More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

Description

Do you consider yourself stoical? Do a bit of meditation or mindfulness practice? Buddhism and Stoicism have a lot to offer modern readers seeking the good life, but they're also radical systems that ask much of their followers. In More than Happiness, Antonia Macaro delves into both philosophies, focusing on the elements that fit with our sceptical age, and those which have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we live. From accepting that some things are beyond our control, to monitoring our emotions for unhealthy reactions, to shedding attachment to material things, there is much, she argues, that we can take and much that we'd do better to leave behind. In this synthesis of ancient wisdom, Macaro reframes the 'good life', and gets us to see the world as it really is and to question the value of the things we desire. The goal is more than happiness: living ethically and placing value on the right things in life.

Antonia Macaro is an existential psychotherapist and the author of The Shrink and the Sage, and Reason, Virtue and Psychotherapy. She is a supervisor and visiting lecturer at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London.

Both practical and informative, this groundbreaking study of the extraordinary resonances between early Buddhism and Stoic philosophy provides a much-needed philosophical framework for those practising mindfulness as well as a call to recover the pragmatic and therapeutic dimensions of philosophy that have long been overlooked in the Western tradition. -- Stephen Batchelor * author of After Buddhism and Secular Buddhism *