Surrender: The peace the Tao offers.
Reflection
The hardest instruction in the Tao Te Ching may be the simplest: relax. Surrender. Stop holding on.
We spend our lives learning to grasp opportunity, to control outcomes, to clutch what we love so that it doesn’t slip away. The closed fist feels like security. It feels like power. But a closed fist limits us because it limits the magic that life has to offer.
The river doesn't decide where to go or how to get there. It meets the rock and goes around it. It meets the cliff and falls. It doesn't negotiate with gravity or argue with the shape of the land. And yet it arrives. It always arrives. Not because it forced its way, but because it yielded, and in that yielding, it became powerful.
This is not passivity. The river is not inactive; but its action has no resistance in it. No part of the river is bracing against the world. Its energy flows toward the sea, uninhibited by what the river itself wants the journey to look like.
When you surrender the need to control the shape of your life, something unexpected happens: you invite in powerful forces that can’t be explained or understood. The tree that refuses to bend snaps. The person who cannot release their image of how things should be breaks against the world's refusal to cooperate. But the supple survive. The yielding endure. When you stop holding on to the illusion that you are separate from this force, you discover you were never doing anything alone.
This doesn't mean passivity in the face of injustice or suffering. It means releasing the story you've written about how your efforts should pay off, and instead remaining attentive to what's actually unfolding. It means holding your plans lightly. It means listening rather than forcing and choosing.
Surrender is not loss. It is how we remain open to the magic that life offers.
Questions to Consider
Close your eyes. Relax into the flow of your life. Don't judge—just notice. What image emerges that summarizes where you are in your life right now? Is it more like the water’s current or the rock that obstructs the current?
Empty the hand,
and the Tao fills it
Receiving what the closed fist never could.
A river doesn’t try to reach the sea.
It surrenders to gravity,
to the shape of the land,
to every obstacle that it encounters
And it arrives.
It always arrives.
You cannot take hold of the Tao.
You can only stop holding on
to everything else.
Yield and overcome.
Empty and be full.
The tree that cannot bend cracks in the wind.
While the supple and yielding survive and thrive.
What remains when the desire to control outcomes ceases
Is the peace the Tao offers through harmony.
. . .
Everything Heron Dance does and offers is summarized here.
Zen Buddhism resulted from the encounter between Buddhism from India and Taoism from northern China. Poetry was an important part of the tradition of the Taoist hermit monks of the Zhongnan Mountains. The Tao Te Ching is the best known of those poems but there were thousands of others written over two thousand years ago. Many are as beautiful and mysterious as the Tao.
Zen Mountain Journal also draws from the poetry of the Zen Buddhist monks of old Japan.
Zen Mountain Journal offers a Taoist journaling practice for those who seek to connect with inner worlds, with the deep silence and peace within. The poems and paintings in these posts are part of a journal now being created by Heron Dance Press. It will be available for preorder shortly.
The Zen Mountain Journal is reader supported but there is no obligation to contribute. If you would be willing to contribute, please do that here.