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On stepping back from thought, holding both sides of life with equal grace, and living as the awareness that you already are
By Paolo Peralta · May 2026 · 12 min read
What Does Emptying the Mind Mean in the Tao Te Ching?
| Emptying the mind, as taught in Tao Te Ching Chapter 16, means stepping back from thoughts rather than suppressing them. The mind is originally empty and spacious. Thoughts arise and pass through it like clouds across a vast sky or a swan’s shadow passing over a river. The practice is to become the awareness that witnesses thought rather than the one who is swept away by it. Grasping and rejecting alike disturb the natural clarity that is already there. |
Hello there, friend.
Welcome to Dao Sessions. I am reading from Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching in the Stephen Mitchell translation, which was gifted to me by a dear friend, and I want to share what is alive in me as I sit with these teachings today.
Before we get into it, I want to offer you something to carry with you through this whole reading. A single idea that, once it truly lands, has the power to change everything about how you relate to your own inner life.
You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness that is aware of thinking.
Read that again slowly. Let it move past the surface of understanding and settle somewhere deeper. Because this is the whole teaching. Everything in Chapter 16, the empty mind, the river and the swan, the mirror that reflects without grasping, all of it is pointing here. To the spaciousness that you already are, underneath and behind and all around the thoughts that pass through you. That spaciousness is the Tao expressing itself through your particular, beautiful, irreplaceable human form. And it has been there the whole time.
“The mind is originally empty. Only when it remains empty, without grasping or rejecting, can it respond to natural things without prejudice.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
1. Emptying the Mind Means Stepping Back From Thought, Not Suppressing It
Here is the first thing I want to make beautifully clear, because it is the point most misunderstood about this teaching and about meditation practice in general.
Emptying the mind has absolutely nothing to do with making thoughts stop. The nature of the brain, this extraordinary supercomputer that processes millions of pieces of information every second, is to think. To generate, to process, to make meaning. Fighting that nature is like trying to stop a river by standing in it with your arms outstretched. The river is the river. Its nature is to flow.
What the Tao Te Ching is pointing to is something far more subtle and far more available than the suppression of thought. It is the practice of stepping back. Of rising above the level of the thought and becoming the one who is watching the thought arise. Of discovering that there is a part of you, the deepest and most essential part of you, that has always been watching. That was watching before the thought arrived. That remains watching after the thought passes. That is, in its nature, spacious and clear and undisturbed by whatever is moving through it.
Lao Tzu gives us two of the most beautiful images in all of contemplative literature for this. The first is the river and the swan. A swan flies overhead and the river receives its shadow completely, without any desire to hold the swan or any resistance to its passing. The shadow arrives. The shadow departs. The river remains, clear and complete. This is the mind in its natural state. Thoughts arise. Thoughts pass. The awareness that holds them is the river. Undisturbed. Complete.
The second image is the mirror. A mirror reflects all things, beautiful and difficult, without refusing any of them and without retaining any of them after they have passed. The mirror holds nothing. It excludes nothing. It grasps nothing. And in its perfect willingness to receive and release, it shows everything exactly as it is.
This is the practice. To become the mirror. To become the river. To step back, just one step, and discover the awareness that you have always been.
“Be like the river. The swan’s passage is traced by its shadow without any omission. The river has no desire to retain the swan. This is the mind in its natural state.” — Tao Te Ching, Chapter 16
| ONE THING FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT You are the vast sky. Your thoughts are the clouds. They arise, they move, they dissolve. The sky remains. The sky has always remained. This is what you are, underneath the weather of the mind. Pure, spacious, utterly undiminished by anything that has passed through. Reflect: The next time a difficult thought arrives, take one conscious breath and ask: who is aware that this thought is here? Rest in that awareness for just one moment. |
2. You Are More Expansive and Vast Than Any Name, Label, or Role You Have Ever Been Given
Here is something the Tao has been saying to humanity across thousands of years of wisdom transmission, and what science is now arriving at from a completely different direction.
You are so much bigger than what you think you are.
The personality, the name, the roles you carry in this material world, the label of musician or parent or employee or creative or Filipino-American or Brooklynite, all of these are true and all of these are real and all of these are extraordinarily partial. They are the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath, grounded in something far more vast and far more stable than any surface identity, is the actual territory of who and what you are.
Albert Einstein, whose scientific genius we tend to separate entirely from the realm of the contemplative, actually spoke from a place of profound mystical understanding about this. He wrote that the religious feeling of the scientist takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that all the systematic thinking of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection in comparison with it. Einstein was pointing at the same thing the Tao Te Ching points at: a vast, organizing intelligence that underlies all appearances, that expresses itself through every form including yours, and that is apprehensible through feeling and surrender far more than through analysis and control.
