The Dao Diaries: My New Weekly Column

If you read my piece on Taoism — When Your World is On Fire, Be Water — you’ll know that a little over a month ago I encountered Taoist philosophy. It was 3am and I was unable to sleep, stressed, anxious, and for some unknown but undeniably divine reason, I typed “Tao philosophy” into Spotify’s search bar.

For the past month, I started reading the Tao Te Ching. I’ve additionally listened to podcasts, read books, found random Taoist blogs, watched YouTube videos, and learned a lot more about the thought process of Taoism.

It has been a uniquely rare intellectual experience in which the information I’m learning doesn’t seem new, but rather, like remembering something I intuitively have always known. But failed to put into practice.

It has been divine timing. Over the past month, as stressful as my life has been, I have discovered peace within the chaos. I have slowly started to practice the concept of being like water.

And if you’re new to Taoism like I was, the biggest perspective shift has been that being like water is not about being passive or apathetic. Water is about being strong, but being flexible. Being soft and effortless, but still moving forward in the direction of your goals. A river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence.

I immediately started integrating Taoism into my daily life. Not in an “optimizer” way or with stringent rules. I just started to work the ideas into my daily life in small, specific ways. And almost instantly I realized this was not a passing interest. I told my husband that I was certain that this was a rabbit hole I would be in for the rest of my life.

I started telling my friends what I was learning about and how – so quickly — it was changing my life in real time. I felt better equipped to handle the stress and overwhelm I was facing in my life, and I wasn’t even trying to “adopt” new habits, I was actually just letting a lot of things go, and allowing my grip on my life to loosen.

I love sharing new ideas, hence this entire Substack. So now I’m going to share my journey into Taoism here on Feeling Good with Emilina: The Dao Diaries.

I’ll aim for a post a week, perhaps with each article loosely connected to a chapter from the Tao Te Ching. But I’m going to move through it with ease, not tension. So let’s see what arises.

Most of the “suffering” I observe in modern life — in myself, in the people around me, in the cultural mood generally — is not caused by a lack of information, resources, or opportunity.

In a way, for many people, it’s a problem of excess. It’s a fundamental misalignment. We live in tension, with tense shoulders and a clamped-down jaw. We walk, if we ever do, with our hands in fists. We yell at people in traffic, we compare ourselves to strangers online, and we are exposed to way too much information at all times.

We are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix, because the exhaustion is not physical. It is the exhaustion of a life swam upstream.

Taoism breaks down the accumulated assumptions that you have about how you think your life ought to be. It gives you a framework for distinguishing between effort that is aligned with your nature and effort that is working against it.

One of the first ways I started integrating these newfound lessons into my life was doing a comprehensive life audit. I wanted to figure out what I actually wanted my life to prioritize — not what I thought I should want, or what looked impressive from the outside.

So I worked through 10 questions inspired by Taoist principles. Things like what gives me energy? What am I forcing? What does “enough” actually look like for me?

I journalled my answers and then used AI almost like a mirror, asking it to find the patterns I couldn’t necessarily see myself. From there, I created my five real priorities, my personal hierarchy, a paragraph describing my Way, and a weekly structure for actually living according to those priorities — while accepting that there are still groceries to buy, children to parent, emails to answer and work that needs to get done.

Don’t get me wrong: My point is NOT to engineer some perfectly Zen existence. It’s to identify where my energy is going, what genuinely matters to me, and what I might be able to simplify, stop forcing, or simply let go of.

I loved the exercise so much that I turned the entire process — including all the questions and AI prompts I used — into The Taoist Life Audit.