Some Days It's Hard to Stay Coherent

Hi Mindful Writers,

Welcome to the latest of my regular posts exploring how the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching applies in our modern life. Sometimes I use my own life to explore it, sometimes a fictional story, sometimes a bit of both. This month’s chapter is from the Stephen Mitchell translation (which you’ll know if you’re a regular reader is my favourite one!).

Before we get started I want to let you know that the early-bird price for the 12-week Mindful Memoir Course starting in September ends on Friday. Sign up before then to get the reduced rate (and if you took the original 6-week course you get a discount off this one too!). Get all the info and apply here.

Friday is also the submission deadline for the September edition of WestWord, which is the lit mag I founded and run. Send us your stories on the theme!

And there’s still time to sign up for the Rewriting the Story course, running in both August and September as live Zoom sessions. This is for women who want to to write a new story and break free from the one their mother told about them. Info here.

Applications for Year of Mindful Writing 2027 open in just over 6 weeks. Which I can’t quite believe! This course has sold out every year since I launched it in 2023 and writers from every year have continued for the following years. Join the waitlist for 2027 and you’ll be sent the application form a week before it opens to everyone else, which means you’ll get first dibs on the limited number of mentored spaces available. I’ve revamped things a little too and it’s going to be even better than before!

Now, on to the Tao Te Ching…

Back in 2023, I used this chapter to explore my feelings of confusion and yearning for a home as yet another house sit arrangement turned out to be people wanting to take advantage of me and Mr Saint.

A situation that continued for a quite some time longer and culminated in the final work for accommodation arrangement we ever plan to do in March 2025 (but never say never as life is unpredictable indeed!), where the accommodation was uninhabitable and we ended up with nowhere to live at all for five months. As you can see by the title of that one, I explored the penultimate verse of this chapter in relation to my predicament.

Today, I want to look more deeply at the first and second verses and how they speak to our modern times and ways of being.

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.

Subtlety and depth don’t seem to be the traits that are respected and revered in our modern times. There’s not a lot of nuance and transformative exploration of what it means to be human in many of the books, music, films, and TV shows being published today. To find the profound and subtle works of art and artists producing them, you have to either be in the know or search very hard.

And when the entertainment we consume doesn’t engage us on deeper and more meaningful levels, over time, we stop knowing how to engage with ourselves and others in this way. In the physical wellness and longevity programs I watch and articles I read, a phrase that is used often is, “Use it, or lose it,” and I believe this applies to our emotional, behavioural, spiritual and psychological muscles too.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.

I’ve written many times about how I feel social media has changed us. And I think it has definitely suppressed these aspects of our psyche. When we’re scrolling and clicking, hearting and thumbs upping and downing, buying things on a whim that we don’t need, or really want, we’re not being careful at all. We’re not alert to the real world we inhabit, to the physical needs of our bodies and emotional and spiritual needs of our minds, we’re lost in a world of soundbites and clickbait and a lot of negative emotions that these platforms seem to be full of.

And courtesy often seems to be a forgotten trait completely on social media where people think nothing of attacking others with vicious words, judgements and personal insults, even when they have never had any interactions with a person before. I too got caught up in all of the angst and doom scrolling and buying things I didn’t need but I slowly started to realise that it wasn’t doing me any good. Which is why I closed all my accounts down several years ago. The reason why I’m wondering how much longer Substack will remain a nice place to be, as day-by-day it seems to be becoming more and more like the other platforms I left behind.

But we can choose not to let these platforms condition us in these ways. We can choose not to let them brainwash us into staying on the surface, easily provoked to say and do things we haven’t thought through.

Fluid as melting ice.
Shapable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

So how can we be fluid, shapable, receptive and clear and what does it mean to be those things? I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching for many years now and I don’t have any definitive answers about this (or anything!), as what I think and feel about each chapter changes depending on when I read it.

Today as I write this, being fluid as melting ice and shapable as a block of wood means to me that I need to be open to new ideas and adaptable to new situations, flexible in my thinking and willing to change my mind. Receptive as a valley makes me think I need to have the capacity to let new perspectives, new people, new ways of being move towards me, through me and away from me and to accept that some of what comes and goes will bring lightness and some will bring darkness.

Being clear as a glass of water is about my thinking and communication, I need to keep my thoughts and the words I say and write coherent and nourishing of all life, just like water is. But just like everything I do, sometimes this will go well, sometimes not so well. But one of the best things my mindfulness practice has brought to me is to accept whatever comes and not judge myself harshly for the times when it doesn’t go so well.

I am a middle-aged woman in perimenopause living through what appears to be the breakdown of the society and way of living I have always known. I am self-employed in the arts in a time when they are deemed of no value. In a time when people’s income for taking writing courses is shrinking. Some days it’s hard to stay coherent and nourishing. Some days I’m overwhelmed and exhausted and irritable and scared. But I know that these feelings are flowing through my valley and will pass on by soon enough.

What about you? What do these verses make you feel and think about what’s happening in your life today?

With love,

Amanda 💙

• When was a time you realised you’d lost a skill or capacity through not using it? What was it, and have you come back to it?

• Describe a moment when you caught yourself being careless, reactive, or discourteous online, face-to-face with someone, or in your consumption habits. What was happening for you at that time?

• Explore a time when you had to adapt quickly to changed circumstances. How did being “fluid as melting ice” or “shapable as a block of wood” help you navigate it?

• Write about a time when you “let the mud settle” before you took action. How did that change the outcome?

• Write a character who is the opposite of the Masters - loud, rigid, reactive, murky. Show the specific moment when this backfires and creates real consequences.

• Create two characters in conflict: one who has learned to be careful, alert, and courteous; one who hasn’t. Show how their different approaches to a situation lead to very different outcomes.

• Write about a character who discovers that their “strength” (their rigidity, their certainty, their need to control) has been slowly destroying something they love. What does the reckoning look like?

• Explore a character who is so conditioned by surface-level engagement that they’ve forgotten how to be present with another person. Show one moment where presence breaks through.

I’d love to hear what comes up for you with these prompts if you’d like to share in the comments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching. You can read the other posts in this series here.

With love,

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