by Ian Felton
I’m Ian Felton, a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Daoist practitioner. Listen as I read the Daodejing in Chinese, craft a fresh translation, and discuss it with the aim of creating inner transformation for myself and the listeners. For those listeners who engaged with the original podcast, "Walking the Timeless Way," with David Wang, I hope you find the new format and approach rewarding. The episodes from that series have all been labeled as "Original Series."
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
2/20/2026
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June 24, 2026
<p>The United States turns 250 this July 4th, and the country is busy assembling the stories it needs to tell about itself. Chapter 17 gives us a ladder — barely-known, loved, feared, despised — and refuses to let us stand outside the rung we're on.</p><p>This episode tracks the descent without the lie that makes it comfortable: there was never a golden age to fall from. Not for America, not in Laozi's China either. The text invents a lost top rung from inside the rubble of the Warring States — the same move we make every time we reach backward for the years when it was good.</p><p>What's actually lost isn't unity. It's 自然 — the felt sense that we did it ourselves. And the contempt so many of us are carrying into this anniversary isn't a verdict on the bottom rung. It's a reading from inside it.</p><p>The one place that agency is still recoverable is the only place the noise can't reach: the felt sense of your own next action.</p>
June 10, 2026
<p>We sit with the difference between stillness and numbness, with a kind of watching that lets a thought arise and lets it go back down without riding off on it, and with the hardest line in the chapter — that returning to the root means returning to the whole turning of things, every season in it, the last one included. Zhuangzi keeps us company here: the man who sits like withered wood, the man found drumming on a tub and singing the day his wife died.</p><p><br></p>
June 3, 2026
<p>Anything can happen at any moment. Most of the energy in a day goes into making sure we don't have to feel that. The job, the people who love us, the home we'll go back to tonight, the self we point to when we say our own name. We stand on all of it like bedrock. The ancient ones knew it wasn't bedrock, and you can hear it in the first thing this chapter says about them. Not what they believed. How they moved.</p><p>This one starts with the fear of being watched and tracked, and what happens to that fear when you notice what, exactly, the watching has on file. From there: the ancient ones who excel with Dao, seven angles on a single way of moving through the world, and a man in Zhuangzi who looks at his own dissolving body and gets curious instead of afraid. Loose about the self. Careful about the body. Crossing the winter river awake.</p>
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I’m Ian Felton, a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Daoist practitioner. Listen as I read the Daodejing in Chinese, craft a fresh translation, and discuss it with the aim of creating inner transformation for myself and the listeners.
For those listeners who engaged with the original podcast, "Walking the Timeless Way," with David Wang, I hope you find the new format and approach rewarding. The episodes from that series have all been labeled as "Original Series."
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