Religion & Politics; Representation; Life Offline; No 2026 Metaphysician’s Day Planner
benebell.wen
Hello! My last newsletter appears to have been from December of 2024, so this is my first newsletter of 2025 and it’s September. Oops. Anyway, hi, how’ve you been? Hanging in there (even if by a thread), I hope. <3
No More Metaphysician’s Day Planner
Hubby James is making me put out a newsletter notice to make sure everyone knows I won’t be producing a Metaphysician’s Day Planner this year, and after nine consecutive years of offering the Metaphysician’s Day Planner, we’re retiring it for good.
We are no longer selling day planners. The level of customization is getting a bit more unwieldy for us to manage as a two-individual team who is not doing this full-time. It’s like a weekend hobby that ballooned out of control. Imagine knitting a beanie hat and thinking, this is cute, I bet there’s are people out there who’d like one, so you start selling beanie hats knit to order and you weren’t wrong, lots and lots of people want your beanie hats knot to order, and before you know it…
It wasn’t just the custom-made day planner where we were doing each person’s natal and solar return chart to manually assemble each PDF one by one, but also, it’s having me run the full year-ahead astrological metrics and then analyze it all, and then write up the companion Metaphysician’s Guide to that given year. You know, the book with the global forecasts for the year, calendar dates of all eclipses, retrogrades, void of course moons (important for those of us who do, well, nevermind) vs. fast and via combusta, and the Chinese lunar-solar calendar forecasts.
And because we were selling them to those who would want it, presumably, on or before the new year starts, that meant I had to have all of those forecast analysis reports done and written up and formatted into the book by the start of Q4. And for those of us with corporate day jobs, you know that Q4 is always the most brutal work-wise, so all this just meant way too much in terms of obligations going on for us to handle.
Grounding & Centering via Life Offline
To be honest, online spaces are less and less appealing these days. Anyone who has any degree of public presence online creating content may be able to affirm that everybody’s comments section is a psychopathic mess. Just ten years ago, unhinged comments under your uploaded content happened, but was the exception not the rule. Unhinged comments have increased exponentially in recent years. And that’s not a poison I feel like I have any obligation to navigate. I would much rather be present and in service of my real-world offline community.
Representation and Voice in Taoist Discourse
There is, however, one solid attachment that keeps me tethered to continuing online educational content: the access it affords people who might otherwise not have this access, and the measurable benefits that access has given them.
I am waiting for more Asian American native practitioners, or Asians of the Diasporas, to take up the mantle so that I can put down mine.
It’s not just the academic rigor and knowledge of classical languages required, or dedicated actual personal practice and direct transmissions of knowledge; it’s all of those and it’s the inherited sensitivity to and intuitive knowledge of our own ancestral traditions that make us uniquely qualified to be the torchbearers, and yet we are not. We are still outnumbered and spoken over by voices that do not come from within the living traditions themselves, leaving the public discourse disproportionately shaped by outside perspectives.
And/or those doing it for profit. Please do not misinterpret here, I’m not going to stand in the way of anyone hustling to make money. I think it’s a necessary and integral part of the ecosystem. But it can’t be the only. It’s a “yes, and.” When you share these traditions for profit, what and how you share becomes entangled with that motivation for profit, whether you intend for it or not. For the most part I would even say that’s fine. It just can’t be the only approach to access. We need more native practitioners willing to make personal sacrifices out of their sense of moral responsibility to the global community at large, to make sure people have access.
We need more than commercial pathways and non-native interpretations taking up all the space and being the loudest voices in the discourse. We need the voices of those who carry it in their bones, who are motivated by moral and spiritual responsibility, rather than money, ego, or glory.
Religion and Politics…
I might have a paradoxical take on this one.
If you are a decision-maker over a diverse population of people and have to account for differing values and priorities, then you must take religion out of your politics. Those who are unable to effectively remove their religious values from their political action should not hold power.
However, those of us who are deeply religious, in my opinion, should be political. Practicing spirituality means living out your values in the world, and politics is the most tangible arenas where that happens. If you sincerely care about the human dignity of others, and you hold the conviction that your spiritual path is the way to mitigate suffering, then don’t you have an ethical commitment to engage with society in a way that improves society?
The reconciliation of the paradox lies in distinguishing between being motivated by faith and imposing your faith on others.
Before gaining power, we’re drawn to political action precisely because most of our religious paths call for us to alleviate suffering, pursue justice, and honor human dignity. But let’s say you become one of the select few who gain power. Now your duty shifts. At that point, you are responsible for serving a pluralistic society, not a religious community.
Where I think some of us get hung up on is what about a deeply religious person who holds the power of influence over a diverse population of people – should they be political?
Self-awareness means you have to be vigilantly mindful of the power or influence you wield, and then go out of your way to not wield it in ways that serve your own ego. A humorous paradox: if you are truly, truly arrogant, then you ought to be overly, overly modest.
Be careful not to follow deeply religious influencers whose rhetoric, on its surface, touts peace, love, and unity, but do so in a way that implies “my way or hell and damnation.” Because that is violence, hate, and divisiveness cloaked as peace, love, and unity. And so it should come as no surprise to anyone when that sort of exclusionary rhetoric claiming to be about peace, love, and unity is met with violence, hate, and divisiveness.
This is not specifically calling out any one religion; it’s a warning that holds true across all systems of spirituality. Heck it’s the biggest reason I want to take my spirituality offline, because I see it happening in online Taoist communities. Any teacher or purported teacher who implies “what I am teaching is the right way, and what everybody else is teaching is wrong” is poisoning the well. Any path that is truly about peace, love, and unity is going to start by telling you there are many ways up the mountain, here is one path I found that got me up the mountain, but hey, you do you, there are probably other paths out there, I don’t know, I’m just saying this is the one I take.
Or perhaps the better analogy here is you and I are both holding the same vaguely drawn map of the mountain, and you’ve interpreted the map as saying this and that is the best path up the mountain, but I’ve interpreted the map as saying something different about the best path. What would be the true motive of me trying to convince masses of people to take my path and to not take your path because your path is wrong? The only motive there I can reckon is something rooted in ego, rather than an actual, sincere concern for people’s spiritual welfare.
Until Next Time!
So that’s where I’m at these days. No more Metaphysician’s Day Planner, but I will still be creating a 2026 day planner PDF for myself, because I still use them, and maybe you’ll find on my blog a free download of that 2026 day planner PDF I’ve made for myself.
I still feel a certain modicum of personal responsibility to keep discourse alive online, but if there’s a thread that runs through all of this, it’s finding new ways to achieve balance between what we take on and what we put down, between speaking up and stepping back, living out our spiritual values privately vs. contributing to the larger collective.