Non doing (Wu Wei)

Very happy New Year 2025.

I was asked by a client struggling with addictive and obsessive compulsive thoughts towards a significant other following a relationship breakdown, if I might recommend a simple practice so they might soothe their overactive mind.

I have written extensively in this blog on addiction and spent twelve years studying it and working with clients clinically. In its most simple form addiction can be viewed as an excess of focusing externally on X (a “thing/activity/person”) and “consume” this X as a way to 1) fill a void, 2)soothe the resulting discomfort due to emotional /nervous system dysregulation and 3) not feel uncomfortable emotions. Addiction is not just being addicted to substances or activities. It can also manifest as addiction to negative thoughts, anger etc as a way to not feel.

Often this is because one has not been taught, accompanied and therefore has not learnt how to navigate our inner world, sustain ourselves inwardly, and how to feel. Clients often have no vocabulary and no map to their own inner landscapes. Many also fear introspecting, reflecting and being with themselves.

The focus is mostly external as humans are inherently relational beings but in excess and in an over-inflated way, towards the X on which they become dependent.

Our society not missing an economic trick is banking on this to of course extract monetary gain.

So I thought of Wu Wei.

This might be anti-thetical to the Western or Global North globalised economy way, with its obsession on “high performance”, or “over-doing” to the expense of learning to first BE.

Wu Wei is a Chinese philosophical concept worth contemplating on. It can’t be translated perfectly.

It can roughly be thought of as “action – less action” ) or “non doing” and is said to be linked to Daoism. This is different to “not doing” or “not doing anything”.

It has been conceptualised by philosopher Martin Buber as “presence”. Again this is not something that can be easily described yet it can be practiced, over and over, starting with offering this same presence we would offer a cherished OTHER to our own SELF.

The below is how Buber might have explained it:

“This has been the activity of the man ( Mensch or human being not simply the male of the species) who has become whole. It has been called ‘not doing’, for nothing particular, nothing partial is at work in them and so nothing in him intrudes into the world”. Martin Buber, I-Thou translated by Kaufman (p.124-125)

A short and simple practice one can introduce when one is prone to obsessive compulsive / ruminating thoughts of an over-active “addictive” mind could be the below:

• I gently notice my attention ( energy) focused on externally on X, Y, Z
• I gently bring my attention ( energy) back inward into my self.
• I take a breathe to the count of 4
• I breathe out softly to the count of 8
• As I inhale to the count of 4
• I exhale speaking “Wu Wei”

I need not do anything.

I am enough.

I am worthy.

I am exactly right where I am meant to be.

Whilst profits, monetary gains are needed in our current paradigm and aren’t “bad” per se, our over-reliance on things external to ourselves and on X as crutches has crippled and disempowered us.

We therefore are invited to rebalance this over-focus on external things. People and animals aren’t things. They are sentient beings.

Happy New Year 2025. May you be at peace, with joy, abundance and health.

Resources

Buber, M. (1937) I andThou, translated by Kaufmann.

Dao: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/daoism/#Primer