Effortless Action
Resilient Ways
This is the second of a series of articles on psychological flexibility, looked at through the lens of resilience.
This time I just want to talk about allowing different parts of ourselves to work together, rather than fighting our different urges and feeling stuck. And rather than an old parable, I hope you don’t mind me starting with a story of me.
A long time ago, I suddenly became extraordinarily busy. My kids were young and I was very much needing and wanting to be at home to be dad, and to put a fair parent’s shift in alongside my better half. A common dilemma, I know!
Work commitments were significant, challenging and extensive. It was early September. I don’t recall the year. But I do recall feeling completely overwhelmed and close to tears. I just couldn’t do it all.
The workload and life obligations felt like a huge wave. I was frightened by it; I felt I would be crushed and drowned. Late one evening, I did cry.
I am not sure what happened next. Something along the lines of “fuck it!” Not just as a thought (although I do remember thinking these specific words), more as a visceral sense of giving in, and accepting my fate. Perhaps it was a moment of derealisation or something similar; I immediately felt some detachment. But what I also remember at that moment was deciding to surf the wave of work.
Yup. My inner response to a crushing workload, standing in the way of going home, was not to ask for help. Instead, I opted for mental surfing (don’t tell the insurers!) and I did just that. I rode out about two months of intense work and family stuff by mentally surfing.
And something magical happened. As I surfed from meeting to meeting, I became aware of a voice inside me - it would drift in and out of awareness - and I noticed it had a clear narrative flow.
My conscious self would hear bits of this inner dialogue at different moments. Maybe you would call it rumination? (I now know that problem-solving rumination is a thing, I didn’t at the time). I became aware that some other part of me was working on my various challenges and now and then, literally the sound of it would drift up into awareness.
I remember thinking “Oh! Sounds like you’re working on stuff down there! Ok, that’s probably good, ‘cos I am just surfing the wave up here.”
And then; the real magic started.
Readiness for each challenge would arrive, often on the morning of the meeting or, at most, the day before. My unconscious would send up useful, whole insights when I needed them for the challenge at hand. “Ah ha! This is what I will do!” It was such a distinct experience I recall wondering how I should charge for the work with a degree of irony, I was in a professional practice and slave to the timesheet, and my solutions were appearing outside of time. Argh!
Is there confirmation bias in thinking that this is a good way to operate? I have considered this subsequently. There is no sense of procrastination, there is no sense of not putting the work in, I don’t think I am ignoring the possibility that things will go badly and pretending it’s fine. So no, on balance, I don’t think there is confirmation bias.
I just know that one reliable way that I work out problems is beyond awareness, and I found that I can let it happen.
I have carried on like this ever since. It is reliable. I learned to trust that answers will come when I need them. And they do. They are not just instinct. They are detailed, often involving surprising thoughts. Like the wheelwright, P’ien, who appears in the first story of this series, perhaps knowing has become etched in my being?
Over time I have become more aware of Wu Wei, or effortless action.
I don’t have to overthink everything, if I give challenges up to the way, answers will come and find me.
This kind of effortless action moved me beyond the idea of practiced movement or learned behaviour, of the kind I had understood since childhood. The experience seemed to break a barrier of my mind: the belief that I needed to be conscious and actively involved in my mental activity.
I didn’t need to be consciously involved. What was happening below the surface, beyond reflection, was what was really needed.
I am not sure, but, before this, I probably would have fought the idea of leaving challenges to some deeper kind of processing, beyond awareness. I guess I had always had insights that popped into awareness from somewhere, but I had probably not appreciated how they happened, or where they were from.
From this point I knew that I had access to something else, a process that seemed to work, and that the best thing to do was to let it carry me and not swim against the flow.
The experience of nearly breaking turned out to be a breakthrough, for me.
In this specific way, I became less fearful of breaking. I sensed these were barriers of my mind, and that it was useful to let them break, and find treasures hidden beyond.
One further thought: the anxiety and fear, I now realise, was a signal of inner work.
However it was a signal that was hard to experience, and harder to read. Sometimes worry fractured clarity for me and seemed to fog up any clearsightedness. It might be so intense as to make me cry with frustration and hopelessness. I now sense that this overwhelmed feeling was a triggered by the same unresolved problems that another part of me was quietly working on, and I was having helpful and unhelpful experiences at the same time: one in the way of the other.
It was not until I was forced to let go of worrying that “I cannot”, that the inner work of “here’s a way” found me. I now practice getting into a problem with “just enough” anxiety, and then leaving it to the way, waiting for the other part of me to circle back with the next step when it’s done.
I hope that my story resonates and either signposts you to a deeper ease with your own challenges.
Are you in partnership with your inner selves?
Do your inner voices help or hinder?
Do they do both?
What do you believe about your intuition?
How can you tune into intuition, discerning what is useful and going with it?
In the next article I will be taking you through one of my favourite resilience meditations, a way of generating a lovely state of flow. See you there!