It's twenty to three in the morning, and you're trying very hard to fall asleep.
The presentation is at nine. You've done everything right. No screens after ten. The room is cold, the way the articles say it should be. You've tried the breathing exercise, the one where you count to four and then to seven and then to eight. You've tried relaxing your body from the toes up. Somewhere around your knees you realised you were doing it wrong, and started again.
Outside, the city hums the way Dubai does at night: a car on the empty road, the air conditioning, a lift somewhere in the building. You check the time. Two forty-one. You calculate how many hours you'll get if you fall asleep right now. Then right now. Then now.
The harder you try, the more awake you are. And some part of you knows, in a way that's almost funny, that the one thing keeping you up is the effort to sleep.
What does wu wei mean?
Wu wei is a Chinese phrase from the Tao Te Ching, usually translated as "non-action". Its literal sense, as Dictionary.com puts it, is "without action". But it doesn't mean doing nothing. It points to action without forcing: what happens when nothing in you is straining against the moment, so the right thing can get done by itself.
Sleep is the clearest example most of us have. It can't be forced. It can only be allowed, once the forcing stops.
Where does wu wei come from?
From a short book and a man we know very little about.
The earliest account of Lao Tzu we have comes from the historian Sima Qian, who wrote, as James Legge notes, about the beginning of the first century B.C. He describes Lao Tzu as a curator in the Royal Library of the Zhou court, a man whose studies were chiefly about how to stay concealed and unknown. Sima Qian says only that he went away, and that it is not known where he died. Even Legge thought parts of the story looked more like legend than record.
I told the story of his leaving, and the book he's said to have written on the way, in Lao Tzu on letting go. That piece was about setting things down. This one is about a single idea in the book he left behind, and it's the one people find hardest to believe.
In Legge's translation of chapter 37 of the Tao Te Ching, it reads: "The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do."
Read it slowly. It doesn't say nothing gets done. It says everything gets done, and none of it is forced.
Chapter 63 puts the same thing as an instruction. The way of the Tao, in Legge's words, is "to act without (thinking of) acting". Not to stop acting. To stop pushing while you do it.
If you'd like to feel what's left when the pushing stops, rather than just read about it, the free Who Am I? masterclass was built for exactly that. You can start it here. Or read on.
Isn't wu wei just a fancy word for giving up?
No, and the difference matters.
Giving up is caving in. You stop caring, stop reaching, stop showing up, usually because you're exhausted. It's still a kind of forcing, just turned inward: you force yourself to stop wanting.
Wu wei is the opposite. You keep working, loving, building, raising your children. What drops away is the strain you were carrying while you did it. The clenched jaw in the meeting. The rehearsing of conversations that haven't happened. The sense that if you loosen your grip for a second, everything will fall.
Think of two people carrying the same heavy table up a flight of stairs. One fights it, grips too hard, braces every muscle, and is exhausted by the landing. The other carries exactly the same weight, but nothing in them is fighting the table. Same stairs, same table. One of them arrives with something left.
Lao Tzu wasn't asking anyone to put the table down. He was pointing at the fight.
Why do we force things in the first place?
Because forcing once kept us safe.
Somewhere early, most of us learned that effort was the price of being okay. Maybe love came when you performed. Maybe the house was unpredictable, and staying alert and pushing ahead was how you got through. Maybe you were the one who had to hold things together, and you learned that if you relaxed, something bad would happen. That wasn't weakness. It was intelligence. The child who pushed was doing exactly what that house required.
The trouble is that the pushing doesn't retire when the house changes. It becomes part of how you are. I've written about one version of it in why do I need to control everything? and about its weight in stop putting pressure on yourself.
Here's the part that makes wu wei so hard to practise as advice. Every forcing pattern is a thought fused to a charge, a memory with weight the body put on it. The thought says "if I stop pushing, it will all fall apart". The charge is the alarm that fires the moment you try to ease off. You can read chapter 37 a hundred times and agree with every word. The alarm still fires at twenty to three in the morning, because understanding argues with the thought and never touches the charge.
When the charge comes off, something different happens. The memory stays. The weight goes. And you don't have to learn to stop forcing, any more than you have to learn to fall asleep. The forcing simply isn't needed anymore, so it stops.
That's why wu wei reads to me like a very old pointer toward something I say all the time. The freedom is in the removal. Lao Tzu was pointing at the same pattern, in two words.
If you'd like a first taste of that, without forcing anything, the free Who Am I? masterclass is ninety minutes you can do at home: a written guide, my narrated video, and a guided session at the end. It's normally USD 297 and currently free with the code GIFT26 at checkout, no card needed. You can start it here.
How can I practise wu wei this week?
You can't force wu wei, which is the whole joke. But you can notice where you're forcing. Try a forcing log for one ordinary day.
- Pick a day with normal pressure. Not a holiday. A day with emails, traffic and at least one thing you're dreading.
- Each time you notice strain, write one line. What you were pushing at, and where you felt it in your body. "Rewriting the email for the fourth time, shoulders." "Driving on Al Khail, jaw."
- Next to each line, write what you were afraid would happen if you stopped pushing. Let the first answer come, even if it sounds out of proportion.
- Then try the same task again with ten percent less grip. Not zero. Ten percent. Send the email as it is. Let the car in front stay in front.
- At the end of the day, read the fears column. Notice how many of them sound younger than you are.
You won't find wu wei in a day, and I'd be wary of anyone who promised you would. But you'll see, plainly, how much of your effort is guarding against a danger that isn't in the room.
What is left when the forcing stops?
Lao Tzu doesn't describe it, and I won't pretend to explain the full depth of a text that belongs to its own tradition. If you're drawn to it, read the whole book in a published translation. I'm not a teacher of that tradition, and the RS Method isn't Taoist practice. The pattern belongs to everyone. The method is mine.
What I can tell you is what people describe when some of the forcing comes off. Not laziness. Not a loss of drive. Something more like ease, and often a surprise at how much more gets done once they stop fighting themselves to do it. You are not broken. You are buried. What's on top is effort that was right once and isn't needed now.
Sometimes what comes off goes deeper than effort. Marko Mladenovic wrote to us three years after working with me: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state." That's his own report, not a promise about anyone else. The word I notice is still.
I wrote a whole book about this direction of travel: Unbecome. It was an Amazon best seller at launch, and it's for anyone who has tried to push their way to a better self and found that it doesn't hold. It isn't a book about Lao Tzu. It's a book about what's left when you stop adding, and stop forcing.
If you'd rather feel that before you read about it, start with the free Who Am I? masterclass. Ninety minutes at home, and nothing in it asks you to push.
Start the Who Am I? masterclass
So here's the question chapter 37 seems to me to ask. Underneath all the effort, who were you before the world told you who to be?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Tonight, somewhere between the last email and sleep, you'll catch yourself pushing at something that won't move. Before you push again, give ninety minutes to the free Who Am I? masterclass, and notice who's there when the pushing stops.