Join Us As We Muddle Through This Podcast On A Rainy Morning

We sit with a stormy morning and use Taoist wisdom to turn chaos into calm, tracing how acceptance changes our experience without dulling our drive. From blackout memories to the Tower card, we explore flow, resistance, and practical ways to steer change.

• freezing rain and last year’s blackout memories
• sharing power, heaters and neighborly coffee
• tarot pulls: Tower, Water and Four of Wands
• be like water as a core metaphor
• Tao Te Ching as a practical guide
• mind-like-water for thoughts and emotions
• continuums over rigid contrasts
• a burnout-to-Tao turning point in law practice
• meditation, nature and everyday acceptance
• India monsoon story as a surrender moment
• spotting resistance and choosing clear action
• small shifts creating wider ripples

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

We are on the line.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

On a rainy morning.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 0:15

Rainy, like we haven't had in six months. We are lucky to keep all alive though. Because this time last year there was freezing rain, and we were starting 10 days. It was at the end of March. It was like 10 days we went without power.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Yeah. And we have now friends in the chat that are under the same, hopefully not 10 days. Let's let's say that.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

No, it doesn't look as bad as it was last year, but it's still bad. I mean, it's it's all across essentially go 20 kilometers north of us, and everybody had freezing rain.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:57

And given the volume of rain we've had, they had that in freezing rain, and that's meant power outages. So we were looking, and there's literally thousands of homes without power north of us.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, just north of us. Like we we really are on the edge. Yeah, in the chat, grateful for the wood stove. Oh my gosh, wouldn't that wonderful?

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Yeah, that's great. That's beautiful having a wood stove. That's what we suffered through last year, was that we had no heat.

Survival Lessons And Community Coffee

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Oh my gosh, it was hot. It was crazy. We we uh you decided uh very early on, thankfully, to go get gas for the generator. And so you went into town, low local town, and there was no gas. And then you turned around and you went down south of us and you found gas, but the gas station shut down like right after.

SPEAKER_03 1:53

No, it was yeah, it was bizarre because we were getting gas almost every day, and we were driving as far as we had to drive to get it.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:02

Um, to keep the generator going.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

But we had, we we were able, it was a miracle. We had coffee every morning.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

And we fully we fully coffeeized our neighbor. She she started coming over what time, like 7 a.m. or something to get it through her pot's full of nothing.

SPEAKER_03 2:28

Fill up performances to help her get through the day.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Yeah. My gosh, what a time.

SPEAKER_03 2:34

She wouldn't come and just stay with us. No, it was the weirdest thing. I won't take it personally.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

No. But we had every heater, like we had the generator running in the garage nonstop. And we had a long plug, an extension cord, and we plugged in every kind of heater we had into our little tiny living room and tried our best to live through it.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

You know, people come to look at our house and they say, geez, it's kind of small. Uh last year at this time I was pretty happy it was.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:09

Yeah. Changes, changes come upon us all of a sudden. Changes can be thrust upon us. Changes can be thrust upon us, and then we look upon uh through the path that led us there and realize we created it for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Well, maybe not, maybe not the ice ring, but you know, this is this is just like this is just a reason to be grateful for the life we have. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:38

Pretty weird.

Change, Tarot, And The Water Metaphor

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Yeah. I pulled we got up in the dark this morning, trudging along, getting ready for the podcast. We're like, what are we gonna talk about? And it's funny because I pulled cards to try to figure that out. And the tower showed up right away, and then and then I was like, no, another card. And so I pulled another card and it was water, which is kind of like what we're talking about this morning. And then I was like, no, another card. So then I pulled the four of wands, which I think I mean, it looks like people are celebrating. So maybe that means our friends in the chat will have their power turned on soon. Yeah, yeah, our water system is running right now. Speaking of water, so yeah, we're we're just I think talking about change this morning. I know we talk about it a lot, but just how we can, I guess, be like water through that change. And how we interpret the change is largely how we experience the change. And if we've if we fight against it, it just makes everything really hard.

