Relax, You’re Already Home

“The men of old knew that life comes without warning, and as suddenly goes. They denied none of their natural inclinations, and repressed none of their bodily desires. They never felt the spur of fame. They sauntered through life gathering its pleasures as the impulse moved them.” – Yang Chu (4th century BCE)

Every morning, Raymond Barnett puts a teapot on low and steps out of his house at Valley Oaks Village, a collaborative housing community in northern California, for a 40-minute walk. By the time he gets back, the water is just at a boil, and Barnett—a 65-year-old Vietnam veteran, Yale University graduate and retired biology professor—quietly pours himself a cup of green tea. He sips it slowly, savoring each moment. After all, he is drinking in the Tao.

When he was younger, studying Chinese history and immersing himself in the teachings of the 6th-century sage Lao Tsu, Barnett saw Taoism as a deeply inspiring, if somewhat exotic, philosophy and religion from the ancient world. Today, he regards the way of the Tao as a practical, down-to-earth approach to everyday life. He sees practicing Taoists all around him, in fact, although many of these erstwhile sages—like his neighbors who rise at dawn each day to jog through a local park, or spend hours lovingly tending their vegetable gardens—might be surprised to hear themselves described this way.

“It is exactly the everyday, practical aspects of life that are most important for following the Tao, because the Tao is everywhere,” says Barnett, author of Relax, You’re Already Home: Everyday Taoist Habits for a Richer Life. “You do not have to go searching for it. From a Taoist perspective, the more you strive after something, the more you search to find something hidden somewhere, the farther you get from what is right under your nose.”

Such ideas are by no means alien to Buddhism. But as Barnett pointed out during my phone interview with him, Taoism is about the immanent, whereas Buddhism often places great emphasis on the transcendent—a tendency that certain Chinese Buddhist masters, no doubt highly influenced by Taoism itself, fought with a ferocity that bordered on the perverse. “Bodhi and nirvana are hitching posts for donkeys,” said the 9th-century Chán sage Linji Yìxuán, who famously urged his students to “kill the Buddha on the road” and described pratyekabuddhas and other exalted ones as “so much filth in the latrine.” Yikes!

Still, I can understand why masters like Linji felt a need to whack their students over the head—literally—with such messages. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I repeatedly forget to relax and just be during the mundane activities of daily life. In part, this is because I have reserved paying full attention for some future moment when I am back on the cushion. Likewise, I repeatedly fall into the trap of becoming fixated on transcendent states or attainments that I have heard or read about. This imagined future takes me away from the actual present, as does the frenetic pace of our materialistic and technology-obsessed culture, which puts a premium on speed and seems to actively encourage distraction.

For Barnett, that would all be a way of saying that I repeatedly allow myself to lose touch with the Tao. In Relax, You’re Already Home, the avid naturalist offers practical tips on how to use what he calls “folk Taoism” to make lifestyle changes that will boost your odds of staying connected. While there is some mention of ch’i in the book, these suggestions have little to do with practicing, say, the microcosmic orbit or donning a Tai Chi uniform and some kung fu shoes. They are practical to the point of seeming homespun. The book even includes worksheets!

Barnett came to this approach after making a series of trips to China in the early 1980s, before the country’s economy went into overdrive. “I found a way to go from the philosophical aspects of the Tao Te Ching to the living-life aspect of Taoism,” Barnett explains. “My buddy Kyle Brown and I traveled independently throughout China, which hardly anyone was doing in those days. We went off the beaten path, visited temples in Taiwan. We saw people that had a simple, easygoing acceptance of life. In China, Taoism has long been described as ‘the art of living.’ We saw this firsthand.”

Fluent in Chinese, Barnett attended innumerable festivals during his trips and sipped tea with Taoists from all walks of life. He came to appreciate, in particular, the way Taoists consciously celebrated both the natural world and the human body as emanations of the Tao. “That’s why I have a chapter called ‘Getting Physical,’ ” he said. “Some people are all wrapped up in their heads, but folk Taoism can be a route for getting out of that prison. It can help you be comfortable in your own skin, in your own body.”

Among other suggestions, Barnett encourages readers to go camping as often as they can, and to cultivate both regular outside activities as well as close relationships with particular natural spots that speak to them. “To stay healthy, we need to interact with the ch’i of trees and streams and mountains and air and birds and clouds,” he writes. He highlights the importance of humor, and of accepting the inevitable ebbs and flows, joys and sorrows of life with humility and equanimity. One of the more moving parts of the book is when Barnett recounts the immense grief of losing his beloved daughter, Holly. “Accept, accept, accept. All of it,” he writes. “To do anything less is to turn away from the Tao. And that we cannot do.” He urges readers to make more conscious use of technology and to reduce their “screen time,” in part by having electronics-free evenings. He suggests creating your own holidays, perhaps pegged to the changes of the seasons or just in celebration of your own personal heroes, ancestors or sources of inspiration. He notes the importance of participation in communal life—whether by pitching in to help your neighbors or just by partying with them—and describes how to surround yourself with what he calls “guides,” or reminders of the Tao.

“I’m sitting in my study here, and I have a half-wall exhibit of beautiful seashells,” he said. “I just love looking at them and handling them. We also have an altar in our front room. It has rocks and seashells on it, and a picture of Holly. If my roses are blooming, I’ll put a couple in the vase. We light little tea lights on the altar a couple of times a day. It is part of reminding yourself of the Tao and how it flows in the world.”

I read Relax, You’re Already Home at the suggestion of a friend who gave up Buddhism after years of practice. I’m glad I took his advice and picked up the book. If I have any disagreement with it, however, it might be over one particular point: As a Taoist, Barnett sees the universe as perfect, just as it is, and would probably find the idea of, say, sitting a three-month meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society to be absurd. But as a Buddhist, I believe there is one thing in our human realm that does need to be “fixed”—namely, the suffering that results from samsara. Ultimately, samsara and nirvana may be one, just as the Tao is one, but I find my own mental chaos, distractedness and emotional upheaval to be so great that I do need to park my posterior on a cushion. I also believe that enlightenment is, as the dharma teacher Kenneth Folk puts it, a physio-energetic process that in certain seasons of development requires active engagement and effort—quite a lot of it, in fact. But without what has been called receptive effort—the non-effort of letting go and accepting things for the way they are—I’m sure such a project would be doomed to fail. The path to nibbana, in other words, might well require surrendering … to the Tao.