You are this intelligence taking the form of a specific, particular, unrepeatable human being. Your mind can travel to the edge of the universe and return here, to this present moment, as you wash your dishes or walk through the park with your dog. That is the extraordinary range of what you are. And to spend this life believing yourself to be only the surface name and role and personality is, gently and with great compassion, to miss most of the beauty of what you actually are.
The Tao is in all things. And it is in you. Right now. In full.
“It is our responsibility, our duty, and our joy, to know that we are so much bigger than what we think we are.” — Paolo Peralta
The Tao, Empty Mind, and the Aware Self
| Q: What is the difference between suppressing thoughts and emptying the mind? Suppressing thoughts is an act of resistance, forcing the mind to silence what it naturally produces. Emptying the mind, in the Taoist sense, is an act of spaciousness: stepping back from thoughts, allowing them to arise and pass without grasping or rejecting them. One creates tension. The other reveals the natural clarity that is always already present beneath the activity of the thinking mind. Q: What does the Tao Te Ching teach about suffering and the present moment? The Tao Te Ching teaches that clinging to the past or anticipating the future pulls us out of the natural flow of the present, which is the only place where life is actually happening. Suffering arises from the remembrance of a past and the anticipation of a future that exists only in the mind. Returning to the present moment, again and again, is the practice that restores natural peace. Q: What are the Four Abodes of the Buddha and how do they relate to daily life? The Four Abodes, or Brahmaviharas, are Metta (loving kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy), and Upekkha (equanimity). They are practiced as inner qualities that can be cultivated toward all beings including yourself. Equanimity, the capacity to hold both joy and difficulty with equal steadiness, is the ground from which the other three abodes express themselves with the most genuine freedom. |
3. All Suffering Lives in the Past and the Future: The Present Moment Is Always Safe
Here is one of the most practically liberating teachings in the entire contemplative tradition, offered here in its simplest and most direct form.
All suffering, in its deepest structure, stems from the remembrance of a past and the anticipation of a future. Both of which exist entirely within the mind. The past is a memory. The future is an imagination. The present moment is the only place where life is actually happening. And the present moment, entered fully and with complete willingness to be here, is always, in some deep and fundamental way, enough.
We have become, as a culture and as individual human beings, extraordinarily addicted to thinking. We send our vital life force backward into what happened and forward into what might happen, and the present moment, which is the address of the Tao, of aliveness, of actual experience, sits mostly unvisited. Mostly unoccupied. Mostly running on autopilot while the mind runs its loops in time.
The Tao Te Ching is an invitation back. Every chapter, every teaching, every image is pointing at the same address: here. Now. This. The naturalness of what is actually present. The squirrel in its full aliveness. The rainbow appearing over a Memorial Day dance party as people move and laugh and hold each other. The music running through human limbs and smiles and open hearts. This is the Tao moving through form. And you can feel it. You can feel it right now, in this moment, if you are willing to step back from the thinking long enough to notice what is already here.
Ram Dass spent his life pointing at this address with the three most powerful words in the contemplative vocabulary: Be Here Now. The morning practice, the journaling, the stillness of the early hours: all of it is training in the same direction. Returning. Again and again and again. To the present moment that is always, without exception, containing everything genuinely needed.
“May you be empowered by the presence of here. Of now. Of just this. Each and every present moment contains a lesson that is waiting for your integration.” — Paolo Peralta
| TWO THINGS FOR YOU TO ASK YOURSELFWhere in your current life is your attention spending the most time: in past memories, in future anticipations, or in the aliveness of what is actually here right now?What would it feel like to bring your full, undivided, genuinely curious attention to the next five minutes exactly as they are, with the simple question: what is the Tao showing me here?Recommended: Use these as your journaling prompts in tomorrow’s morning practice. Write without editing. Let what arrives surprise you. |
4. Engaged but Not Entangled: The Art of Caring Deeply With Equal-Mindedness
Paramahansa Yogananda offered a teaching that has been one of the most useful and clarifying phrases in my own inner life, and I want to give it to you today because it names something that the Tao is pointing at with great precision.
Be engaged but not entangled.
This is the whole art. To be fully present to life, to care deeply and genuinely about what is happening, to bring your complete self to the moment and the relationship and the work: all of this is engagement, and it is beautiful and it is the fullness of being alive. Entanglement is something different. Entanglement is when the caring becomes grasping. When the engagement becomes attachment. When you are so inside the experience that you have lost the awareness that is watching the experience. When the swan has disappeared into the river rather than passing over it.
The practice of engaged but not entangled is the practice of holding both: full presence and spacious awareness. Full caring and inner steadiness. The willingness to be moved by what is beautiful and to be honest about what is difficult and to hold both with the equal-mindedness that the Buddhist tradition calls equanimity. Upekkha. The ground from which loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy can all express themselves freely because they are no longer dependent on favorable conditions for their availability.