Taoist Roots: Be Like Water

SPEAKER_03 4:55

Yeah. I think there's a lot of value that gets missed in philosophy. I think we're we're at a time in the world where people are are searching for philosophies, searching for a new way to look at things, searching for new broad ideas to shift our interpretation of our reality. I think that philosophies are incredible tools, especially when they can be applied across multiple circumstances. And, you know, the philosophy that I I think about in times like this, especially when somebody says water, is Taoist philosophy from sort of the the oldest times. It's really one of the oldest books on the planet that we have, you know, pushing 3,000 years old. The Tao Ta Qing, the great, the great book on the way of virtue, Tao meaning the way, the way things are, the way things work, the way things happen, the way to be, being virtue. And yeah, primarily in the Tao Ta Jing, it really, really tries to encourage you to see yourself as water and be like water and act like water and see the power of water. And I guess you know, on a day when we've been hammered by rain that freezes and messes with our systems, it's a good day to be like water and find the lowest, most comfortable place. Settle in, realizing that water is a powerful, powerful thing, and to mimic water, to be like water, is to give yourself an enduring power. Not not a momentary thing. You know, the rain flattens a mountain over millions of years, and it's the rain that does it, and it's patient and it moves as the forces direct it. Water doesn't resist, but if you've ever tried to move your hand quickly through water, you could feel its resistance, its power, its strength of being. So that your natural strength settles in, and at the same time, your flexibility and adaptability is always available. It's not that water isn't incredibly powerful or possibly the greatest force on earth. Because what all the other forces do gets dampened. No pun intended, but it's a good one. Gets dampened by the forces of water, right? Fire can be extinguished, right? Heat, that kind of power is amazing, and yet water can overcome it.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

And even a trickling stream over years will will wear down the earth around it or rocks around it.

SPEAKER_03 8:17

Yes, water holds energy.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Oh, yeah, in the chat. Yes, even the hardest rock gets worn away by water flow.

Mind Like Water: Thoughts And Emotions

SPEAKER_03 8:23

Yes. The earth, the fire, the wind um carries water. It integrates water. It's why we have water finds its way into earth, into fire, into wind.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

So just like the card suggests, be like water.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

How can when we think of the mind? I'm gonna put you on the spot. How can the mind be like water? How can you use your mind like water?

SPEAKER_00 9:02

I suppose when you're either having external environment things happen, you can use the mind to not push against it, but find flow with it. And that goes for even your thoughts. No, sometimes what comes to me is maybe we do want to stop some thoughts, but in their tracks and chain and and decide on another thought, but even with emotions, instead of pushing against emotions with our thoughts, we can flow with the emotion, ask the emotion what's what it means, and move with it. And so I think there is lots of opportunities with the mind to be open to the external environment and the internal environment. I know for myself that if I'm pushing against my day, like what's what's happening around me, or if I'm not if I'm saying like, let's say I'm saying no to everything in life, that can really shut down the flow of life, I think, when you have blocks. I think it's a helpful. My rambling on mind and water.

