Hey, what’s your Wu Wei?

Doing without doing...

Going with the flow...
In the zone...
The hum...
The spark...

I've no doubt you've tasted the secret sauce, you know it somewhere deep, you've found yourself 'in flow' or 'in the zone', you've let it take you for the ride...

The musician 'becomes' the music, the dancer 'becomes' the dance, the writer feels their internal hum and the chapter “writes itself”, the runner pants as they pound left foot then right and suddenly they're effortlessly suspended (“runner's high”) and could run and run forever and ever*.

Welcome to the wonder of Wu Wei.

*Apparently the world-famous ultra-marathon runner Scott Jurek even experiences Wu Wei chopping cucumbers... I do hope he's experiencing it on his runs too!

Think back to a time when you were busy doing something and somehow you stopped thinking, you lost sense of time - totally in touch with every action yet forcing nothing. So absorbed you were that you dropped every to-do list and stressy thought and desire and unbearable pain - you dropped your ego and all sense of yourself as you rode the bliss-wave to total balance.

And wasn't it such an epic feeling? So alert and alive yet so peaceful - like you became a finely-tuned instrument through which something so much bigger buzzed through. You stopped rowing and were sailing through it. You didn't add a thing, you didn't have to do anything, you just spontaneously unlearnt and peeled away some blockers.

And lo and behold you unintentionally created your best run, best work, best masterpiece...

You were embodying what the ancient Chinese Daoists called Wu Wei (the heart of Daoism):

Wu - non / no / not
Wei - action / making / forcing

I've been asked a number of times “Practicing mindfulness / meditation is all very well, but if you're always living in the moment how do you get anything done?”. Wu Wei is the perfect example of what can happen when we strip away stressful and striving thoughts from action - the magic that occurs if we let go of outcome and allow ourselves to align perfectly with the flow of life.

Why not embody a little Wu Wei today... can you let go of results and distractions by practicing actionless action? Just do what you're doing for the sheer flow and fun of doing it?

Love, Jo x