Top 12 of the Tao Te Ching
The Path of Well Being

The world tells us to trust only in our senses. To believe only what we see. The Tao guides us to trust our inner knowing, our feelings, and our connection to Source. It’s only be letting go of our obsessions with life – our repetitive thoughts, our constant acquisition of more things, that we can choose to life a life of central peace.

To “play” with these ideas further, reflect on the following questions:

1.     Have you ever desired something just because someone else did, and then found that you didn’t like it?

2.     Have you ever stayed awake at night thinking about what you don’t have that you want?

3.     Have you ever made a judgment based upon appearance that went against your inner feeling, then found out that your inner feeling was correct in the end?

Sometime during this month, do the following:

1.      Take out a clean sheet of paper and 2 different color-ink pens. The next time you have a choice to make, let one ink color represent the outer world of seeing, and the other represent the inner world of feeling. Let the two colors “talk it out” on paper. Then sit quietly and sense which one feels truer. Your inner nature knows far more that your outer seeing. Connect with your inner words and then make your decision!

The Tao Te Ching  (pronounced Dow de ching) was written around 6th century BC  by the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, "Old Master", a record-keeper at the Zhou Dynasty court, by whose name the text is known in China. The text's true authorship and date of composition or compilation has not ever been verified. According to legend, Lao Tzu wrote the Tao as an old man, and then walked off into the hills, never to be seen again.

Tao means "way", "road", "path", or "route," but was extended to mean "path ahead", "way forward", "method", "principle", "doctrine", or simply "the Way".  Te means "virtue" in the sense of "personal character", "inner strength", or "integrity".  Ching originally meant "norm", "rule", "plan".

©September 2004 by Jill N. Henry, Mountain Valley Center, Otto NC. All rights reserved.

Dr. Jill Henry is the author of Energy SourceBook – The Fundamentals of Personal Energy (Llewellyn, 2004) and webmaster for www.mountainvalleycenter.com. She is founder, with her husband Charlie, of Mountain Valley Center metastore  and the Otto Labyrinth Park in Otto, NC. Jill is an Associate Polarity Practitioner, an Independent Distributor of the RichWay Amethyst Biomat, and developer and presenter of CEU workshops for nurses, physical therapists and massage therapists  http://www.mountainvalleycenter.com/flow.htm