30 How to prioritise ourselves with Charlotte Bronte - | Philosophy and Literature - Female Empowerment - Bluestocking Society -Women's intellectual history

Welcome to the Female Stoic podcast.My name is Stephanie Poppins and I am an advocate for literary empowerment.That means I believe the example set by the literary masters can broaden life perspective, create increased self-awareness, and empower us to overcome the obstacles we encounter here in the 21st century.

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By listening and referring what we hear to Stoic philosophy, we can foster a strong sense of self and navigate the world more effectively.This podcast takes the form of both discussions and meditations, and if you like what you hear, you might consider looking me up on my socials where I post empowering videos every day.

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Or you may like my classic audiobooks and original stories available on my website, newworldbooks.uk.Happy listening.

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To get rid of that.Really, don't I?OK, right.Hello.In gay long time no see.How are you and how is life in the sun?Is it sunny yet or is it still cold?

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Yes.Welcome, Amanda.I hope you well.Welcome and I hope you enjoy the podcast.That's good.That's fantastic.Michigan.Wow.What's really nice and what really is what I really enjoy is the fact that there are people from everywhere on this platform and that there is so much free content available, which means thanks for the warm sun need that, which means we it, it draws people in from everywhere no matter where their circumstances, what their circumstances are.

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So what we do, Amanda, is basically I come off my screen so I can't see you while I am delivering the podcast.Then I go back on at the end and I check any comments and with that, I am going to begin.If you can see the card posted, it is Jane Eyre and we are talking about Charlotte Monte today.

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So I'm going to come off my screen now and yes, talk about yourself.Here we go, right?

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Welcome to today's episode of the Female Stoic Podcast.Today's episode is entitled How to Prioritise ourselves with Charlotte Bronte.We will be having some quotes from the Stoic philosophers.

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I will be offering tips for Stoic living and obviously references to my favorite literary master, Charlotte Bronte reference.Check out my audiobook, Jane Eyre, which is available anywhere you listen to audiobooks and also Insight Timer on the premium tracks.

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And from next week on Insight Timer, I'm happy to say Villette will begin now.If you don't know the story of Villette, it was written in 1853 by Charlotte Bronte.It's a psychologically intense novel following the protagonist, Lucy Snow, a reserved, impoverished English woman who flees A tragic past to teach at a girls school in the fictional city of Villette in La Bassacour.

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I hope I got that right.La Bassacour.Yes, Lucy Snow struggles with isolation.Unrequited love.Gosh, how I love unrequited love unrequitedly.So she has an unrequited love for Doctor John Breton and a passionate, tempestuous relationship with the eccentric Paul Emmanuel.

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So that's coming from next week.And why Charlotte Bronte for this inspiration?Well, as we know, Charlotte Bronte prioritised herself by fiercely protecting her intellectual life.She pursued an independent writing career despite societal constraints upon women of the time.

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This being the 19th century, she demanded personal autonomy over conventional stifling of financially mercenary marriage options.And despite a life often marred by self repression and in her early years having to take on the role of caregiver for her siblings and suffering much loss, familial loss, she consistently maintained her own voice.

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She consistently maintained her own focus on her ambition.And of course that in a world she's quoted, as she's quoted in one of her letters as writing.

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But life is a battle.May we all be enabled to fight it well.And this resonates deeply because of course, as I always say, it is stoic survival.And that is why we are here, to make sense of our experience of life.

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So who was Charlotte Bronte?When she was 18, she sent a poem to the poet, Poet Laureate Robert Southie, and she asked what he thought of her writing.So this is very ambitious for a young girl of her time.

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And of course, this letter was written as a woman, a young woman.Southie then wrote back to Charlotte, but not necessarily with what she wanted to hear.He said, You evidently possess a no inconsiderable degree of what Wordsworth would call the faculty of verse.

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But literature cannot be the business of a woman's life.It ought not to be.The more a woman is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.

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Wow, we're lucky to be alive now.In other words, he's saying Charlotte should be focusing on what society expected of her.To marry and have children and look after the family, only to have no focus other than that.

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To have no ambition other than that.To prioritise others over herself.Writing, he suggested, would be a distraction.And this episode is all about maintaining our priority for ourselves whilst understanding there will be distractions.

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We will be pulled in many different directions, but we still ultimately prioritise ourselves.And of course, Charlotte being Charlotte, stoically, she took selfies, praise of her writing, and she ignored the rest.

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And as a result, we have Jane Eyre, thank goodness, my favorite novel.It's hard to Rep.It's hard to separate the Brontes from their family life, being one of six children and then suffering the loss of her mother and two further children and then her far her brother when she was quite young, she suffered a great deal.

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She experienced significant chaos.Yes, she lived in a Parsonage, and yes, they were reasonably well to do, although they did have to work in order to get enough money to survive.

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But the three sisters remaining wrote their famous novels as they sat round the table together.They read outfits to each other, and they were committed to their inner fantasy world above all else.

