The Intersection of Stoicism and Yoga
Most people stumble into either Stoicism or yoga, but rarely both. And honestly, that makes sense. On the surface they seem completely different. One’s an ancient Greek philosophy about mental discipline and accepting your fate. The other’s about stretching, breathing, and maybe sitting cross-legged while trying not to fall asleep.
Personally, I found them years apart. Yoga first, though just as exercise at the gym – nothing philosophical about it. Stoicism found me some time in my 20s, thanks to the Tim Ferriss blog, at a time when I couldn’t stop overthinking and needed to manage my anxiety.
Then after a decade or so of practicing yoga I decided to do the yoga teacher training. It was there, while studying ancient texts about detachment, impermanence, and observing your thoughts, that I realized I’d been reading the same concepts in Stoic philosophy. The language was different, the practices were different, but they were both teaching me to stop fighting reality and start working with it.
Here’s the thing – when you dig past the surface (past the Instagram quotes and the $100 yoga pants), these philosophies actually tackle the same fundamental questions. How do we live well? How do we handle suffering? How do we find any kind of peace?
But these philosophies also diverge in important ways. Stoicism is about accepting fate, working with logic, examining your thoughts. Yoga is more embodied – it recognizes you can’t just think your way to peace. You need to breathe, move, feel. Stoicism can feel too cerebral while Yoga can get a bit woo-woo sometimes . But together? They might actually fill in each other’s gaps. Over the coming posts, I’ll explore these overlaps and tensions. What each tradition teaches. Where they complement each other. What’s actually useful when you’re just trying to navigate regular life.
This blog isn’t about creating some new-age hybrid philosophy or pretending I’ve discovered some secret connection the ancients missed. It’s about exploring what each tradition actually offers and seeing how they might work together in regular life. No gurus. No dogma. Just practical experiments with old ideas.
What’s coming:
I’ll be breaking down core concepts from both traditions – things like control, acceptance, impermanence, and presence. I’ll share practical exercises from both philosophies and what I’m discovering as I test them out.
Some specific topics on deck:
- Why both philosophies obsess over control (and what they mean by it)
- The Stoic and yogic approaches to suffering
- Breath work meets rational thought: where body and mind intersect
- What “non-attachment” actually means
- Ancient practices for modern anxiety
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