Chapter Six
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.
Creating Reality
From my readings of the Tao Te Ching over the past several years, what I have come to understand is that Tao is an invisible force that creates everything we are, we see, we experience. It is continually creating it and because we all come from the same source, everything really is connected. It is never ending as, I believe, are we. Through meditation and what I have been studying and learning, I have come to recognise that the essential "me" is not this body and mind but something else.
Recently I did the Level One Usui Holy Fire III Reiki training and the profound experiences I had in the meditations, during the training and every day since, showed me that there is much more to this experience we're having that our 3D senses can't comprehend.
As the Jesuit, Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), said: "We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience."
For our storytelling with the Tao purposes though, it is the second part of this month's chapter that I really want to dig into.
It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.
Another thing I have learned so far in this lifetime is that we create our own reality. We can use the Tao anyway we want and how we use it will determine how things turn out for us. We can choose to find something of benefit even in the most difficult of situations we might find ourselves in. We can see the suffering and hardships we face as gifts that enable us to become more aware and conscious, or we can choose to let them make us bitter and unhappy and devolve into a lesser version of ourselves. We can become disillusioned with the world because of the violence and inequality, or we can choose to try and make a difference in whatever way we can.
As Dara Mark’s says in her brilliant craft book, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc, which I write about here:
The Writer's Access to the Great Mother
What strikes me about this chapter is how it also describes the creative process. As writers, we are constantly drawing from this Great Mother — the inexhaustible source of inspiration, stories, characters, and insights that seems to exist beyond our conscious minds. In my own writing practice, I've learned that the more I trust this source, the more freely it flows. The more emotionally resonant my work is.
During my Reiki training, I was asked to sense the energy field around my teacher with my hands, and suddenly I could feel this subtle but unmistakable current of life force. I could feel the places where it changed, sometimes a greater sense of heat other times a fizzing sensation. I understood that it has always been there but I just hadn't been paying attention to it. This is how I believe the creative source works for writers. The stories and characters are always present around us, waiting to be noticed and accessed.
What I've discovered through my meditation and writing practices is that when I approach my work from ego and try to force a particular outcome, or I write to try and impress rather than to discover, I cut myself off from this deeper source. But when I write from that quiet, receptive place that meditation cultivates, something larger flows through me.
The phrase "You can use it any way you want" has become central to my understanding of both spiritual practice and storytelling. We have complete freedom in how we respond to what life gives us, and this freedom extends to how we craft our stories. Do we connect with characters who grow through suffering, or characters who become diminished by it? Do we share stories that reveal the interconnectedness of all things and grow unity feelings, or stories that reinforce separation and fear?
Story as Spiritual Practice
Every story we write is an act of reality creation. When I sit down to write, I'm actively participating in the Tao's creative force. But as I wrote about here, I’ve come to realise that I don't create these stories so much as receive them. The characters come to me fully formed, with their own voices, their own struggles, their own wisdom.
This understanding has transformed how I approach my writing. Previously, when I wrote about loss or trauma, I would steel myself against the emotional impact. Now I see these moments as opportunities to practice what this chapter teaches: we can use the Tao, including its manifestation as challenging experiences, any way we want.
When a character comes to me who is facing grief, I'm not exploring their psychology from the outside, I'm becoming a channel for their experience. I'm allowing their consciousness to move through me, to show me how they respond to suffering. Sometimes they discover that their essential nature remains untouched by loss. Sometimes they find that their capacity for love actually deepens through mourning. Sometimes they choose the path of bitterness and contraction. I don't decide. I listen and receive what they show me.
This channeling process has taught me that characters aren’t people I make up, but a consciousness that already exists in that infinite realm the Tao describes. They're expressions of the Great Mother, and my job is to let go of myself and my ego around my writing craft to let their truths flow through me onto the page.
The Interconnected Nature of Character and Story
Understanding that everything really is connected has revolutionised how I trust the creative process. When I channel characters, I don't plot their journeys in advance. Instead, I've learned that the story structure emerges organically from their authentic responses to whatever arises.
This means that in my stories, a character's internal transformation and external events aren't separate things I need to coordinate, as they're both arising from the same source simultaneously. The Great Mother is giving birth to both the inner and outer worlds as one unified expression. The challenges a character faces internally are perfect reflections of their external world, and vice versa. Not because I've cleverly arranged them, but because consciousness and circumstances come from the same place.
This approach requires enormous trust. I have to believe that if I channel the character authentically, their story will naturally unfold with perfect structure. And time and again, I've found this to be true. The "plot" that emerges feels more organic and surprising than anything I could have designed, because it's arising from the character's actual spiritual journey rather than my ideas about what should happen.
Sometimes I'll be writing a scene with no idea where it's heading, and suddenly the character will say or do something that perfectly leads towards a resolution. This, I believe, is the Tao at work through storytelling.
Personal Practice: Writing as Energy Work
My Reiki training taught me that healing happens through the practitioner becoming a clear channel for life force energy. I don’t generate the healing, I simply create the conditions for the universal healing energy to flow through me. Writing, I've discovered, works in exactly the same way.
Before I begin writing sessions now, I often do a brief meditation similar to what I learned in Reiki training. I release attachment to particular outcomes, and simply ask that what emerges serves the highest good.
The result is that my writing feels more alive, more surprising, as if the Great Mother is indeed giving birth to infinite worlds through me, and I'm learning to assist in that birth rather than trying to control it.
