Dao with Ian Felton

Ian Felton
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Sometimes the thing making life harder is what we're doing to make it better. We try to win an argument and stop listening. We try to accomplish more and lose the ability to be still. I'm Ian Felton, a psychotherapist exploring Daoism as a practice for everyday life. Each episode draws from a chapter of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), one of the foundational texts of ancient Chinese philosophy. I offer my own translation and explore what the chapter reveals about life today: relationships, psychology, politics, and the habits that quietly shape our experience.

  1. 5d ago

    Don't Be an A*****e. I'm Talking to Myself. | Daodejing 28

    A walk around the lake shouldn't become a competition over who moves aside. Yet a scowl, squared shoulders, or an unanswered hello can turn a few feet of pavement into a question of status. I catch myself wanting to mock the performance. Then I notice how easily the joke could become my own way of competing. In Chapter 28 of the Daodejing, “The Valley of the World,” Laozi asks us to know strength while keeping to receptivity, to know without always displaying what we know, and to live with status without demanding recognition. From Muay Thai and psychotherapy to leadership and governance, this episode explores the difference between having a capacity and needing another person to acknowledge it. Dao with Ian Felton explores ancient Chinese wisdom as a practice for ordinary life today.

  2. Oct 9

    No One Discarded: Moral Narcissism and the Good People

    One of the easiest ways to become morally unbearable is to become certain you're one of the good people. Chapter 27 begins with strange images of mastery: travel without wheel tracks, calculation without counting rods, tying without rope. As skill deepens, less machinery seems necessary. Then Laozi applies the same movement to people: no one is discarded. In Muay Thai, the person across from me becomes my teacher whether they intend to teach me or not. They expose the dropped hand, the forced exchange, the flash of pride after being hit. A healthy gym also makes room for bodies that don't fit our usual picture of an athlete, including people training with Parkinson's disease. The same principle appears in psychotherapy. Difficulty does not make a person disposable. From there, Chapter 27 makes its sharpest turn: “The good one is the teacher of those who aren't good. Those who aren't good are the good person's resource.” This episode explores moral narcissism, the strange pleasure of using other people's badness as evidence of our own goodness, and what becomes possible when disagreement, boundaries, and moral judgment no longer require us to discard the person.

  3. Sep 18

    Why Bad Driving Is Such a Good Test of Your Mind

    I caught myself getting annoyed at another driver before they had even done anything. I was watching to see whether they would use their blinker—not because I needed the information yet, but because I was waiting for them to do it wrong. That became the practice behind Chapter 26 of the Daodejing: “Stillness is sovereign over restlessness.” This episode explores the small territory before anger or road rage—the tightening, judgment, and pre-annoyance that can quietly begin organizing attention. What changes when we remain alert without becoming irritated? Can we see careless driving clearly without letting another driver govern our nervous system? Driving became a surprisingly good laboratory for deep listening: watching speed, distance, wheels, movement, and the whole field rather than demanding that everyone around us perform perfectly. Chapter 26 calls this gravity. Heaviness roots lightness. Stillness remains sovereign inside movement. Dao with Ian Felton applies the ancient wisdom of the Daodejing to ordinary life today. The companion Dao app includes the podcast, foundational texts, meditation timer, and journal.

    Why Bad Driving Is Such a Good Test of Your Mind

  4. Sep 9

    Cycles - When Going Backward Is Part of Growth

    We tend to picture growth as a line moving forward. Chapter 25 of the Daodejing, one of ancient China's most important books of wisdom, gives greatness another shape: receding, far-reaching, returning. I begin with the hobbits leaving the Shire and eventually returning home profoundly changed, then turn toward something much closer to my own life. After four months away from martial arts, I'm preparing to spar again. I have ideas about what psychological reflection and Daoist practice may have changed. Sparring gives me somewhere to find out. The chapter also raises an important distinction: not every retreat is far-reaching. Avoidance retreats from uncertainty into what is already familiar. A different kind of retreat takes us beyond the conditions where our existing answers work. Through Tolkien, music, psychology, motor learning, leadership, and my own return to training, Chapter 25 asks a simple question: When we return to familiar territory, what comes back with us?

