Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism
Words of Taoism·Hosted by Chen Li·96 episodes
Life Wisdom is a podcast inspired by Taoist teachings, offering guidance on mindfulness and inner peace. Each episode features meditative storytelling, simple practices, and deep reflections to help you reconnect with the present moment. Brought to you by Substack bestseller author Chen Li, from the blog Words of Taoism.
Why listen
Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism offers calm, reflective essays rooted in Taoist ideas about timing, letting go, simplicity, gratitude, and inner peace. Episodes feel like guided contemplations, with meditative storytelling and gentle practical prompts rather than debate or doctrine. It is a good fit for listeners who want a quiet spiritual reset during a walk, commute, or evening wind-down.
Episodes
We are fluent in kindness toward others and strangely mute in it toward ourselves.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Notice, for a moment, how you speak to yourself on a bad day, after a mistake, a failure, something you are ashamed of. There is usually a running commentary in there, and it is rarely gentle; for many of us it is a voice we would never use on a person we loved, and we aim it at ourselves without a second thought.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Beneath the ten thousand changing things, it says, there is a stillness that does not change. All things rise and flourish, each in its own season, and each in its own time returns to the place it came from.Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.Coming home to yourself is the difference between living as a stranger in your own experience and living as someone who belongs there, who can turn inward and find, instead of an empty room or a courtroom, a place that is genuinely theirs.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.To stay with yourself is gentler and far less busy than the fleeing makes us fear. It asks only that you keep the feeling company, letting it be there, noticing where it sits in the body, the tightness in the chest or the heaviness behind the eyes, without running from it and without spinning it into a story.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.To take something personally is to place yourself at the center of another person's behavior, to assume that what they did was aimed, that it carried an intention toward you and a judgment of your worth.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.Think of how you feel walking through your own door at the end of a hard day. You are often carrying a weight that is unmistakably heavy, and yet if you stopped to sort through it, you might find that a surprising amount of it is not actually yours.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.We have arranged things so that we are almost never alone with ourselves, and the moment a pause opens, the phone is in the hand, a sound is filling the silence, the next task is already pulling us forward.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
The deepest discipline is not never falling away. It is learning how to return without turning against yourself.Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.We have moved from seeing more of another person's story, to listening past their words, to imagining our way into their world, to choosing a response instead of firing off a reaction. All of it has been leaning toward one simple thing, the plain willingness to be good to another human being. So I want to end on a question we rarely stop to ask about that. What does kindness give back?More resources: Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to daily wisdom.You know the moment. A message arrives with the wrong tone, or someone says the thing that finds your sore spot, and before a single clear thought has formed, the heat is already up and the sharp reply is already writing itself. You hit send, or you say it aloud, and some part of you knows even as it happens that this is not your best self talking. It is fast, it feels like honesty, and it is often the least wise version of you that exists.More resources:Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome Back to Daily Wisdom.Each of us moves through life inside a world built from our own history, our fears, the things that once hurt us and the ones we are still hoping for. A word that means nothing to you can land on someone's oldest wound, and a small kindness you barely noticed can be the thing that holds their whole day together.More resources: Free resources, books and more on https://wordsoftaoism.com/ My Substack Blog: https://taoismteachings.substack.com/Music I use, as a playlist: https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.Most of us think of ourselves as good listeners, and in some moments perhaps we are. We care. We try to be present. We would never enter a conversation hoping to miss what the other person is trying to say.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.The story we build about another person is often a confession of our own, which is worth remembering the next time one arrives feeling like simple fact.More resources: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
