Stoicism: Turn suffering into unshakeable inner strength | Chloé Valdary

• All human beings have felt sadness. This is part of what it means to be a human, but we don't actually know how to sit and be with suffering. We numb pain. We try to avoid pain. We deny that we're in pain. Stoicism is all about understanding what's in our control and what's not in our control. I can't control that an emotion emerges from me, but I can control how I relate to the emotion itself. It's the capacity to be with the feeling, to be with the emotion as it arises and simply watch it, not fix it. And if we can learn to be with both ourselves and with our fellow human beings within their suffering, I think we can actually learn how to transcend suffering.

My name is Chloe Valdary. I am the founder of the Theory of Enchantment, an anti-racism organization based in New York City. Socialism emerged after Alexander the Great died. Alexander the Great had just conquered the known world. His territories were being carved up among his four generals, and this was causing a great deal of chaos and a sense of existential despair among the people who were impacted by this conquering. Imagine that you are a citizen in Ancient Greece, and in the past, you knew your neighbors, you spoke the same language, you were very rooted in your environment, but all of that has become upended, and you are now experiencing an incredible amount of homelessness. Not only physical homelessness, but existential homelessness.

Stoicism was kind of invented as a way to deal with that feeling. This is why I think it's immediately relevant in our context today because there's all kinds of ways in which we can encounter existential homelessness where we don't feel at home where we are. So stoicism is all about getting us in right relationship with the things that we can control and we can't control.

The outlook is bleak. People could not control that Alexander the Great died, but they can control their response to the event itself. And in that same vein, I can control, and you can control, how you respond to the events that arise in your own life. Sympatheia is a Greek term. It's a stoic principle. And it essentially means a capacity to see everything as interrelated.

So this capacity to zoom out of your own lived experience enables you to see how connected you are to other human beings and to what's going on around you. This is very useful, let's say if I'm feeling really sad— instead of simply feeling sad, I can zoom out and think to myself, oh, what's it like to feel sadness? Instead of being in the emotion, I can be with the emotion. I can then say I'm not the only person that has felt sadness, right? And so even in that very difficult feeling, I can feel connected to my fellow human, and I can experience meaning, even though it's a very difficult feeling to feel.

And this is related to one of our most sacred pop culture relics: "The Lion King." In "The Lion King," Mufasa tells his son Simba about the circle of life. This is a very stoic scene where Mufasa says to his son,

[Mufasa] "The circle of life, it's a thing."

And then Simba says, "What do you mean? We're not the antelopes."

[Simba] "Dad, don't we eat the antelope?"

And Mufasa says,

[Mufasa] "Yes, Simba, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eats the grass. And so we are all connected in the great circle of life."

This is the kind of move that can help us get out of existential despair even. I will add, however, as a caution, we want to zoom out and zoom in at the same time. There is a situation where you keep zooming out, and you just see the vastness of space, and that can actually bring you into despair as well. So you want to do the move where you zoom out but you also zoom in simultaneously, and those two things can help inform each other and can help balance each other out.

My stoic practices are very context specific. So let's just take sympatheia for example. There will be times where I am feeling sad and melancholic. I will, de...