Hello my friend,
Welcome to your meditation.
My name is Stephen Dalton.
And it's my great privilege to meditate with you today.
You find me on a rainy day in Transylvania.
This is in total a one hour meditation.
But you can leave after 20 minutes or 40 minutes.
Or you can stay with me for the full hour.
There will be silence in it,
And rest,
And you're welcome to drift wherever it takes you.
But mostly.
This hour is a conversation.
I'll be talking a lot with you.
About people.
About yourself.
About the difficult people in the world.
The rude ones.
The ones who cut you off.
Talk over you.
Let you down.
And the one difficult person you can never walk away from.
The one who lives in your own head.
And speaks in your own voice.
That's a little of what's to come.
But for now.
.
.
Find a position that you can stay in for a while.
For this one you can sit or lie down.
Whichever your body is asking for if you are sitting.
Imagine an invisible thread.
Gently guiding your head upwards.
Allowing you to find a nice tall spine.
If you're lying down.
Lie in any way you want.
But ideally you might lie.
In the yogic pose of Shavasana.
You're back to the ground.
Your arms by your sides.
Your palms open upwards and your feet.
Gently falling away from each other.
So with your eyes closed,
Realize there's nothing to look at now.
There's nothing to check.
Let's take one slow breath in through your nose and let it go.
Another one now.
And when you breathe out,
Breathe out through your mouth.
So in through your nose.
And out through your mouth.
Just one more breath now.
Really finding yourself grounded.
In through your nose,
Deep breaths.
And slowly out.
Notice the points of contact.
Where your body meets the chair or the bed.
Or the floor.
Let those points take your full weight.
You don't have to hold yourself up for the next hour.
Something else is doing that.
Let your shoulders come down from wherever the day left them.
That your jaws soften.
Let your hands rest.
Open.
Or loose.
If your mind is busy.
That's fine.
Minds are.
You don't need to empty it.
But you can try and notice it That's one of the keys of meditation.
The noticing part.
We go through our lives not noticing so much.
The thoughts can come and go in the background.
Like traffic on a far road.
And I'll continue to talk.
I spoke earlier about people.
The people who cut you off and talk over you or let you down.
And about yourself.
Now,
There's a way of meeting all of them.
That is more than 2,
000 years old.
And it still works.
It comes from the Stoic.
A school of thought born in Greece and grown up in Rome.
Named for a painted porch in Athens,
Where the first of them toured.
Its teachers were Greeks and Romans.
Slaves and senators.
People who lived through play.
Exile.
And politics that could turn deadly overnight.
And who spent their lives working out.
Our person stays steady inside all of it.
Nothing here needs studying.
It has been road-tested for 23 centuries.
You only have to listen.
And while you listen.
Just notice your breath.
Be in this moment.
And how about allowing yourself to enjoy this time?
How lucky you are.
To have this time.
This time on earth.
This time where you don't need to do anything.
You don't have to do anything.
It's a luxury.
So enjoy yourself now.
Somewhere today.
Or yesterday.
Or definitely some day.
You stood near a stranger.
And a cue,
Maybe.
And traffic.
On a footpath.
And here is what you could see.
A coat,
Perhaps.
A face,
For sure.
A phone in hand,
Maybe.
Perhaps an expression you read in half a second and filed away.
And here is what you could not see.
The phone call they got this morning.
The results they're waiting on.
The argument still ringing in their ears from last night.
The mortgage.
The interview that went badly.
The friend who has gone quiet on them.
The child who won't talk to them.
The worry.
Over someone they love.
Or something smaller.
Three bad nights of sleep in a row.
And a world that keeps asking things of them anyway.
Every person you pass.
Today.
And in your life.
Is a whole world.
And you only saw the doorstep.
Personally.
I have to remind myself of this a lot.
I can be highly sensitive.
See someone's expression in a split second and think they're judging me or looking at me in a funny way.
Oregon.
Get frustrated with someone very quickly without noticing.
Remembering all those things I just said.
I say this because.
.
.
I want you to know that I am learning with you as we go here and there.
For me,
These are daily lessons.
You don't just hear this and then move on.
It's something you need to remind yourself of.
All the time.
It offers you much more peace.
And it offers those around you.
Even the strangers.
A lot more peace too.
As I was saying.
Every person you pass to today is a whole world.
The whole universe.
Until you just saw the doorstep.
And they saw your doorstep too.
Whatever you carried through your day.
The tiredness,
The worry sitting behind your eyes.
The thing you couldn't stop turning over.
The strangers who passed you.
Soar.
None of it.
Or a fraction of it.
