MF 21: Self exercise techniques

Pythagorean instruction of silence. (two most difficult things of all, keeping quiet and listening)
An exercise of memory
techniques for concentrating though and breathing
ascesis exercises: abstinence, meditation, meditation on death, meditation on future evils, the examination of conscience, etc.

The body must not be neglected in the exercises, even when it is a matter of practicing philosophy. Virtue must go through the body to become active.

Musonius: There are exercises of the body itself, of the soul itself, and of the body and the soul. The objectives are, on the one hand, training and strengthening courage, which we should understand as resistance to external events, the ability to bear them without suffering, collapsing, and letting oneself be overcome by them; resistance to external events, misfortunes, and all the rigors of the world. Then, second, training and strengthening that other virtue, the ability to control oneself.

To bear what comes from the external world and enables us to limit, regulate, and master all the internal impulses, the impulses f one's self.

Plato in Law: In order to train a good citizen or a good guardian, we need to train both his courage and then his moderation or self-control.  In Plato these two virtues---courage with regard to the external world; control of oneself----are secured by physical exercises. All this specifically athletic training is one of the guarantees that one will not be afraid of external adversity, that one will not be afraid of the adversaries with whom one learns to fight, the struggle with another person having to serve as the model for the struggle with events and misfortunes.

Athletic preparation involves many renunciations, many abstentions and sexual abstinence in particular: It is well known that one cannot win a contest a Olympia unless one has led a particularly chaste life. One must accustom oneself to bear hunger and thirst, and to bear extreme cold and heat. One must get used to sleeping rough. One must get used to coarse and inadequate clothing, etc.

Seneca: Light exercises only. Not let gymnastics burden the soul. Stoic ethics is concerned with the bodies of old men, of quadragenarians, not with the young man's athletic body. Practice wearing coarse clothes, eating little, and drinking water, to be sufficiently detached to be able to treat the wealth and goods around us with the necessary indifference and with correct and wise nonchalance. What he eats must be what is actually necessary to relieve his hunger. He must only drink knowing that the final purpose and real measure of what he drinks should be what enables him to quench his thirst, etc. Exercises of abstinence for forming a style of life, and not exercises of abstinence for regulating one's life in accordance with precise interdictions and prohibitions.

The exercise that "tomorrow you will die." This exercise, in which one both displays legitimate attachment and in which one detaches oneself through this work of the soul that clearly sees the real fragility of this bond with people you love, will be a test.