Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - Meditation to welcome the new year - Taoism

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

A new year opens up new paths.Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My blog ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist

There is this moment at the very beginning of the day when light hasn't quite arrived yet. The sky hesitates between night and dawn. The world is silent, as if suspended between two breaths. It's a moment that asks for nothing. It doesn't demand to be seized, analyze, optimized. It is simply there, offered to whoever is willing to receive it. You can open a window and feel, the cool air on your face.

You can stay still for a moment, doing nothing but breathing. You can let the day come to you rather than rushing toward it. The new year resembles this dawn. It arrives gently without needing to be caught. It's already here, at the door, patient. And all we need to do is open it. But something in us wants to break down that door. Something wants to rush forward, grab the year with both arms, rest promises from it, bend it to our plans.

We've learned to treat every beginning as a battle to fight, a conquest to undertake, the territory to mark with our resolutions. What if this time we enter differently? Not as conquerors, but as hosts. Not by forcing, but by welcoming. not by demanding but by receiving. The year doesn't need our agitation to exist. It will unfold regardless day after day whether we rush it or not. The only question is, how do we want to move through it?

In tension or in presence? Running or walking, in noise or in attention. I'm not offering you a program or a method here. I'm not giving you resolutions to keep or goals to achieve, I'm simply inviting you to feel, to feel what is here at this beginning of the year before the mind seizes everything and transforms this fresh time into a to-do list. There is in every beginning a particular freshness, an openness, a possibility. But this freshness is delicate. It dissipates quickly under the assault of our habits.

it asks to be protected, cultivated, honored. To enter the year gently is perhaps first and foremost this, preserving that freshness, not immediately covering it with plans and projections, giving it time to exist before filling it, like letting an empty room breathe before installing furniture, like letting a blank page exist before writing on it. There is beauty in empty room. richness in unoccupied space.

And this beauty is often what we're searching for without knowing it. When we frantically accumulate to fill what we mistakenly take, enter gently, we must first look at what we carry. We don't arrive empty-handed at this new year, loaded with everything we've lived through, of course, and that is natural and precious. but loaded also with many things we haven't consciously chosen, things we picked up along the way without realizing it, weighing on our shoulders without us truly knowing why we still carry them.

First, there are expectations, those we've built over the years about what our life should be, what we should have accomplished at our age, what happiness should look like, And then the expectations of others real or imagined that diffuse pressure to correspond to something, to prove something, to become someone. These expectations are rarely examined. They're simply there, like constant background noise, a voice whispering, not enough.

Or comparisons. That habit so deeply rooted in us of looking at what others have, do, are, and measuring our life against that standard. Social media has amplified this phenomenon to absurdity, but it existed long before them. We compare ourselves to our friends, our colleagues, our siblings, to images of success we've internalized without knowing where they came from. And each comparison is a small wound,

a small voice saying, you're behind, you're not measuring up, look how others do better. There are also undigested projects. Everything we've started without finishing, promised without keeping, envisioned without realizing. These ghost projects that linger in a corner of our mind, neither truly abandoned nor truly pursued. They take up space.

They consume energy. Each time our thoughts brush against them, A small tension appears, a small, silent reproach. We carry them like unpaid debts, promises unkept to ourselves. And then there's everything else. Old resentments we haven't managed to release. Disappointments we still ruminate over. Fears we dare not look at directly.

Beliefs about ourselves we've never questioned. All of this forms an invisible but very, real baggage, a bag we carry on our backs, whose weight we've forgotten because we've been carrying it for so long. Imagine yourself walking with this bag. It's stuffed to bursting. Objects stick out from every side. Some are useful, precious even, true learnings, nourishing memories, connections that matter. But many others have no reason to be there anymore. They were useful once, perhaps, or we thought they would be. Now they only weigh down our steps, tire our shoulders, divert attention from what lies ahead. And your hands, look at them. Are they free? Or are they gripping tightly

things you dare not release? Certainties you cling to for fear of emptiness, identity, entities you maintain out of habit, possessions, material or symbolic, that you clutch as if your life depended on them. These encumbered hands cannot receive anything new. They're too busy holding what they already have. The simplicity I want to speak of is not an ideal to achieve through willpower. It's not a discipline we impose on ourselves, a diet for the soul, a cure, of austerity. It's rather what naturally appears when we begin to release what clutters. It's a lightning, not a deprivation.

