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The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism: Tools for Emotional Resilience & Positivity
Optimize joy, overcome obstacles - discover the calm of stoicism
Being a stoic means embracing positivity and self-control through the ability to accept the uncertainty of outcomes. With this stoicism guide, the beginner stoic will learn how to take charge of their emotions on the path to sustained happiness and satisfaction.
This easy-to-navigate stoicism guide gives you the emotional tools needed to let go of the things you can’t control and find joy in what you have. Through thought-provoking strategies and exercises, this book helps you find contentment so you can build closer relationships and become an active member of society.
The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism
Evolution of stoicism - Discover the history of stoicism and how its principles can help you find peace. Complete the mindset - Find acceptance using an essential emotional toolkit based on the disciplines of Desire, Action, and Assent. Time to reflect - Apply what you’ve learned to your own life with ethical questions, quotes, and exercises. Change your perception, focus on positivity - become the best version of yourself with The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism. PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Being a stoic means embracing positivity and self-control through the ability to accept the uncertainty of outcomes. With this stoicism guide, the beginner stoic will learn how to take charge of their emotions on the path to sustained happiness and satisfaction.
This easy-to-navigate stoicism guide gives you the emotional tools needed to let go of the things you can’t control and find joy in what you have. Through thought-provoking strategies and exercises, this book helps you find contentment so you can build closer relationships and become an active member of society.
The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism
Evolution of stoicism - Discover the history of stoicism and how its principles can help you find peace. Complete the mindset - Find acceptance using an essential emotional toolkit based on the disciplines of Desire, Action, and Assent. Time to reflect - Apply what you’ve learned to your own life with ethical questions, quotes, and exercises. Change your perception, focus on positivity - become the best version of yourself with The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism. PLEASE When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Published November 12, 2019
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October 4, 2025
The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism – tools for Emotional Resilience and Positivity by Matthew Van Natta
10 out of 10
In the age of the pandemic this Guide to Stoicism – reading books by Seneca to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus would be paramount on that measure – will help interested readers to obtain serenity, peace of mind and the Eudaimonia envisaged by the sages of the ancient and modern times…Eudaimonia being the enlighted life, placed in opposition at times with Hedonia, the former looking at the long distance, the horizon and the latter having a short range, insisting on the present…but here we have already a contradiction, or maybe just a different interpretation, or a misunderstanding, for Stoics aim for Eudaimonia, indeed, it looks like it is their Ultimate Goal, but in the book we have a quote from Emperor Marcus Aurelius – among many other references to the classics – that prompts us to set a circle around the present and see that the future is out of control and all we have is the moment – it is actually far from what the famous Stoic emperor has said, but there you have it…look at what classic stoicism has become, altered as it is by the interpretation of one scholar or another and then misunderstood by the likes of yours truly, who tries, but does not really catch on stoicism…
We could argue that without a serious dose of Stoicism, we cannot cope with adversity and trauma – incidentally coping with trauma and adversity is key to positive psychology, as stated in the exhilarating The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/t... and formulated in Happiness Activity No 6 -Developing Strategies for Coping-practicing ways to endure or surmount hardship or trauma, which seems to be extracted straight from a Stoicism Manual – and watch the news these days, where we find that Russia is again pushing an army at the border with the Ukraine – after seizing Crimea, they want the whole damn country now – China is sending fleets to the Philippines, war planes to Taiwan, arresting those who want freedom in Hong Kong, Israel and Iran can come to blows at any time…without a Stoic approach, one could say The End is Nigh…
This Guide for Beginners has quite a few advantages – and some shortcomings, if you ask me…and it is not perfect, for it strives for getting better, in the good tradition of the ancient thinkers – one of which is that it is rather short, at about three hours of reading, offers the background, with the brief story of Zeno of Citium, founder of the School of Stoicism – from Stoa, where he taught – after he had been through a shipwreck, went to Athens and when he asked a bookseller where he could find men like Socrates, Crates of Thebes, the most famous Cynic living at the time passed by and the bookseller pointed him out…follow him
Criticism for Stoicism would insist on the fact that ‘if we want what we already have’ then this is an attitude that will stop progress and it is the end of capitalism, modern society as we know it – another precept comes to mind, the notion that we have everything within ourselves and we do not need to travel per se, we can do it as an internal exercise – which would be the end of the travel industry, almost destroyed by the pandemic as it is – and we need to consume more, or else workers will lose jobs in all sectors, from production to transportation and finally sales and services…the upshot being of course that Stoicism or at least a degree of that will be so good for the planet, nay, the only escape from the destruction inflicted by consumerism and ever greedier buyers that throw things that end up polluting oceans and everything…
Avoid Over thinking and Social Comparison is rule three in the aforementioned How of Happiness and it is again a textbook example of Stoic thinking, proving that new studies, the new science of Positive Psychology – for which Sonja Lyubomirsky is such an esteemed, acclaimed expert – have reaffirmed the old rules of Stoicism, which itself has so much in common with Zen Buddhism, both insisting on the damaging, crippling effect that desire has on our happiness, for the latter, Nirvana as the Ultimate State of Joy is achieved when…you want nothing else, you have no desire left, perfect equanimity has been achieved.
