There is a verse in the Tao Te Ching that has lived inside me for decades. It has been a companion through my darkest nights and my most luminous mornings, a quiet thread woven through every session I have ever held, every hand I have ever placed on a trembling body. Lao Tzu writes:
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
When I first read those words, I was a young woman sitting cross-legged on the floor of a tiny apartment, surrounded by books and candles and a desperate hunger to understand why life hurt so much. I thought I understood them immediately. Simplicity — keep things simple. Patience — wait for things to get better. Compassion — be kind to others. Check, check, check. I could do that. I could master that.
Oh, how little I knew.
It has taken me a lifetime to begin to understand what Lao Tzu was actually pointing toward, and the understanding has not come through my mind. It has come through my body, through my bones, through the slow, sometimes agonizing process of sitting with everything I did not want to feel.
The Tao Does Not Take Sides
There is another verse that cracks open the comfortable illusion most of us carry around like a security blanket:
The Tao doesn't take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn't take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners.
Read that again, slowly. Let it land in your body, not just your mind.
The Tao — the great creative intelligence of the universe, the source from which all life springs — does not take sides. It does not sort the world into neat columns of acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and unworthy, light and dark. It gives birth to all of it. The saint and the sinner emerge from the same womb. The tenderness and the rage arise from the same source. The part of you that loves with fierce devotion and the part of you that wants to slam the door and walk away — they are both children of the Tao.
This is not a comfortable teaching. It is, in fact, deeply unsettling to the part of us that has spent a lifetime building walls between our "good" qualities and our "bad" ones. We have been taught, from the time we were very small, to identify with the saint and exile the sinner. To present our polished, acceptable face to the world and to lock the rest away in a dark closet, hoping no one — including ourselves — will ever look inside.
But the closet door never stays shut, does it?
It rattles in the night. It leaks. The exiled parts of ourselves find their way out through our sharp words, our sudden irritations, our inexplicable anxieties, our bodies that ache in places we cannot explain. They emerge in the friends who trigger us, the enemies who enrage us, and the quiet moments alone when we are flooded with feelings we cannot name.
We Are All Both
I want to say something that may feel radical, though it is the simplest truth I know: we are all both. Every single one of us carries within us the capacity for extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty. We hold tenderness and violence, generosity and greed, wisdom and foolishness. We are saints. We are sinners. We are confused, contradictory, magnificently messy beings.
And this is not a problem to be solved. This is the human experience to be lived.
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Explore Healing SessionsI have sat with thousands of people over the years — in my healing room, in workshops, in retreats around the world — and I can tell you that the single greatest source of suffering I have witnessed is not the external circumstances of people's lives. It is the war they wage against themselves. It is the relentless, exhausting effort to be only the saint, to banish the sinner, to present a version of themselves that is acceptable and safe.
A woman came to me once, a dear one who had spent her entire adult life in service to others. She was a healer, a caregiver, a devoted mother. And she was utterly depleted. When I placed my hands on her body, I could feel the tension — a deep, chronic holding pattern that ran from her jaw through her chest and into her belly. It was the tension of someone who had been holding her breath for thirty years.
"I don't understand," she whispered. "I do everything right. I meditate. I eat well. I serve others. Why do I feel so angry all the time?"
Because, my love, you have been trying to be only the saint. And the sinner — the part of you that is furious, that is exhausted, that wants to scream "What about me?" — has been locked in that dark closet for decades. And she is done being quiet.
The Path to Peace
So how do we find our way to peace? Not the brittle, surface-level peace of pretending everything is fine, but the deep, unshakeable peace that can hold the full catastrophe of being human?
We begin with those three treasures Lao Tzu offered us. But we must understand them at a depth that goes far beyond their surface meaning.
Simplicity does not mean making your life simple. It means stripping away the layers of pretense, the masks, the stories you have told yourself about who you are supposed to be. It means returning to the raw, unadorned truth of this moment — including the parts of this moment that are uncomfortable, confusing, or painful. Simplicity is the courage to stop performing and to simply be.
Patience does not mean waiting for things to get better. It means being willing to stay present with what is, even when what is feels unbearable. It means sitting with your own confusion without rushing to resolve it. Sitting with your own anger without immediately trying to fix it or explain it away. Patience is the radical act of giving yourself permission to not have it all figured out.
Compassion does not mean being kind to others while secretly judging yourself. It means turning that same tenderness inward — toward the parts of yourself you have rejected, the feelings you have deemed unacceptable, the memories you have tried to bury. Compassion is the willingness to hold your own brokenness with the same gentleness you would offer a frightened child.
Sitting With Our Own Good and Evil
Here is the practice, and it is deceptively simple: we have to be willing to sit with all of it.
We have to be willing to sit with our own good and evil. Our own saints and sinners. Our own confusion and anger. Our own jealousy and pettiness and fear. Not to wallow in them. Not to act on them. But to acknowledge them. To feel them fully. To let them move through us like weather moving through an open sky.
Because here is what I have learned, in my body, through decades of this work: what we resist, persists. What we exile, grows stronger in the shadows. But what we meet with presence — what we turn toward with those three treasures of simplicity, patience, and compassion — begins to transform.
This is not a metaphor. I have felt it happen under my hands, in the bodies of people who finally, finally gave themselves permission to feel what they had been running from. The jaw unclenches. The belly softens. The breath deepens. Something that has been frozen for years begins to thaw, and what flows out is not the monster they feared, but a river of tears, of relief, of homecoming.
Our Friends, Our Enemies, Ourselves
This inner work does not happen in isolation. It plays out in every relationship we have — with our friends, our enemies, and ourselves.
The friend who irritates you? She is showing you a part of yourself you have not yet made peace with. The person who enrages you? He is holding up a mirror to the exile in your own closet. This is not to say that harmful behavior should be tolerated or that boundaries are unnecessary. Boundaries are essential. But the emotional charge — the intensity of our reaction — is always, always pointing us back to our own inner landscape.
When we can sit with our own darkness, we stop needing the world to be different in order to feel at peace. We stop needing our friends to behave perfectly. We stop needing our enemies to change. We stop needing ourselves to be flawless. And from that place of deep, embodied acceptance, something miraculous happens: we become genuinely free.
Not free from difficulty. Not free from conflict. But free from the tyranny of our own resistance to life as it is.
The Cost of Abdication
If we cannot sit with our own inner storms — if we refuse to meet our own confusion, our own anger, our own shadow — then we are abdicating. We are handing over our power to every external circumstance, every difficult person, every piece of bad news. We are saying, in effect, "I will only be at peace when the world arranges itself to my liking."
And the world, as you may have noticed, has no intention of doing that.
This is the great trap. We wait for peace to arrive from the outside — from the right relationship, the right job, the right political outcome, the right spiritual experience — and it never, ever comes. Because peace is not a destination. It is a practice. It is the daily, moment-by-moment choice to turn toward ourselves with simplicity, patience, and compassion, and to welcome whatever we find there.
The Tao does not take sides. It holds everything. And when we learn to do the same — when we learn to hold our own saints and sinners with equal tenderness — we discover that we have been carrying the peace we were searching for all along. It was never out there. It was always right here, in the willingness to sit with the full, glorious, heartbreaking truth of who we are.
This is the path. It is not easy. It is not quick. But it is real, and it is yours.
