Metabole

The Stoic practice of actively transforming external resistance into moral and intellectual growth through reappraisal — stripping obstacles of their negative meaning and using them as material for virtue, patience, and the training of reason.

Metabole (from Greek metabolē = change, transformation) denotes in Stoic philosophy the specific process by which the faculty of judgment (prohairesis) strips an external obstacle of its negative meaning and instead uses it as material for the exercise of virtue, patience, and the cultivation of reason. This is neither passive acceptance nor a denial of suffering, but an active — often arduous — transformation of adversity into substance of the soul. It takes place exclusively within the hegemonikon, the ruling faculty, and not within external circumstances themselves.