Author name: David

3ravenpecking through the dusty grassthe first raindrop falls Lesson # 3 Guard your gold closelyand someone will steal it from you.Beam out your light and the rest of us are covered in shadows.There is no hope,except to give it all away. Lead by giving people what they truly need, and not what you think they […]

2as the river shoves into a now muddy seait cries, “I still exist!” Lesson # 2 No opposites endure. Beauty pokes its face out of ugliness. Goodness wraps evil around itself. The coin flips, the front becomes the back and then becomes the front again. Therefore act, but do not teach. From: 81 Lessons from

Chapter One- Begin Here Haiku: the robin’s songslices into the stillnessa silver blade Short Form: Lesson # 1 Names are lies. Speak the name of a thing and you kill it. You dare to limit it to your puny ideas about what a thing might be. You carve it out from the everything that it

For the next 81 weeks we will be taking a thorough study of the Tao Te Ching chapter-by-chapter. The posts will begin with a Haiku tangentially related to the material in this chapter. Then will come a shorter version of the chapter from my book 81 Lessons From the Tao Te Ching. . This will

I am looking for folks all over the world to join me in playing a game to spread Lao Tsu’s wisdom everywhere. It is free to play. Just send me an address and I will mail you a deck of 81 cards. The Game with the Deck of the Tao How to play the game:

I worked with clients with addiction issues for two decades. I still hear folks say, “I don’t understand why they just don’t just stop.” I hope this letter will help you understand. There is a good reason why people get drawn into addiction. Addiction feels so good. Maybe it’s that wave of relaxation at the

To begin let’s make some distinctions. When I was growing up the function of the news was to inform you about things going on in the world. The function of entertainment was to provide some amusement or engrossing story to give you some relief from the ordinariness of your life. The function of advertising was

Thoughts from Contemporary Taoism. T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem East Coker, a part of the longer series Four Quartets. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut

Contemporary Taoism is not a religion and is not an extension of the Chinese traditions and practices associated with traditional Taoism. It is a philosophy, a cosmology, a way of life and a spiritual practice that arises from Lao Tsu’s text the Tao te Ching, a work over 2,400 years old. Contemporary Taoism focuses on

Welcome to this little newsletter and blog post from David Skibbins. In the United States we have received a mandate from a majority of our citizens that all this social justice and climate change stuff is not to their liking. That should make the next for years interesting, as in that Chinese curse, “May you