But to them you were mostly just a coat and a face.
Someone may even have glanced at your expression.
And decided something about you.
In half a second.
That was entirely wrong.
It works in both directions.
It always has.
There is an old line.
Shared so often that its true author has been lost along the way.
Be kind.
For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Whoever first said it.
Noticed something the Stoics had noticed long before.
People are rarely difficult at you.
They are difficult.
From somewhere.
From inside a day.
A year.
A life you know nothing about.
So with all that said.
.
.
I'll leave you for a moment now just to dwell on that.
Just notice your breath.
Notice the sounds around you if you wish to.
That leave you for a moment.
Almost two thousand years ago.
The most powerful man in the world.
Sat in a tent on a cold frontier,
Writing notes to himself.
In Greek.
The language of his teachers.
That no one else was ever meant to read.
Marcus Aurelius Emperor of Rome.
If anyone ever had an excuse to be harsh.
It was him.
Nineteen years of war.
Plague moving through his empire.
Betrayal from people he trusted,
And a court full of people telling him whatever kept them safe.
And still,
In the privacy of pages meant for no other eyes.
The notes he leaves himself.
Are about patience.
Each morning.
Before the day could reach him,
He prepared.
Today,
He wrote,
I will meet people who are rude,
Impatient,
Ungrateful.
Dishonest and then the part that matters.
He reminded himself.
Why?
They act this way out of their own confusion.
Their own pain.
Their own not-knowing They do not do it to wound me.
Most of the time.
They barely see me at all.
He wasn't talking himself into gloom.
He was doing what you do before rain.
Checking the sky and bringing a coat.
When the rudeness came.
And it always came.
It landed on a man who was.
Who had decided hours earlier.
That it wasn't going to run his day.
The Stoics were blunt about what anger actually costs.
And who pays.
Seneca wrote a whole book on it.
And his observation was simple.
Anger punishes the angry.
The rude stranger delivers one bad moment.
The younger delivers the next forty.
Replaying.
Rehearsing.
Tightening your shoulders on their behalf somebody is short with you for 10 seconds.
And you do the rest of the damage yourself.
Free of charge.
For the rest of the morning.
Seen that way.
Patience stops looking like a virtue.
And starts looking like plain self-interest.
You are the one your patience protects first.
So I'm going to leave you for another moment now.
Just to sit with your breath with the sounds around you.
If you're staying with me for 20 minutes We'll be coming towards the end of our time together in a couple of minutes.
Maybe sit with what we've spoken about today.
That idea.
Of remembering that others are carrying their own battles.
That idea of protecting yourself.
Before you leave the house.
And remembering that We're all in this together.
Just notice the breath now.
The sounds around you.
And maybe the good thoughts you're having.
Of realization.
Of curiosity.
Of learning.
Okay,
If you're leaving me now.
.
.
I wish you a peaceful day.
Or night,
If that's the stage of the day you're at.
Thanks for meditating with me.
And I hope that some part of this has landed with you.
And if you stay,
Let's continue.
Continue to notice your breath.
As I continue to talk.
Another stoic teacher.
Epictetus.
Born enslaved.
Became in time one of the most sought-after minds in the Roman world.
A man who started with nothing of his own.
Is time,
Is labor,
Is days.
Or belonging to somebody else.
Worked out exactly which things can never be taken from anyone.
It gives his teaching a weight no comfortable philosopher could have given it.
His entire philosophy rested on one distinction.
Perhaps the most useful sorting of a life ever made.
Some things are up to us.
Most things.
Or not.
Up to us.
Our judgments.
Our values.
Our responses.
What we do with the next moment.
Not up to us.
Nearly everything else.
The traffic,
The weather,
The economy,
The past.
This is the one that changes everything.
Other people.
What they say,
What they do,
What they think of us,
Their moods,
Their manners,
Their choices,
All of it is out there with the weather.
Think how much of an ordinary day is spent in that second column.
Waiting on a reply that hasn't come.
Wondering what someone meant by that.
Wishing a decision had gone another way.
Hoping a particular person will change.
Energy poured into weather.
Meanwhile,
The first column.
The shortest one.
Sits mostly untouched.
How you'll speak today.
What you will give your attention to.
How you will treat the next person in front of you.
Even your own past sits in that second column now.
The thing you said last year.
The choice you made at twenty.
No longer up to you.
Nobody is granted edits.
What stays in the first column is what you do with the person those things made.
And the tone you take with yourself along the way.
You have never once argued the rain into stopping.
You dress for it.
You give it its space.
And you carry on with your own errand.
Other people's behavior.
Is weather.
When someone is short with you.
