This week you’ll work on understanding and internalizing Stoic principles of your choosing in two ways: through meditating on them daily and by using them as “at-hand phrases” at appropriate times. Seneca mentions three possibilities to start:

• Virtue is the only good.
• There is no good without virtue.
• Virtue itself is situated in our rationality, producing true judgments.

There are many other themes to choose from besides these, which you’ve encountered throughout your Stoic practice. Here are some other ideas:

• The dichotomy of control.
• Humans do better when they work together.
• Nothing lasts forever.

Write down Stoic concepts that you’d like to soak your soul in over the coming week. You can choose from these six or any others from throughout the book. We suggest no more than three, so you can truly focus on a small, important set of Stoic ideas.

Meditate daily

The first way you’ll attempt to submerge your mind in these ideas is by meditating on them daily. There are many ways to meditate. You can sit down and read them slowly each morning. Or maybe you prefer to journal each night about how you can apply them the next day. Write how you are going to meditate on the Stoic concepts you chose.

At-hand phrases

Seneca mentions that if you soak your soul in these ideas, they have a better chance of springing to mind automatically when appropriate. The second step in your practice this week will facilitate this process through repeating at-hand phrases. At the beginning of this chapter, Georgiana chose to repeat a question to herself in order to help prompt Stoic impulses to act. Write out at least one implementation intention to help you remember one of the Stoic ideas you’re focusing on this week when in a relevant situation.

Seneca explicitly lists the reasons for soaking your soul in basic Stoic concepts. One reason he gives is so that they’ll come to your mind more automatically when needed. This, in turn, allows you to judge the situation correctly. From a Stoic perspective, this means you won’t judge externals to be more valuable than using your virtue. This will lead to virtuous actions since, as we described in the past few chapters, and as Seneca stated, impulses to act stem from assenting to some impressions. Using these concepts as at-hand phrases helps this process along and reminds you of what’s important in any given moment.

Now that you’ve kept some basic Stoic concepts close at hand over the past week, take some time to write about your experience. Did you find that the Stoic ideas came more easily to mind with rehearsal? Did that affect your actions in turn? Did you find meditating on the ideas more or less useful than repeating them to yourself in appropriate situations?

We’ll continue to build on the practice of at-hand phrases in the next chapter within the context of pain, discomfort, and illness.