The Choice in Every Moment
Perhaps the most profound aspect of this chapter for my writing practice is the recognition that channeling characters is itself a continuous act of "using the Tao any way you want." When I open myself to receive a character's consciousness, I'm not a passive vessel, I'm making moment-to-moment choices about how clearly I can receive them, how fully I can trust what they're showing me, how completely I can let go of my ideas for what a story should be.
I choose whether to approach the work from ego or from that deeper receptive place. Do I try to force the characters to say what I think they should say, or do I surrender to what they actually want to express? Do I judge their choices and try to redirect them toward outcomes I prefer, or do I trust their wisdom even when it surprises or challenges me?
I've learned that characters will show me exactly what they need to explore, but only if I create the inner conditions for clear reception. This means releasing my attachment to particular storylines, letting go of my ideas about what makes a "good" story, and trusting that the character's authentic journey will be more interesting than anything I could manufacture.
Sometimes a character will lead me into territory I'm uncomfortable with and bring up emotions I'd rather not feel, put me in situations that seem too difficult or too strange. In these moments, I have to choose whether to use the Tao by staying open and trusting the process, or whether to contract and try to control the direction. More and more I am learning that surrendering is the best thing to do.
What I've discovered in doing so is that characters know things I don't know. They understand their own journey, their own growth, their own losses, in ways that my conscious mind cannot.
Reading
A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri
You can read it online in The New Yorker and it also appears in the 1999 collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
Synopsis
The story follows Shoba and Shukumar, an Indian American couple in their thirties, as they reconnect for one hour each evening during a planned electricity outage. They are mourning the stillbirth of their child and are unable to speak to each other in the way they once did. Shoba has buried herself in her work and never speaks of anything of consequence. Shukumar has stopped going to work, stays in bed until lunchtime and rarely leaves the house. But he has taken up cooking to ensure that Shoba eats. Over the course of the five nights of darkness, Shoba and Shukumar reveal secrets they’ve kept during their three-year marriage over candlelit, wine-infused dinners with a boldness and sense of connection that has faded during the daytime and make love for the first time since their baby died six months earlier. The story explores themes of loss, grief, intimacy and deception of ourselves and others.
I chose this as the reading for this chapter of the Tao Te Ching as it very much ties into creating your own reality by how you respond to the suffering that life brings. While Shukumar believes that they are starting to rebuild what they once had, Shoba’s final secret she reveals is that she has been finding somewhere else to live. Ultimately, the relationship ends not because of the tragedy that occurred, but instead because of their different ways of grieving, or of using the Tao.
How Grief Becomes Reality Creation
What makes this story so powerful is how it demonstrates that even in the deepest suffering, we are still using the Tao. We’re still creating reality through our responses. Shoba and Shukumar aren't passive victims of tragedy and they both actively shape their reality through how they choose to engage with their grief.
Shukumar's choice to care for Shoba through cooking shows him accessing something inexhaustible within himself to express his love through nourishment. Even in his depression, he's drawing from the Great Mother's endless capacity for nurturing. His reality becomes one where love persists through service, even when words fail.
Shoba, meanwhile, creates a reality of self-protection and gradual departure. Her secret apartment-hunting is a practical and a spiritual choice about how to use her life force. She's decided that preservation of self requires separation, that her path or recovering from grief leads away from shared vulnerability.
Neither choice is right or wrong from the Tao's perspective. Both are ways of using the infinite creative power that's "always present within you." But they create vastly different realities and, ultimately, incompatible ones.
As writers, we can learn from how both characters' choices are shared with equal compassion. There’s no judgement for Shoba leaving or for Shukumar hoping. We’re just shown two souls using their creative power differently in response to the same devastating loss. The story becomes a meditation on how consciousness shapes experience, even in extremity.
Please do let me know in the comments your thoughts and feelings about everything I have shared here about this chapter and storytelling.
Writing Prompt
Write a scene or a story where two characters are grieving the same thing but dealing with their grief in very different ways. What does how they deal with it reveal about their individual characters and their relationship?
Building on this prompt, consider these deeper questions:
For Each Character:
How is their grief response connected to their fundamental beliefs about life, love, and meaning?
What inexhaustible source within themselves are they either accessing or cutting themselves off from?
How do their choices create a particular energetic reality around them that others can feel?
What would their response look like if they were consciously using the Tao versus unconsciously resisting it?
For the Relationship:
How do their different ways of accessing (or avoiding) their deeper source create resonance or dissonance between them?
What might happen if one character recognises the spiritual dimension of their choice while the other doesn't?
How does the interconnectedness of all things play out in their dynamic, even if they can't see it?
For You as Writer:
As you write this scene, how can you practice using the Tao in your creative process?
What happens if you write from a place of trust in the story's wisdom rather than forcing predetermined outcomes?
How does your own relationship to grief and loss inform the compassion you bring to these characters?
I would love to hear anything you discover in these exercises if you would like to share it.
Want to explore ideas like these more deeply? I have lots of workshops and courses coming up and I would love to work with you to deepen your craft and writing practice. See my Autumn & Winter schedule here.
I really love what you had to say about the interconnectness of character and plot. When I write fiction, I feel my job is to learn who the characters are by writing them and finding out how they respond. Any serious plotting is beyond my control -- or role!
Great piece, I enjoyed following your thoughts on this subject, Amanda.
the way you describe the Tao makes me think of how I understand the Divine: do you see a connection between the two? I love the "Tao that can be explained is not the Tao..." so maybe my question, is a bit of a fruitless one!