    Cycles - When Going Backward Is Part of Growth

  5. Sep 2

    Superfluity - When More Becomes Less

    A Star Tribune story about Minneapolis Public Schools losing $4.1 million in special-education reimbursements sent me digging. Then I found an astonishing divide: White students near the national top while Black, Hispanic, and Asian student groups rank near the bottom among comparable reporting groups. My first explanation was ideological. Maybe an intensely equity-focused school system had overreached. The evidence would not stay that simple. The farther I looked, the more the question shrank toward attention, knowledge, time, and what actually happens when a child does not learn what was taught. Chapter 24 of Daodejing begins with two bodies: one on tiptoe, one taking too long a stride. From schools to therapy to mortality and self-esteem, this episode asks when something worthwhile becomes superfluous because the life or system carrying it is already full. And what changes when we leave enough room to stand, walk, love, play, settle, and let something remain undone.

  6. Aug 26

    #23 - One of Dao - Identity, Politics & Letting the Storm End

    A gust is real. It doesn’t need to become the climate. Chapter 23of Daodejing begins with wind and rain that cannot sustain their intensity, then turns toward something stranger: alignment with Dao, De, and even loss. After a weekend camping alone in North Dakota, watching squirrels fight and stop, and turning around when a massive bull blocked the trail, I began thinking about identity, politics, and the exhausting human habit of keeping every conflict at full intensity. Race, sex, nationality, political affiliation, and history can all matter without becoming the whole field. Progress can be real while injustice remains real. And sometimes the smallest loss we accept keeps us from creating a much larger one. What does it mean to become one of Dao when reality refuses to stay the way we want it?

  7. Aug 19

    #22 - The Deep Listener (Chapter 22 of Daodejing)

    What happens when being right gets in the way of hearing the person you love? Chapter 22 of the Daodejing begins: Bent leads to wholeness.Sunken leads to fullness.Lack leads to gain. This week I noticed how quickly I “straighten” things in conversations with my partner. A comment feels unfair, defensiveness rises, and before she finishes speaking I’m already preparing the correction. Chest tightens. Jaw sets. The answer forms. I’m no longer receiving anything. I’m full. In this episode, I explore bending as a relational practice, the difference between disagreement and contention, and why I translate 聖人 (shengren) not as “sage,” but as “the deep listener.” We also touch on couples therapy, clinging to views in Buddhism, and the Bhagavad Gita’s treatment of attachment to winning. Maybe wholeness doesn’t begin with getting everything straight. Maybe it begins with leaving enough room for something new to enter.

  8. Aug 12

    #21 - The Subtle Way - Chapter 21 of Daodejing

    What happens when reality refuses to fit the categories we use to understand it? In Chapter 21 of the Daodejing, Laozi tries to describe Dao “as a thing” and finds something that flickers: unclear, misty, containing image, substance, vital essence, and evidence. In this episode, I explore The Subtle Way through the strange behavior of the double-slit experiment, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, the Daoist practice text Neiye, and the human urge to turn uncertainty into certainty. Quantum physics doesn’t prove Daoism. Laozi wasn’t secretly describing photons. But both can disturb our confidence that reality is made of stable things waiting for us to correctly name them. What happens when we stop demanding the final explanation and stay with what can actually be observed? Image. Thing. Vital essence. Evidence. Not certainty. Evidence. Chapter 21 of the Daodejing: The Subtle Way.

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About

Sometimes the thing making life harder is what we're doing to make it better. We try to win an argument and stop listening. We try to accomplish more and lose the ability to be still. I'm Ian Felton, a psychotherapist exploring Daoism as a practice for everyday life. Each episode draws from a chapter of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), one of the foundational texts of ancient Chinese philosophy. I offer my own translation and explore what the chapter reveals about life today: relationships, psychology, politics, and the habits that quietly shape our experience.

Information

  • Creator
    Ian Felton
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    107
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Ian Felton
  • Show Website
    Dao with Ian Felton