Listen · Guided practice
The View From Above
A guided Stoic meditation for stepping back and seeing a difficult moment in a wider frame.
Listen to the meditationWriter · Meditation teacher · Practitioner
A life of
putting ideas
into practice.
I’m Jon Brooks, founder of The Stoic Handbook. I write and teach about the gap between knowing how you want to live and actually living that way.
Stoicism. Meditation. Ordinary life.
01
The person behind the work
Interested in what
holds up in real life.
I’m a dad, a writer and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we learn, and why a good idea can be so difficult to use when we need it.
Meditation and psychology have shaped how I think about practical philosophy. I began working with HighExistence in 2015. These days, The Stoic Handbook is where most of my writing and teaching lives.
I’ve spent over a decade testing Stoic ideas against work, parenting, training and setbacks. What survives that testing goes into what I publish. When something doesn’t work, I say so.
there were the sketches.See how it started
02
A few places to begin
Get a feel for the work.
Read an essay. Listen for a while. Try a practice.
Read · Behaviour & judgement
Why you knew better
and did it anyway
On the decisions that feel reasonable in the moment, and look very different the next morning.
Read the essayWatch · Practical philosophy
Overthinking is not
a thinking problem
Three Stoic exercises for examining the judgements that keep an overthinking loop going.
Watch on YouTubeListen · The podcast
Marcus Aurelius was
terrible at Stoicism
An episode about the distance between a person’s principles and their practice.
Listen to the episodeRead · Behind the work
The origins of
The Stoic Handbook
The original drawings and the question that started the project: how do you make an idea stick?
Open the notebooksWatch · A practical talk
Why the Stoics never
needed willpower
A lesson on discomfort, difficult goals and what makes an effort worth sustaining.
Watch on YouTubeJon is a great source of information, and his content has helped many people get turned on to modern Stoicism.
Donald J. RobertsonAuthor of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
03
The ongoing work
Find your
way in.
Most of what I make belongs to The Stoic Handbook. These are the places to follow along.
Visit the Handbook
01 / AUDIO
The Stoic Handbook podcast
Longer conversations, practical philosophy and guided meditations.
02 / VIDEOYouTube
Watch me explore Stoic ideas and how to put them to work.
03 / LETTERSThe Practice
Essays and practical Stoic ideas, delivered to your inbox.
04 / MEMBERSHIPThe Stoic Vault
Courses, guided practice and a community. My paid membership.
An invitation to practise
Try it for seven days.
The free 7-Day Stoic Challenge gives you one short audio practice a day. A simple place to begin if you’re curious about this work.
Start the free ChallengeConversations start somewhere
Say hello.
For interviews, collaborations, or a thoughtful note about something I’ve made, you can reach me here.
jon@stoichandbook.co