We nearly always confuse strength with hardness, and gentleness with weakness.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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.By the time a day ends, most of us have already quietly judged it. We got somewhere, or we fell behind. And what is striking is how often the verdict is a small no, even after a day that was full. More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.We are fluent in the language of doing too much, and nearly mute in the language of living at the wrong speed. We know how to say we are busy, stretched, behind. What we rarely learn to name is something quieter and more corrosive: the fatigue of moving, for years, at a rhythm that was never ours.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.We can accept slowness more easily when we have chosen it. A slow walk, a slow morning, a slow conversation. But when the thing we want is delayed, when healing takes longer, when a project grows slowly, when clarity arrives in fragments, when change happens unevenly, slowness can begin to feel like resistance. It can feel as if life is withholding something from us.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.We speak about saving time as if time were something we could keep somewhere. We say we gain time, lose time, spend time, waste time, invest time. These expressions are useful, and in some ways they are true. Time matters. It is limited. The way we use our days shapes the life we eventually live.More resources: 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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, I would like us to explore our relationship with time. Because many of us know how to organize time, divide it, save it, optimize it, measure it. But we may have forgotten how to actually live inside it without turning every hour into a test.More resources: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
When was the last time you were truly alone?Perhaps the question troubles us a little, if the answer feels distant. But it is not meant as a reproach. No one is guilty for having adapted to a noisy world. We have simply lived in the world given to us, a world that has made distraction easy and silence rare.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.There is a moment, when you enter a dark room, when you think you can see nothing.At first, the darkness seems complete. The shapes disappear. The walls, the furniture, the distance between things, everything becomes uncertain. You may stand still for a moment, not because there is nothing there, but because your eyes have not yet learned how to see in that new condition.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.We often want to know the meaning of a step before we take it. We want to know whether this beginning will lead somewhere good, whether this change will be worth it, whether this conversation will heal or complicate things, whether this small movement will become part of a larger direction. We want the future to explain itself before we agree to enter it.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, we are exploring what it means to trust what is not fully clear yet. We began with self-trust, and the idea that trust is not the absence of doubt, but the ability to keep listening while life gives us only part of the path. Then we looked at the strange and tender passage of being between two lives, when the old shape has begun to loosen, but the new one has not yet fully appeared.Today, I would like to stay with the question that naturally follows: why does clarity take time?More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.There are transitions that begin beneath our understanding. A person does not always know at first why they feel less at home in a place that once comforted them. They do not always know why certain ambitions lose their shine, why certain conversations feel more difficult, why certain hopes return again and again after being dismissed.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, I would like us to explore what it means to trust what is not fully clear yet. Not to rush toward certainty, and not to remain frozen until everything is guaranteed, but to discover how we move when life gives us only part of the path.Today, let us begin close to ourselves, with this question: what does it mean to trust yourself?More resources: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
You finally arrive at something new, something hoped for, something chosen. And yet, just as one door opens in front of you, another door closes behind you. For a moment, the heart cannot tell whether it is happy or sad, because both things are true.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that the heavy is the root of the light, and stillness is the master of restlessness.I find this line very helpful when we speak about emotions, because the question is not only how to feel more, or how to feel less. The deeper question is how to remain rooted while something moves through us.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, we are staying close to the world of emotions. Yesterday, we looked at the idea that an emotion is not an enemy to suppress, and not a master to obey. It is a signal to read. Today, I would like to look at what happens when too many signals remain unread, when too many feelings are carried quietly, and when the inner life has had no real place to exhale.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, I would like us to stay close to the world of emotions, to understand them with more tenderness and more clarity. We will ask why we ignore what we feel, why small things can hurt more than expected, and why emotional tiredness sometimes becomes heavier than physical fatigue.More resources: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
Maybe you know this feeling. The feeling of being capable, but not rooted. Needed, but not fully alive. Active, but not placed. It is possible to do many things, even to do them well, and still feel that something essential in us has not found its proper ground.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that those who know others are wise, but those who know themselves are enlightened.I have always found this distinction powerful, because knowing oneself is not the same as thinking about oneself. And many of us think about ourselves constantly. We analyze what we should do, what we should have said, what kind of person we are becoming, what others might see in us.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.There is also a kind of chasing that does not really bring us closer to life. It moves us, but it does not nourish us. It gives us direction, but not rest. It keeps the body active and the mind alert, yet somewhere inside, we may feel that we are running after something we cannot quite name.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.Something light touches us, and a deeper sound begins. The slight coldness in someone’s voice may touch a memory of love becoming uncertain. A small criticism may awaken the belief that we must be flawless to remain accepted. The moment may be small. But what it awakens may not be small at all.