☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: How To Live Freely

Freedom to or freedom from?

1. Morning Contemplation

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

Good morning.

The Stoics often spoke of the practice of philosophy as a type of training. Changing one’s way of thinking and acting takes sustained effort, so it’s no surprise that it was thought of as a kind of regular workout.

Some components of this philosophical training were shared with his students by the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus.

Examples include:

• Instead of enduring hardships for the sake of money, to train oneself to want little

• Instead of giving oneself trouble about getting notoriety, to give oneself trouble how not to thirst for notoriety

• Instead of trying to find a way to injure an envied person, to inquire how not to envy anyone

The French philosopher Pierre Hadot wrote that for the Stoic, doing philosophy meant practicing how to "live": that is, how to live freely and consciously.

If we consider Musonius’s training, this “living freely” is less about having the freedom to do certain things and more about having freedom from certain things.

In other words, as Hadot put it: giving up desiring that which does not depend on us and is beyond our control, so as to attach ourselves only to what depends on us: actions which are just and in conformity with reason.

Training oneself to see things a certain way depends on us.

Relying on the external world for the sum of money, the level of reputation, or the interpersonal victory that will make us happy means desiring things that don’t depend on us.

It means our own happiness is almost always out of our hands.

Living freely entails a decision to take responsibility for our thinking, our development, and ultimately our contentment.

It involves a decision to commit to our training.

And that very training is what enables us to put “living freely” into practice.

So taking inspiration from Musonius Rufus, if you want to be free, keep training.

2. Morning Meditation