The ten gifts of Apollo

In Meditations 11.18, feeling anger stir, Marcus Aurelius doesn't suppress it or reason it away in the abstract. He reaches for a list (nine reflections from the Muses, and a tenth from Apollo himself) and works through it deliberately. Robertson surfaces this passage as a core Stoic self-therapy toolkit.

Seneca passed on an old saying: anger is "a brief madness." What follows is Marcus working his way back out of it.

The ten gifts:

• We are made for each other — Humans are social creatures, built to cooperate. Anger works against our nature.Beehive: Justice's bee from the four virtues, at the hive it belongs to; work against the hive and the bee loses too.
• See the whole person — Look at their life and context, not just the act that irritated you.Spectacles: put them on and the one act shrinks to its place in a whole life.
• No one does wrong willingly — People act badly from ignorance or confusion. They deserve understanding, not rage.Root: not-seeing, the affliction yoga's other four grow from; nobody wrongs you from clear sight.
• You have the same capacity — You've done similar things, or could. This dissolves self-righteous anger quickly.Two figures: them and you, drawn alike, because what they did is in you as well.
• Everything passes — The situation, the person, and the anger itself are all transient. Nothing here is permanent.Melting ice cube: impermanence's mark from the three marks page, and the anger is ice as well.
• Anger harms you more than them — It poisons your mind and body while leaving the other person relatively untouched.Poison bottle: hatred is one of Buddhism's three poisons, and the one holding the bottle is the one who drinks.
• It's your judgement, not the event — The event is indifferent. Your belief that you've been wronged is what creates the pain, and that belief is yours to examine.Gavel: nothing hurts until the ruling comes down, and the gavel is in your hand.
• Understand their motives — Try to see why they acted that way. Understanding usually softens what outrage hardens.Shoe: theirs, worn a while, because most acts make sense from inside them.
• Kindness is the antidote — Genuinely cultivate warmth toward them. Opposite emotions tend to displace each other.Open door: loving-kindness's mark from the four abodes, the opposite the three poisons page sets against hatred.
• Apollo's gift — stop expecting perfection — It is unreasonable to expect flawed human beings never to act wrongly. Accept this as a condition of life, not a shocking injustice.Anchor: equanimity's mark from the four abodes; someone will do wrong today, count on it, and you hold steady without going cold.

Sources: Marcus Aurelius — Meditations 11.18; Donald J. Robertson — How to Think Like Socrates