🌾 Module 4 — Askesis: The Training of Soul and Body | Musonius Rufus Course
Updated: Oct 31
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Philosophers Series
Help us reach the people who may need this most by sharing this free course with friends, family, colleagues, online communities, social media or on your own website.
🎧 Audio - Listen on the Go: Daniel
🌾Module 4 — Askesis: The Training of Soul and Body
Nearly everyone knows the experience of having decided something clearly and then failing to do it when the moment came. Someone resolves to eat simply, means it completely, and finds that resolve dissolving the instant they pass the bakery and the warm smell reaches them. Another person swears to stay calm in the next hard conversation, then a single sharp remark lands and the calm vanishes before any choice is made, replaced by heat rising in the chest and words already leaving the mouth. The decision was real. It simply did not hold.
The previous lesson named this gap between knowing and doing, and traced it to Musonius Rufus's conviction that philosophy has to be practiced, not merely understood. This lesson takes the next step and asks the obvious question. If practice is what closes the gap, then what does that practice actually consist of? Musonius had a specific and demanding answer, and it is the heart of what he taught. The answer is a discipline the Greeks called askesis.
Askesis: What the Word Means
The word askesis comes straight from the world of athletes. In Greek it meant training, the exercise a wrestler or a runner puts in to build a body capable of winning. The Stoics borrowed this athletic word deliberately and applied it to the soul. Just as an athlete trains the body through repeated effort until strength and skill become automatic, the Stoics held that a person trains the character through repeated effort until virtue becomes reliable. Askesis is that training. It is the deliberate, ongoing exercise by which a human being develops the capacity to live well, the same way an athlete develops the capacity to compete.
It is worth clearing away a confusion right at the start, because the word invites it. Askesis is the root of the English word ascetic, and so people often assume the two mean the same thing, that Stoic training is really just self-denial, a grim program of punishing the body and refusing every comfort for its own sake. That is not what Musonius meant, and the difference matters enormously. Asceticism, in the sense of suffering treated as valuable in itself, makes hardship the goal. Askesis treats it as a tool. The Stoic does not go cold or hungry because deprivation is holy or comfort shameful. He does it as an exercise, the way a runner runs hills, in order to build something. And what he is building is not toughness for its own sake but freedom, the condition of a person no longer at the mercy of every appetite and discomfort. That liberation is what the training exists for. It is never punishment.
Two Kinds of Training
When Musonius set out how this training actually works, he divided it into two kinds, and the division is the core of his teaching. A complete person, he observed, is not a mind floating free of a body, nor a body with no inner life. A human being is a synthesis of soul and body together, and so genuine training has to address both. The soul, he said, deserves the more zealous care, as the better part, but the body is never to be neglected, because a person lacking in either is lacking as a person.
Training proper to the soul. The first kind works on the soul alone, and it is the practice of keeping true principles before the mind until they become settled instinct. The student takes up the central judgments of the philosophy, above all that character is the only real good and that everything else, money, pain, reputation, comfort, ranks as raw material rather than anything to chase or dread. Then comes the actual exercise: returning to those judgments constantly, turning each one over, rehearsing it until it sits ready, so that when a hard moment arrives the principle gets there before the old reaction does. A judgment read once is merely met. Practiced daily, it becomes part of the person, which is the whole aim of this first kind of training.
Training common to soul and body. The second kind is training that works on soul and body at once, and this is the part that makes Musonius distinctive. Here a person deliberately habituates themselves to hardship. They accustom the body to cold and heat, hunger and thirst, plain meager food, a hard bed, scarcity, and the refusal of pleasures that could easily be taken. Done steadily, this makes the body sturdy, resilient, and ready for whatever life demands of it. But the deeper effect is on the soul, which is trained right alongside the body. Enduring hardship exercises courage, while declining available pleasures builds self-control. The body is the training ground, and the character is what actually gets stronger.
Musonius insisted on this second kind because he thought a training of the soul alone was incomplete for a creature who is not soul alone. A person can hold flawless principles in a quiet room and still be undone by cold, hunger, fear, or temptation, because those things work on us through the body, and a mind that has never been trained against them has no practiced answer when they arrive. The body is where much of life's pressure actually lands. To leave it out of training is to prepare for a fight in only half the arena.
Why Voluntary Hardship
The demanding part of this teaching is the voluntary hardship, and modern readers often flinch at it. Why would anyone choose to be cold, or hungry, or uncomfortable, when they do not have to be? Musonius argued the point directly, and his reasoning runs as a chain.
Begin with a plain observation: every genuinely good thing is acquired through effort and difficulty. Strength, skill, knowledge, character, none of them arrives for free, and all of them cost something to obtain. From this it follows that a person who refuses to endure any difficulty has, in effect, cut themselves off from everything good, because they have refused the one price at which good things are sold. The person unwilling to bear hardship condemns themselves to being worthy of nothing worth having.
