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."
I caught myself getting annoyed at another driver before they had even done anything. I was watching to see whether they would use their blinker—not because I needed the information yet, but because I was waiting for them to do it wrong.
That became the practice behind Chapter 26 of the Daodejing: “Stillness is sovereign over restlessness.”
This episode explores the small territory before anger or road rage—the tightening, judgment, and pre-annoyance that can quietly begin organizing attention. What changes when we remain alert without becoming irritated? Can we see careless driving clearly without letting another driver govern our nervous system?
Driving became a surprisingly good laboratory for deep listening: watching speed, distance, wheels, movement, and the whole field rather than demanding that everyone around us perform perfectly.
Chapter 26 calls this gravity. Heaviness roots lightness. Stillness remains sovereign inside movement.
Dao with Ian Felton applies the ancient wisdom of the Daodejing to ordinary life today. The companion Dao app includes the podcast, foundational texts, meditation timer, and journal.
9 Sept 2026
Cycles - When Going Backward Is Part of Growth
We tend to picture growth as a line moving forward.
Chapter 25 of the Daodejing, one of ancient China's most important books of wisdom, gives greatness another shape: receding, far-reaching, returning.
I begin with the hobbits leaving the Shire and eventually returning home profoundly changed, then turn toward something much closer to my own life. After four months away from martial arts, I'm preparing to spar again. I have ideas about what psychological reflection and Daoist practice may have changed. Sparring gives me somewhere to find out.
The chapter also raises an important distinction: not every retreat is far-reaching. Avoidance retreats from uncertainty into what is already familiar. A different kind of retreat takes us beyond the conditions where our existing answers work.
Through Tolkien, music, psychology, motor learning, leadership, and my own return to training, Chapter 25 asks a simple question:
When we return to familiar territory, what comes back with us?
2 Sept 2026
Superfluity: When More Becomes Less
A Star Tribune story about Minneapolis Public Schools losing $4.1 million in special-education reimbursements sent me digging. Then I found an astonishing divide: White students near the national top while Black, Hispanic, and Asian student groups rank near the bottom among comparable reporting groups.
My first explanation was ideological. Maybe an intensely equity-focused school system had overreached. The evidence would not stay that simple. The farther I looked, the more the question shrank toward attention, knowledge, time, and what actually happens when a child does not learn what was taught.
Chapter 24 of Daodejing begins with two bodies: one on tiptoe, one taking too long a stride. From schools to therapy to mortality and self-esteem, this episode asks when something worthwhile becomes superfluous because the life or system carrying it is already full. And what changes when we leave enough room to stand, walk, love, play, settle, and let something remain undone.
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