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So how did Charlotte specifically prioritise herself?Well, she was a voracious reader.She valued intellectual pursuits as a way to soften and refine the mind.She viewed her own often lonely existence as a rich interior experience.

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Again, with a mention of Stoicism there.And the value of silence and our own time.Despite the advice of experts like Robert Southie, she refused to stop writing.

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She prioritised her writing along with her sisters and they used their own funds to publish their work, choosing to chase their dream of becoming professional authors, albeit using pseudonyms to get their work over the threshold.

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She famously declared she would never enter a marriage for mercenary reasons or simply to escape her situation.She valued her independence and true feeling over a degrading what she called a degrading marriage market.Although she did have a relationship, but she insisted on treating herself as an equal in her work, creating characters like Jane Eyre, who despite being porn plain, refused to be treated as inferior.

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This priority to her female archetype, in which she sought to live as everyday was so prevalent in her work through her characters, particularly in Jane Eyre Violette, she experienced her own passion.

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She experienced her anger and her longing for independence.She could channel, as I've spoken to you in previous episodes, she could channel that emotion into something positive.And this, if you listened, go back and have a look at the episode about how we use emotion.

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We can see that ultimately we can transform that pain into something that is celebrated.And of course, then she became well known, but she didn't seek out.

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She sought out criticism, but she didn't seek out the limelight.She sought out the priority of her vision of who she was.That did not at any point mean that she neglected her familial duties.

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She was still very much beholden to employment, beholden to the caring of her siblings when they got ill and where they lived.Illness was prevalent.The average age of life, life expectancy at that time is 24.

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So she was still committed to her roles.And again, to go back to a former episode where we discuss the roles that we have to undertake, it wasn't that she neglected any of those roles, but she understood that to prioritise herself meant she was able to then happily fulfill those roles.

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And this is the connection to Stoicism.The Stoic order of priorities is designed to foster this life of virtue, tranquillity and resilience.We are focusing our energy exclusively on what is within our power and it is within our power to prioritise our voice, Epicteter said.

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The chief task in life is simply this, to identify and separate matters so I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which I have to do with the choices I do actually control.

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Where then do I look for good and evil?Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself, to the choices which are my own.We have a dichotomy of control, as you know in the Stoic philosophy.

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Everything we can control and everything that's external to that, the indifference, things we cannot control.But our supreme priority is obviously that which we can control, our virtue and our character, everything from within.

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And Stoics believe the only true good is moral.Excellence is our virtue.And of course, if we are driven to create, we are to prioritise that element of our self because that is within our circle of control as well as those things we consider are important to maintain our virtue.

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So let's have a look at the four cardinal virtues.We've got wisdom, justice, courage and temperance.We are using our wisdom to navigate complex situations.We are using our justice to act fairly and kindly towards others.

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We are using our courage to face challenges and pain with a resilience.And we are using our temperance to control our desires and impulses.And it is a fine balance of all these at any one time.

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And of course, when we consider external forces, especially in the life of someone like Charlotte Bronte, who was a young woman who had other siblings who were dropping like flies around her, there was much illness.

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We understand that the only thing that she really had within her control was how she reacted to that.And I talk about this a lot in my podcast Reactivity, and that is a thing we're trying to avoid.

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We're trying to avoid extreme reactions.We are trying to create a distance between the externals and ourself.As I always say, the power is in the pause, a pause or a space between.

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So obviously we need to have that space in order to be able to prioritise ourselves because there are so many demands on us every day.So how do we prioritise ourselves?Well, we're going to start with our mornings.

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We have to remember at the start of the day, the world doesn't reward self sacrifice, but it rewards self command.Our success is not one if we bleed ourselves dry for others, but if we fill ourselves up first so that then we can give.

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And This is why I've used Charlotte Bronte as an example because she was such a kind sister and yet she understood that she couldn't neglect her calling.And that's the point here.It's a balance, a daily endeavour and a balance.

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Someone who dares to put herself first, who makes her growth, her clarity, who makes her direction her top priority, will inevitably rise.Not because the world is fair around her, but because she's following the law of vibration.

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The world is adjusting to her vibration, which is higher than everything else.If she's tapping in with her higher self, if she's aligned with her true higher power, the world will adjust to meet that.

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And this is what happened with the Bronte Sisters Challenge.They were in many ways, but their higher power, their higher self, their commitment to prioritise their story, their stoic worth surpassed all of that and it enabled them then to deal with the externals in a stoic way.

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So we're not confusing here pulling ourselves first with selfishness, because that's what is traditionally connected with self prioritisation.But selfishness is taking without giving.

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It's demanding without offering, it's expecting without effort.But we're not doing that.We're not taking without giving.We are permitting ourselves at the start of each day our time for ourself, knowing in full knowledge that in order to connect with and do honour to our virtue, we must also give.

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We must also give to others, but we come first.Essentially, we have to come first.This is our start priority.And a person who knows who he is.

