The Stoic practice of continuous attention to your own mind. Not meditation in the modern sense. Something more demanding.
The Greek word prosoche translates as attention or watchfulness. For the Stoics it referred to a continuous, non-judgmental attention to the movements of your own mind: your impressions, your desires, your fears, your automatic reactions. Not to suppress them. To see them clearly before you act on them.
Pierre Hadot, the philosopher who did the most to recover Stoic spiritual practices, described prosoche as the fundamental Stoic spiritual exercise. Without it, all the other practices are incomplete. You cannot examine your day if you have not been paying attention during it. You cannot apply the dichotomy of control in a crisis if you have not been practising it in quiet moments.
In practical terms, prosoche means developing the habit of noticing the gap between a stimulus and your response to it. The craving appears. The argument flares. The shame arrives. Prosoche is the practice of seeing these things arise without immediately being swept along by them.
"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."
Epictetus, Discourses
Step 11 asks for conscious contact, which is a remarkably good description of prosoche. Not unconscious reaction. Conscious engagement with what is happening in your mind and in your life.
The phrase praying only for knowledge of his will and the power to carry it out has a Stoic parallel that is exact: the Stoics distinguished between knowing what virtue requires in a given situation and having the discipline to act on that knowledge. Knowing is not enough. The capacity to act on what you know requires a separate kind of development.
The regular practice this step calls for, whatever form it takes for you, is building that capacity. It does not have to be religious. It does not have to be silent. It does not have to look like what others' practices look like. It has to be yours, and it has to be consistent. Consistency is where the development happens.
Try this for one day: whenever you feel a strong emotion, pause for three slow breaths before responding to it. Just the pause. Not suppression, not analysis. Just a small gap between the feeling and the reaction. At the end of the day, write down what you noticed. That is the beginning of prosoche.