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.The present moment does not ask you to give up your dreams. It does not ask you to forget your responsibilities. It does not ask you to stop becoming. It only asks you not to abandon the life that is already touching you while you wait for another one.More resources: 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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.This final week, I would like us to look beneath the surface of some of our most familiar movements: the desire for more, the difficulty of being present, the way we react before we understand, the things we keep chasing, and the words we use when we are trying to protect ourselves.Today, let’s begin with a question many of us may carry quietly, even in seasons where life looks fine from the outside: why don’t I feel fulfilled?More resources: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
How to recognize true intuition and let it become clear.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.Approval does not always look dramatic. Often, it happens in small movements: We hide an opinion because it might make the room less comfortable. We say yes quickly, before checking whether we mean it. We become slightly more cheerful than we feel, slightly less tired than we are, slightly more agreeable than our own truth allows.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.You are at the gathering, and everyone seems lit from within by the occasion, and you are smiling in the right places while a distance sits in your chest.You hear people describe what they want from their lives, the things they are chasing, the future they are building toward, and you realize you do not want those things, or not in the same way, or not with the same heat.And the question arrives, , almost ashamed of itself. What is wrong with me?More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.This week, we are staying close to the way we relate to ourselves from the inside. In the last reflection, we spoke about comparison, and how easily another person’s path can make our own life feel smaller than it really is. Today, we continue with a question that often lives beneath comparison, beneath self-criticism, beneath the quiet pressure to become more.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom. There is a story I imagine often. A small bird lives in a garden, and every morning, before singing, it looks toward the other trees. It hears the nightingale and thinks its own song is too simple. It sees the swan crossing the pond and thinks its own body is too ordinary. It watches the eagle above the hills and thinks its own wings have failed because they do not carry it so high.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.This week, we begin a new movement in the series. After looking at control, pressure, acceptance, responsibility, and the unknown, we now turn toward something more intimate: the way we relate to ourselves from the inside.More resources: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 a force in us without which nothing would ever be done. It moves us to begin, to build, to love, to hope. It carries us out ahead of ourselves, toward what does not yet exist and what we long to see come into being. We call this force desire. Without it, we would stay still, watching the world go by, never once taking part in it.Welcome back to Life Wisdom, hosted by Substack bestseller author Chen Li, from Words of Taoism.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.A person who admits they do not know yet is not necessarily lost. They may simply be refusing to lie to themselves for the comfort of an immediate answer.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.A tree can offer shade, fruit, and shelter. Birds can rest in its branches. People can sit beneath it. The tree gives generously, yet it remains rooted in the earth. It is held while it holds. Its strength comes from receiving as much as giving.Many of us try to be trees without roots.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.Acceptance can sound like a cold word when the heart is still hurting. It can sound as if we are being asked to approve of what happened, to pretend it does not matter, to become peaceful before we are ready. Many of us resist acceptance because we think it means saying that what hurt us was okay.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.This week, I would like us to follow a simple thread: the places in our lives where care slowly becomes tension.Because many of us are not exhausted only because we do too much. We are exhausted because of the way we do it. We try to work well, but we carry the work like a test of our worth. We try to love well, but we become afraid of disappointing. We try to grow, but we turn growth into pressure.More resources: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
Welcome back to Daily Wisdom.In the last few episodes, we have been circling around the same quiet difficulty from different angles: the way we try to keep life safe by thinking more, doing more, rushing more, proving more, holding more. And today, I want to sit with a question that is at the center of many of our struggles, even when we do not always name it directly.More resources: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
I’ve been thinking about a strange pattern many of us know: the closer we get to rest, the harder we push ourselves.More resources: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
Welcome back to daily wisdom.Think about what happens when you finally have a free afternoon. The kind that arrives unplanned, when a meeting cancels or a task finishes early. For most of us, the first reaction is not relief. It is unease.The Taoist sages would have recognized this anxiety immediately. They wrote often about the danger of excessive doing, of constant striving, of treating one's own life like a problem to be solved.More resources: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
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