I came across a stoic connection - this is from Elizabeth Gilbert talking to Tim Ferris about Meditations:

“And I love the way that he speaks to himself directly in his journals. The way that he’ll say to himself, “Come on, come on man, come on Marcus. Dude, get it together. It’s taught — this is a moment for you to act. You can go down now or you can find your strength, you can find your resilience.” The way that he coaches himself, I find that incredibly inspiring. And I also think my friend Martha Beck, who I talk about a lot, because she’s a great teacher, but she has a great teaching that she gives people when they’re full of anxiety and full of fear. There’s ways that you can learn to speak to yourself that will actually mitigate that and one of the ways that she teaches is that she tells — coaches her clients to write down, let their fear speak. So you just give your fear its day. You have to respect it. It exists. It’s part of you. You don’t want to cast it away or attack it. You just open up your journal and you invite your fear to write down everything that it’s afraid of and you listen politely and with nonviolent compassion to your fear as it speaks.

And then once it’s done and it’s had its say, you say, “Thank you so much for sharing that. I’m really grateful that you trust me enough to be this vulnerable and to tell me everything that you’re afraid of.” And then you say to your fear, “I’m now going to ask you, now that you’ve had a chance to speak, if you’ll step aside and I’m going to bring another aspect of myself forward and I’m going to ask it to speak. So if fear — if you would just step aside for a moment, I’m now inviting wisdom into the room and now I’m going to ask wisdom to write down what it thinks and what it suggests in this case.”

And it’s extraordinary to see the wisdom that people find in themselves. That you are not just made of fear, you’re also made of grace and of wisdom and those meditations of Marcus Aurelius, it feels like that’s what he’s doing. He’s writing to himself from a place of fear, anxiety and uncertainty, and then he’s writing back to himself from a place of wisdom and saying, okay, this is what you’re upset about, I recognize that, I see that, and now I’m going to ask wisdom to come into the room and this is what it would suggest.”