We tend to picture growth as a line moving forward.

Chapter 25 of the Daodejing, one of ancient China's most important books of wisdom, gives greatness another shape: receding, far-reaching, returning.

I begin with the hobbits leaving the Shire and eventually returning home profoundly changed, then turn toward something much closer to my own life. After four months away from martial arts, I'm preparing to spar again. I have ideas about what psychological reflection and Daoist practice may have changed. Sparring gives me somewhere to find out.

The chapter also raises an important distinction: not every retreat is far-reaching. Avoidance retreats from uncertainty into what is already familiar. A different kind of retreat takes us beyond the conditions where our existing answers work.

Through Tolkien, music, psychology, motor learning, leadership, and my own return to training, Chapter 25 asks a simple question:

When we return to familiar territory, what comes back with us?

A Star Tribune story about Minneapolis Public Schools losing $4.1 million in special-education reimbursements sent me digging. Then I found an astonishing divide: White students near the national top while Black, Hispanic, and Asian student groups rank near the bottom among comparable reporting groups.

My first explanation was ideological. Maybe an intensely equity-focused school system had overreached. The evidence would not stay that simple. The farther I looked, the more the question shrank toward attention, knowledge, time, and what actually happens when a child does not learn what was taught.

Chapter 24 of Daodejing begins with two bodies: one on tiptoe, one taking too long a stride. From schools to therapy to mortality and self-esteem, this episode asks when something worthwhile becomes superfluous because the life or system carrying it is already full. And what changes when we leave enough room to stand, walk, love, play, settle, and let something remain undone.

A gust is real. It doesn’t need to become the climate.

Chapter 23of Daodejing begins with wind and rain that cannot sustain their intensity, then turns toward something stranger: alignment with Dao, De, and even loss.

After a weekend camping alone in North Dakota, watching squirrels fight and stop, and turning around when a massive bull blocked the trail, I began thinking about identity, politics, and the exhausting human habit of keeping every conflict at full intensity.

Race, sex, nationality, political affiliation, and history can all matter without becoming the whole field. Progress can be real while injustice remains real. And sometimes the smallest loss we accept keeps us from creating a much larger one.

What does it mean to become one of Dao when reality refuses to stay the way we want it?

What happens when being right gets in the way of hearing the person you love?

Chapter 22 of the Daodejing begins:

Bent leads to wholeness.
Sunken leads to fullness.
Lack leads to gain.

This week I noticed how quickly I “straighten” things in conversations with my partner. A comment feels unfair, defensiveness rises, and before she finishes speaking I’m already preparing the correction.

Chest tightens. Jaw sets. The answer forms.

I’m no longer receiving anything.

I’m full.

In this episode, I explore bending as a relational practice, the difference between disagreement and contention, and why I translate 聖人 (shengren) not as “sage,” but as “the deep listener.”

We also touch on couples therapy, clinging to views in Buddhism, and the Bhagavad Gita’s treatment of attachment to winning.

Maybe wholeness doesn’t begin with getting everything straight.

Maybe it begins with leaving enough room for something new to enter.

What happens when reality refuses to fit the categories we use to understand it?

In Chapter 21 of the Daodejing, Laozi tries to describe Dao “as a thing” and finds something that flickers: unclear, misty, containing image, substance, vital essence, and evidence.

In this episode, I explore The Subtle Way through the strange behavior of the double-slit experiment, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, the Daoist practice text Neiye, and the human urge to turn uncertainty into certainty.

Quantum physics doesn’t prove Daoism. Laozi wasn’t secretly describing photons. But both can disturb our confidence that reality is made of stable things waiting for us to correctly name them.

What happens when we stop demanding the final explanation and stay with what can actually be observed?

Image. Thing. Vital essence. Evidence.

Not certainty.

Evidence.

Chapter 21 of the Daodejing: The Subtle Way.

What happens when you no longer need to prove that your day was useful?

In Chapter 20 of the Daodejing, everyone else appears bright, discerning, prosperous, and certain of their place in the world. The speaker stands apart: dim, muddled, coarse, alone.

After retiring, I discovered that stopping work was easier than stopping the need to justify my time. Every empty afternoon wanted to become a project. Every hour needed a purpose.

Then something began to loosen.

In this episode, we explore usefulness, productivity, belonging, fear, the strange freedom of being “left behind,” and the chapter’s final image of a newborn feeding at the mother.

What if a life doesn’t have to earn the space it occupies?

Includes my translation and reading of Chapter 20 in Chinese.

The Dao with Ian Felton app is available on the App Store and Google Play, featuring the podcast, meditation timer, journal, and foundational Daoist texts.

Most advice begins with a chisel. Chapter 19 puts it down.

As I prepare to move, I sort through a lifetime of accumulated books—and begin to recognize the identities they once helped me construct. Psychology. Natural history. Social commentary. Years of trying to understand enough to make life manageable and, perhaps, protect myself from death.

Moving between a powerful psychedelic experience, my work as a psychotherapist, music, and the ordinary ritual of making tea, I explore the difference between curiosity and accumulation, kindness and the need to be good, skill and the need to gain.

But Chapter 19 does not merely tell us what to strip away. Beneath the identities and defenses we relinquish, there must be something to belong to.

Dao is not another identity we adopt. It is what we already belong to.

This episode includes my original translation of Chapter 19 and a closing reading in Chinese.

A while back I sat in an urgent care chair and noticed my mind doing math about my insurance deductible instead of asking whether my brain was okay. That gap — between the genuinely human thing and the system-approved version of it — is the whole of Chapter 18.

The Daodejing watches eight short lines do the same thing four times: something whole breaks, and a named virtue shows up to fill the hole. Benevolence, duty, filial piety, the loyal minister — all of them arriving late, as symptoms. The word for kindness shows up exactly when kindness has left the room.

We hold it against Zhuangzi's stranded fish, keeping each other alive with spit on the dry mud — heroic, moving, and a perfect measure of how far the water has dropped. The Neiye gives the method: tend what's underneath, and the warmth doesn't need a name. The Daodejing gives the warning: the moment you reach for the warmth directly, you get the performance of it instead.

No belief required. Just something you can feel for in your own body — the cold of the calculation, and the warmth waiting underneath it.

The companion app — meditation timer, journal, the podcast, and the foundational texts — is on the App Store and Google Play. Search for Dao with Ian Felton.

The United States turns 250 this July 4th, and the country is busy assembling the stories it needs to tell about itself. Chapter 17 gives us a ladder — barely-known, loved, feared, despised — and refuses to let us stand outside the rung we're on.

This episode tracks the descent without the lie that makes it comfortable: there was never a golden age to fall from. Not for America, not in Laozi's China either. The text invents a lost top rung from inside the rubble of the Warring States — the same move we make every time we reach backward for the years when it was good.

What's actually lost isn't unity. It's 自然 — the felt sense that we did it ourselves. And the contempt so many of us are carrying into this anniversary isn't a verdict on the bottom rung. It's a reading from inside it.

The one place that agency is still recoverable is the only place the noise can't reach: the felt sense of your own next action.

We sit with the difference between stillness and numbness, with a kind of watching that lets a thought arise and lets it go back down without riding off on it, and with the hardest line in the chapter — that returning to the root means returning to the whole turning of things, every season in it, the last one included. Zhuangzi keeps us company here: the man who sits like withered wood, the man found drumming on a tub and singing the day his wife died.