Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - The feeling of being overwhelmed - Taoism

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

Lightening your weight allows you to be more welcoming.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

Lately, I've noticed that many more of you are joining the podcast, and I feel deeply grateful for that. The words you take the time to send me touch me more than I can express, and I want you to know how thankful I feel at this very moment. For those of you who don't know yet, beyond the spoken word, I also write. I explore ideas through writing on the Substack blog call. words of Taoism, whose name inspired this very podcast, and more than 12,000 of you are already there. I would like to also share with you some resources that I've created. Those are free guides I've made along the way, including a guide to flow, a personal translation of the Tao Te Ching, and a guide

to understanding your energy levels throughout the day. You can download them on on my coffee page for free and try to integrate some of these seeds into your life. Before we begin today's meditation, one final thank you for being here, for listening, and for opening this space for yourself. A potter had been shaping vases for 40 years. One day, an apprentice asked him

what the secret of a beautiful vase was. The old man took a lump of clay, needed it at length, then began to hollow it out on his wheel. The apprentice watched the working hands, thinking the secret lay in the outer form, in the elegance of the curves, in the fineness of the walls. But when the vase was finished, the potter simply said, The secret is not in the clay I shape.

It is in the emptiness I create. Without this emptiness, it would only be. be a block of earth. It is the emptiness that makes the vise. Then he added, looking at his apprentice. The same is true of a life. This wisdom of the potter we have forgotten. We spend our days filling, our homes, our calendars, our minds, as if the value of a life were measured by its clutter. We accumulate objects, commitments, information, relationships, convinced that the more we possess, the richer we are, that the more we do, the more we exist. And then one day, we wake up with this strange sensation of having reached a limit.

Something in us is full, too full, and can no longer receive anything. This sensation has a particular quality. It is not exactly fatigue, though fatigue is there. It is not exactly stress, though stress. is present. It is something more diffuse and more total, the impression of being filled to the brim like a vase into which someone has poured relentlessly and which now threatens to overflow at the slightest additional drop. Even what is good can no longer enter. An invitation that should bring joy becomes a burden. An opportunity that should excite becomes pressure.

The cup is full, and everything that arrives now spills over the side. This saturation sometimes appears upon waking before the day has even begun, as if sleep had emptied nothing, restored nothing. It sometimes appears in the middle of a conversation, when suddenly the other person's words become noise, when attention slips away despite every effort to maintain it. It is everywhere at once, in the head cluttered with thoughts that circle without finding resolution, in the chest tightened by a dull tension, in the shoulders carrying an invisible weight. Perhaps you recognize yourself in these words. Perhaps you're living through this sensation of too muchness at this very moment. If so,

know first that this is normal. You're not failing. You're not incapable of managing your life. You're simply human, with human limits, in a world that seems to have forgotten these limits exist. Overwhelm is not a personal failure. It is often the predictable consequence of conditions that exceed what a human being can reasonably absorb.

The potter knew it. Even the most beautiful vase has a finite capacity. To pour beyond that is to lose what you pour. But where does all this that fills us come from? The potter knows exactly what he puts in his vase. He chooses each element with care. We have lost this mastery. Our vase fills without our having truly decided it. Our ancestors, just a few generations.

ago, lived in a world where information was scarce, one newspaper per day, perhaps, a few letters per month, village news passed along by word of mouth, the rest was silence, space, slowness. Today in a single day, we receive more information than they received in an entire year. Our brain, shaped by millennia of evolution in a calm environment, finds itself plunged, into a torrent, it is not equipped to process. We are not made for this. No one is. The human Voss was not designed for this deluge. But overwhelm is not only external. It is also made of everything that accumulates within us without being digested. The thoughts that loop back because they have never found resolution. The emotions we have set aside for lack of

of time to move through them, the unfinished conversations that keep turning in our head, the postponed decisions that weigh like debts, the suspended projects that occupy a corner of our mind without advancing. All of this takes up space. All of this fills the vase drop by drop until there is no more margin. It's like a house where one would enter each day with new art. without ever throwing anything away. At first there is room. One finds corners, drawers, shelves. Then the spaces fill up.