It's what remains when we remove what isn't necessary. It isn't built. It reveals itself, like a statue that already exists within the block of marble and that the sculptor merely uncovers. This lightning begins with an honest look,

What am I really carrying? What weighs without serving? What am I holding onto out of fear rather than choice? These questions don't demand immediate answers or drastic decisions. They simply ask to be posed, sincerely, and to let the answers emerge at their own pace. Sometimes simply seeing clearly what we carry is enough to loosen our grip. What was held by, unconsciousness releases when consciousness illuminates it, I remember a morning when I realized I'd been carrying for years an expectation that wasn't mine, an image of what my life should be, inherited from my family, my culture, from, I don't know exactly where. This image had become so familiar that I no longer saw it. It had become part of my mental scenery, and yet it weighs.

It colored each of my choices with a muffled dissatisfaction, because my real life never quite matched this image. The day I saw this clearly, something untangled. Not that the image disappeared instantly. These things take time, but it ceased to exercise its unconscious grip. I could begin to question it, to put it in perspective and finally to set it down.

Living simply is not renouncing. This misunderstanding is common, and it's important to dispel it. Simplicity is not the opposite of ambition, of engagement, of richness, of experience. It's not a timid retreat, a diminished life, a refusal of the world. It's rather a clarification, a pruning, a return to the essential, It doesn't remove what matters. It removes what prevents us from seeing what matters. Think of a mountain path.

The path is there, it leads somewhere, and the walk is beautiful. But if you're carrying a bag that's too heavy, you won't see the landscape. You'll be too busy suffering, counting the meters, wondering if you'll make it. The bag will have taken all the space. It's not the path that's too long. It's what you're carrying that's too heavy. Lighten the bag and the same path becomes an entirely different experience. The same kilometers are crossed differently.

The same mountain reveals its beauty. What's true for the backpack is true for everything we carry inside. Projects too numerous. that scatter our energy, commitments made from obligation rather than desire, possessions that demand more maintenance than they bring joy. Relationships maintained by habit or guilt. All of this takes up space, consumes attention, diverts from the present step, and the present step is the only one that truly exists. All the others, yesterdays and tomorrow's, are merely memory or projections. Only this one is real. Removing what diverts from the step doesn't mean becoming

motionless or indifferent. It means consciously choosing what we want to carry and accepting to release the rest. It's an act of discernment, not renunciation. It's recognizing that our energy is limited, our attention precious, our time finite, and that we want to dedicate them to what truly matters to us. This recognition isn't sad. It's liberating. It transforms life into deliberate choice rather than accumulated burden.

And when the bag lightens, something surprising happens to our gestures. They change in quality. They become more present, more whole, more alive. A gesture made without haste has a particular density. It fully occupier. the space and time given to it.

It's not pressed by what comes after, not pulled back by what came before. It's simply there, complete in itself. I think of those simple daily gestures we generally perform without thinking. On autopilot, our minds already elsewhere. Preparing a meal, walking to work, listening to someone speak,

drinking a cup of tea. These gestures can be a common. mechanically like obstacles to overcome to get to something else. Or they can be inhabited, present, conscious. The difference isn't in the gesture itself, but in the quality of attention we give it. When the gesture is no longer hurried, it becomes right. It finds its own measure, its own rhythm, its own completeness. cutting a vegetable becomes a whole act if we're truly present to it.

The contact of the knife, the resistance of the flesh, the colors, the smells, the sound. Walking becomes a meditation if we really feel our feet touching the ground, our body moving through space, air entering and leaving our lungs. Listening to someone becomes a true gift if we stop preparing our response. while they speak and simply make ourselves available to what they're saying. There is an essential difference between agitation and living movement. Agitation is scattered, fragmented, torn between a thousand directions. It gives the impression of doing much but accomplishes little.

It exhausts without nourishing. Living movement, on the other hand, is unified, present. engaged. It can be fast or slow, intense or gentle, but it is always whole. It leaves nothing behind because it is entirely in what it does. This difference can't really be theorized. It's felt. We all know deep down when we're in agitation and when we're in presence. We know the difference between doing things and being in what we do. The simple life I'm evoking, here isn't a life without action. It's a life where action has found its rightness. Where doing is no longer escape, but expression, where movement is no longer agitation,

but dance. This rightness doesn't come from any particular technique. It comes from an inner lightning that allows the gesture to be what it is, without overload, without hurry, without ulterior motive. And this lightning reconnects us to something we already know, but have learned to ignore our own rhythm. For we have a rhythm, each of us. A rhythm that isn't that of the surrounding culture, not that of our neighbors,

