Finding Your Natural Rhythm — Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu opens by calling for vacancy to the utmost degree and stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and then we see them return to their original state. When things in the vegetable world have displayed luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root.

Returning to root is what we call the state of stillness, and that stillness may be called a reporting that they have fulfilled their appointed end. The report of that fulfilment is the regular, unchanging rule. To know that unchanging rule is to be intelligent. Not to know it leads to wild movements and evil issues.

Knowledge of the unchanging rule produces capacity and forbearance, which lead to a community of feeling with all things. From that comes kingliness of character, then likeness to heaven, then possession of the Tao. Possessed of the Tao, one endures long, and to the end of bodily life is exempt from all danger of decay.

Luxuriant growth is not the end of the process. Each plant returns to its root, and that return is the report that an appointed end has been fulfilled. Intelligence is knowing this unchanging rule. Missing it produces wild movements and evil issues. Capacity and forbearance grow from that knowledge, then a community of feeling, then a kingliness that becomes heaven-like.