Their sharpness belongs to their day.
Their storm.
Their sky.
What belongs to you begins just after.
The breaths you take.
The story you tell yourself about it.
The answer you give.
That's a smaller kingdom than we might like.
It is also the only one that was ever really ours.
And the Stoics found that when you stop trying to rule the weather.
You finally have both hands free to rule yourself.
Thus is what Marcus was doing in his tent.
He couldn't choose the people the day would bring him.
He could choose in advance the man they would find when they arrived.
I leave you for another moment now.
Just sit with yourself.
Peace.
The space you're in.
With your breath.
And the sounds around you.
I'd like you to picture an ordinary morning.
Just really go here with me.
Breathe into what I tell you,
Okay?
You're in a cafe.
Shop.
Or on the phone to some helpline.
And the person dealing with you is.
Well,
Short.
They give you clip dancers.
They give you no eye contact.
The small flick of impatience that says,
You are an inconvenience.
Feel what happens in the body.
It's fast.
A heat in the chest or the face.
A tightening.
And then.
.
.
Almost instantly.
A story arrives to explain the heat.
Oh,
Rude.
Who do they think they are?
I've done nothing wrong.
Now Epictetus would stop you right there.
With kindness.
It isn't events that disturb us,
He taught me.
It's the judgments we lay on top of them.
The clipped tone.
That's the event.
Three seconds of another person's voice.
Everything else?
The insult,
The meaning,
The who do they think they are?
You added.
And what you added.
You can sit down.
Try the other story.
You'll never know the true one.
That's rather the point.
So,
Notice that you're choosing a story either way.
Maybe their shift started at six.
And they've been working for hours.
Maybe there's a manager who humiliates them.
Maybe the customer before you was cruel.
And you're simply next in line after the wound.
Maybe their child was up coughing half the night.
And they are running on four hours sleep and pure will.
And inside that not knowing.
There is room.
Be generous.
Generous to them.
And by doing so.
Generous to yourself.
Notice too what usually happens instead.
The moment ends.
And then it doesn't.
You carry it out the door.
You tell a colleague.
You tell your partner at six in the evening about a stranger from nine in the morning.
The encounter took 40 seconds.
The residency you granted it.
Took the whole day.
The Stoics would ask a very practical question here.
What is it paying you?
For all that space.
Somebody who has already forgotten you exist.
Is occupying your afternoon.
And paying nothing for the room.
I'll tell you something that happened to me recently as well.
If you follow any of my work,
You'll know that I have two dogs,
Timmy and Frankie.
Well,
Recently I was in the park and.
.
.
Frankie was off the lead as she's allowed to be in this particular park.
And she ran towards the Labrador.
I then saw the lady who owned the Labrador running.
Towards her Labrador.
Pulling the dog away from Frankie.
Than I was thinking.
What's going on here?
So,
As I saw her running towards the dog,
I said to her,
My dog's friendly,
It's okay.
The lady paid me no attention and kept going towards the dog and pulled it away.
Then said to her,
Is your dog not friendly?
She took off headphones.
And it was then I realized she hadn't heard anything up until then.
I said again,
Is your dog not friendly?
She said,
He is,
But I don't know about yours.
Her tail was up.
I became a little bit annoyed and said my dog is incredibly friendly.
She was just going up to play.
She's only a puppy,
She's only one.
They walked away.
But I took it very personally.
And that lady.
Weeks later.
Still.
Takes up space in my brain.
So as I speak these words to you today,
Words that come from our ancient forefathers.
Like I say.
I am also learning with you.
We can't know what other people are thinking.
We can't know what they've been through.
I need to be kinder to that lady in my head.
I don't know what previous experiences led her to the assumption.
That my dog wasn't friendly.
Sir.
In that moment,
I could have just breathed.
Remember we all have our own experience and let it go.
And here's what you can do in a moment like that.
Here's what the choice looks like.
You slow down instead of speeding up.
Your voice comes out warm.
You say thanks and mean it.
You become for ten seconds the one easy thing in another person's day.
It costs you almost nothing.
And you walk out carrying nothing.
No replay.
No rehearsed complaint.
The whole event lived and died in under a minute.
And your day is still yours.
Pause with all of that now for a moment.
Just sit with yourself and your breath Now let's take another situation.
One that many of us can probably relate to.
Someone cuts you off.
No indicator.
No wave.
A stranger you will never see again.
Whose face you never even saw.
And your heart is pounding.
And your morning has a new theme.
Notice something odd about this anger.
It has nowhere to go.
The other driver is half a mile away by now.
Radio On.
Thinking about their meeting.
