Regard the Body as the Self
Traces every fear and every hope back to having a body at all, and suggests that the person able to treat that body-bound self carefully, rather than anxiously, becomes fit to be trusted with the world.
Chapter 13 continues past its opening claim about favor and disgrace to ask a sharper question: "why do I say favor and disgrace both bring fear? Because I have great trouble in having a body — if I had no body, what trouble would I have?" This isn't a call to escape or despise the body; it's a diagnosis of where anxiety actually originates — in the fact of being a bounded, vulnerable, mortal self with something to lose. Because the chapter has already linked fear to any state where self-worth depends on external things, it is naming the body itself as the first and most basic thing a person is attached to protecting. The chapter's closing lines then make a surprising political move: the one who values the world as much as their own body, or who treats caring for the world with the same seriousness as caring for the self, can be entrusted with the world — self-regard, handled rightly rather than anxiously, becomes the basis for trustworthy leadership rather than its opposite.
I have great trouble in having a body — if I had no body, what trouble would I have?
Tao Te Ching