One story has stayed in mind, from the moment I heard it, the narrative of the Zen master and his boy ‘On his sixteenth birthday the boy gets a horse as a present…All of the people in the village say, “Oh, how wonderful!”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see”…One day, the boy is riding and gets thrown off the horse and hurts his leg…He’s no longer able to walk, so all of the villagers say, “How terrible”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see”…Some time passes and the village goes to war…All of the other young men get sent off to fight, but this boy can’t fight because his leg is messed up…All of the villagers say, “How wonderful!”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
Fear of the future is one attitude that the Stoics combat – the example of Socrates is clear here, for he claimed there is no reason to fear death, for we do not know anything about it, nobody returned from the other side to tell us about it and thus it would be claiming to know what we do not know, when fearing this…in turn, he was declared the wisest man of Ancient times by the Oracle of Delphi and after thinking about it, the great philosopher came to the conclusion that it must be because he never claims to know what he does not know, which is what most, or all people in his times and ours did and are doing
There are many suggestions, rules, strategies that have proved their worth, and as aforementioned have been tested, researched and proved by positive psychology, such as ‘it is not what happens, but what you make of what happens’ – for we clearly misinterpret events, and as in the example of the Zen master, what we think is so wondrous, turns out to have negative consequences and vice versa – concentrate in the Present and try to Be in Control, which brings us to another quintessential work of Positive Psychology, Flow, by the co-founder of that science, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f... who writes about the fact that we get ‘In the Zone’, reach maximum happiness when we engage totally with the moment, We are In Control of the activity – which is what Stoics aimed at – and then time becomes relative – again, something probably anticipated by the Stoics – we Forget about anything else, except what we are doing – therefore obeying the rule of focusing at the here and now, just like in the Tolstoy quote, the most important time is now and the most important person is the one you have in front of you – therefore we can make a connection between Zeno, the stoics and Flow, positive psychology, especially since Stoicism is not a philosophy of absolute renunciation, for hermits and ascetic obsessive –compulsive, on the contrary, it is a magnanimous system of thinking, aiming for equanimity, joy and the wellbeing of self and others…
10 out of 10
In the age of the pandemic this Guide to Stoicism – reading books by Seneca to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus would be paramount on that measure – will help interested readers to obtain serenity, peace of mind and the Eudaimonia envisaged by the sages of the ancient and modern times…Eudaimonia being the enlighted life, placed in opposition at times with Hedonia, the former looking at the long distance, the horizon and the latter having a short range, insisting on the present…but here we have already a contradiction, or maybe just a different interpretation, or a misunderstanding, for Stoics aim for Eudaimonia, indeed, it looks like it is their Ultimate Goal, but in the book we have a quote from Emperor Marcus Aurelius – among many other references to the classics – that prompts us to set a circle around the present and see that the future is out of control and all we have is the moment – it is actually far from what the famous Stoic emperor has said, but there you have it…look at what classic stoicism has become, altered as it is by the interpretation of one scholar or another and then misunderstood by the likes of yours truly, who tries, but does not really catch on stoicism…
We could argue that without a serious dose of Stoicism, we cannot cope with adversity and trauma – incidentally coping with trauma and adversity is key to positive psychology, as stated in the exhilarating The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/t... and formulated in Happiness Activity No 6 -Developing Strategies for Coping-practicing ways to endure or surmount hardship or trauma, which seems to be extracted straight from a Stoicism Manual – and watch the news these days, where we find that Russia is again pushing an army at the border with the Ukraine – after seizing Crimea, they want the whole damn country now – China is sending fleets to the Philippines, war planes to Taiwan, arresting those who want freedom in Hong Kong, Israel and Iran can come to blows at any time…without a Stoic approach, one could say The End is Nigh…
