Embracing the One
Describes a practice of holding body, breath, and mind together in undivided unity rather than letting them scatter into competing agendas.
Chapter 10 opens with a string of pointed questions rather than instructions: "can you embrace the One and not depart from it? Can you concentrate your breath and become supple, like a newborn babe?" "The One" functions as shorthand for the Tao in its unified aspect — before it has split, as chapter 42 describes, into the Two and the Three and the ten thousand things — so embracing it means resisting the mind's habit of fragmenting experience into competing wants and judgments. Chapter 22 picks the same phrase up in a more social context: "the sage embraces the One and becomes a model for the world," linking this inward unity to an outward capacity to be genuinely present for others without a hidden agenda. Both chapters treat "the One" less as a metaphysical object to acquire than as a state to return to — the undivided condition a person keeps losing and has to keep recovering through practice.
Can you embrace the One and not depart from it?
Tao Te Ching