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Valerie Roney

ToV 16 – January Blues? Find your Centre!

Though I have my own tradition of post-Christmas meltdowns, I think it’s a rather universal thing. There’s even a name for it: Blue Monday – that day in January when all the excitement of the holidays has worn of, the bills have started to come in, and months of Winter darkness have taken their toll. But I think there’s something else too.

The madness of December, an annual anomaly: your regular life left in stasis for a while. The trouble comes in January when you pick up your life again after been separated from it for a while. It gives you some perspective, and that perspective is sometimes disconcerting. When you’ve stepped away from the busy daily grind and can actually look at your life, there’s often a moment of: What the hell? This isn’t what I wanted for myself, this isn’t what I wanted to be doing.Read More »ToV 16 – January Blues? Find your Centre!

ToV 15 – Mud Settles and email Clears

I’ve spent a lot of the last 14 chapters trying to explain how Taoism isn’t some lay down in the dirt, do nothing, don’t try sort of principle, but a passiveness with an innate, more natural drive – wei wu wei, action arising from stillness. It’s hard to find the words to articulate it, which is why when I came to this stanza in chapter 15, I was inwardly shouting YES and pointing emphatically.

Do you have the patience to wait
til your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
til the right action arises by itself?

So, there ya go! It isn’t about doing nothing, it’s about doing nothing until it’s time to do the right thing. In Taoist circles, we joke about Taoist Problem Solving i.e. do nothing and see if the problem resolves itself. This strategy often makes other people nuts when they’re thinking: there’s a problem ohmyGod do SOMETHING! More often than not, when the mud settles, turns out things aren’t such a problem after all. At the very least, you get a clearer idea of what actually still needs to be done.

I was talking to a friend the other day, she’d inadvertently stumbled upon this sort of problem solving simply by being too busy and flooded with emails. Read More »ToV 15 – Mud Settles and email Clears

ToV 14 – the Tao of Ranting?

I had a good rant the other day, about The Secret …and the Celestine Prophecy. I don’t get my knickers in a twist about much these days, but the cerebralization of the spiritual, the ego-greed- material commercialization of what is an innate human need makes me a little bonkers (and yes, the fact I get ranty about that is part of the stuff I’m still working on). So, I’m really digging a line from the next chapter in the Tao Te Ching:

You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

When you’re “in the Tao” you’re in the flow, and it’s easy; there’s no resistance, because you’re not resisting. That’s not to say it’s not work, that it’s always smooth sailing; there will be rough waters and work to do. Challenging your own bullshit, getting out of your own way, is sometimes a painful, tumultuous, process. But most of the suffering comes from your own resistance to the process.

Sometimes resistance comes in sneaky guise (that monkey mind is a clever clever monkey). One of the sneaky ways to offer resistance to that “wisdom” of “where you come from” is the surface approach to the spiritual process. Read More »ToV 14 – the Tao of Ranting?

ToV 13 – Hope as a Delusion

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

But but… I hear you saying in protest to these lines, the ideas of success and hope so ingrained into our collective psyches. Just hear me out, it’ll make more sense shortly!

We’re starting to get into variations on themes here in these chapters and this calls back to Chapter two’s No Judging! Here we have a different spin on the same principle, and one that may be a little more painful to look at.

I was watching Love and Other Drugs the other night, about a woman with early onset Parkinson’s. Some fella falls in love with her, starts dragging her around to no end of cutting edge experimental treatments until she finally gets pissed off and walks out; tired of living life in hospitals, she wants to get back to her actual life. The fella chases her down, asks: “Don’t you want to get better?” She answers: “Yes. Desperately. It’s not gonna happen.” This woman’s got the wisdom to live the life she’s got rather than wasting it on pursuing the life society says she should have.

Hope, just because it’s optimistic doesn’t make it any less a delusion. Read More »ToV 13 – Hope as a Delusion