Philosophical Exercises

  In June 2025, I meditated alongside David Whyte’s poetry on the “meanings, paradoxes, and complexities of everyday words.”   His essays moved me, but I regret how I went about the exercise. Image by Karen Arnold Consolations, by David Whyte, is a course you can find on the Waking Up app, a very good philosophy-oriented meditation & spirituality app. The course itself is essentially the audio book version of a book of essays bearing the same name: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words . The essays are close to poems, at least when being read aloud by the author, and each audio clip in this series is one such poem. In the introduction to the series, David Whyte explains the reasoning and creative process that birthed these essays. Through this explanation, we get the blueprint that, for our purpose, we can identify as a “ philosophical exercise ”. One that could be called “finding consolation in everyday words”. David Wh...