A Tribute to the Tao
Fire
The Tao is an expression of all things, all manner, all material.
Literature on the Fire Trigram of the Tao.
Courage is the brighter side of being Brave.
When I speak through the written word, I am expressing my soul’s right to be. And so, I write with abandon and flair and silliness and Fire. It’s all I need to do to express my nature and my being, and I collaborate with a version of myself that I consider to be my high nature, which just feels to me like being my own best friend.
That’s who I am.
That’s Me.
Today, tonight, and tomorrow, why be anything you were never meant to be?
Volume 1. Section A. The Light Red Tones.
by Janice Brown (January 24, 2025) Book segment
Symphony of Fire: Tao Framework of Significance
Characteristics and Nature of Fire (simplified)
Dynamic: Hot-Cold Dynamic | Perspective: Fracturing light, facets
Fire has the characteristic of rising up.
It must rise to meet its strength, and once its strength is exploited it must come home to rest. Rest is imperative for Fire to secure its natural tendency to rise.
It won’t otherwise. It will simply simmer in the bottom of a crockpot wishing it could be somewhere else.
Now, what’s the moral of this story?
Give Fire time to build and once it rises, fan the flames, then when it comes back to Earth it will never be the same again. Flame burns to the ground and becomes ashes. Everyone thinks it’s the residue of the burn that remains, but it is the ignition of the next spark of life that is burned into the residue so powerfully that no spark remains.
It is life. A breath of fresh air being brought to life, over and over again. Fire is in essence the eternal flame, the spark within all things and this is the simplest understanding you may have about Fire; Fire is impenetrable. It is without body, shape, or form; it can pivot and move from one direction to the next with barely a hint of a suggestion.
It will, when coaxed do as it is told or requested, but Fire resents this behaviour and quite literally will turn itself inside out to no longer exist in this circumstance.
It is without warning that Fire will suddenly reappear and then spark a new light over here. And when this happens the light becomes the new flame to start all over again. This is the purity and intensity with which love burns, it is unassailable.
And so, once in a while simply sit and talk to the flame as if you are talking to your best friend, tell the flame your story and your pain, and flame will rise to meet your name.
This is the soul purpose and quest of Fire:
To rise into the night and blind the night stars,
To make a single tear drop stream straight through to Mars.
And once in a while, when you talk to your flame,
tell them the story of your greatest name.
Tell them the story of love that’s in vain,
then tell them the truth of love that remains.
And Fire will tell you a little sweet tale,
the story of We Love that bursts through the veil.
The veil of stars, a streamer of light,
the curious feelings of having delight.
This is the true love, the heart burns within,
its life and its bounty, shines through din.
You can see the first light, a truly bright sphere,
As many awaken and hasten the near.
These volumes are being published in a serialized format. Please join me weekly on Thursdays, as Volume 1 is published in my Substack publication, Symphony of Colour.
Light has an absolute devotion to Love.
C’mon Baby, Light My Fire
by Janice Brown (September 1, 2024)
A common misunderstanding about the Tao is that it’s just a philosophical process.
The Tao is a tool of understanding deep psychological and physiological processes.
It works both ways, and we study this in Chinese medicine, and we live it in life. What makes you think you can take a shortcut is that you don’t understand what you’re talking about fully, and as you go deeper into the material, you’ll want to roll back the carpet and reroll it a few times, talk about context with friends and family, and once you know it, you’ll be bold.
You want to watch a rocket to the moon every time you go out the front door, but then you go walking sideways down the alley of despair. People do it every single day, and then they think there’s something wrong with them or their life. They can’t see where they have brought misfortune front and centre into the game each and every time.
It worries me that we don’t see these potentials until they are too late.
What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? You can be forthright. You can be clear. You can be certain. Now certainty takes a long time, but being certain happens in a moment.
You can’t clearly explore this without having some aptitude for really feeling things deep down inside. When you do, you know it either feels wonderful or terrible, and that’s where we’re going to place our benchmark—wonderful or terrible. Really? What about all the space in between?
