Trailer | The Turtle as an Organizing Force
Living the Tao-A Spiritual Podcast
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (mcdn.podbean.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
In this subscriber-only episode (1-174), Taoist Master Mikel Steenrod explores the turtle as an organizing force within Taoist thought. Beginning with a classic teaching story of a turtle withdrawing beneath a storm, the discussion expands into the turtle’s deeper symbolic and practical roles across Taoist tradition.
The episode examines how the turtle shell became an early tool for extracting order from chaos through divination practices that predate the I Ching, and how its structured form influenced cosmological thinking. Mikel also discusses the ancient Daoist board game Liubo, modeled after the turtle’s undershell, which functioned as both entertainment and a symbolic map for understanding movement through the universe.
The turtle’s association with longevity, containment, and the preservation of qi is explored, along with its comparison to jade as a storage medium for essence. The discussion then connects these ideas to Taoist cosmology, including the emergence of differentiation from chaos and the need for ordering devices to understand reality.
This episode presents the turtle as a model for survival, perception, and energetic containment, offering a practical and symbolic framework for navigating chaos while preserving vitality.
Full episode available to subscribers, along with AMA access, commentary, and community discussion.
🎧 Listen to the full subscriber episode on supercast. Subscribe now at https://living-the-tao.supercast.com