This Guide for Beginners has quite a few advantages – and some shortcomings, if you ask me…and it is not perfect, for it strives for getting better, in the good tradition of the ancient thinkers – one of which is that it is rather short, at about three hours of reading, offers the background, with the brief story of Zeno of Citium, founder of the School of Stoicism – from Stoa, where he taught – after he had been through a shipwreck, went to Athens and when he asked a bookseller where he could find men like Socrates, Crates of Thebes, the most famous Cynic living at the time passed by and the bookseller pointed him out…follow him
Criticism for Stoicism would insist on the fact that ‘if we want what we already have’ then this is an attitude that will stop progress and it is the end of capitalism, modern society as we know it – another precept comes to mind, the notion that we have everything within ourselves and we do not need to travel per se, we can do it as an internal exercise – which would be the end of the travel industry, almost destroyed by the pandemic as it is – and we need to consume more, or else workers will lose jobs in all sectors, from production to transportation and finally sales and services…the upshot being of course that Stoicism or at least a degree of that will be so good for the planet, nay, the only escape from the destruction inflicted by consumerism and ever greedier buyers that throw things that end up polluting oceans and everything…
Avoid Over thinking and Social Comparison is rule three in the aforementioned How of Happiness and it is again a textbook example of Stoic thinking, proving that new studies, the new science of Positive Psychology – for which Sonja Lyubomirsky is such an esteemed, acclaimed expert – have reaffirmed the old rules of Stoicism, which itself has so much in common with Zen Buddhism, both insisting on the damaging, crippling effect that desire has on our happiness, for the latter, Nirvana as the Ultimate State of Joy is achieved when…you want nothing else, you have no desire left, perfect equanimity has been achieved.
One story has stayed in mind, from the moment I heard it, the narrative of the Zen master and his boy ‘On his sixteenth birthday the boy gets a horse as a present…All of the people in the village say, “Oh, how wonderful!”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see”…One day, the boy is riding and gets thrown off the horse and hurts his leg…He’s no longer able to walk, so all of the villagers say, “How terrible”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see”…Some time passes and the village goes to war…All of the other young men get sent off to fight, but this boy can’t fight because his leg is messed up…All of the villagers say, “How wonderful!”…The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
Fear of the future is one attitude that the Stoics combat – the example of Socrates is clear here, for he claimed there is no reason to fear death, for we do not know anything about it, nobody returned from the other side to tell us about it and thus it would be claiming to know what we do not know, when fearing this…in turn, he was declared the wisest man of Ancient times by the Oracle of Delphi and after thinking about it, the great philosopher came to the conclusion that it must be because he never claims to know what he does not know, which is what most, or all people in his times and ours did and are doing
There are many suggestions, rules, strategies that have proved their worth, and as aforementioned have been tested, researched and proved by positive psychology, such as ‘it is not what happens, but what you make of what happens’ – for we clearly misinterpret events, and as in the example of the Zen master, what we think is so wondrous, turns out to have negative consequences and vice versa – concentrate in the Present and try to Be in Control, which brings us to another quintessential work of Positive Psychology, Flow, by the co-founder of that science, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/f... who writes about the fact that we get ‘In the Zone’, reach maximum happiness when we engage totally with the moment, We are In Control of the activity – which is what Stoics aimed at – and then time becomes relative – again, something probably anticipated by the Stoics – we Forget about anything else, except what we are doing – therefore obeying the rule of focusing at the here and now, just like in the Tolstoy quote, the most important time is now and the most important person is the one you have in front of you – therefore we can make a connection between Zeno, the stoics and Flow, positive psychology, especially since Stoicism is not a philosophy of absolute renunciation, for hermits and ascetic obsessive –compulsive, on the contrary, it is a magnanimous system of thinking, aiming for equanimity, joy and the wellbeing of self and others…
Displaying 1 of 1 review