The Freedom of No Worries

No matter how long we have been meditating or walking the spiritual path, we can still find ourselves worrying over the most trivial and meaningless things in our lives. We feel that if we just worry enough, we will then be able to control the future and get everything to work out the way we think it should. Yet we find, again and again, that no matter how much we may worry and obsess over the circumstances of our lives, our worrying thoughts only serve to cause a greater anxiety and fear in our minds, and never actually change the circumstances that we are worrying about.

The truth is; all of us long for freedom from these habitual, useless worries and the joy found in flowing with the current of our lives (the Tao). But how to do this?

There is a great clue that is given to us in the following story about a Taoist sage named Wei Po Yang, who lived way back in 125 AD, and was a noted scholar and master of the I Ching, the Taoist Book of Changes. Towards the end of his life, after devoting himself for 50 years to mastering the Taoist teachings, and writing many commentaries on the I Ching, Wei Po Yang was asked by his students to sum up everything he had learned in all of his years of study and meditation, so that they could put his teaching into practice when he was gone. The old Master contemplated for a moment and then said:

"Worry is Preposterous."