☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: How To Always Get What You Desire

A shortcut to contentment.

1. Morning Contemplation

🎧 You can find the audio version of this morning’s contemplation below.

Good morning.

The ancient Stoic teacher Epictetus outlined three domains a person needs to train in if they’re to make progress toward becoming truly good.

Today, we’ll focus on the first of these domains, since Epictetus regarded it as the most important and urgent. The urgency relates to what it addresses, what we can immediately benefit from minimizing: Negative emotions.

Epictetus called it the domain of desires and aversions. His belief was that a negative emotion is only ever the result of frustrated desire or ineffective aversion.

The result of training in this domain is that we never fail to get what we desire and never experience what we want to avoid.

The effectiveness of this training relates to our judgment of what is good, bad, and indifferent in life. As Epictetus taught, we all start with a natural ability to get this right:

Just as every soul naturally assents to the truth, withholds assent from falsehood, and suspends judgment in uncertain cases, so it’s natural for it to be moved by desire for what is good, by aversion toward what is bad, and in neither of these ways by what is indifferent.

To the Stoics, the only thing worth desiring is our own good, our inner virtue. The only thing worth having an aversion to is the truly bad—vice. Everything else is an indifferent, not worth desiring or having aversion to. Not worth risking negative emotions like mental turmoil, anger, envy, fear, and misery.

This means locating goodness in our use of reason. It means we use Courage, Wisdom, Justice, and Temperance as a guide for our intentions.

Externals are no longer things we have inflexible desires or aversions toward.

Epictetus provides a couple of practical examples:

• ‘My father’s taking away my money.’ But he’s not harming you.

• ‘My brother’s going get more of the estate.’ Let him have all he wants. He won’t be getting your self-respect, your trustworthiness, or your brotherly love, will he?

The point is that no one can make us part with what’s truly good. Thanks to our training, that remains ours. To us, it’s unimpeded, unconstrained, and unobstructed—meaning, if that’s what we focus on, then we’ll never fail to get what we desire.

2. Morning Meditation

Sit down in a safe, comfortable spot, close your eyes, and take a few minutes to meditate on this morning's theme.

Adapted from illustrations: Benoît DE HAAS. License: CC-BY-SA