Why The Name ‘The Mindful Stoic’? Finding Balance
I’ve been asked a few times why I named this blog The Mindful Stoic. When I first started the blog, my answer to this question was not well formulated. Back then, I knew that mindfulness was a life-changing practice because practicing it had changed my life. I...
Premeditatio Malorum: A Practice For Resilience
Our lives are controlled by external factors. When we fail to anticipate this, we suffer. The ancient Stoics were acutely aware of this. In fact, they developed an epithet for practitioners of Stoicism to keep at arm’s length to remember this crucially important...
Watering Roots, Not Leaves: Cultivating Compassion Effectively
In 1968, James Forest was traveling through the Midwestern United States with the late Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. They were thousands of miles from the napalm and Agent Orange that was raining down on Nhat Hanh’s native Vietnam. One evening,...
8 Ways To Be Humble And Confident
“It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.” This quote comes to us from the legendary Muhammad Ali. It’s not hard to find other quotes of his just like this—oozing with in-your-face, unapologetic confidence and swagger. This conspicuous confidence serves...
21 Uncommon Meditation Tips
Here are some meditation tips you haven’t heard before—at least this was my hope when I compiled them. Many of these meditation tips are original, in that I’ve developed or adopted them into my meditation practice, which has been part of my life for twelve years. They...
Interconnection & Its Connection With Stoicism
Where we find overlap of ideas across cultures and periods of history, we find truth about human nature. We commonly associate interconnection—the notion that we are all fundamentally connected to each other—with Buddhism or other Eastern philosophical traditions. The...
How To Practice The Virtue Of Temperance In Stoicism
They say sitting is the new smoking. But how can this be? Our bodies are highly evolved survival machines. We emerged as the dominant species on this planet not in small part because we can run long distances. We can maneuver through and manipulate our environment in...
Stoic Daily Reflection & How Stoics Define Success
The ancient Stoics emphasized the need to reflect at the end of the day and ask ourselves constructive questions about what went well and what did not. But how can we measure the success of a day? By which criteria are we defining good days and bad days? And since...
Calm Superpower: How To Act Calmly In Any Situation
It was a clear November day in Dallas. Tires screeched under the force of a heavy car turning too fast. The force of the turns and rapid acceleration was suffocating to Lyndon B. Johnson, who stared at the car floor just centimeters away from his face, with the full...
The Way Of Chuang Tzu & Four Practices Of Taoism
Who was Chuang Tzu? He was a champion of the individual, he drew lines in the sand against established power structures, and he often used humor and colorful paradox to convey his teachings. He was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century...
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