One begins to stack. One closes doors on rooms that have become impassable. One circulates with increasing difficulty through one's own dwelling. And one day one realizes one can no longer move that every gesture displaces something that living space has disappeared under the accumulation. The vase has become a block.

It has lost what made it a vase. And then there is what we accumulate ourselves, sometimes without realizing it. The commitments we make out of obligation or fear of disappointing. The possessions we keep out of habit or fear of lacking. The identities we maintain. out of loyalty to a past that no longer is, the expectations we carry about what our life should be. All of this also fills, clutters, saturates, the vase overflows with what we have received

despite ourselves, and with what we have poured into it ourselves. The potter would choose with care what deserves to enter his work. We let everything accumulate without. discernment. The old potter knew the wisdom of Lao Tzu who already observed this fundamental paradox of human existence. We give all our attention to what is full, to what is visible, to what is tangible, and we neglect what is empty, what is invisible, what is space, yet it is emptiness that makes things useful. We shape clay to make a vase, but it is the inner that allows the vase to contain.

We cut doors and windows into a house, but it is these openings that make it habitable. We hollow out the hub of a wheel, but it is this central hole that allows the wheel to turn. This observation is so simple that it may seem banal, and yet it contains a wisdom we constantly forget. forget. The vase without inner emptiness is only a block of clay. The house without openings is only a tomb. It is space that allows movement. It is absence that allows presence. It is emptiness

that allows receiving. A full vase can welcome nothing more. It can only overflow. An ancient master told the story of a scholar who came one day to consult him about the way of wisdom. The scholar was brilliant, cultivated, laden with knowledge. He spoke at length about everything he had read, all the philosophies he had studied, all the questions he pondered. The master listened in silence, then offered to serve tea. He filled his visitor's cup and continued to pour as the cup overflowed as tea spread across the table ran onto the floor. The scholar exclaimed, But what are you doing? The cup is full. It can hold nothing more. The master set down the teapot and said softly, like this cup, you are full of your opinions, your certainties, your knowledge.

How could I show you anything if you do not first empty your cup? The scholar was like all of us. He had filled his cup to the brim, convinced this was the path to wisdom. The more he knew, he thought, the wiser he would be. But the master was showing him the opposite. The overflow had become the very obstacle to what he sought. As long as we are full, nothing new can enter. As long as our life overflows, no grace has room to slip in. Love cannot enter a heart saturated with resentment.

peace cannot settle in a mind cluttered with worries. Joy cannot bloom in a life where there is no space for it. It is not what we accumulate that makes our richness, but the space we preserve for living. A day filled with activities from morning to night, without a minute of pause, is not a rich day. It is a saturated day where nothing truly has time to be lived. A mind stuffed with knowledge and opinions without space for doubt and wonder is not a cultivated mind.

It is a cluttered mind incapable of receiving anything new. The potter knows this better than anyone. It is not the thickness of the walls that makes the value of the vase. It is the quality of the space they delineate. So why do we feel like this? Why this compulsion to fill every void, to occupy every space, to saturate every silence? The answer at bottom is perhaps simple. We are afraid.

Afraid of emptiness itself. Afraid of what we might find there or not find there. Emptiness confronts us with ourselves. When there is nothing left to do, nothing left to watch, nothing left to listen to, we find ourselves alone with what we are. And this encounter can be uncomfortable. We discover thoughts we preferred to avoid. We feel emotions we head carefully buried.

We see truths about our life that busyness allowed us to ignore. Emptiness is a mirror, and we do not always like what it shows us. So we fill. We fill. so as not to have to look. A man who had spent his life in hyperactivity fell ill and was forced to rest. The first days were torture. He could not bear the silence of his room, time stretching out, the absence of things to do.

He constantly asked to be brought something to occupy himself, books, a phone, anything to fill this unbearable emptiness. Then gradually, something changed. In this forced vacancy, memories began to surface. Emotions he had not allowed to express for years. Questions he had fled all his life. Tears, too, that he had never shed. This encounter with himself was painful, but was also the beginning of a transformation.