Continuums Over Contrasts

A Lawyer Meets The Tao

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Oh my well, I think that to fight against thoughts is actually to reinforce them. To think counter-thoughts, to engage contradictory ideas, one creates the other, right? Back to Taoist philosophy, one of my favorite things, you know, is that you know, up defines down, this creates that, me creates you. You know, Taoist philosophy is is really clear that it is opposition, and that the truth is, is it's not it to be of water is to not be in opposition, but it treats everything equally. So to see, rather than there be contrasts, to see continuums, continue I to see a continuum of degrees, hot creates cold, but there is everything from frozen all the way to steaming, and every single degree along that path exists, you know, to see you know the continuum of pleasure all the way to pain as just the continuum of experience, degrees of the same thing. I'll just say that I I think for me, I have a particular predisposition to love Taoist philosophy, because in many respects I feel like it saved my life. Um, I was downtown Toronto, had my own office, Bay Street, right on the corner of Bay in Richmond, working my butt off being the lawyer that I thought I was supposed to be, and working, you know, 14-hour days every day, but one, working some days through the night, working and working and not feeling like I was getting anywhere. And I was really, really confused with myself because I would go through real extremes in my emotions. And when you go through extremes in your emotions, you go through extremes in your relationships. Even the people that you love more than life itself watch you go through these extremes, and then they become, you know, the bystanders and often the victims of those extremes in emotions and extremes in in energy. You know, when you have lots of energy and you put it in one place, and then there's no energy left for other places. Anyway, so the story is really simple. Right beside my office, and in the office tower next door, there opened an audiobook store, which was like a brand new thing. Like it was, we're talking about, you know, centuries ago. I I took I took away Hillary's way of saying it. She wanted to say it. She was biting your tongue down. But yeah, this was a long time ago. And and there was this audiobook store, and I was really interested because I was commuting massive, you know, a couple hours a day minimum, often three hours a day. And reading was just impossible for me because to sit and read would just cause me to fall asleep. And so finally I walked by this store enough times going to and from the coffee shop that I finally went in, and the biggest display was a display of a recording of Stephen Mitchell's translation of The Doubta Chain. And I had no idea what it was at the time. And I uh I looked at it and looked at it and looked at it and finally said, you know, because that would have been, you know, a collection of the time, here we go, of cassette tapes.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

I loved my cassettes, and uh but the data chang had just come out, right? Like it was just written.

SPEAKER_03 14:47

She's been waiting on that one for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Sorry, continue. I don't know.

Meditation, Nature, And Peace

SPEAKER_03 14:55

Okay, so cassette tapes were in the back in the dark ages when there was just cassette tapes. So yeah, I bought my first set of cassette tapes of Stephen Mitchell's doubt of ching and listened to it on my way home because it doesn't take a long time. It's a small, small book. And then I listened to it probably constantly every time I was in the car alone for months after that. And that had such an enormous shift in me, at least in my sense of hope and my sense of purpose, in my sense of understanding all the dynamics that I was going through. And it got to the point where I had the darn thing memorized. I got to the point where I wore out the cassettes and had to buy new ones. And I bought an extra set because I knew I was going to give a set to somebody, and I gave them to a colleague of mine. You know, it's Taoist philosophy is about understanding the power of your mind when it comes to interpreting the circumstances around you. Taoists are some of the original meditators. Meditation is a central part of any sort of Taoist practice. Um, it became a philosophy that really, really saved me because I began to see it in everything. And that's part of the the core of the Tao Tijing is the is the idea that um nature is the greatest teacher. Anyway, so when you pulled these cards, and it was change and it was water, and it was cups.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Uh no, four of wands. Yeah.

Freezing Rain As A Teacher

SPEAKER_03 16:59

You know, just energy and opposition and resistance are the ideas that came to me quickly, and they they come to me from having a philosophy that I turned to, still turned to it. It led me to a lot of other philosophies. I mean, it it's it's beautiful what it started in me. Uh you know, it led me to Buddhist philosophy, it led me to the Bhagavad Gita, it led me to Shinto philosophy, and that to Zen philosophy. That led me to Stoicism. Um, there are so many beautiful philosophies out there, just ways of thinking, ways of seeing, and then yeah, that's when peace begins. Because uh probably the best thing about philosophy is learning acceptance, allowing, letting things be, embracing what is, and addressing it sometimes. You know, freezing rain is part of our life in this part of the world. It's the most crazy thing that the air above us is warmer than the air down on the ground, and so that the air down on the ground was below zero, and so as the rain falls from the warm air down into the cold air, it freezes and then accumulates and then gets really heavy. And then things break.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Yeah, that was the craziest night last year where we woke up in the middle of the night after 24 hours. I don't even know how long ago, how long it was, but like up to 24 hours of freezing rain, and then we're just hearing cracking everywhere, trees just falling down. One fell on my car. It was crazy though, because like it just sort of it toppled over on my car, but in such a way that it didn't damage anything, it was it was insane.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Just lying on top of it. Yeah, yeah. Still took me an hour to get it all off.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

You know, this it's it's it's fun. I mean, we've been unable to do podcasts for a number of different reasons for the last few days. We haven't done one in a while. Yeah, I feel like it's been a long time, and much of that is just life's happenings and us adjusting. And you know, not engaging in shoulds, yeah, and not engaging in guilt. Life will throw you curveballs, life will I should use baseball analogies, life will bring you that which you did not expect. And if you're like water, you adjust, you find the lowest spot and you level out, and in that you find safety and you find stability. And that instability continues. We're not gonna be able to do a podcast tomorrow morning, are we?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

No, tomorrow's Thursday, so we're not doing a podcast.