We need reliable methods of discernment to keep moving forward. If you want a life hack, get your SolePath measured. And I sincerely mean that, it's a game changer. If you want to live a life of grace and ease, start debunking the myths about why you think you’re so flawed.
You need an aggressive Warrior spirit so you can set a benchmark high enough that no other standard will do, and that’s what I do when I’m setting myself up for success: I look so damn high that the clouds don’t see me sometimes.
Perhaps I look like a monkey hanging from the rafters, but I’ll know how to legitimize my way around some radical territory because I’ve done this first and foremost—I made a plan to take my Intellect into another threshold of experience, and then I let the reins fall and see where it went.
I made another plan to not be so downhearted, and then I cried my last tear for a while. I made a choice to enliven my life with friends and relatives and fold in those I hadn’t seen for a long time simply because I had spent so much time alone over the last number of years. And being alone isn’t something that I mind; in fact, I kind of dig it. But being alone can also get you a little around the ankles and get you tied up in knots you didn’t know were there.
So that’s life and living on the flip side.
It takes a grand achievement to see it really take hold. Sometimes footholds don’t seem like much, but they are the path home, and you’ve got to test your resources from time to time, otherwise, what’s the point in having them?
I’ve sat around for a lot of years in my life wondering when I was going to get up off my duff before realizing that I was the one that put myself on my duff in the first place.
You’ve got to embrace a little Fire, feel a little burn, and then walk it back out the doorway again and see if you still feel the same way. Not feeling inspired? Maybe you need a little more zest and verve; that’s what most of us need, a slapstick afternoon on a country lane with a best friend chortling in our ear.
Not going to find that on the freeway on your way to work at the old grindstone. You need to take some allowances and take some liberties. Once you see it, you’ll remember it used to be fun sometimes. And that’s what the world is missing: a little joy, a little bit of upheaval from time to time never hurt anyway.
We’ve behaved ourselves into a corner for far too long, and that’s what feels out of whack. Our nature is to be exuberant and full of whimsy, but we lack a certain degree of comfort with being comical or silly, and then we spend the rest of our time looking down our nose at those that do.
Stop what you’re doing and think about it for a minute. I did this just the other day; I went to a store with my best friend in heart and mind and never bothered to tell them I was going there. Whatever for? Simply because I didn’t want to be an inconvenience to their routine or day? What about life makes you think you should never shake it up and hit a big ol’ guffaw out of the gates once in a while? So do it. Do it while you can.
What’s the point of waiting your life away longing for a perfect moment? It can’t find you if you don’t play the game. So sit a little outside the safe zone so you can bump into a stranger or two and have an awesome bus ride. Put a smile on someone’s face. Trust a little bit more. Bandy about a bit. See a new movie and watch an old one back to back. Bothering people has become a mental construct that keeps us isolated on our perch.
If you want to walk down memory lane, walk down memory lane with a friend. If you want to build a new resort out of chopsticks, get a new set of wheels to haul your supplies. If you want to come up with the best and greatest algorithm, go write on a wall, or a porch, or a book, or a map, but you’ve got to get it out of the dustbin and into the fire to shed a little light on it.
You’ve got to start.
And the starting point is a simple new choice: What will I do today that’s different than what I did yesterday?
Grab a frock and go frolic. Get a new haircut. Throw on an old t-shirt. Put some wind in your hair and some sparkle on your shoes, and go out and look for some good news. Got to be a thing or two worth remembering about today if you walk out the door with a new set of ideals in your mind.
Make it a dangerous choice to make a move, and you’ll find a way to stay exactly as you’ve been.
Always remember that resilience is a grand choice. It’s powerful, and it’s effective. The only thing you need to decide is where you are bouncing back to.
Forward or backward?
Light has an absolute devotion to Love.
Fire on Fire
(Impenetrable)
Where do we go when we can no longer be who we are without fear of moving into a certain framework or lesson?
Impenetrable.
This is the dynamic of Fire on Fire in Significance.
Each and every time you come to a realization of self you will find that there is a light that is shining within. This ring of Fire around Fire creates a barrier of effervescent and external protection. Nothing gets through the Fire wall! But that’s ok, this is a safety boundary for your own inner realization. The thing that must occur and will, is that the inner Fire can move through the Firewall at will and often does without you even realizing it.