Later, he would say that this illness had been the greatest gift of his life, because it had forced him to stop and find himself again. The emptiness he had so feared had revealed itself to be the space he needed to heal. There is also the fear of missing out. If the calendar is not filled, we will miss opportunities. If we don't keep these objects, we might need them someday. If we don't maintain these relationships, we'll end up alone. If we don't stay informed about everything, we'll be left behind.

This fear pushes us to accumulate well beyond our real needs, as if surplus were insurance against life's uncertainty. But this insurance is illusory. The objects we keep just in case end up cluttering us more than serving us. The relationships we maintain out of fear of loneliness often exhaust us more than they nourish us. The information we accumulate compulsively creates more anxiety than security. Surplus does not protect us. It weighs us down. And the heavier we carry, the less capable we are of moving, adapting, grasping what truly matters. The over-full vase is not

richer. It is only heavier to carry. And then there is the fear of boredom, which is perhaps a disguised form of the fear of oneself. We have lost the habit of doing nothing. Inactivity makes us nervous, guilty, uncomfortable. We need to be stimulated constantly, as if our existence could only be justified by a constant flow of activity and consumption. Simply being there, doing nothing in particular,

has become almost impossible. A moment of waiting, and immediately the hand reaches for the phone. A silent journey, and immediately we turn something on. An evening without plans. And immediately anxiety rises. The slightest empty space in our day seems like a threat to be filled. This flight from emptiness exhausts us. It consumes considerable energy.

This constant vigilance to avoid silence. this permanent race to fill every space. And it doesn't really work. The emptiness we flee always catches up with us. In the insomnia of three in the morning, in the sudden anxiety that seizes us without apparent reason, in this sensation of too muchness that is perhaps paradoxically the sign of a deeper emptiness we have never dared to face.

for there are two kinds of emptiness. There is the emptiness we flee, the one that frightens, the one that confronts, the one that reveals what we prefer not to see, and there is the emptiness we could inhabit, the one that rests, the one that regenerates, the one that opens a space for something new to be born. These two emptinesses are not different in nature,

They are the same emptiness experienced differently. One is suffered and resisted. The other is chosen and welcomed. The difference is not in the emptiness itself, but in our relationship to it. The potter does not fear the emptiness at the center of his vase. He creates it deliberately, knowing that this is where the very function of his work resides.

When a vase overflows, the solution is not to find a bigger vase. The solution is to stop pouring. This obviousness should guide us, and yet we often do the opposite. We seek to increase our capacity rather than reduce the influx. We want to become more efficient, more resilient, more capable of managing. As if the problem were our insufficiency, and not the excess that assails us. The self-improvement industry abounds with promises along these lines.

How to do more in less time. How to manage your stress to withstand more of it. How to optimize your sleep to need less rest. How to become a better machine in short. But we are not machines. And even machines have limits beyond which they break. The potter does not seek to endlessly enlarge his vases. He knows that each form has its right measure,

its own capacity, its natural limit. We are not insufficient. We are simply finite. There is a maximum amount of stimulation, information, commitments, emotions that we can process. Beyond this limit, we saturate. And wisdom is not to constantly, push this limit back, but to know it and respect it, to honor it as one would honor a friend who

tells us the truth. Creating space is not done by adding something. This may seem obvious, but we constantly forget it. We cannot add emptiness. We cannot acquire space. We cannot buy silence. Space is revealed when we remove what was cluttering it. Emptiness appears when we stop filling. Silence emerges when we turn off the noise. This is not a construction, but an unveiling. This is not an acquisition, but a letting go. A sculptor who was asked how he created his works replied, I create nothing. The statue is already in the block of marble. I simply remove what prevents it from appearing. This answer echoes the potters. We do not space within us. It is already there beneath the layers of clutter.

Our work is not to add, but to remove, not to build, but to clear, not to acquire, but to let go. The emptiness we seek is not to be manufactured. It is to be revealed. This removal can concern the most concrete things, the objects we keep without use, and that clutter our environment, and by extension, our mind. our mind. The clothes we no longer wear, the books we will never read, the devices gathering dust, the papers that pile up. Each of these objects occupies not only physical space, but also mental space. They ask to be stored, cleaned, thought about. They exert subtle pressure on our attention, even when we are not looking at them.