Then Musonius adds an inversion that gives the argument its bite. Look, he says, at how much hardship people are already willing to endure, and for what. Someone consumed by lust will go to extraordinary trouble and risk. A person chasing money will exhaust themselves, lose sleep, and suffer for years. Those hungry for fame will endure humiliation and strain that would wear anyone down. People pour enormous effort into these pursuits without hesitation, and often for ends that wreck their lives rather than improve them. Given that we will clearly bear great hardship for the sake of a desire or a payday, Musonius asks, how strange is it that we balk at bearing even a little for the sake of virtue, which is the one pursuit that actually makes a life good? The willingness is obviously in us. We spend it constantly on lesser things. Training simply redirects it toward the thing worth having.
The Line Itself
The teaching has a famous formulation, and it repays reading closely. "We will train both soul and body," Musonius said, "when we accustom ourselves to cold, heat, thirst, hunger, scarcity of food, hardness of bed, abstaining from pleasures, and enduring pains." The line is a plain list of exactly the discomforts a comfortable life is arranged to avoid, and that plainness is the point. This is not mysticism. It is a training program, concrete and unglamorous.
Something like this idea has enjoyed a real revival lately, in the popularity of cold showers, fasting, hard workouts, and the general notion of deliberately doing hard things. Much of that captures something true, and it descends, knowingly or not, from exactly this Stoic root. But it is worth being clear about what the modern version sometimes strips away. For Musonius, the cold and the hunger were never the achievement. He had no interest in becoming impressively tough, or in hardship as a badge or an aesthetic. The whole point lay beyond them, in the freedom and the virtue the training was meant to build. A person who takes the cold shower yet remains enslaved to their appetites, quick to anger, and ruled by their fears has missed what Musonius was after entirely. The discomfort is only ever a means. Freedom of character is the end.
What the Training Actually Builds
It helps to be precise about what this training produces, because the payoff is not vague self-improvement. The reps build specific strengths of character, and they build them the way physical reps build specific muscles.
Enduring hardship builds courage. Each time a person meets cold, or hunger, or difficulty and stays steady instead of collapsing, they are rehearsing exactly the capacity they will need when something genuinely frightening or painful arrives. The small voluntary hardship is practice for the large involuntary one. In the same way, declining an available pleasure builds self-control. Whenever someone could indulge and chooses not to, they strengthen the ability to govern their own appetites rather than be governed by them, so that when a real temptation comes with real stakes, the strength to refuse is already trained and ready. Courage and self-control are two of the four qualities Stoicism has always placed at the center of a good life, the cardinal virtues: wisdom means judging truly; justice means giving people what they are owed; courage holds a person steady in the face of what is hard; and self-control governs one's own wants. What Musonius adds here is the mechanism, the concrete answer to how a person actually comes to possess the last two. Not by admiring them. By training them, one repetition at a time.
Turning Exile Into Training
Musonius did not only teach this. He lived it, and his life turned it from advice into demonstration. When Nero banished him to the barren island of Gyaros, he was handed hardship he had not chosen, the involuntary kind that simply happens to a person. A waterless rock, scarce food, harsh conditions, isolation from everything familiar. Most people would experience such a place only as suffering to be survived. Musonius met it as training. The very deprivations that made Gyaros a punishment became, in his hands, the exact conditions his philosophy prescribed for building strength of character, and he came through the ordeal not broken but confirmed. His exile is the clearest proof of his teaching, a man who had trained for hardship on purpose meeting hardship he never asked for and standing up under it because the training was already in him.
Consider, in a much smaller and more ordinary key, someone like Carl. He has begun taking a cold walk in the mornings without bundling up against it, choosing the plain, simple lunch when a richer one is easily available, and skipping the second drink he could effortlessly have. None of this is dramatic, and proving something or looking disciplined to anyone is not the aim. Carl is simply doing what a practitioner of Musonius's philosophy does, using small, chosen discomforts as a training ground, so that the capacity to stay steady and to govern his own wants is built quietly, in low-stakes moments, and will be there when a moment that actually matters arrives. That is askesis in ordinary modern life. Not grand suffering, but the deliberate, repeated, unspectacular practice of doing the harder thing, so that the strength is trained before it is needed rather than desperately reached for when it is already too late.
So how does a person actually begin? Both kinds of training can be started this week, and here is each one as a method you can follow.
How to Train the Soul: Keeping a Principle at Hand
The soul's training, remember, is keeping true principles before the mind until they become settled instinct. Here is that teaching as a concrete daily method. It takes about two minutes a day.
Choose one principle. Just one. The natural candidate is the principle that earned a "recited" label on your Gap Page earlier in this course, the one you believe but could not find under pressure. One principle trained is worth ten admired, and Musonius's few-proofs rule applies to your own practice too.
Compress it to a single line in your own words. Short enough to say in one breath, because it has to arrive faster than a reaction. Practitioners often borrow a line until their own arrives: "Not mine to control." "Add nothing to this." "This is the rep." "Steady is a choice."
