Prosochē - Stoic Version of Mindfulness

Prosochē (προσοχή) [pro-soh-KHAY]—the attitude and practice of attention—is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude.1 It is a state of continuous, vigilant, and unrelenting attentiveness to oneself—the present impressions, present desires, and present actions which shape one's moral character (prohairesis).2 When you relax your attention for a while, do not fancy you will recover it whenever you please; but remember this, that because of your fault of today your affairs must ...

 The Watson/Holmes Modes of Thought

As Holmes reminds us, “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.” But it’s also more than mere fancy. In essence, it comes down to one simple formula: to move from a System Watson– to a System Holmes–governed thinking takes mindfulness plus motivation. (That, and a lot of practice.) Mindfulness, in the sense of cons...

 Labeling Emotions Helps Control Them

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.” When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference—the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the ...