They haven't given you a second thought.
There wasn't even a first one.
Right now.
The entire event exists in exactly one place in the universe.
Your chest.
You are the only venue it's still playing in.
Seneca called anger a brief madness.
And his first remedy was the least dramatic one imaginable.
Delay.
Just wait.
Anger is loud.
But it has terrible stamina.
Give it 60 seconds of your silence.
And it starts looking for the door.
And while you wait.
Notice the lopsided way we judge these things.
It's worth seeing once so you can catch it forever.
When you cut someone off,
There's a reason.
If we didn't see them.
The junction was confusing.
You were distracted for one second in a long,
Careful year.
When they cut you off.
There is a character.
Menace.
Typical.
Same act.
One gets a circumstance.
The other gets averted.
And this stranger's story.
You're raising one anyway.
Let it be the merciful draft.
Late for the school pickup.
Rushing to a hospital.
Or simply having the kind of scattered,
Overloaded morning.
You've had a hundred times yourself.
You have cut someone off sometime,
Somewhere.
And thought nothing of it.
You were the villain.
In a stranger's morning once.
And you never even knew.
Let them go.
It isn't for their sake.
They'll never know they were forgiven.
The forgiveness is entirely for the person holding the anger.
You.
Were the only one it was burning.
I leave you for a moment now to sit with that.
And if you've decided to leave after 40 minutes.
You'll be coming to the end of your time soon.
But just sit with your breath.
And the sounds around you.
And dwell,
If you like,
On what we've spoken about today before you go.
I'll let you know when it's time.
Okay.
If you're leaving me now.
Gently allow your eyes to open and I wish you peace throughout the rest of your day.
Carry these words with you.
These words from our ancient forefathers.
These thinkings.
See you soon.
And if you're staying with me.
Let's dwell on one last scenario.
And it may be the one you know best.
No stranger this time.
No traffic.
You drop something.
Forget something.
Say the wrong thing in a meeting.
And before anyone else has even reacted.
A voice is already in.
You idiot.
Typical.
You always do this.
Notice whose voice gets away with that.
If a friend spoke to you the way you speak to yourself on a bad day,
The friendship wouldn't survive the months.
Yet this voice has a lifetime contract.
And it works from inside the house.
Here is what the Stoics notice.
The voice.
Is just another difficult person.
And everything you've practiced this hour works on it.
Exactly the same.
The spark.
That hot flush of shame.
The breath.
The question.
And here the question comes with an advantage.
Because for once you actually know what battle this person is fighting.
You know precisely how tired you were.
What the week had taken.
What you were afraid of.
You are the one witness with the full story.
And you were about to rule against yourself anyway.
So make the choice.
Answer the voice the way you'd answer any harsh stranger.
Oh,
Fuck.
No surrender.
Yes,
That could have gone better.
Tomorrow slower.
Marcus wrote his notes to himself as a friend offering a correction.
Never is a judge passing sentence.
The tone you take with yourself is up to you.
To you.
It sits in the first column.
One of the few things that always did.
Just take a moment now to sit with your breath.
To sit with the sounds around you.
Before we enter into the final part of today's meditation.
And we've spent over 40 minutes on other people's battles.
Our last minutes together.
Are about yours.
Here is the turn.
Somewhere out there.
There is a person who finds you difficult.
Someone has driven home replaying a thing you said.
Someone has shown your message to a friend and asked Can you believe this?
You have been the curt stranger,
Some tired evening,
Some overloaded afternoon.
You have been the distracted friend,
The sharp reply,
The one who forgot.
You have been somebody's bad driver.
Now excuse me if you don't feel that these all apply to you.
But obviously I am speaking in as general a sense as possible.
So we can understand the point of the message You may even be able to feel one of the things I just mentioned,
If you look.
A moment from this month,
This week.
Somebody who walked away from you.
Carrying weight you may have put there.
From tiredness,
From distraction.
From a bottle of your own they couldn't see.
They may still be carrying it.
They may have handed it on to somebody else by now.
There's no guilt wasting in this.
Only company.
Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
And you are someone people meet.
The circle was never drawn around everyone except you.
Which means that throughout this meditation.
You've been building something you are now entitled to use on yourself.
Every bit of understanding you've practiced sending outward.
The unseen mornings.
The frightened places.
The merciful draft of the story.
Turn it around.
Point it home.
The days you were short with someone.
What battle were you fighting?
What had that week already taken out of you?
What were you carrying that nobody at the table could see?
It's probably a good idea for me to share a bit with you now about my own life.
Because I don't want you to feel alone in this.
These days I live a pretty good life.