not the one we think we should have. An intimate personal rhythm inscribed in our body and our being. This rhythm knows when we need rest and when we're ready for action. It knows when we're forcing and when we're flowing. It knows what is too much and what is enough. This rhythm speaks through fatigue. Not the productive tiredness you feel after a right effort,

but the dull chronic fatigue that signals we're living against the current of ourselves. It speaks through momentum, those moments when energy rises naturally and action becomes joy. It speaks through the need for silence, solitude, withdrawal, needs we often wrongly interpret as laziness or antisociality. All these sensations are messages. They tell us something about our alignment or misalignment with our own nature. But we've learned not to listen. We've learned to override fatigue, to ignore the body signals,

to conform to external rhythms that aren't ours. We've learned that rest is a reward earned after work, not a need honored when it arises. We've learned that spontaneous momentum is suspect, that it must be controlled, channeled, submitted to discipline. We've learned to distrust ourselves. The simple life is also a return to this listening, a reconciliation with our own rhythm,

not to become lazy or self-indulgent, but to become right, to find that rightness that is neither forcing nor letting go, but something between the two, an action that respects both what must be done and the one doing it. This rightness cannot be proscripted. from outside. It can only be discovered by listening, trying, adjusting, listening again.

I speak of these things knowing how far they can seem from daily reality. We have responsibilities, deadlines, obligations. We can't simply decide to listen to our rhythm and ignore everything else. Modern life has its constraints and they're real, but even within these constraints, Some margin exists, a space for choice, a possibility of adjustment, not always as large as we'd like, but present. And it's in this space that simplification can begin. This brings me to the question of direction. For living simply doesn't mean living without intention.

The journey continues, even lightened. The question is, how do we carry this intention without it becoming a grip? How do we have a direction without being possessed by it? How do we plan without the plan becoming a prison? I think of the image of a lamp held before us in the night. The lamp illuminates a few meters ahead. It allows us to see where to place our next step. It gives us a general direction.

But it doesn't show us the whole path at once. It doesn't light up the final destination. It illuminates just enough to move forward, not enough to control everything. That's sufficient. It's even preferable. For if we saw the whole path in advance, we might be discouraged by its length or tempted to travel it in thought before traveling it in reality. To hold an intention like holding a lamp is to keep the direction without clenching. It's knowing where we're going in general without clinging to the details of how and when.

It's accepting that the real path will be different from the imagined one, and that this difference isn't failure, but natural adaptation to the terrain. It's trusting that if the direction is right, the means will reveal themselves as we walk. This way of carrying intention requires a form of detachment that isn't indifference. We care about our direction. It matters to us. It expresses something deep about what we want to do with our lives. But we don't cling to it desperately. We don't squeeze it until we suffocate it. We hold it firmly and lightly at once, like holding a bird, firmly enough that it doesn't assess. lightly enough not to crush it. This lightness isn't natural for most of us.

We've learned that to obtain something, we must want it hard, very hard, and never let go. We've learned that letting up is dangerous, that it leads to failure, that only tension guarantees success. But this belief is exhausting, and it isn't even true. for what is grip too tightly often ends up breaking what is wanted too intensely often ends up fleeing and the energy we put into clenching is energy we're not putting into moving forward

something mysterious happens when we stop forcing things begin to fall into place on their own not by magic but by coherence it's as if our clenching created interference noise, friction, and releasing suddenly allowed elements to find their natural arrangement. I don't know how to explain this phenomenon well. I can only testify that it exists, that I've lived it, that others have lived it. Encounters that happen at the right moment without being forced.

Opportunities that appear when we've stopped searching for them desperately. solutions that emerge when we've stopped fighting against the problem. Relationships that ease when we give up being right. It's not that our efforts were useless. They prepared the ground. They planted seeds. But the flowering happened when we stopped pulling on the shoots. I remember a period when I was intensely searching for something.

A job. A direction. I don't remember exactly. I was doing everything that needed to be done and more. I sent applications, multiplied meetings, bustled in every direction. The more I bustled, the more things seemed to close. I was exhausted, discouraged on the verge of giving up,

and then one day I let go. Not through wisdom, through exhaustion. I no longer had the strength to force. I stopped searching, at least for a few days. And it was in those days that something arrived, completely unexpectedly. I'm not saying my letting go cause this event, but I believe it made it possible that it created the space in which it could occur. What I'm describing isn't a technique to apply.

