Towards Living Without Judgment

5 quotes from Lao Tzu to help you destress, relinquish control, and achieve your mindfulness goals.

I remember exactly where I was when I first picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching. The year was 2011, and I was in the campus bookstore of Stony Brook University, halfway to nowhere, smack bang in the middle of Long Island. It was my last day before graduation.

The local bars were beckoning with the promise of year-end celebrations, and I was doing my best to hawk as many secondhand textbooks as possible — anything to help pay for the night ahead, which I definitely couldn’t afford.

However, still only being late-morning and the bars’ doors firmly shut, I decided to pass the time by aimlessly browsing through the bookstore. I can think of few better ways to while away an hour than by picking up book after book, row by row, and randomly flicking through a few pages here and there.

It was in this manner that I happened upon a tiny sliver of a book with a blue-grey cover and gold lettering. I started, as always, by skimming through the first few pages, expecting little, but with an open mind. Ten minutes later, transfixed to the spot, I was already a quarter of the way through the book. Coming out of my trance for a split-second, I raced to the counter, paid, and hustled straight to my dorm. Beers, shots, and celebrations be damned! Instead, I locked myself in for the rest of the day, and read, re-reading, and re-read again, this oblique and often sideways book — the Tao Te Ching.

Nearly ten years later, I still know exactly where that very same copy lies within my house. While I am far from a mindfulness champion — I have my constant stresses and foibles — the wisdom of its author, Lao Tzu, has stayed with me ever since. Whenever I have needed some ancient guidance, that copy of the Tao Te Ching has been there to calm, and soothe, and put everything back into perspective — without judgment. It can do the same for you.

“Do you want to improve the world? I don’t think it can be done.”

This quote, like so many from the Tao Te Ching, offers so much more than its purely literally reading.

Of course, we should try to make the lives of those around us better. No-one should ever abandon their efforts in trying to improve their own lives or the lives of those around them.

Yet when we see what Lao Tzu writes next, we begin to see what he is really trying to tell us:

“If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.”

We all suffer, at times, from the same projections of control — we all have a vision of what life should look like, how we should be treated, and what we should be doing and achieving.

I know I certainly did throughout my twenties — and I still do now.

Yet we need to remember that these projections of what should be are rooted only in our own limited understanding of what is good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair. What we don’t know far outweighs what we do. There are very few things over which we have complete control.

By relinquishing these feelings and coming to the realization that we can’t control the universe, we free ourselves from our own high expectations of ourselves.

We can be content simply living in the moment. It is OK to just be ourselves — as best we can — under the current circumstances.

“A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind.”

It feels pretty shitty when things don’t go the way we thought, or hoped, they would. I, for one, can be a very sore loser.

So when things go wrong, it’s tempting to deflect blame and to put up barriers that prevent us from growing and learning from our mistakes. We can embark on unhelpful bouts of self-denial — blaming others or the circumstances.

Yet as I’ve grown older, I’ve softened and mellowed. Whatever happens, happens. Que sera, sera.

If we accept that sometimes we will be faced with circumstances outside of our control, we can turn our efforts towards adapting and trying to make the most of the situation.

“Stiffness is a companion of death; flexibility a companion of life. An army that cannot yield will be defeated. A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind.”

Like the tree, we must remain flexible and bend with whatever life throws at us. If we try to remain stoic in the face of overwhelming hardships and challenges, we will eventually break.

All experiences are temporary, “the hard and stiff will be broken; the soft and supple will prevail.”

“Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.”

We are social animals. We all want to fit and be accepted. We care deeply about others’ opinions of us, and fret and worry over how we come across.

Completely ridding ourselves of the desire to fit in, or of seeking others approval, is unrealistic. To some degree, that will always remain.

But we must be careful not to place too much stock in what others think. As Bob Marley reminds us, “You can’t please all the people all the time.”

Thinking too much about the judgment of others only cages us into living someone else’s life, not our own.

“The ancient Masters didn’t try to educate the people, but kindly taught them to not-know.”

Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, not because he possessed greater knowledge than everyone else, but because he understood just how little he really knew.

Similarly, Lao Tzu understood that our biases can blind us into thinking we know much more than really do. In assuming that we already know the answer to any of life’s problems, we have immediately closed off the possibility of other, possibly better, answers becoming known to us.

In order to learn more about the world — and ourselves — we must appreciate that our ignorance is just as important as our knowledge.

“The Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything.”

The art of “nothingness” is central to Taoism. But that doesn’t mean you should do nothing at all.

What Lao Tzu is really getting at is the ease of action which comes to those who practice and seek true mastery of a skill or action.

• An Olympic marathon runner hardly looks like he or she is straining at all.
• A great dancer’s body moves and flows like water, as if their joints move according to different rules than our own.
• A skilled writer can hold our attention while hardly seeming to be doing anything at all on the page.

There are times when we will feel inadequate next to somebody who makes a task or performance look easy, as if they don’t have to try — are doing nothing.

But that mustn’t discourage us. Through patience and dedication, we too can improve.

I hope these quotes can help you to reduce stress and achieve a greater sense of mindfulness when things get tough. Even if these ideas haven’t inspired you as they have me, I hope that they might, at the very least, point you further in the right direction.