Your chance to become more resilient to the ups and downs of life

One of the reasons that so many people look East to find ancient warrior traditions is that in the West they largely died out. Thankfully, writings and manuals of Western martial arts remain, and good work is being done to recreate them, but there is rarely an unbroken teacher/student link to the past. On the philosophical side of the arts, Stoicism is one of the ancient traditions of European culture that also died out, but has seen a huge resurgence in popularity recently.

I’ve always been interested in the philosophical side of Tai Chi – particularly Taoism and the writings of Lao Tzu. In fact, that was where my initial interest in the art began. I was looking for something that would help me become more resilient to the ups and downs of life, rather than a self-defence course. More recently I discovered Stoicism, and noticed how many parallels there are with “Tai Chi philosophy”. Stoicism is fundamentally different however, and perhaps more suited to a Western mind. It is especially useful for dealing with worry and anxiety, and puts a lot of emphasis on living a better, more meaningful life.

SMRT 2016 will be starting on Sunday 19^th June and continues for four weeks. If you want to find out more about Stoicism then it’s a great opportunity to do so in a practical (and free!) way, since the course contains exercises to do on a daily basis. Click here to find out how to sign up.

As an example of Stoic philosophy, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoic, once wrote:

“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”