It would be absurd to say, let go to obtain what you want. that would still be a form of manipulation, strategy, control. The letting go I'm speaking of isn't a means to an end. It's a way of being with what is, whatever the outcome. It's an abandonment of obsession with results, not a technique for obtaining results. This nuance is essential. If we let go in order to obtain, we haven't truly let go.

And perhaps the fruit of this letting go won't be what we hope to obtain. Perhaps the answer that comes isn't the one we expected. Perhaps the path that opens leads elsewhere than where we wanted to go. But if we've truly released our grip, this becomes acceptable. We can welcome what comes, even if it's not what we had planned. We can adapt, reorient, let ourselves be surprised. This flexibility is itself a gift of letting go. Faced with all this, I always come back to the same simple things.

Breathing, walking. These are perhaps the three most fundamental gestures of human life. And yet we perform them most of the time without truly being present to them. Breath enters and exits without us noticing. Steps follow one another without us feeling. the ground. Sounds reach us without us really hearing them. And yet each time we return to these simple gestures with attention, something recenters within us. Breathing consciously, if only for three breaths, brings attention back into the body, into the present, into immediate reality. It solves

no problems, but it changes the place from which we look at problems. Walking while really feeling our feet, touch the earth, grounds us, stabilizes us, reminds us that we have a body and that this body is here now. Really listening to the sounds around us, to someone's voice, to silence itself, pulls us out of imprisonment in our thoughts and opens us to the world. These returns to simplicity aren't escapes. They aren't ways of avoiding life. life's complexity. There are other foundations upon which complexity can rest without overwhelming

us. When we're rooted in breath, in body, in listening, we can face many things. When we're uprooted, lost in our thoughts, cut off from our base, even small difficulties overwhelm us. I wish these words you're reading could be like a pause. A moment when you can set down for an instant what you carry. You don't have to do anything with what I'm saying. You don't have to apply it, transform it into resolutions, make it into a program. You can simply receive it, let it resonate or not,

and continue on your way. Perhaps a phrase will stay with you. Perhaps an image will return in a few days. Perhaps none of this will leave a trace. It doesn't matter. What counts is this moment of pause itself, this small breach in the agitation where something else becomes possible. The year that's beginning isn't an adversary to defeat or a territory to conquer.

It isn't a promise that should be fulfilled or a test we should pass. It's simply a space of time given to us. A certain number of days. to live, breaths to take, steps to make. What we do with this space depends partly on us and partly on what will happen to us. We don't control everything. We don't even control much, but we can choose how we walk. We can walk ahead of the year, pulled by our projections and expectations,

always one step ahead of the present, always straining toward what isn't yet there. Or we can walk behind it, weighed down by our regrets and unsaid things, dragging the past like a ball and chain, always looking. Or we can walk with it, at its side, at the same pace, neither ahead nor behind, simply present to what is. Walking with the year means accepting its rhythm, which isn't always the one we'd want. Some months will be slow and others fast.

Some days will be full and others empty. There will be moments of momentum and moments of stagnation, moments of joy and moments of sorrow, moments when everything seems possible and moments when everything seems closed. Walking with the year means welcoming all of this as part of the journey, without preferring one part over another,

without wanting it to be difficult. different from what it is. This acceptance isn't passive. It isn't resignation. It's the foundation upon which right action can be born. For we can only act rightly upon what we have first accepted as being there. As long as we resist reality, our energy is lost in that resistance. When we accept what is, our energy becomes available for what can be done.

for what can be done. Acceptance isn't the end of action, it's action's true beginning. So, in this year that's beginning, perhaps you could simply walk, not towards something extraordinary, not to prove anything, not to become someone else.

Just walk, one step after another, in the life that is yours, with what you carry and what you are. Set down the bag from time to time to catch your breath. look around and see where you really are. Listen to what your body tells you, what your heart whispers, what silence reveals.

The year is here, available, open. It asks nothing more than to be lived. It promises nothing more than days to move through. That's little and that's immense. That's ordinary and that's precious. Let's enter it gently as we'd enter a friend. home. Let's enter with hands a little emptier than before, ready to receive what will come. Let's enter without forcing, without demanding, without knowing in advance what we'll find there.

And let's allow ourselves to be surprised, perhaps, by the simple beauty of a year that asks only to be inhabited.