SPEAKER_03 20:16

And we should be able to do one Friday. Friday. Oh, maybe not. I gotta go deal with Perry. My dad's estate stuff. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

It's a busy time.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

Spring is like that.

Acceptance In India: A Turning Point

SPEAKER_00 20:32

But yeah, just uh thinking about the acceptance of things. And you know, I think about a story coming to mind. It's not my story, it's my nanas. And she, if I'm getting the story right, I'm sure I'm messing up a little bit of it. But the gist of the story is she went to India years ago, back in uh early 90s. And she had always wanted to go to India and she got there and she just fought against everything. She fought against the heat. She, you know, mentally fought against the smells and the experience as a whole, and just the differences, the contrast. And and then on her trip, they went for months. I think they went for like six months or nine months or something. And on the trip at some point in the beginning, thankfully, the monsoons hit. And she when when like basically a river went through the town that she was in, she was out in the street, she was walking across a street or something, and she just had enough. And she just looked up at the sky and like yelled kind of thing like in that moment. Moment was this peace and acceptance that flowed over her. And then suddenly she just loved it all. Out of nowhere, just came this huge love and peace and acceptance for the whole experience. And then from that point on, she she just loved India, loves India. Like it's her favorite place besides home. And she just became part of the experience, became part like that water that was in the street taking things away. She just accepted the experience. So I think there can be a lot of peace in accepting the experience, right? Peace in our minds, peace in the bodies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:54

Yeah. Resisting is a path to suffering. We we judge things as good or bad, we judge them as as they should be. We expect things to have a moral value. This range shouldn't be. Judging it, proving to ourselves that our judgments serve nothing, they change nothing, they create rigid structures in our minds, and then everything goes from what it is to bad. To see the truth of that idea that nothing's ever good or bad, but thinking makes it so, that it is not what it is, but how we interpret it. That in this world things change. It's what they do constantly, all day long. And it's the resistance to change that creates suffering. It's the telling yourself, this is bad, this is wrong, this shouldn't happen, I shouldn't have to go through this, I shouldn't have to have this experience. People shouldn't do the things they do. Our leaders should act better than they do. It's the resistance that takes away the opportunity to grow. Seeing resistance in your own mind is a potentially enlightening event.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

And how do you witness the resistance?

SPEAKER_03 24:38

Well, sometimes you witness it by standing in the middle of a street and screaming and realizing that you are resisting what's going to happen anyway.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 24:53

You are resisting everything that's there. And in seeing your own resistance at its peak is when you can step away from it and see its pointlessness. See how it doesn't serve you, still it doesn't make anything better. With the uh spring comes the squirrels and our dog thinks that we need to be protected from. She's beautiful that way. So rather than resist her, we just open the door to let her go. Because she's going to get wound up no matter what. Yeah. Because that's her job. Keeping the things away, standing guard, which is what she's doing now.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah. So what were you saying? You were saying something.

The Tower Card And Loving Change

SPEAKER_03 25:40

Well, how do you how do you how do you witness your own resistance? I think sometimes you you don't witness it until it gets so extreme that it gets ridiculous. Sometimes we witness it simply by learning that technique of observing our mind, getting better and better and better at observing what goes on in our mind. I mean, it's a fundamental skill for for everything that we talk about. Learning to see inside yourself the things that you, the things that you react to, the things that you resist, the things that you like versus the things that you don't like. Observing things for what they are. Thoughts are very, very transient. There's a hundred thousand of them in your life today. Majority will be negative. The majority will be things that you have thought on previous days. Witnessing your thoughts as habits is what opens the opportunity to change them. Taking that which is typically unconscious and making it conscious creates the opportunity for change. As we sit here, we've been breathing. We haven't paid any attention to it. It's taken care of itself. And yet, right now, we can turn our attention to it, take control of it, and enjoy a nice deep cleansing breath, enjoying some relaxation and some peace. When we take those things that happen habitually, unconsciously, and we make them conscious, we can use them for our own benefit.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

