Trailer | The Turtle as an Organizing Force

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...