I work very hard to make sure that I'm As kind as I can be,
As patient as I can be.
What I don't do is succeed.
And I certainly haven't in the past.
For a long period of my life,
Alcohol played a big part in my life.
There are times I can't even remember.
Thanks to many years of sobriety now.
I have a lot more peace in my life.
But I know there are people out there who.
.
.
Still think of me in a way I wouldn't wish them to.
I've made amends where I can.
But we are all difficult from somewhere too.
We always are.
But we have to have an understanding that life is just.
.
.
Weather in a way.
Do we have to show ourselves mercy?
Seneca had a practice for this and it is small.
And it has lasted twenty centuries.
At the end of each day by lamplight.
He would look back over the day,
The way a kind judge might.
One who wants the truth and holds no grudges.
Where was I hasty today?
Where was I harsh?
Where did I do well?
And zen.
This is the part people miss.
He would speak to himself the way you'd speak to a friend you believed in.
You were sharp with him today.
You see it.
Tomorrow,
Be slower.
No punishment in it anyway.
Just noticing in kindness.
With tomorrow in mind.
He said he slept better for it.
The day fully looked at.
And then fully set down.
Let's do a small version now.
Together.
Let one moment surface.
Recent.
Ordinary.
Where you weren't at your best with someone.
Not the worst thing you've ever done.
Just a small one.
A tone you took.
The patience you didn't have.
Look at it the way you've been looking at strangers.
Throughout this time we've spent together.
See the person you were in that moment.
What they were carrying.
How tired they were.
What the day had already asked of them.
Notice that you would forgive a friend this exact moment in about four seconds.
You've probably done it.
The standard you hold yourself to at midnight.
Is one you would never dream of applying to anyone you love.
Say to the person you were what Seneca said.
I see it.
Tomorrow.
Slower.
That is the entire ceremony.
No sentence to serve.
The moment has been looked at honestly.
And now it is allowed to be over.
And Seneca's review had a second question.
One people skip.
Where did I do well?
Because there was a moment,
Today or near it,
Where you were patient when it was hard.
Where you let something go that you'd have gripped a year ago.
Where you were somebody's easy thing in a difficult day and never knew it.
Find one.
Takes a credit quietly.
Progress in this practice is nearly invisible from the inside.
It looks like arguments that never happen.
Angers that never arrive.
Evenings that stayed peaceful for no reason anyone could name.
Nobody hands out medals for the fight you didn't have.
So the noticing has to be yours.
Seneca kept a line from an older teacher and passed it on as the truest measure of progress he knew.
Asked what philosophy had actually given him.
The answer had nothing of success in it.
Nothing of serenity.
Just this.
I have begun to be a friend to myself.
And whoever manages that,
He had it.
Is never alone.
And turns out to be a friend to everyone else as well.
That.
Is the whole direction of travel.
The relationship you have with yourself is the longest one you will ever be in.
Every room you will ever enter,
You are there.
So make an ally of the company.
The voice that speaks to you at midnight can learn a new tone.
And you.
Are the one who teaches it.
One more thing before this meditation ends.
Throughout this hour we've worked on the difficult people.
But your life holds the other kind too.
Bring one of them to mind now.
Someone who is simply easy to love.
Whose name on your phone makes the day better.
Who has seen you at your most difficult and stage.
See their face.
Hear the particular way they say your name.
Think how unlikely they are.
Of all the crossings and timings and chances in a lifetime.
This person's path bent toward yours.
And Zen.
Rarer still.
They were gentle with you.
Nothing guaranteed it.
Whole versions of your life exist where the two of you never met.
You live in the one where you did.
And they have battles too.
Ones you've seen,
And ones they've kept from you.
To spare you the wait.
The gentleness they show you isn't effortless.
It's chosen.
Again and again.
On days when it costs them something.
Is what makes it worth this minute of your gratitude.
The hour is nearly done.
Nothing more to learn now.
The sinking part of you can clock off.
So just as we close.
Think of those beyond the window where you sit.
All of them.
The stranger.
The Kali.
The family,
The driver.
And the voice in your own head.
Quiet at last.
Every one of them home by now.
Or nearly.
Every one of them setting down a day you'll never know the weight of.
Every one of them,
Wanting exactly what you want now.
For there to be peace in your heart.
And kindness.
And patience.
When you're ready,
You can open your eyes.
I wish you peace,
My friend.
We're all in this together.
Don't forget that.
And if you can.
Write one kind word for someone who might read it below.
And do so.
If you'd like to hear more meditations like this,
Based on the Stoic philosophies.
Let me know.
Thank you.
And see you soon.
