Hello and welcome,
My name is Rachel and I am going to be your guide today through this talk on exploring Taoism for sensitive souls.
I'm going to share how this practice,
Philosophy and way of being has changed my life and how it can help to change yours.
Taoism is one of the most practical approaches to life that I've encountered and for highly sensitive people or empaths,
Those people who struggle with the everyday pressures of modern life,
It offers something rare,
Something beautiful,
It offers permission,
It gives permission to be soft in a world that demands hustle,
Demands hardness,
It gives permission to move slowly when everyone else is rushing and it gives permission to start allowing to flow with the natural rhythms of our lives.
And over the course of this track I'm going to share how Taoism has helped me navigate my sensitivity and how it might also help you too.
So let's settle in and let's begin to explore together.
If you're here you might know what it means to be a sensitive soul.
It means that you're constantly being told throughout your life that you might need to be different,
You might need to be stronger,
Tougher,
Less affected or have thicker skin.
You need to push through,
Show up more,
Do more,
Be more and I spent years of my life trying to keep up with the pace of this,
To keep up with the ever demanding world of work,
Lives and social media.
All the while my body was begging me for rest.
I forced myself to live in environments that drain me,
In big cities where there was constant motion and no depth or slowness.
I questioned constantly why I could not do this while others could.
And alongside this I encountered chronic digestive issues through most of my life,
Insomnia,
Anxiety,
Trying to force myself into a way of being that did not work with my nervous system and was not in my truce.
It was around this time that I started to read and explore the idea of Taoism.
I first heard sprinklings of it in podcasts,
In tracks,
Which eventually led me to do my own research on it.
And what really spoke to me was that our softness in this world is not a problem.
But what if trying to be hard and trying to push and trying to force against nature and the correct way that works for you was the problem.
And Taoism teaches us that the strongest things in nature,
They're not rigid,
They're flexible.
For example,
Water carves through stone because it yields and bamboo survives storms because it bends.
I stopped trying to be this sense of strength and I started to accept that I could be strong in a different way.
One of the core concepts in Taoism is wu-wei,
Which means effortless action or non-forcing.
It means acting in alignment,
As I just mentioned,
With the natural flow and process and order to things,
Not pushing against the current or not forcing outcomes.
We could take the image of when we're trying to swim in an ocean,
We're trying to fight the waves and it tires us out,
Which leads us to feeling drained and we don't get to where we want to be.
If we allow the water to take us,
We allow ourselves to move naturally,
And I want to share a little understanding of how this changed in my life.
I used to be somebody who said yes to everything,
Every social event,
Every party,
Every opportunity,
Even when I felt that my capacity was full and I felt that the overwhelm was bubbling.
Even though I knew that I needed time to recover.
When I started bringing in this practice of wu-wei to my life,
I started to think about what I was saying yes to.
Was I saying yes out of forcing,
Pleasing,
And was I saying yes against what was in my highest good?
And now when someone invites me and my body contracts,
Perhaps someone offers me a job and it doesn't feel aligned,
I listen to that information in my body and I know that it's my system saying this isn't the right current right now.
Because what we lean into naturally and what feels natural is the right thing for us.
And this doesn't mean being passive,
It just makes me strategic with my energy.
Moving with the natural rhythm of what is right for me and what feels right rather than against it gives me energy for what matters,
Allows me to make better life choices and live in alignment with who I am rather from a place of fear,
Rather from a place of striving to be like somebody else.
And you might have heard of the idea of yin and yang before.
Obviously there's a famous symbol that lots of us know about.
And in Taoism,
Yin represents the feminine,
The receptive,
The soft,
The inward,
The restful.
And yang represents the masculine,
The active,
The loud,
The more outward driven.
Neither are wrong,
But both are necessary.
The thing is that our culture for the most part has been conditioned to worship yang,
To think that productivity over rest is better,
To think that forcing over rest is better,
To think that being loud over quiet is better,
And to think that being outwardly strong and insensitive and not letting things get to us is better than being sensitive.
And as a sensitive person,
You might be more naturally yin.
You might need more rest,
More quiet and more time to process.
And the world unfortunately has told you that that is a problem.
But when I learned about yin and yang,
I realized that I'm just yin in an over yang world.
And it's not to say that I don't have any yang in me,
But it helped me to see the world a little bit more clearly.
And when I started noticing that my patterns were more yin,
I started honoring that.
I stopped apologizing for needing rest.
And I started honoring that inside me,
I had more yin energy,
And that was who I was.
I didn't need to be more yang.
And what this tells us is that we don't need to be more of anything.
We have both yin and yang in us.
But just honoring that and noticing that yin is an amazing quality that we can have within us,
And not something to be pushed away.
In Daoist text,
Water is also a perfect example of how we can move through life.
As mentioned previously,
Water doesn't force,
It flows.
When it meets an obstacle,
It doesn't crash.
It flows around it and it finds another way.
And in its own time,
Water creates mountain landscape,
Not through force,
But through persistence,
Through softness,
Through flow.
And I used to think that we had to meet everything head on in life.
We had to be hard,
We had to push harder,
We had to be more harsh.
But that's not how water works.
And that's not how my nervous system works as a sensitive person.
And now when I encounter something difficult,
Something harsh,
Perhaps an overwhelming situation,
I ask,
What would the water do?
And often I find that it allows me to step back and I give things time.
And I let solutions unravel in front of me,
Rather than forcing them.
And at the heart of Daoism,
This is the practice,
To let things unravel in their own time,
Rather than trying to force them into an outcome.
So you might be thinking,
This is all really interesting,
But how can this apply to my own life?
And what I would encourage you to do is to honour who you are.
Stop matching the pace of people around you who work differently,
And start just allowing yourself to be and act in a way that is intuitive and beneficial for you.
This might be asking how you're doing today to yourself,
And instead of forcing a workout,
A yang workout,
Or exercise,
Or morning routine that doesn't serve you,
Lean into how your body is feeling.
Does your body need more yin today?
And try to honour that,
Even if it's inconvenient.
Daoism taught me to turn around and to stop fighting against the current,
And to trust that the way I needed to live my life and wanted to live my life was valid.
There's an ancient teaching that says nature does not hurry,
Yet everything is accomplished.
The seasons change without forcing,
And flowers bloom without shortage.
So,
Just taking a few moments to integrate what I have shared today,
And just knowing that when we try as best as we can to view the world through this lens,
We become more accepting of ourselves,
More compassionate towards ourselves,
And we live lives that are ours.
Thank you for practicing today,
Wherever you are,
With love,
Rachel.