The realization of self is the most important moment in any lifetime, yours or mine. And so, this is the worthiest pursuit known to man. Mankind in and of itself is no greater and no lesser than any other species or construct that exists. It is part of your divine nature to be in absolute worth, and so the very first place you can begin to see this is through the light that you hold up, first for yourself and then for others.
This is a specialized form of selfishness that catapults you through the ceiling into a territory of high worth, and high worth prevails as an ultimate destination point for all who walk this land. It comes as no surprise then that as you get closer to your own light, you may feel the world suddenly amplify and brighten, and then through the suddenness of effort, the world can suddenly plunge itself into darkness.
This is not a darkness of something abhorrent; it is a darkness as, in a sense of being in a vacuum—I can’t go back where I was before, and I can’t see a way forward yet. This is the landscape of the divine light within, and as this light emboldens itself, it moves through the shadow and the dark into a new and powerful frontier where each and every one of us must run through the gauntlet of our own Heart’s desire.
Now desire in these terms is seldom understood. Desire in the mainstream context is simply an urge to receive a certain outcome based on a particular sort of formation.
This desire is the longing of the Heart in its true manifest form. And so as you begin to see the world through the desire of your own knowing, you’ll begin to see avenues of Hope that you haven’t seen before. And once you are in Knowing, you will begin to understand that there is a landscape here for each man, woman, and child.
This becomes the home base of all your accomplishments as you begin to be in service to your own divine purpose, your own divine nature. You come to see who you are as a beacon of hope for others, and this is a time where much hope is needed.
On an elementary basis, Fire can be understood as the one that can clear through any distortion, simply because that’s what Fire does—it cleans house. Once in a while, Fire can get catastrophic, and we’ll talk about that in another construct. But here and now, We want you to see that there is no hope for You without Me.
And Me is a misnomer; it simply means that one can not exist without the other.
If there were never an opportunity to know the self, how could you know it as apart? A part? This is where it gets a little complicated, and sometimes we just have to roll with it until we can see through a new lens a little further than we have before.
When I say Me, I mean You too, because I can’t be Me without the framework of another to exist.
So in the simplest terms, let’s just talk about this in a backwards kind of way, and ‘kind of way’ means a simple gesture of faith and reason.
I’m going to give you some preliminary concepts here, and that is so you have a few purchase points for a frame of reference on your concept wheel. And we'll talk about concept wheels a little later too. First and foremost, you have to understand that you are not an accessory; you are Vital. Intricate. Beloved. And, Involved.
You can only be here with a certain amount of honesty and distortion known through the framework of isolation, but isolation in and of itself is not worth holding onto if you can’t adjust to find the Wind of the sail that moves you through.
You need to understand that though each and every one of us is born to be here for our own knowing, our own reason, and our own understanding, we are also born to be here for another. And that other is going to find you wringing your hands out some days because you’ve lost track of your own sense of purpose, your own sense of knowing, and yes, your own sense of being yourself.
You need to be yourself more than any other thing on this planet, and that’s the first thing I need to say. You do You, because it can’t be any other way.
The sense of accomplishment that can be achieved simply by having utmost regard for the self is pivotal to the nature of your very being. And being who you are is no easy task, it’s not a sunny stroll through the park.
Some days you are going to find yourself screaming, “What the *#$@…?!” And the very next moment be infused with such a sure and sudden peace that it will make you feel a bit crazy.
That’s dialing it down and dialing it in.
You’ve got a pragmatic sensor that helps you relate to those around you and the experiences you live through, but you also have a sense of wonder and a common sense of misbelief. And this stems from your very own decision to keep yourself in a circle of light that is too small to hold You.
This inner escalation of flame becomes the one that needs to break through the ring of Fire. And Fire holds itself at bay, and Fire also climbs the highest tree to jump to the next place it needs to be. So you’ve got this inner sense of obligation that is holding you in check, making sure you don’t burn out and also that you don’t overachieve and leave nothing left to leave.
