26 Ways to Drop Your Mind: How the Tao Can Help Us in Everyday Life, is part Eastern philosophy, part psychology, and part poetry. Philosopher, therapist and poet Brian McDermott highlights 26 key principles he finds operating within Taoism, and his analysis of these precepts is full of wonderful and challenging insights into the reasons our daily lives seem to be so often filled with conflict and struggle. The reader is not simply left to dwell in problems, though. Each essay reflects upon how it is that unhealthy thought processes get constructed, and McDermott offers different ways for us to identify them and to find ways around them. At the end of each observation are questions and poems that show us how the Tao can bring us to a place of greater awareness and understanding of our own lives - if only we can change our stubborn patterns of thinking and reacting long enough to appreciate the peacefulness of the mystery that is unfolding all around us."We want things to be other than they are. We want to always be healthy and to always be loved. We don't want things to end or change.

We don't want death to happen. The problem is our tendency to believe that we are in control of our destinies comes up against a wall when any realities appear that set a limit to our ability to choose what we want. These realities are here among us everywhere and yet for the most part we choose not to acknowledge them. The reason we choose not to look at them is because we've become accustomed to feeling that life is better than death, that health is better than sickness, that our happiness is better than experiencing sorrow. The Tao says, however, that all things are equal. There is a value judgment at the base of our being. Who can blame us? We would rather preserve ourselves than perish. But the will to survive and preserve ourselves has led to a disease in the mind.

It has created a false sense of superiority like the blood cell that would tell the heart how it should beat. This false sense of superiority, this preference for one half of the duality, creates suffering." --Excerpt from the book.