XPERIENCEIT PRESS IS PROUD TO PUBLISH
It is What It is: A Place to Begin with the Tao Te Ching
What I’d tell my twenty-three-year-old self after forty years
t twenty-three, Cliff Kayser encountered the Tao Te Ching in a required World Religions course and asked a question that would remain with him for forty years: Could this one help with all the others?
He kept returning to the text—through work and relationships, loss and recovery, leadership and human development, a life-changing mountain-bike accident, and the long effort to live what he could already recognize on the page.
It is What It is gathers the counsel he would place in the hands of that twenty-three-year-old now. Kayser has selected twenty-three chapters as a guided entrance to the Tao Te Ching. Each chapter pairs his poetic reinterpretation with a brief reflection drawn from lived experience and practice. The first movement names It as directly as language allows. The second turns to water, valleys, storms, roots, and other images that can carry what explanation cannot.
This is not a scholarly translation from Classical Chinese. It is an invitation to begin: to meet reality without confusing acceptance with approval, to recognize the distance between understanding and embodiment, and to remain curious enough to keep practicing.
Each chapter also opens into a free, complete Just Tao It companion essay through a direct chapter link. No account or subscription is required.
It is What It is: A Place to Begin with the Tao Te Ching is the first of four books in the Guided Tao Series.