Fr Joseph Pallattil

A calm mind is a blessing in a chaotic world. Unfortunately a lot of people have chosen to achieve this by using and abusing pills and other substances which can lead to addiction. If you want to achieve inner peace in a healthy and non-medicated way stoicism has some valuable methods to offer. Following are the five stoic exercises among seven for the inner peace.

1. Negative Visualization:
Optimism is the point. When you reflect to believe or hope that your life or specific aspect of it is going to be favourable and positive you possibly set yourself up for disappointment. That is why so many people start today with positive attitude and end the day defeated by the harsh and ugly realities of life. The stoics have a way to counter attack life’s ugliness by a technique called the negative visualization. The Negative Visualization actually takes strength from pessimism by mentally preparing you for undesirable and uncomfortable situations. One of the most important stoic teachers, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, said the following, “Begin each day by telling yourself, today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offender’s ignorance of what is good or evil. By visualizing negativity combined with an accepting attitude Marcus Aurelius managed his expectations and shielded his soul against adversity.

2. Self-Control Practice:
The ability to control oneself can be very useful to stay away from addictive behaviour. Acting on your impulses when it is better not to and to remain focused on the things that really matter to you. The stoics make a clear distinction between the things we can control and the things that we cannot control. Abectirius says, “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion and in a word whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, prosperity, reputation, command and in one word whatever are not our own actions.” The key is strengthening the things in our control which takes practice. There are different ways to do this, an example is intermediate fasting in which you don’t eat for a specific amount of time. Another example is chewing your food for a certain amount of time before you swallow it. The last one seems easy, but when you are a glutton like me when it is for food, it’s actually very difficult.

3. I Just don’t care practice:
Now after swallowing your food after chewing it for ten to twenty times why don’t you start eating like a pig. Don’t use your hands. Just go for it, especially in a restaurant, so that everyone can see what you are doing. This is a way to combat a trait that most of us seem to have in excess- caring too much about the opinions of other people. The thing is the opinions of other people are not up to you. So why worry about it. Because of our social conditioning it takes practice to break this habit. A fear of social ostracism is deeply ingrained within us. By deliberately making a fool of ourselves we will be exposed to situations which people will judge us negatively, even if it is just by looks and giggles. Slowly you will experience that this doesn’t hurt as you have imagined. Thus you, I just don’t care attitude becomes stronger.

4. Journaling:
Writing your thoughts down is a practice done by the stoics to find relief and greater sense of order in their thoughts and memories. Therefore journaling has a very cathartic influence in their minds. The most famous stoic who kept a journal is Marcus Aurelius. In fact his journal can be read in a book form and is called meditations. This work was never meant to be published because it was a personal diary of Marcus. Abectirius and Seneca, both stoic philosophers, practiced some form of journaling as well. Seneca says, “When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that’s now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I have done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

5. Memento Mori:
Remember thou art mortal. A practice of memento mori is a reminding ourselves that we are going to die. Thinking about the reality of death puts your life in perspective and tells you life is ticking away second by second and we should not waste it. Also it teaches us the life more fully because tomorrow we might as well be dead. Thinking about death should not invoke fear but gratitude and appreciation for life that has been given to us. Seneca says, “Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

6. View from above:
However some believe it is flat let us take with the widely accepted truth that the earth is an orb. This orb is a planet in the solar system and completely dwarfed by the bigger planet Jupiter and Saturn and don’t even speak about the Sun. The Sun again is a small star compared to many other stars in our galaxy which is just one of the many galaxies in the Milky Way. When we realize how small we are it comes much easier to let go of the many trivialities of human existence. That annoying co-worker, that ordering law, the guy who cut us of in traffic are not so significant anymore when we see that from a cosmic point of you. But even larger events like wars, natural disasters and other tragedies are minor events if we realize how fast the universe is. Reminding ourselves of our smallness is humbling which puts our existence in perspective and occasionally makes us giggle at people upset by stupid meaningless things.

7. Amor Fati:
When we worry we are concerned with a certain outcome. We want the future to be such and such and we omit the idea that things can go completely the other way. Worried about the future creates anxiety. Stoics have a very simple technique for this called Amor Fati, literally loving fate. Whatever happens in the life as long as we love the outcome you will be fine. This doesn’t mean that we should become nihilistic and do nothing and have no goals because we are fine anyway. Goals and ambitions are fine as long as you are detached from the outcome. Say you are a musician and you practice as hard as you can and write the best music as you possibly can but remain detached from the outcome at the same time. Your focus will shift from a conceptual end goal somewhere in the future to the present moment enlightens you from worrying about undesirable outcomes. Wherever the future goes I embrace it.