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Laozi on Letting Go
A Practical Taoist Guide to Releasing Control and Moving with Life Instead of Against It
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Loss / 39m
A Practical Taoist Guide to Releasing Control and Moving with Life Instead of Against It
What are you holding so tightly that the holding itself has become painful?
Your work. Your children. A plan. An old argument. An outcome you cannot control. An idea of how life is supposed to go.
Laozi on Letting Go explores the ancient Taoist idea that strength does not always come from pushing harder. Sometimes the wiser move is to soften, make room, wait, adapt, or finish your part and step back.
The audiobook begins with a simple image: a clenched fist is strong, but while it remains closed it cannot receive anything new.
You’ll discover:
The goal is not to become passive. It is to stop using force where force is making life harder.
The audiobook also includes a practical Ancient Coping companion guide to help you notice where force, control, and over-involvement are making life harder than it needs to be.
It includes Around Not Through, Before the Brim, Let It Settle, Thirty Spokes, Step Back, guided reflection pages, and a seven-day Taoist practice for loosening your grip without giving up what matters.
We'll email you the first chapter of Laozi on Letting Go after you confirm your address.
Make a fist. Right now, while you are listening. Squeeze it as hard as you can. Hold it. Notice what happens. After a few seconds, your hand starts to ache. Your forearm tightens. If you keep going, your shoulder joins in, then your jaw. And notice something else. While your hand is clenched like that, it cannot hold anything. It cannot pick up a cup, shake a hand, or catch something thrown to you. A fist is strong, but it is also completely closed. Now open it. Slowly. Feel the blood come back. Feel the relief. That small exercise is the whole of this book, in about ten seconds. Most men go through life with a clenched fist somewhere inside. Around their work, their money, their children, their plans, their grudges, their idea of how things should go. They hold on, hard, because they believe that letting go means losing. And they cannot understand why they are so tired, so tense, and why the things they grip hardest seem to slip away anyway. About two and a half thousand years ago, in ancient China, there was a teacher who understood this better than perhaps anyone who has ever lived. His name, as it has come down to us, is Laozi, which simply means the old master. He left behind one short book, around five thousand Chinese characters long. You could read it in an afternoon. It has been translated more times than almost any book in the world except the Bible. And its central teaching is that the soft overcomes the hard, the yielding outlasts the rigid, and the man who learns to let go gets more of what matters, not less.
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