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Welcome to the Daily Stoke Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStoke.com.

Don't stuff your emotions down.

The popular image of the stoic is of the unfeeling beast, the tough person gritting, gutting it out. But this is wrong.

Just look at a story we have of Marcus Aurelius consumed with grief. After the death of one of his favorite teachers, a young Marcus could barely drag himself out of bed.

One of his attendants tried to rouse him from this seemingly unsteak state, thinking it was the right thing to do.

But Antoninus Pius, Marcus's adopted stepfather, steps in and stops him. Let him be human for once, he said, for neither philosophy nor empire takes away natural feelings.

This is an important counterpoint to the stoic mythology of the Superman, the unfeeling, the invincible, the immovable philosopher robot.

Of course the stoic grieves, of course they love, favor, get knocked down by life. Stoic gets scared, a stoic mourns, a stoic worries, a stoic feels.

There must have been many such moments in Marcus's tragic life. He lost multiple young children, he lost his wife, he lost Antoninus, he lost Rousticus.

He lived and led through a terrible plague, we know he cried then too.

If he had stuffed those emotions down it wouldn't have made him tougher, it would have hurt him. It would have been to swallow emotional poison that would have made him more irritable, more vulnerable, vulnerable to the straw that would eventually break the camel's back.

No, it was good that he felt those things, processed them and worked through them.

The stoic does try to do is not be carried away to excess by any of these natural feelings. We try not to be enslaved or destroyed by our feelings. Antoninus intervened and gave Marcus the space to mourn the loss of this teacher because it was a perfectly reasonable response.

Now if a year later, even a month later Marcus still wasn't getting out of bed, you can imagine Antoninus would have intervened there too, but on the same side is the attendant this time, because to allow death to ruin the lives of the living is not natural or human either.

It's okay to let it out sometimes, don't feel bad if that's what you need. Life can be a bit of a pressure cooker, and like an actual pressure cooker you've got to hit the release valve every so often so that the whole thing doesn't explode in your face.

You're only human, so be human, not just once, but all the time. Let yourself feel.

Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day, so check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.

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