But there is also an energetic dynamic that we’ll call simply the belief and faith in self that is so profound that it can only be realized through a certain sense of accomplishment that is an awful lot like friction. This friction can be an unbearable feeling, a lot like internal claustrophobia, and it arises out of the need to break out of your own shell. This feeling is the prompting and pushing of yourself forward in advance of the circumstances that you need to get there. This is an internal struggle, and it is as real as the skin on your nose.
You know you need to do something, and yet you will hold yourself back because the momentum is taking you beyond your space. Again, physically, we can see this barrier like the skin being malleable, flexible, and just outside the self. Mentally and emotionally, we may see this as an advancement of fear that negates potential because it walks the Fire line, saying, ‘Nope, not here, not a safe place to make the jump from today.’
This energetic is bound to rise.
These constraints feel like a block of autonomy, and ironically, it is the autonomy that is the one blocking the access point.
So how does Fire on Fire make its way through the Battlefield of Hope and Reason? It does the only thing that it can do; it burns itself into a new form of expression that can only be realized by burning away all the misperceptions.
These misperceptions are like a giant bird cage. Now a cage gives a false sense of protection because a Fire will walk right on through that, any direction it wants to, but because there is the imposition of a structure, Fire will try to behave in a sort of half-hearted way.
Fire needs the resources to run forward; it can’t get there from here if there is no leg to stand upon, no bridge to burn, no log to jump to over here. And so, that’s where we begin to see a sense of hopelessness within Fire because Fire needs to run and no one can run fast enough to keep up with it.
Everything that tries must self-sacrifice in order to feed the Fire, and Fire feels a sense of obligation and a sense of distortion towards others as a mainstay of keeping itself in form. The place you need to understand this is that this isn’t a distortion towards the one that is in front of you; it’s a distortion towards the self for a sense of neediness to keep in expression.
This burns Fire’s desire to a crisp if it is left untended. And this is the other thing to know about Fire, Fire can traverse any area with a certain and steadfast partner that will give the resources to make the transposition, but will always and only be able to do so when the inner light burns bright enough that it can see a way forward without harm to the self and those around them.
The wiseman once said, ‘Better not keep your stick in the Fire too long or it will turn to Red.’ And Red is what we are talking about when we are talking about Fire. Fire needs alternate fuel sources that don’t imply destruction, just as much as it needs a water source to be emboldened enough to see itself in its own reflection. Fire needs to see through the eyes of one who can hold it still without trapping it within a construct. This is the benefit of being able to hold Fire without burning the self. This is the job of Lake.
A Fire that gets down on its knees and prays doesn’t get down on its knees and pray for a sunny day; it looks for a little darkness so it can inhabit itself in form, and form takes a stillness that Fire can’t abide. Fire needs to evacuate and renegotiate its terms from time to time, and when this happens, Fire can build a bigger, safer home.
Fire housed in Earth will know its own expression is of value; it can contribute to a society, and it can bring a new sense of wonder and awe. It can’t, however, leave its own domain without the sure and ever-present opportunity to move through the land with a carrier in hand. And the best carrier for a Fire is the Heart, because the Heart has the capacity to hold all things.
And this is where we begin today, looking at the Heart in a brand new way.
by Janice Brown (September 25, 2024)
The Energetic Pairs are an Alliance, not an Oppositional Force
When an energy is present in excess, use it to propel itself in a new direction. Don’t seek to bind it in opposition.
You do yourself a disservice when you think in terms of opposition; it brings to mind old schools of thought; one creates and one takes a way.’
New thought is, ‘One is in alliance by offering congruence.’
When you see this picture fully, you will transform your work. Be so proud of you for completing the thing you would rather do to get to the thing that you want to do.
Does this make sense? The thing you would rather do to get to the thing that you want to do. There isn’t any opposition here; there is an allowance. And that is the rule of the game: allowance and forbearance.
Together these entities unify the field in fullness and resonance and congruence, and so we are saying that you are seeing the edge but not the whole picture; you’ll need to take a step closer to do that.
