better at? How do you get started in real concrete terms?
Summary and Call to Action
00:50:02
Speaker
Well, I would suggest looking into first different guided meditation programs. So of course we have StoA, the meditation app, and that has a number of courses that you can take to focus on meditation. We have a three weeks course on Stoicism that combines many of the ancient Stoic teachings with
00:50:29
Speaker
some of these modern mindfulness practices and modern therapies as well. So I suggest doing that. Alternatively, there's a number of other quite good mindfulness programs. You have some people who work on mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy that I think is good and
00:50:48
Speaker
That's the sort of thing you're looking for is managing anxiety or depression in a mindful way. I Google that and check out some work by Mark Williams, perhaps. And then on the book side, there's a book called The Mind Illuminated by a fellow named Kaledusa, which is a practical guide for becoming enlightened.
00:51:13
Speaker
and it lists out the eight steps one needs to go through as a meditator to achieve a form of Buddhist enlightenment. And the first three or four of those steps are useful for
00:51:30
Speaker
anyone who wants to be better at meditating and learn how to meditate and also get a sense of what Buddhist philosophy looks like. I think I'm not a Buddhist and as the steps, you know, get a little bit, go a little bit longer on the path. I'm not there in my personal practice. I'm not sure if I even want to go that far. I'm not sure if that's a valuable project of itself, but it's really an excellent book, very detailed.
00:51:59
Speaker
And it works well either with you're taking some meditation course and giving you that mental initial initial, some of the initial mental models. Great. Well, that was super interesting. I learned a bunch. I think that was a pretty clear breakdown on what mindfulness is, where does or does not intersect with stoicism. And because of that, what a stoic mindfulness practice might look like.
00:52:25
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
00:52:40
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.