Removing them lightens something within us, something more than the space freed in the closet. A woman decided one day to empty her house of everything she did not really use. She began with the obvious objects. The boxes never opened since the last move, the clothes that no longer fit, the gifts kept out of guilt.

Then she went further, questioning each object. Do I use it? Does it make me happy? Does it have its place in the life I want to live? This process took months, and as the house emptied something strange happened within her, she felt lighter. As if in removing the superfluous objects, she had also removed something that weighed on her mind to space had created an inner space. She had found again the emptiness that makes the vase.

This removal can concern our commitments, the activities we maintain out of habit or obligation, without their truly nourishing us. The meetings that could have been emails, the projects we no longer want to pursue, the responsibilities we assumed without really having chosen them. Each commitment is a levy on our time, and energy. Some are worth it. They help us grow. They serve what matters to us. They connect us to

others. Others drain us without giving anything in return. Learning to distinguish one from the other is an essential apprenticeship. Saying no is difficult. We fear disappointing, appearing selfish, missing something, being excluded. But every yes we say to something that does not nourish us is a no we say to something that could. Our time is limited. Our energy is limited. These precious resources deserve to be protected, invested with discernment, given to what truly matters. A no-pronounce with clarity and respect is not a rejection. It is an affaffirmation of what is essential to us. It is the way to preserve the emptiness that allows us to receive, what truly matters. This removal can concern our consumptions. The flow of information we

absorb passively, the social networks we check compulsively, the entertainment we use to flee rather than nourish ourselves. This is not a question of right or wrong, it is a question of quantity, quality, awareness. What do we let enter us? With what attention? For what purpose? There was a time when one actively chose what one read, what one watched, what one listened to. Today, content comes to us endlessly, algorithmically optimized to capture our attention. We no longer really choose. We are chosen. Our attention has become a resource that others exploit.

Taking back control of what we let in is an act of sovereignty, a gesture. to become once again the guardians of our own threshold. The potter decides what enters his vase. We have abdicated this choice, and our vase fills with what others pour into it. This removal can concern our thoughts themselves, the ruminations that loop endlessly without ever leading anywhere, the worries about things over which we have no control,

no control, the judgments about ourselves and others that serve only to contract us, the projections into a future that does not yet exist. All of this fills the mind with noise that prevents hearing anything else. We cannot command our thoughts to stop. Anyone who has tried knows this does not work. Trying not to think about something makes us think about it more. But we can change our relationship to our thoughts. Observe them without following them. Let them pass without clinging to them. Recognize that a thought is only a thought, not a truth, not an obligation, not ourselves.

This distance creates space. It allows thoughts to exist without completely invading us. An old sage compared the mind to a sky through which clouds pass. Clouds come and go, some are light, others are dark and threatening. But the sky always remains the sky, vast and open, unaffected by what passes through it. Our thoughts are like these clouds. They pass. They are not the sky. We are not our thoughts.

This simple recognition can be profoundly liberating. It creates a space between us and the contents of our mind, a space where rest becomes possible even amid mental agitation. The sky is the emptiness that allows clouds to pass. Without it, there would be only density and darkness. All of this, the removal of objects, commitments, consumption's thoughts, is not done in a day. It is not a radical spring cleaning, a brutal purge that would empty everything at once.

This kind of violence against oneself rarely produces lasting results. It is rather a progressive, patient, attentive movement, looking at what is there, questioning what deserves to stay, letting go of what no longer has reason to be. Not all at once, but a little each day, not through asceticism or duty, but through desire for space, through thirst for breath. And there is no universal formula. What clutters one person may be precious to another. What nourishes one may drain another.

Discernment is personal. It requires knowing oneself, listening to oneself, observing oneself honestly. What truly weighs on me? What would I miss if I let it go? What am I keeping out of fear and not out of choice? These questions do not demand immediate answers. They ask to be carried, meditated upon, left to ripen until clarity comes. What is revealed when we remove may surprise us.