Each morning, read the line once and scout the day. Ask: where will today most likely test this? Maybe a meeting, the commute, a phone call, or the house at six in the evening. Picture that moment for ten seconds, and see yourself responding the way the line would have you respond. You are rehearsing the play before the game.
At the test, say the line inwardly before anything else. That is the entire move. Not a lecture to yourself, just the line, arriving ahead of the old reaction. Some days it will land in time. On others it will come three seconds late, which is still training, because next time it shows up sooner.
Each evening, log one line. Held, slipped, or no test today, plus a few words about what happened. The log matters more than it looks: it is how a principle glanced at becomes a principle returned to, which is the exact thing Musonius said makes the difference.
Keep one principle for at least a full week before even thinking about adding a second. Depth beats collection, here most of all.
How to Train Body and Soul Together: Choosing a Training Rep
The second kind of training needs a bit more care in the setup, because the whole practice lives or dies on doing it the way Musonius meant it, as training, never as punishment.
One honest safety note before the menu, given plainly and once. This training is meant to be small, chosen, and harmless, and a few boundaries keep it that way. Anyone with a mental or medical condition, including eating disorders, heart or blood pressure concerns, diabetes, or pregnancy, checks with their doctor before adding cold exposure or any change involving food, full stop. Those whose relationship with food has ever been a struggle simply leave food out of their training entirely and choose from the many non-food options below, with nothing lost, because self-control can be trained on a hundred other materials and Musonius's goal was never served by self-harm. One more boundary: the moment an exercise stops feeling like training and starts feeling like self-punishment, it has left this practice and gets set down. This philosophy partners with doctors and therapists and substitutes for neither.
The rules of a good rep. Practitioners generally hold to five:
Chosen. You pick it freely, in advance. Hardship that simply happens to you is life; the kind you select is training
Small. It should register as mildly uncomfortable, never as suffering. A rep you dread is too big; shrink it.
Time-boxed. A defined start and end. Thirty seconds, a single meal, an evening, or one night.
Purposeful. Before starting, name what it trains, whether courage or self-control. A rep without a named purpose drifts into toughness theater.
Private by default. Not announced, posted, or performed. The audience is the character being built.
A menu to choose from, with the understanding that there is nothing special about any item on it, and anything small, chosen, and harmless serves just as well:
End the shower with thirty seconds of cool water
Take a walk slightly underdressed for the weather, within sense
Skip one habitual small pleasure for a day: the episode, the evening scroll, the background podcast
Sleep one night on the floor, a couch, or the firmer side of comfort
When a small want arrives, whether it's a purchase, the urge to check the phone, or an itch to look something up, wait ten minutes before meeting it
Deliberately take the stairs, a long line, or the slow checkout, and stand in it without reaching for distraction
What to say while it is happening, because the words are half the training. A line spoken inwardly during the rep keeps it aimed at character instead of endurance for its own sake. Practitioners use something like: "This is training, not suffering. I am building self-control. It ends at the end of this shower." Said once, plainly, and then the discomfort is simply kept company until the time-box closes. Afterward, one line in the log: done, and one word about what it was like.
That is the entire method. It is almost embarrassingly undramatic, which is exactly how Musonius would have it. The drama is the enemy; the repetition is the work.
Philosopher's Practice: The Training Page
Open the notebook to a fresh page. This one is called The Training Page, and it runs for a week, which makes it the first page in this course that you build day by day rather than in one sitting. Fitting, for the module about training.
Set the top of the page tonight. Write three things: your one-line principle from the soul-training method, your one chosen rep from the menu, and next to each, the virtue it is training. That header is your whole program for the week. Resist, firmly, the urge to pick three principles and four reps. One and one.
Each day, make two marks. The principle log: held, slipped, or no test, with a few words. The rep log: done or skipped, with one word. Two lines a day, less than a minute, and by the end of the week the page holds something most people have never once possessed: an actual written record of their own character in training.
At week's end, run the audit again. Take just the one principle you trained and give it a fresh label using the method from earlier in this course: recited, partly lived, or lived. Then set this page beside your Gap Page and answer, in writing, the only question that matters: did it move? Even one step, from recited to partly lived, is the gap closing, and you watched it close because you have the receipts, which is more than Nadia ever had.
One last line to finish the page, written in your own first person: "Which was harder for me this week, the soul practice or the body practice?" No need to interpret the answer yet. Just write it down plainly, because it is a piece of evidence about yourself that you did not have a week ago, and the road ahead in this course, through food, clothing, hardship, and daily life, will give it meaning. The notebook comes too.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses present the ideas of historical Stoic philosophers for educational and self-reflection purposes only. They describe what these thinkers taught and argued and do not constitute an endorsement of any philosophical position, nor do they constitute religious instruction or professional advice of any kind. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
Comments