LESSON OVERVIEW
Week One: Recognize the Limits of Your Control
We suffer when we believe we are powerless. In this first teaching, Mark invites you to explore the parameters of your personal control and tools for reducing anxiety, neutralizing self-judgment, and practicing ‘informed acceptance’.
Week Two: Protect Your Inner World
No one can disrupt your inner world without your permission. In this second lesson, you do a thorough inventory of how you conspire with outside forces that threaten your well-being, and how you can guard your mind and heart in the midst of negativity and outrage.
Week Three: Turn Your Obstacles Upside Down
Every situation contains the seeds of its own potential solutions. Paradoxically, it’s by confronting adversity without evasion, including worst case scenarios, that you reveal the optimal way forward, as you’ll learn from the Stoics in this third lesson.
Week Four: Move Beyond Hatred and Polarization
“What is bad for the bee is bad for the hive,” noted the emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Even amidst extreme polarization, it’s possible to maintain a view of the whole and safeguard our humanity. This week, you focus on the divisions within the prevent you from living as if this were true.
Week Five: Practice Your Essential Virtues
Virtue is the path to happiness, the Stoics taught. Yet how little time most of spend cultivating our key virtues. In this lesson, you examine your strong and weak virtue points, and aspects of your character that require mindful cultivation.
Week Six: Be Happy with the Life You Have
The timeless practice of Amor fati – learning to love your present existence, with all its imperfections – is essential to resilience and adaptation. This last step on our Stoic journey to mental health is an invitation to self-acceptance, opening to conditions as they are in order to optimize well-being and wisdom.