Ancient Wisdom

The StoicMom Project

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the title of this Substack from StoicMom’s Newsletter (which was kind of the default that just made the newsletter possessive to my username) to The StoicMom Project. It was kind of a whim. It felt right. I began to ponder what this meant. 

A project indicates that we’re trying to accomplish something: create something, learn something, right? We’re working toward a result. My tagline has been: using my daughter’s trans identity as inspiration to become a better human. 

That was always the intent of this site for me. To document my own journey of using Stoic principles to deal with this painful and destabilizing external circumstance that Life (and my daughter) had dropped in my lap: 

• Figure out what I can and can’t control

• The obstacle is the way (use this difficult circumstance to learn and grow and become stronger, more stable)

• Reframe things in a way that made them less scary, more actionable–so I could feel less incompetent and make progress on those things within my control: namely my thoughts, actions, perspectives, and beliefs, or as I like to say “my inner world.” 

Like the Stoics, I came to recognize how little of the world I have control over, yet there was so much power in the idea of “changing the world” by changing my inner world. I could transform the experience I was having if I took responsibility for these things that were within my control. 

To be honest, I had discovered this long ago. I had tested this previously. It seemed Life wanted to make sure I’d really learned this one. The Obstacle is the Way. So my daughter brought me the strangest, most difficult, most destabilizing experience I could have imagined.

And there was even more ancient wisdom this project would beat me over the head with; I didn’t have to invent anything, I just had to allow myself to learn what so many humans throughout time had already discovered. Cliches and outdated sayings and stories and archetypes that contain these ancient lessons…they all converged to remind me there’s really nothing new under the sun. Humans have been figuring out how to overcome suffering for as long as we’ve been a species. Once you change your inner world, you’ve essentially trained your brain to handle difficult things. This is simple neuroplasticity that results in resilience. But what this can do for your heart was most surprising for me, and profoundly transformational. 

It’s truly possible to find gratitude in anything. You can develop a lens of gratitude–this is simply a practice. And by viewing the world through this lens of gratitude, you can completely transform your experience. It’s no wonder this is built into the ancient practice of prayer. And those Stoic ideas of reframing and ‘the obstacle is the way’ are both practiced when we decide to be grateful. How can you be grateful for this experience? When you can view this circumstance as a gift, an opportunity for you to heal yourself and get better at Life, and you start to see the results of that effort, how can you not experience gratitude? 

This experience also reminded me of the power of faith. Something I would have scoffed at not long ago but hadn’t recognized how it connected to the trust I was advocating for when it comes to parenting–trust in ourselves, trust in our children, trust in the bonds we nurtured. That this is simple faith–in humanity and Life itself–and it’s embedded in Christianity and in Taoism. I was pretty blown away when I heard this Taoist principle that resonated so hard for me: if you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy. Which also connects to this ancient idea that…

What you focus on expands. I didn’t realize this concept was in the Bible. Now I want to clarify what this means to me: heightened attunement to certain elements of your environment. When something enters our awareness and we start paying attention to it, we tend to see it everywhere. Like when you learn a new word or concept that has always been there, but not for you. Then suddenly it’s everywhere and you couldn’t stop seeing it if you tried. 

If we suspect people are out to harm us, we’ll find evidence to support this. If we look for what our children are doing ‘wrong’, we’ll find plenty. If we’re trying to shape our children to be a certain kind of person, we’ll find all kinds of things we need to fix. On the flipside, if we’re looking for beauty, we’ll find it. Imagine what a different world it might be if instead of looking for what’s wrong with people that we need to point out, that if whenever we met someone new, we were looking for what that person is meant to teach us. How would that person respond differently to us? 

If we apply this idea to our children’s “highest qualities” as Sasha would say, we might see these fascinating humans we birthed into the world very differently. When you look at your child, what are you looking for? Insert that Circe quote again here: 

Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. 

Are you seeing the product of all your parenting efforts, and measuring your child against the standards of a sick society? 

If you’re looking for those highest qualities, it creates an expectation that doesn’t even need to be spoken as such, from my experience anyway. I don’t say to my daughter, “I expect you to make good choices.” I say it as a matter of faith, “I know you love yourself and will make the healthiest choices you can for your body and your future.” 

My mom always said, “we love the ones we serve.” I used to expect things from others and experience resentment when I didn’t get them. I figured out that if I model what I want, like say, doing kind things expecting nothing in return, then in those times that I do ask for something, my loved ones tend to want to comply. I’ve decided to never do anything with resentment again. If I can’t do it with love, I don’t do it. If I start to feel resentment, I take that as information about my boundaries, and then I make a choice as to whether I can find a loving place from which to perform this task or whether I need to communicate a boundary. 

I’ve also discovered that tragedy can break your heart to pieces, or it can break it open, allowing you to experience more richness, more beauty, more pain, more curiosity, more love. Most of us put shields around our hearts at a very young age. When we realized how much pain this world could cause us because it doesn’t make any effort to truly see us, to accept us as perfectly flawed creatures who are always doing the best we know how to get our needs met, we start armoring ourselves. Our hearts don’t get to develop the resilience needed to fully experience Life. 

I’m realizing this is opening a whole new topic that I don’t want to include in this piece. So, I’ll leave that as a teaser–the idea that this can break your heart open and that that might actually be a good thing. I just want to communicate that I am profoundly changed by taking this Stoic approach (that invited even more ancient wisdom) to this circumstance that my daughter introduced into our home. This is the essence of that idea of being a lighthouse for me. At first, I jumped in the rowboat and chased her out into the stormy seas thinking I could “save” her. That was fear-driven and fear is not attractive and I have little control over the water, the weather, and my own boat while in the storm, let alone hers. 

Photo by Hanro Bauermeister on Unsplash

But the lighthouse can be battered relentlessly and still shine bright, unaffected by the storm, guiding those that are still out at sea and communicating where to find solid land. All those humans throughout the ages understood that solid ground is an inside job. Steady is attractive. Life can throw all kinds of tragedy at me and I can stand strong in my values, unaffected by the storm…which eventually passes and the sun comes out, and sometimes there’s even a rainbow, but there is breathtaking beauty that won’t be experienced if you’re clinging to your capsized boat, lost miles out at sea. It’s there–that beauty–but you won’t even notice it because now you’re struggling just to stay alive.  

So, yes, I’m grateful. My daughter helped me to become a lighthouse. And the StoicMom Project started attracting other moms. Moms who are already lighthouses or are discovering they’d like to take on this inside job and become that steady beacon. We’re learning from each other and we’re populating the coastline of this vast, unpredictable sea with lighthouses. 

I changed the name so that you might recognize the invitation. To build a lighthouse. To try a little Stoicism. To change your experience and get on solid ground. To consider allowing your heart to be broken open.