And I think, you know, we had a laugh this morning when I pulled the tower right away. What are we going to talk about today? Pulled the tower. And we joke because we pull the tower a lot, or less pulls the tower a lot, I should say. Um, but it really is the interpretation. So for anyone that doesn't know the tower, the general in interpretation is is change, right? It's a it's a change, and it can be a dramatic change. And it is how we the the card asks us to notice how we are interpreting the change.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

Resisting it.

Harnessing Momentum Without Resisting

SPEAKER_00 28:03

Either resisting it or flowing with it. And there's beauty in the change to look for that. You know, there's there's these monarch butterflies coming up from the, you know, the lightning has struck the earth and and the earth looks like it's flowing upwards, almost like a cat cataclysm type thing happening here. And and yet there are butterflies flowing up from it. And there's dark in the corner and light in the other corner. And in the chat, we've got, are we excited or fearful? That's my relationship with the tower. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 28:42

Well, I've got a friend he uses this phrase and I love it. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah, that's true.

Small Changes, Big Ripples

SPEAKER_03 28:51

Nothing changes if nothing changes. And change is not to be avoided. In fact, sometimes we pursue it. Change is not to be resisted because with it all things are new. And if we're trapped inside the pattern of judgment of the way things should be and they're not, and then we're really resisting the change. And sometimes the best thing to do is grab a hold of the change and make it bigger than it intended. I think we're in a world of change. I think we're experiencing in the outer world so many things we didn't anticipate, so many things that have that that are just not what we're used to. And we can resist the change, we can fight against the change, we can call names and take sides, or we can grab the opportunity to change and keep pushing until it becomes what we want. Like water gathering momentum, moving down a hillside. Yes, it's going to wash away many things, but that's the opportunity to create new things. And that momentum, the power of water as it moves to the lowest spot, the lowest place can be mimicked by us. I really think that right now in the world, the worst thing we can do is resist. That doesn't mean we go along. It means that we take the momentum of change and we state clearly, this is not satisfactory to me. This is not my preference, this is not what I want. And then state very clearly to yourself, what do I want?

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Back to that question.

SPEAKER_03 30:44

What do I want? And create the thing that makes you stronger and safer, makes you clearer.

Closing Hopes And Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 30:52

Yeah. And as we said, oh gosh, maybe a month ago, we can create change just in our mind and in our environment. Just, you know, arms reach around us, or we can create change further out. But just know that whatever kinds of change you're making, whether it's a little change or a big change, it's it's having it's having its own ripple effect going outward to to different people, who knows, maybe across the world. It's that idea of the butterfly's wings. Flap of a butterfly's wings can I don't know if it's true or not, but the metaphor is nice. How it can create a storm in the, you know, in the Caribbean or in the Atlantic Ocean or something. But it's true. We can we can have such an effect, even if we just focus on our own mind. Yeah. So everyone, thank you for hanging out this morning and muddling through this podcast with us. We weren't exactly sure what we were going to talk about, but I think I hope we didn't get too bored. But yeah, I think change is always a good topic. Because it is, it's nonstop. And we want it to be non-stop because you know, I the the the the image that always comes to me is if we don't change, if we don't work on ourselves, we end up being like that you know that guy in in movies where he's sitting on his porch and he's rocking back and forth, and he's got his dog down by his side, and that's all well and good, but that to me represents I don't want to change, I don't want to do anything, I don't want to get up from here, I don't want to move, you know. And so yeah, that's that's what comes to mind. But anyway, I hope you guys have a good day. I hope that you get your power back on soon, and thanks for hanging out. We'll see you later.