Dao with Ian Felton

Ian Felton
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I’m Ian Felton, a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Daoist practitioner. Listen as I read the Daodejing in Chinese, craft a fresh translation, and discuss it with the aim of creating inner transformation for myself and the listeners. For those listeners who engaged with the original podcast, "Walking the Timeless Way," with David Wang, I hope you find the new format and approach rewarding. The episodes from that series have all been labeled as "Original Series."

  1. 5d ago

    #15 — Being Like the Ancient Ones (Daodejing, Chapter 15)

    Anything can happen at any moment. Most of the energy in a day goes into making sure we don't have to feel that. The job, the people who love us, the home we'll go back to tonight, the self we point to when we say our own name. We stand on all of it like bedrock. The ancient ones knew it wasn't bedrock, and you can hear it in the first thing this chapter says about them. Not what they believed. How they moved. This one starts with the fear of being watched and tracked, and what happens to that fear when you notice what, exactly, the watching has on file. From there: the ancient ones who excel with Dao, seven angles on a single way of moving through the world, and a man in Zhuangzi who looks at his own dissolving body and gets curious instead of afraid. Loose about the self. Careful about the body. Crossing the winter river awake.

    19 min

  2. May 20

    #14 - You Want It All But You Can't Have It

    You wanted the version where no one declines. Where the people you love don't go. Where the practice deepens forever and the work keeps landing. The tower of a life without loss. Chapter 14 of the Daodejing is what's left when that tower comes down. Not consolation. Not a better tower. Orientation toward something you can't see and can't hold — and the discovery that it was steadier than the tower the whole time.

    22 min

  3. May 13

    #13 - The Art of Uselessness

    When we let ourselves think about our lives as something that has to be useful for the economic system built around us, we can completely lose touch with ourselves. What is left when we refuse to sacrifice our lives on the altar of the economy?

    21 min

  4. May 6

    #12 - Running From Your Footprints

    The chase of the hunt maddens the heart. Chapter 12 of the Daodejing diagnoses what happens to the perceptual apparatus under sustained intense stimulation — and names the structural problem underneath hustle culture, status-seeking, and the pursuit of perfection that wears the clothes of cultivation. A guitar solo at two in the morning. A man trying to outrun his shadow. What gets clearer when the hunt stops running the show.

    23 min

  5. Apr 29

    #11 - The Hollow Does the Work

    Thirty spokes share a hub. The cart's use lives in the hollow at the center. A clay vessel holds what it holds because of the empty space the clay is shaping. A room is useful because of the air inside the walls. Chapter 11 of the Daodejing walks you through three ordinary objects and asks where the use actually lives. Not in the form. In the hollow the form makes available. This episode opens with a song that came alive when a hand left a chord unplayed, moves into the role of release in taiji practice, picks up a story from Zhuangzi about a tree that survived by being useless, and lands in the silence inside a therapy session — the place where the work actually happens. What is there acts as benefit. What isn't there acts as use.

    22 min

  6. Apr 22

    #10 - What's There When You Stop Improving

    There's a story in the Zhuangzi about a man named Hundun who had no face — no openings, no gates. He was apparently doing fine. His well-meaning friends decided to give him what everyone else had. One opening per day. On the seventh day, Hundun died. Chapter 10 asks seven questions. Each one is an opening being drilled. Not to acquire something — but to ask whether the drilling has already cost something, and whether what it cost can be found again underneath. De is what you already are when the accumulated strategies, roles, and improvement projects thin out enough to see through. Not an achievement. Not a moral quality. What's there when the well-intentioned drilling stops. This episode looks at Hakomi character strategy, the mirror that shows things as they are when it's clean, and what it means to stop relating to the people you love through a role. De isn't something you earn. It's what's already here. Dao with Ian Felton works through all 81 chapters of the Daodejing as a practice manual for living.

    23 min

  7. Apr 15

    #9 - How Not to Break Your Leg

    Chapter 9 of Daodejing is five lines. One image: the blade hammered past its edge, the vessel filled past its capacity, the man who couldn't stop when the work was done. This week — the cook whose knife is still sharp after nineteen years, two injuries that came from knowing the signal and continuing anyway, and what the seasons know about finishing that we mostly don't. 無為 (wú2 wéi2) isn't passivity. It's a higher order of attention — the kind that can feel where the resistance is, and trust the spaces enough to move through them.

    18 min

  8. Apr 8

    #8 - Daodejing Chapter Eight

    Water. Chapter 8 of the Daodejing takes the most ordinary thing in the world and asks you to look at it until you see something extraordinary. This episode does the same. Ian shares a Dao moment from Senegal — from the darkness of the Door of No Return on Gorée Island to an impossible reunion on a Dakar street corner — and then reads his translation of Chapter 8, staying closer to water than most translations dare. What follows is a conversation about what it actually means to dwell in the low places, to let the heart go deep without bracing, to give without keeping score, to speak without concealment. And about the quality of seeing that makes any of this possible — not sharper attention, but a cleared aperture. 幾於道 (jī1 yú2 dào4). Nearly Dao. It's as close as any of us get.

    31 min
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About

I’m Ian Felton, a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Daoist practitioner. Listen as I read the Daodejing in Chinese, craft a fresh translation, and discuss it with the aim of creating inner transformation for myself and the listeners. For those listeners who engaged with the original podcast, "Walking the Timeless Way," with David Wang, I hope you find the new format and approach rewarding. The episodes from that series have all been labeled as "Original Series."

Information

  • Creator
    Ian Felton
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    94
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ian Felton
  • Show Website
    Dao with Ian Felton