The Four Abodes of the Buddha, Metta as loving kindness, Karuna as compassion, Mudita as sympathetic joy, and Upekkha as equanimity, are not four separate practices. They are four expressions of the same inner ground. When you are genuinely rooted in equanimity, in the capacity to hold both what you love and what challenges you with equal steadiness, loving kindness flows naturally. Compassion arises without effort. Joy in the joy of others comes easily, because it is no longer threatening to your own sense of what is possible for you. Everything opens from equanimity. Everything is available from that ground.
And the morning practice is the daily cultivation of this ground. This is what the stillness is for. The journaling. The reading. The quiet before the world begins. Every morning you spend in that spaciousness is a morning you are building the equanimity from which the rest of your life can be lived with full engagement and full freedom at the same time.
“Be engaged but not entangled. Care deeply, with equal-mindedness, holding both sides, knowing that the opposite of everything is also true.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
5. You Are the Awareness That Is Thinking, and This Changes Everything
Here is the gem. Here is what all of this is building toward. Here is the nail, as I like to say.
You are the awareness that is aware of the thought. You are the river, not the swan. You are the sky, not the cloud. You are the mirror, not the reflection. And once you genuinely understand this, once it moves from an interesting idea into a lived, felt, embodied knowing, everything about how you relate to your own inner life changes completely.
When you are identified with the thought, you are at the mercy of the thought. If the thought says I am failing, you feel like you are failing. If the thought says I am not enough, the feeling of insufficiency moves through your body like fact. The thought and the identity are fused, and the biology of the body responds to the thought as though it were literal outer reality, because as far as the nervous system is concerned, in that moment of identification, it is.
When you step back into the awareness that is watching the thought, everything changes. The thought is still present. The thought may still carry real information worth considering. And it is now something you are observing rather than something you are being. And from that position of observer, you can bring genuine discernment: is this thought nourishing to my nervous system? Is this thinking helpful for my circulatory system? Is this bringing forward the most creative version of what I am? Is this thought the round peg being forced into a square hole, or is it genuinely pointing at something worth moving toward?
Your beliefs, held as fixed truths, close the world to the size of what you already know. Your beliefs, held as one perspective among the billions of available perspectives, open the world to everything it actually contains. The practice of stepping back into awareness is the practice of keeping the world perpetually larger than any single view of it.
This is what Alan Watts was pointing at in his beautiful and playful way throughout his teaching: the self that is anxious about itself is not the whole self. The self that is worrying about whether it is doing life correctly is a very small and very useful and very partial subset of what you actually are. And behind it, larger than it, holding it with complete ease, is the awareness that has never once been troubled by any of it.
“You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness that is aware of thinking. Once you know this, everything about how you hold your inner life shifts.” — Paolo Peralta
| ONE THING FOR YOU TO TRY THIS WEEKOnce each day this week, when a particularly loud or insistent thought arrives, practice this: take one full breath and ask, who is aware that this thought is here? Sit for just one moment in the awareness that answered the question. That awareness is the Tao expressing itself as you.Recommended: Write about what you notice in your morning journal. The practice deepens through the writing. |
6. Let Go of Judgment: To Hold Both Sides Is to Live in the Tao
Here is the teaching that I find the most quietly radical, the most countercultural, and the most immediately practical of everything Chapter 16 offers.
When you judge something, you have taken a side. You have stepped out of the natural flow of the Tao, which holds all things with perfect impartiality, and into the realm of preference and reaction and the exhausting work of trying to make life arrange itself around your categories of acceptable and unacceptable. The white cannot take over the black. The black cannot take over the white. Their beauty is in the dance. Their truth is in the coexistence. And to attach yourself only to the things you prefer while refusing to honor the reality of their opposites is, as I learned from my own life, a kind of beautiful and costly delusion.
There was a time in my own life when I preferred a particular state of consciousness above all others, and I arranged my days around maintaining access to it. And what I discovered, slowly and with real cost, is that a life organized around the avoidance of its own difficult truths is a life that grows smaller and smaller over time. The joy of the preferred state becomes less available because the contrast required to feel it fully has been systematically avoided. The river, if it were to refuse certain kinds of weather, would cease to be a river.
The Tao holds everything. The rainbow over the dance party and the hard morning that follows a night of cloudiness. The music moving through open hearts and the grief that sometimes moves through the same hearts. The deep creative flow and the dry season when the words come slowly. All of it is the Tao. All of it is real. And to meet all of it with the same quality of presence and compassion and genuine interest is the practice of a life lived in genuine alignment with what is.
This is the mirror teaching. The mirror reflects all things. It honors the beautiful and the difficult with equal clarity. It offers neither judgment nor preference. And in that perfect willingness to receive and release, it shows everything exactly as it is. This is your practice. This is the invitation of the Tao. To become the mirror. To become the sky. To let life move through you with full richness and full honesty and full presence to whatever color it is wearing today.
