Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.41

If you take away your opinion about that which appears to give you pain, you yourself stand in perfect security.

“Who is this self?”

The reason.

“But I am not reason.”

Be it so. Let then the reason itself not trouble itself. But if any other part of you suffers, let it have its own opinion about itself.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (tr Long)

When I wake in the morning, I will often feel intense emotional pain. I open my eyes, and I immediately feel flooded by a deep sense of loss. I do not choose the pain as it comes over me.

When I wake in the morning, I will also often feel intense physical pain. I open my eyes, and I am immediately grabbed by sharp stabbing in my chest. I do not choose that pain either as it comes over me.

If I did not have recourse to my own Stoic attitude, I am fairly certain either one of these circumstances alone would take me down. Both together would be completely unbearable. Yet as it stands, even if I cannot make the pain disappear in either my emotions or my body, I can choose what I am going to make of it in my thinking.

This ability not only allows me to live, but also, more often than not, for my life to be something more than clinging to the edge. The best way for me to describe it is learning to put pain in its place. This means not allowing it to take over, but it also means not being so foolish as to pretend it doesn’t exist. By all means, let pain act upon all the parts of me that are not reason, but at the same time let the part that is reason, the ruling part, understand that nothing must impose upon it if I do not permit it to do so.

The power of judgment is such that I can decide what anything means to me, and so I can determine how deeply I will allow myself to be affected by this or that feeling. I don’t think of this as a denial, but more as a sort of bracketing. I can have a healthy respect, knowing what something can do to my flesh and emotions, but I also can know I do not have to let it go any further than that.

In the simplest of terms, a pain within the body does not need to become a despair within the mind. The mind, through its distinct nature, can rise above this.

I would be a fool to say that I am just the sum of my emotions, and it is sadly that sort of approach that would allow me to go under whenever something hurts. Yet I would also be a fool to say that I am just a mind, denying the reality of all my other aspects. Accept each for what it is, but do not allow one to intrude upon the proper place of the other.

The power of the mind to have its judgment of “yes” or “no” to be absolute over itself is quite an amazing thing. It doesn’t proceed from brute strength, or extraordinary willpower, or violent conflict, but rather from just knowing that there is something within me that is always completely invulnerable to anything out there. Because mind rules itself, it rules what it permits into itself.

The pain may be there, but it does not have to be here. I will sometimes repeat a silly little phrase to myself, that a broken heart, whether literally or figuratively, doesn’t need to also be a broken head. 

Written in 10/2016