Hi, I’m James Bickers … and I’m happy to welcome you to Practical Tao!

I discovered Taoism roughly 20 years ago; it made an immediate and indelible impact on my life, and although the level of that impact has varied in the subsequent years, the focus on the tao has been a persistent part of my adult life. At least, it has been on the good days.

Taoism is a family of religious and philosophical beliefs, ideas and structures that have evolved over the centuries. Their roots are in Chinese culture, but the basic philosophical notions behind them are prevalent in all of the great religions of the world - and, most interesting to me, they are present in many great non-religious systems, from the voluntary simplicity movement to the “Getting Things Done” culture.

There is a religious component to Taoism, but frankly, that is the aspect of it that interests me the least. I’m interested in the real-life implications of Taoism, and those are the ones I want to explore on this site - how the basic underpinnings of Taoism can be used in a practical way to impact modern life positively.

Taoism - the egregiously simplified overview

So what are those basic underpinnings? There’s no better primer on this topic than Benjamin Hoff’s timeless book The Tao of Pooh, which attempts to explain Taoism through the Winnie the Pooh books. It works, and extraordinarily well.

A better introduction comes in the, ah, introduction to my personal favorite translation of the original Tao de Ching text, the Stephen Mitchell translation. He writes:

A good athlete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the right stroke or the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm for non-action; the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.

Anyone who has really excelled in any given pursuit knows this feeling - the drive to the basketball goal that feels effortless, the hours immersed in rewarding work that seem to go by in an instant, the instincts that urge a mother or father to meet the unspoken need of their child.

It’s a natural state - wei wu wei, or “doing not-doing” - in which the memories of our muscles and our reflexes and our subconscious minds prompt us to act in the correct manner. We don’t have to think about it; it happens, because it is who we are.

Of course, life has a way of building layer upon layer of crud atop the spirit of the person who can do those things without thinking about them; Taoism is about scraping that layer of crud away.

Future posts will explore this further on in a theoretical sense. But most of my posts, I believe, will focus on practical, real-world applications of Tao ideas - using the ideas of Taoism to create a happier home, a more productive and enjoyable workplace, and a schedule that allows time for the things that truly matter to you.