“The Tao holds everything. Joy and its opposite. The rainbow and the hard morning. The music and the grief. All of it is real. All of it belongs.” — Paolo Peralta
7. You Are Equipped: The Discovery of Who You Are Can Be Fun, Colorful, and Joyful
I want to close with the most affirmative and the most forward-looking part of everything the Tao has to offer us today, because I want to make sure you walk away from this not with a sense of how much inner work remains, but with a sense of how much beauty is already here.
You are equipped. Fully, completely, right now as you are, equipped for the discovery of who and what you are. You have a mind that can travel to the edge of the universe and return here in the same breath. You have a body that is responding to love and music and sunlight and rest with extraordinary faithfulness. You have an awareness that has been patiently and completely present through every chapter of your life, holding everything with the spaciousness of the river, the clarity of the mirror, the vast steadiness of the sky.
The discovery of who you are can be fun. It can be colorful. It can be genuinely joyful. The inner work does not require that you suffer your way toward clarity. The Tao is playful. The Tao moves through music and dance and the iridescence of a rainbow and the shadow of a swan on a perfectly still river. It moves through the smell of the morning and the taste of food prepared with care and the warmth of genuine human presence. It is available in all of these things, as beautifully and as fully as it is available in the deepest meditation.
Try something new. Let what resonates in you be your guide. Watch what brings you more aliveness and more joy and let that be the signal. Transfer that aliveness into how you serve and uplift the people around you. This is the constructive life. The life that is genuinely building something. One morning at a time, one present moment at a time, one conscious breath returning to the awareness that you have always been.
This is earth school, my friend. And it has never been so easy to find the teachers, to access the wisdom, to connect with the community of people who are on this same path of waking up to the extraordinary vastness of what they are. The resources are here. The Dao Sessions on Start Early Today are here. The morning practice is here. And the Tao, which has been here since before the beginning of anything we can name, is here.
Take a deep inhale. And a full, complete, releasing exhale. You are the Tao. And the Tao is you. And what a beautiful, enormous, inexhaustible thing that is.
“The discovery of who you are can be fun, colorful, and joyful. Try new things. Watch what resonates. Transfer what brings you aliveness into how you serve the world.” — Paolo Peralta
✦
Be the river. Be the mirror. Be the vast sky in which every thought arises and passes without diminishing the sky. Step back. Breathe. Return to the awareness that you have always been. That is the Tao. That is you. And it is more than enough. It is everything.
Namaste, friend. That is it for today.
With warmth and full presence,
Paolo
Key Insights From This Dao Session
| SUMMARY · TAO TE CHING CHAPTER 16 · FOR SHARING AND REFERENCE• Emptying the mind means stepping back from thought, not suppressing it. The mind is originally spacious and clear.• You are the river, the mirror, the vast sky. Thoughts pass through you without diminishing you.• You are more expansive and vast than any name, label, or role you carry in this material world.• All suffering lives in past remembrance and future anticipation. The present moment is always the address of the Tao.• Be engaged but not entangled. Care deeply, with wisdom and equal-mindedness, holding both sides of life.• The Four Abodes: Metta (loving kindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy), Upekkha (equanimity). All flow from equanimity.• You are the awareness that is aware of thinking, not the thought itself. This is the gem.• Let go of judgment. The Tao holds everything. White and black. Joy and its opposite. All of it belongs.• The discovery of who you are can be fun, colorful, and joyful. You are already equipped. Begin with what resonates. |
Three Questions to Carry Into Your Morning Practice
| JOURNALING PROMPTS · DAO SESSIONS · CHAPTER 161. Where in your life right now are you most entangled rather than engaged? What would it feel like to step back into the awareness that is watching?2. What are the two sides of something in your life right now that you have been honoring only one of? What would it mean to hold both with equanimity?3. What is the Tao showing you in the present moment of your life, in the circumstances exactly as they are, that you have been looking past in search of better conditions? |
Keep Going: Related Reading and Listening
• Dao Sessions on Start Early Today: Full Archive All Tao Te Ching readings and contemplative sessions.
• How to Build a Morning Practice That Actually Changes Your Life The daily container for this kind of inner work.
• Gene Keys: Moving from Shadow into Gift The inner map of your deepest contemplative unfolding.
• Make Pure Thy Heart: Daily Dispatches on Consciousness and Intentional Living Your daily companion for the examined and fully lived life.
• 30-Day Morning Practice Course Thirty days of building the awareness practice that everything else flows from.
Sources and Further Reading
1. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell Translation
2. Paramahansa Yogananda: Autobiography of a Yogi
3. Albert Einstein on Science and the Mystical (Letter to a Child)
5. The Four Brahmaviharas: Loving Kindness, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity
6. Alan Watts: The Wisdom of Insecurity
7. The Neuroscience of Thought Awareness and the Default Mode Network
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