The emptiness we feared is not nothingness. It is not the absence of everything. It is on the contrary, full of a particular. particular presence, the presence of what was always there, but that clutter prevented us from perceiving. In silence we begin to hear, in space we begin to see, in rest we begin to feel. What seemed like a lack is revealed to be an opening. Contemplative traditions have always known this. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of listening. Space is not the absence of objects, it is the presence of availability.

Rest is not the absence of activity. It is the presence of being to itself. What we flee is a terrifying void can become if we dare to inhabit it, a place of deep replenishment. The potter knew it from the beginning. The emptiness he creates is not a lack. It is a capacity. It is what allows the VARs to fulfill its function.

Some make this discovery by accident, forced by circumstances to stop. An illness? A loss? A collapse. In this imposed emptiness, they first know discomfort, agitation, the sensation of lack, the habit of fullness demanding its dose. Then, gradually something else.

A calming. A widening. The discovery that emptiness was not empty. that it was inhabited by a quality of presence that agitation made impossible. That in this silence, something could finally settle, clarify, regenerate. Others make this discovery by choice, deliberately granting themselves moments of retreat, a silent walk, an hour without screens, a day without agenda, a retreat far from noise. These chosen spaces are not escapes. They are returns, returns to oneself,

to what matters, to what is alive beneath the layers of accumulation. They do not solve all problems, but they create the conditions for problems to be seen clearly and sometimes to dissolve on their own. Inhabited emptiness is not a place where nothing happens. It is a place where everything can happen. happen because space exists to welcome it. Availability, openness, the capacity to receive what comes without knowing in advance what it will be. This quality of being is precious,

and we have largely lost it. We are so busy filling that we have forgotten what it is to be empty. Empty like a vase that can receive. Empty like a room that can be inhabited. empty like a silence that can be listened to. A teacher asked his students to practice what he called the sacred pause. Before each important action, before answering a message, before entering a meeting, before making a decision, stop for an instant, just enough to create a space between stimulus and response, between impulse and action. In this tiny space, he said, resides our freedom.

Without it, we are automaton's reacting mechanically to what happens to us. With it, we become beings capable of conscious choices. These pauses do not slow down life. They deepen it. They do not make us lose time. They make us gain presence. They do not diminish our efficiency. They transform our scattered agitation into concentrated action.

Paradoxically, by doing less, we often accomplish more. By stopping, we advance better. By emptying, we fill ourselves with what truly matters. The pause is the emptiness between two gestures, and it is what gives each gesture its rightness. The potter has finished his vase. He looks at it for a long time,

turning the object in his hands. The walls are thin but solid. The form is simple but right. And at the center, this emptiness he is created with as much care as the walls themselves. This emptiness that is the reason for being of the vase. This emptiness that will allow it to receive, to contain, to serve. Without this emptiness, it would only be a block of clay. With it, it is a vase.

The same is true of a life he had told his apprentice. and perhaps this is the final teaching. Our life is not made only of what we put into it. It is also made of the space we preserve within it. It is not the thickness of our walls that makes the quality of our house, but the room they delineate, the space where one can live, breathe, be. It is not the density of our calendar that makes the richness of our days. but the moments of presence we know how to create within them.

It is not the number of our thoughts that makes the depth of our mind, but the silence from which they emerge and where they can settle. The vase that has long overflowed can find space again. We stop pouring into it without thinking. We let part of its contents evaporate. We deliberately remove a few stones that were taking up too much room. And slowly, the margin reappears.

The vase can receive again. Not everything that passes, but what deserves to be there. Not any old way, but with discernment, not to the point of overflowing, but to that point of fullness that still leaves space to breathe. This vase is each of us who have

known overwhelm and who seek, perhaps clumsily, to find a little space again. This quest is not selfish. It is not a luxury. It is the condition for being able to give anything to others, for being able to receive anything from life, for being able to be present to anything that matters. One cannot pour from an empty vase, says the proverb. Can one receive into a vase that overflows.