gonna take a question from one of the private Facebook groups where I do various experiments and this question is from Christian B while reading and living stoicism how do you avoid spending too much time thinking about the inevitability of death and how do you harness it to empower you rather than scare or overwhelm you so let's begin with a definition of terms stoicism or stoic philosophy very simply and this is going to be simplified for any academics out there who want to poke holes in it is a philosophical system that focuses on separating the things
you can control from the things you cannot control and then instills in your daily practice habits and exercises such that you can focus as much of your energy as possible on things you can control part of stoicism is meditating on death certain inevitabilities and finding freedom in that instead of overwhelm alright that sounds very nice and theoretical and conceptual what does that mean in practice I spend an amount of time that might seem ridiculous reminding myself of death and this sounds morbid but it is very valuable to me because it emphasizes the impermanence and the
short duration of life that we have which gives me a sense of urgency to pursue the things that are important it gives me a sense of urgency in having the uncomfortable conversations that are so important in life that can define the next chapters of your life that can change your life and without a sense of urgency when you sort of cover your eyes and ears to not think about death it is easy to push things off - tomorrow - tomorrow - tomorrow until you die and it's too late and you would have benefited from asking
those uncomfortable questions taking those uncomfortable actions far sooner so I have instance a memento mori coin made by a friend of mine an author Ryan holiday well known for his writing on stoicism which acts as a visual reminder I have different quotes that are laser etched on to driftwood that also serve this purpose and for that reason Christian I I don't try to avoid spending too much time thinking about the inevitability of death and the way that at least I find it empowering instead of overwhelming is to recognize a it's outside of your control be
it happens to everyone and see you can control in a sense or hone your perception of death and view it as a catalyzing help as opposed to an overwhelming sadness and one practice that might seem unusual that I have found very valuable and this harkens back to an anecdote or maybe an allegory of sorts that I was told by Tara brach famous meditation teacher and that is a famous sage once said the only question worth asking is what are you unwilling to feel so as you think about death and how you relate to death you
may also think about how you relate to other emotions you don't want to feel from me particularly with a history of depression up until say five years ago where I have not had any major depressive episodes in the last five years and then I think in part what I'm going to describe has been very helpful for staving off depression I optimized for positive positive positive positive meaning I wanted as many moments in my day to be purely positive as possible I did not want to feel sad I did not want to feel tired I did
not want to feel angry so on and so forth those emotions are going surface and when you have labeled them as bad and try to refuse them with as much mental willpower and emotional power as possible what you resist tends to persist and those things have an outsized impact on your life negative impact conversely if you use and here's the practice say minor-key music which I had not used until a few years ago didn't listen to minor-key music and then just look up minor key piano music to get a taste for what this sounds like
it instills melancholy it has a sad sound to it and I've I've begun listening to music that evokes that type of feeling deliberately because at the end of listening to this music for say 5 to 10 minutes and then you play another track that has a more upbeat feeling to it say a lot of bossa nova from Brazil you realize that the sadness much like excitement is transient and that your psyche is porous in that sense the excitement flows into you and then it flows out of you not literally but of course that is the
subjective experience and that's also true of sadness which a lot of us try to avoid and when you realize how transient that is and how you can turn it on and turn it off with cues in your environment it becomes less intimidating it becomes less overwhelming you can use films in the same way watching films that are scary sad depressive whatever it might be and then contrasting that with something that is on the opposite end of the spectrum that is a practice in other words seeking out artistic cues that catalyze emotions historically have tried to
avoid that transcends the practice itself and helps you to relate differently to things like death because most likely what you fear or what you find abhorrent is not so much death itself but the way that you're emotionally relating to the concept or definition of death I know that sounds very very abstract but that is one way that I've approached this in controlled legal settings I will also say that transcendent psychedelic experiences can greatly remove a fear of death I think that relates to some of the phenomenology aka subjective reports of a feeling of fusing with
source consciousness but we're gonna get off into crazy town talk real fast if we continue with discussing that particular aspect of my own personal journey nonetheless in legal safe supervised settings that is also a tool in the toolkit it can be an overused tool in the toolkit but nonetheless it is it is one tool similarly there are questions you can ask that I think show you or showcase the value of keeping death in mind such as one question and I'm gonna paraphrase this this is from Mooney Ali who was in tribal mentors and I believe
the question I asked him was what do you do when you feel scattered or overwhelmed and his response and I apologize if I'm not getting this completely right but it's paraphrasing I do use this a lot when you are experiencing something simple laying in a warm bed an example that comes to mind for me is laying in a hammock watching my dog Molly play with a stick when you are on your deathbed how much would you pay or even 20 years from now how much would you pay to relive this experience right now and very
often that number gets quite high maybe it's something that you physically might not be able to do 30 years from now 40 years from now I was just skiing a few days ago and had a wonderful experience with two of my closest friends what would I pay 40 years from now to have that day back and experience that and think about it don't throw away that question and make up a number really think about what you might spend and I think that highlights the value of experience relative to this decay that we all experience pass
a certain client on our descent to death and those are a few of the ways that I try to harness mortality to empower and enrich my life as opposed to disabling or distracting if that makes sense so those are a few tips few recommendations that have been deeply helpful to me and if you'd like to learn more about stoicism then I would suggest you google Tao of Seneca ta o of Seneca Seneca being one of the foremost writers or best-known writers as it relates to stoic philosophy I put together three large PDFs that are available
for free with the original artwork and all sorts of fun stuff that dig deeper into the practical applications of stoic philosophy you
