Caregiver’s Tao Te Ching
Caregiver’s Tao Te Ching
Those who care for the ailing, whether helping someone recover, grapple with a long-term disability, or face a terminal illness, often feel alone, overwhelmed, exhausted. William and Nancy Martin have worked as counselors, hospice trainers, and Zen guides — and as caregivers themselves. With empathy and insight, they offer readers solace drawn from the eternal wisdom of the Tao Te Ching.
Like the original Chinese text, this book contains eighty-one chapters. Each chapter includes a poem for caregivers, evocative of the verses of the Tao Te Ching, followed by a reflection that presents practical guidance for navigating the emotional and physical hardships of caregiving. The resulting resource gently awakens readers to the grace, growth, and even joy possible at each step along their path.
About the Authors:
William Martin, a teaching guide at The Still Point Center for Zen Practice, is the author of five books on the Tao Te Ching, including The Parent’s Tao Te Ching. Nancy Martin, the founder of Zen Compassionate Care, is the director of The Sill Point. They live in Chico, California.
The I Ching is used in a type of divination called cleromancy, which uses apparently random numbers. Six numbers between 6 and 9 are turned into a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the text, in which hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter which has been endlessly discussed and debated over in the centuries following its compilation, and many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing.