It invites you to step back from the mundane and consider your life, its infinitesimal place in the universe, its ultimate transience, and the kind of attitude and virtues you want to practice.
It's a form of deep reflection that places your life in a cosmological perspective. In that respect it serves a similar function to prayer and the contemplation of the divine in some religions.
I don’t think stoicism is related to those things. Those sound like nice meditative things to do, which are compatible with a wide range of different philosophical schools of thought, but none of that sounds like it is actively connected to the defining characteristics of stoicism.
I disagree. I have only read parts of Epictetus' Discourses and Aerelius' Meditations, but I think it is borne out by both texts. I don't have them to hand. But quickly looking through an online edition of the Meditations, I am faced with a great many passages matching the stated views. For example:
'Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same.'
'How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe.'
That’s still not what stoicism is. Those quotes are one of many about not holding your success or who you are to materialistic goals, or infinite goals.
while reflecting on yourself via meditation can be useful, it is not the only way, it doesn’t need a one week retreat, and if the goal is to meditate on the next idea that will revolutionize everything then that is definitely not stoic.
I did not say that it was all that stoicism is. I am not even claiming that it is especially central to stoicism. But it is undeniably a part of stoicism, as any fair reading of those two quotes indicates. Yes one of the central beliefs of stoicism is that we should inculcate within ourselves an ability to withstand any change in our external circumstances. But it is a complex philosophical system. It is perfectly possible for stoicism to admit both that belief, and the view that I'm ascribing to it.
