The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

A few months ago I was in a conversation that started to go sideways. I could feel the tension rising, the tightening in my chest, my voice getting sharper. I knew exactly what was happening. I have studied this. I have taught this. I know what Marcus Aurelius would say. And in that moment it was like I had never read a word of Stoicism.

If you have spent any time with this philosophy, you have probably had your own version of this. The email lands and you spiral. The criticism stings and you are devastated. Someone cuts you off and you react exactly the way Epictetus said not to. This is the gap between knowing and doing, and it is the central challenge of practising philosophy.

In this episode I explore why the philosophy disappears when we need it most, what Seneca confessed about this exact problem 2,000 years ago, and why more reading is not the answer. The Stoics were not building a library. They were building a gymnasium for the soul.

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A slow, Yoga Nidra-inspired body scan to help your body soften and your mind go quiet at the end of the day. You will move gently from head to toe, releasing tension as you go, then drift into a calm, spacious stillness that makes it easier to fall asleep.

A quiet Stoic thread runs underneath it: release what you cannot change, and come back to the only place you ever actually rest, this moment.

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Imagine aliens installed a silent CCTV camera over your shoulder for 30 days, then compiled a report on what you actually value, based only on your calendar, your screen time, your purchases, and how you spend your evenings. Would you recognise yourself?

The Stoics put it bluntly: acta non verba. Actions, not words. What you do is what you believe. Everything else is commentary.

In this episode I lay out the Stoic CCTV protocol, a 7-day experiment that pairs old Stoic practice (prosoche, voluntary discomfort, the evening review) with a few modern tools (implementation intentions, friction design) to close the gap between the values you state and the values you live. You will run a simple audit of where your time actually goes, find your alignment score, and rebuild self-trust by keeping one small promise a day.

This is not about motivation. It is about seeing clearly, then changing one thing.

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Start the day with a short gratitude practice rooted in Stoic thinking. In about ten minutes you will name three gratitudes, shift your attention from what is missing to what is already here, and set yourself up to notice what is going right rather than only what is going wrong.

It draws on Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, who both used this kind of looking to see clearly what they already had before the day's demands took over. Good for mornings when you want to feel steady and grounded before anything else starts.

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Start the day with the most useful Stoic distinction there is: what is up to you, and what is not.

In this 6-minute guided morning practice you will gently name a current worry, notice where it sits in the body, and let go of everything outside your control. Through short teaching, a simple visualisation, and a daily intention, you will practise meeting the day with calm and a clear sense of what is yours to do.

Good for anyone who wakes up with racing thoughts or anxiety about outcomes. Epictetus, made practical. Come back to it daily and it gets easier.

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Martijn Schirp and I have known each other for nearly a decade. He first reached out after reading a meditation article I posted on Reddit, a message that ended up changing my life and led to us co-founding HighExistence and running retreats together in Costa Rica.

Since then Martijn has lived several lifetimes. Professional poker player who finished 102nd at the World Series of Poker. A crisis of meaning in Vegas that took him to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Then co-founding Synthesis, one of the first legal psilocybin retreat centres in the world, which partnered with Imperial College London and got called the gold standard of psychedelic retreats.

Then it collapsed. In 2023 Synthesis went bankrupt, leaving hundreds of students and staff in limbo. Martijn got physically ill from the stress and spent years recovering, volunteering on a farm in Portugal, working with the soil, reconnecting with his teachers.

Now he is back with something new: Upayosis and A Path Between Worlds, a 12-month program that weaves Buddhist contemplative training with intentional psychedelic practice. It is the first time we have spoken in depth in years, and I was struck by how different he seemed. As he put it: I do not have to seek anymore. I think I have found it. Now it is more a question of deepening.

In this conversation we get into the intergenerational trauma he traced back through plant medicine, why he believes the container is the medicine, what actually went wrong at Synthesis and what he learned, the Buddhist take on whether psychedelics break the Fifth Precept, why peak experiences are not enough and what lasting change actually requires, animism and our relationship to the non-human world, why spiritual friendship is the whole of the path, and what his new program involves.

I am joining this program myself, not as an endorsement but because I have seen how thoroughly Martijn builds things and I want to deepen my own practice. If you have had meaningful psychedelic experiences but feel stuck, or you meditate and you are curious how these paths meet, this one is for you.

Learn more: upayosis.com

Contact Martijn: upayosis.com/contact

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Most of us feel we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. The Stoics had a different diagnosis: the problem is rarely a shortage of time, it is how much of it we hand away without noticing.

In this episode I draw on Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus to make the case for spending your attention on what actually matters and letting the rest go. We look at why a finite life is a gift rather than a threat, the question Marcus asked himself to stay focused, how the dichotomy of control frees you from worrying about things you cannot change, why discomfort is often a sign you are doing the work that counts, and the one step you can take today to get your focus back.

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What if the way into real gratitude is not positive thinking, but imagining loss?

In this 12-minute guided meditation I walk you through an old Stoic practice called praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation of adversity. Used by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus, it trains you to appreciate what you have before it is gone.

We imagine a vivid scene: a sudden accident that changes everything. Not to be morbid, but to wake you up to how fragile and precious your life already is, your health, your freedom, the people you love, the simple ability to walk across a room. It is a way to feel gratitude rather than just think it, to steady yourself for difficulty, and to loosen the grip of always wanting more.

As Epictetus put it: he is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he does not have, but rejoices for those he does.

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The Greek terms are where a lot of people get stuck with Stoicism. This episode is a plain-English guide to the vocabulary that actually matters, so the ideas stop sounding academic and start being usable.

I walk through the key Stoic words and what they really mean: arete (excellence of character), apatheia (freedom from being ruled by passion, not apathy), prohairesis (the choice that is always yours), logos, and the difference between the destructive emotions and the healthy feelings the Stoics did want. Along the way I clear up the biggest misreading of all, what indifferent really means, and give you a few simple ways to put each idea to work.

New to Stoicism or years into it, this is the episode that turns the jargon into something you can use.

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Ever feel like you are drifting without a clear sense of what actually matters? The Stoics had an answer: four virtues to steer by.

In this episode I break down the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus used to handle everything from private anxiety to running an empire.

Wisdom is seeing reality clearly and focusing on what is yours to control. Courage is acting on your principles, which matters far more than physical bravery. Justice is treating others fairly, and the Stoics thought it was the source of all the other virtues. Temperance is balance in a world built to pull you toward excess. I give a practical daily exercise for each, with modern examples, and make the case for why these 2,000-year-old ideas still hold up.

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