Taoism begins with something that cannot be named. This has always struck me like lightning.

The Tao is described as an invisible, formless intelligence — an underlying field from which all things arise and to which all things return. It animates the universe without effort, gives rise to creation without attachment, and remains untouched by what it brings into being.

What has always moved me about this teaching is not its mysticism, but its innate simplicity and intimacy. Taoism suggests that human beings are not separate from this source. That our deepest nature is already in direct contact with it. Not through striving or belief, but through being. And this feels almost radical in a world that trains us to look outward for answers. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time — or rather, how we experience it.

From a Taoist perspective, our modern obsession with speed disrupts not only the body, but the spirit. When time becomes compressed, breath shortens. When breath shortens, thought fragments. When thought fragments, we lose our capacity to sense the subtle currents that guide us.

We move in a crazy, frenzied energy — a pendulum between the “should haves, could haves, would haves” of the past, and the anxieties of the future. Both have a stern warden, keeping us contracted, contained, small. Both carry urgency: a need to correct what’s already happened; a need to control what hasn’t.

The Tao cannot be accessed through urgency. It reveals itself in the pauses between thoughts. In the space between breaths. In the moments when we stop trying to steer outcomes and allow ourselves to receive guidance.

This weekend, my body delivered that lesson.

A migraine arrived without negotiation — debilitating, disorienting, all consuming. It halted everything. Plans dissolved. The world narrowed to breath, darkness, and stillness. I lay fetal-like for days, and in that state, there was no productivity to perform, no narrative to uphold. Only the undeniable sensation of pain.

Pain has a way of stripping life down to what is essential. And as uncomfortable as it was, I began to wonder what my body was asking me to notice. I refrained from asking, “How do I make this stop?” and instead asked, “What am I being invited to see?”

Taoism teaches that the body is not separate from intelligence. It is an expression of it. When imbalance appears, it communicates what requires restoration — what requires reclamation. Symptoms become signals: the body’s way of speaking its wisdom when the mind is too loud to listen.

In the quiet of that migraine, I could feel how far ahead of myself I had been living. How often my breath had become shallow without my noticing. How time had tightened — not because there wasn’t enough of it, but because I had stopped inhabiting it fully.

Alan Watts spoke about this paradox: the harder we try to grasp life, the more it slips away. The Tao, he reminded us, is not something to be achieved. It is something we learn to move with.

The migraine passed, as these things do. But something lingered. A deeper respect for the body’s wisdom. A quieter relationship with time. A renewed awareness that balance is not an abstract ideal, but a daily, moment-to-moment practice.

Perhaps the invitation of Taoism in our modern lives is simple: to engage the world with more presence. To stop treating time as an enemy, the body as a machine, and stillness as an inconvenience. To remember that beneath schedules and motion, there is a deeper current moving us. And when we slow enough to feel it, we remember something quietly profound—we were never separate from it at all.