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So in the case of Charlotte, she knew who she was.She had trained her mind.She had sharpened her habits.She had guarded her time.The person who knows who they are, who have committed and cultivated their inner world, can then show up as the best version of themselves, their higher self, for others who need them.

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And of course, as women, this is the priority because we are called upon so much to give so many parts of ourselves.When we look around, we can see that most of us are exhausted.

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But we're not exhausted because we're working too hard at ourselves.We're exhausted because we've betrayed ourselves for too long.We say yes when we mean no.We run on empty.We're trying to please people who wouldn't necessarily notice if we disappeared and of course those who don't understand because we haven't set those boundaries that actually we need time alone.

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If we silence our ambition to maintain appearances but all the while watching our potential waste away, we are becoming bitter.That is eating away at us.If we neglect ourselves, then it stands to reason that we will then neglect others, and that is not honouring our virtue.

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So our first responsibility is to ourselves, not our boss, not our spouse, not our peers, to us.And if we wish to be effective mothers, wives, friends, leaders, educators, intellectuals, writers, thinkers, workers, we have to acknowledge as Stoics that the power to do this starts from priority, prioritising ourselves.

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So in today's journal task, we always have a journal task.And this is a journal task which is aimed at morning times.So you might want to go back and listen to the podcast after just to remind yourself what the task is, which is a perfect point for me to inject into the conversation.

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My new course that's coming up, a five day working week course all about stomach discipline.And this is getting us to connect with a disciplinary practice that we can maintain everyday in order to tap into our higher self.

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And of course, this general task is also for the beginning of the day.So the question today for this general task is where do we place ourselves in the hierarchy of our mind?

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Are we approaching life through intellect or accident?Where do we place ourselves on the list of important things to do that day?So where do we place ourself in the hierarchy of our mind?

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Are we approaching life through intellect or accident?Where do we place ourselves on the list of important things to take care of each day?And obviously, underneath, we have to note that if we are not at the top of our list of priorities, we are then electively building a life of resentment, which is not protecting our inner peace, which is allowing our inner citadel, the walls of our inner citadel, to crumble.

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No matter how noble our intentions.When we do that, if we give more to others than ourself, we will crumble.We can't give what we don't possess, and if we don't prioritise ourselves and give to ourselves first, we have nothing to give.

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So rising each morning, submerging ourself in self respect, beginning early before the world demands our attention.That's the answer.That's the priority.That's the time we secure.

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Or in your life, in your family commitments, in your world.It might be at the end of the day, but taking that time before the world demands our attention, to protect that space for ourselves, protected like a fortress.

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And this time is the time we go into our inner citadel and we have a look around.What are our virtues?What are our values?Tapping in with our higher self.This time we are first thing in the morning, training our minds, choosing our thoughts and writing down what we are building.

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And we are all building something.And of course, we remember not to check our phone before we check into our inner citadel, avoid anything but a nice hot drink when we wake up, and get that journal out.

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And off we go.Because this inner citadel, this metaphor for this unbreachable fortress within our mind, is providing our inner strength.It's protecting our resilience and tranquillity against externals and we have to keep as in as with any builder, we have to keep adding bricks because it does crumble.

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External forces are and emotions are powerful and it will crumble if we don't maintain it.So we're avoiding reactivity at the 1st point of the day.We are earmarking this time we are saying this is ours and we understand that if we neglect that and we begin the day in reactivity, we will remain reactive all day long.

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So we avoid that.We say no, this is my time.That is how we prioritise ourselves.And if you think about that in terms of a whole day, it's not very much of A day, but it's so powerful.

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We need to become more strategic about our energy and time as women.That's the message here.If we're valuing ourselves, if we're staying true to our higher self, we are refusing to hand over that energy before we have.

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We charged our batteries ourself.And according to the Stoics, we always prioritise separating situations into two categories, what's in our control and what's not, so that we understand before we go into any situation in the day that the chaos that will arrive inevitably is outside of our control.

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We remind ourselves of that.We tap into the dichotomy of control and we remember what we have to do and what we have the power over and what we don't.According to Marcus Aurelius, the day-to-day focus is structured around 3 main practices.

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We understand there's a dichotomy of control.We use our disciplines, which the course will inform you about.We use our disciplines to direct our actions for the common good, and we also accept that certain things are without outside our control and there's nothing we can do about them, he said.

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The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.And he was so right.And this is the message of today at the Female Stoic podcast.

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We're prioritising ourselves, we're protecting our thoughts, our energy in our space and we understand we have time for everything and everyone in our life as long as it's on our terms, Charlotte Bronte said.

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I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.And what she meant by that was even those with the best intention in the world are still externals and the only thing we really have control over is our reaction to that.

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Hey Stephanie here, thank you for listening to the Female Stoic podcast.It is an honour and I just want to say I really appreciate you being here.It's amazing the power of women in literature and the stoic messages they have to share.

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Please, if you can, return the favour by spreading their words and sharing this podcast far and wide so more of us can benefit from their wisdom.And don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard.See you next time.