Back to using one energy to propel itself into another. How does one propel inertia with more inertia? Inertia is not an energy; it is a force that expresses itself upon an energy. And so we are saying there is only Light in energetic terms. That Which Does Not Allow an energy to transform and move in the way it is realized to perform is a force. An oppositional force may prevent an energy from transforming, but it itself is not an energy.
Now understanding what we know about forces, we can look at things with a slightly different eye. If we are looking to transform an energetic imbalance through the removal of an oppositional force, we are playing a completely different game than using another energy to redirect it.
Whatever ‘seems to be true’ is likely not the case in true alignment. What seems to be true is often a picture painted backwards. And what is a picture painted backwards? It is a reflection. And how can we know this? We don’t. We trust. And we try. And we see.
An illustration would be in order. When we return to the complexities of human thought, you will be relieved that this is always the case. For now, let’s look at energetic patternings.
The energetic force of charisma is Fire, and it roils and burns and sometimes slow burns, but it is always burning. We are not saying use the water to put out the fire; we are saying use the fire to let it burn itself down. When you use the water, the energetic of the fire itself subsides, but not in a peaceful, natural way. It is stopped short, snuffed out, exhausted.
Were it to be the case that every fire requires only water to subside, this advice would seem foolish.
But what is the benefit to having no flame at all? What one desires is a manageable, controllable flame of considerable warmth and light but not destructive in purposeful terms. What we need is an application of a new form of less resistant material. And That Which Is Likened To Itself Is Drawn.
And so we are saying the most powerful thing you can do is let Fire be Fire, and Wind be Wind, and Water be Water. And what we would do to control this is not control it, but allow it in a new form of being in expression.
It is not that the Fire desires to burn the tree to the ground; it is that it has no choice in the matter. This is what Fire does. But what else does Fire do? It allows progress and expansion and growth. And we can see through your eyes, and we can see through our eyes, and ‘the think’ that we see is a parallel circumference but not an absolution.
So we should look to this in terms of a quiet child looking to be left alone.
The quiet child will continue to be a quiet child until it can no longer bear the silence that is within the artificial construct of the exterior mind. The child desires true silence, and so it drops a coin of sound to see what reflects back. If the return reflection is an echo of their experience, they are reassured that this is the case. Create a new sound, a louder sound, and this is the place where the testing begins... there is always an echo to the sound that is created.
If the sound that was created was allowed to carry on its way without a return of the echo, the sound would dissipate. And so we are not talking about energetic forces as opposites; we are talking about them as echoes. Echoes establish a kind of interference of data that must be compelled to be returned in perpetuity. If the echo didn’t bounce back, how would you know? By feel. By the feel of the warmth that is beside you. The warmth that is within you.
Complete this sentence for me if you will. What lies before me and what lies beneath me is nothing compared to what lies... within me. And so what lies within you is energetic resonance. This is your gift. Your gift of understanding that resonance is the power and the counterbalance is the enabler of the power, and it is not in fact an opposite but an alliance. It is an equalizer.
So reframe your mind work. If I want to manage the fire that is burning out of control, the most effective way to do this is to allow it to burn in the direction it is moving and not to constrain it but to support it.
How do you support the fire that is burning out of control? You don’t interfere with its path or trajectory, but you move the fuel to the side of it to re-engage it in another direction. You can lead a fire where you want it to go by giving it the appropriate fuel source in another energetic direction.
So let’s take the for instance of a child that is being unruly and out of control; a swift application of water not only squelches the fire, it evaporates the water. We are not looking to destroy Water; we are looking to allow Fire. We want the fire to burn; we just want it to burn in a new direction.
Whatever you are used to saying and seeing, this will be a profound and turbulent energetic shift if you allow it to be, or a simple and quick course correct. So let’s get on with the course correct. And here is the beauty of the now moment. It provides all the resonance that is required. It just supplies it in a new and resonant format.
What seeks expression will continue until it is expressed.
One knows this without thinking about it. But what one fears is the expression of an undesired result. The undesired result comes only from an unnatural force that is placed upon a natural energetic movement. Do you see this? When a fire wants to burn up and you tell it to burn down, you must lay the fuel on the ground in a low-lying, resonant pattern.
And so we are saying, take the directional force and use it. Use Fire's ability to burn up and when it reaches its limit, it will fall back down, there’s nowhere left for it to go. So complete the cycle; don’t interrupt it. Allow it.
What happens when the school is burning on fire? Or the church? Or the country? The Fire only burns because it continues to receive fuel. Without the sustenance, the Fire can’t maintain itself. And so we are saying let it burn itself out through the resonance of dissolution rather than the mechanism of antagonism.
This seems perplexing, but it’s true. The energy will move the way it must when it is allowed to, and then it will dissipate. It will conserve itself for another expression; once it sees that there is no opportunity through exertion, it will fold back into itself, awaiting a new and beautiful opportunity to shine. This works like a charm. Every. Single. Time.
Every single time when you allow the energy to proceed without resistance, it will return to its natural arrangement. And so a Fire that is not fueled does not burn out of control. A flame that is not stoked doesn’t fracture off in new directions; it follows the path of least resistance and folds back into itself. It will always sustain itself, but it will do no harmful destruction.
Do no harm. What do you think this means? Do not provoke with oppositional force. This will in fact inflame the region beyond the comfort of the being’s expression, and all manifestations at this point are seen in opposition to what is the natural recourse of the energy. But it is not the energy that is at fault. It is the fault of the force that is being applied against its natural behaviour.
Where to go to process this? Just get quiet for a moment. Get still and see what new and remarkable insight you will pull from the field when you no longer sit in disallowance of That Which Is.
That Which Is is not an energetic collapse; it is an energetic resistance that is applied in force only due to the uncertainty of the being in the moment. If the being knew that it was safe, it would not leave a trail of drag marks everywhere it went. It would simply allow the movement and return to itself.
So what will it be, a channel or a dam?
Personalities constrain themselves against their natural energetic response because they wish to appear in a different manner. While this is understandable at times, it is not an issue with the nature of who they are; it is an issue with the perception of who they are that is really at the root of the consequence that you would consider ill health or problematic outcome.
So to be perfectly clear, we are not condoning inappropriate action; we are discussing the allowance of a natural energetic movement pattern. And so, when you look to the energetic movement, look for ways to allow it instead of restrain it. See it in a new light and you will see all your misgivings transform.
Contrast expresses itself in the form of resistance when it could simply express in the expression of the light companion without having a need to be in a forceful, frictionous state. It could simply be allowed to be seen for what it is: an energetic disruption that doesn’t require control but release.
I’m thinking about my dog stretching and his claws scratching me, not because he has a desire to make an affection painful, but because his body is contracting in a natural response to a movement pattern.
When the contraction stops, so does the contraction that curls his claws forward into a penetrating state. Move aside or reposition from the contraction; allow the follow-through, and it will naturally subside. A contraction requires force to sustain itself.
Think of a yawn or a yawn muscle contraction as opposed to a workout at the gym. Sustained, forced contraction results in an energetic imbalance. The compounding result is a more powerful expression of the necessary energetic to ignite the motive force.
This will revolutionize your thinking process in terms of sustain and maintain for achieving “resonant health.’ Resonant health flows without constraint. It is the difference between contraction and collapse.
Collapse is a forced energetic. You collapse under force. Contraction is a natural rhythmic undulation.
by Janice Brown (June 19, 2020)
About Janice
Rev. Janice Brown DTCM, sp.M (master), CS.p
Janice is a specialist in the Tao. If you look at the 10,000-hour rule, she has been exploring the Tao a lot longer than that. She is both a doctor of Chinese medicine and a Reverend with a metaphysical practice, who writes and talks about life from a metaphysical perspective. Her understandings of the Tao and Emotional Relevance come from these two veins of understanding.
She is an avid writer about the dynamic relationships of the energies of the Tao. Over time, you'll begin to see patterns emerge that you thought were your own and you'll suddenly recognize them in the collective experience. This is powerful stuff. She considers the work she does as Spiritual Care.
Janice lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada with her family and pup where her heart feels at home. She is the Secretary Treasurer for Mediation Yukon ~
A Society to Promote Peacemaking.
Interested in training on the Tao?
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