The Art of Doing Nothing

How mindfulness and the practice of non-doing can help when we're feeling like we're not "enough."

I caught up with an old friend the other day, I’ll call him Jason. Jason had reached out to me looking for some ideas for how he might improve his meditation practice. Since we both work In advertising, after discussing mindfulness practice, our conversation turned to work, and despite the fact that only moments before we had been blissfully talking about mindfulness and how, at its core, it’s a practice of acceptance of and being kind to ourselves, Jason suddenly blurted out, “I know I have a pretty good life, but I feel bad about my career. Like I haven’t tried hard enough, haven’t done enough.” Then he laughed and said, in the most matter of fact tone, “Yeah, basically I don’t think I’m good enough.”

Although this was tossed out lightly in conversation, it landed right in my bones. And it stayed there for the rest of the day. I began to notice just how pervasive the “not good enough” storyline is in just about every facet of my daily life. Later that day, on the phone with my partner Julian, I listened as he gave me a rundown of all the things he felt he should be doing better, casually beating himself up for not doing more and ending with “yeah, just trying to summon up a little motivation. Otherwise known as self-loathing.” Easily 80% of our daily conversations are one us giving the other a litany of everything we failed to do that day. We didn’t accomplish enough, work hard enough, exercise enough, eat well enough, parent well enough.

Later in the evening, when I sat down to do my regular meditation practice, I repeated this exercise solo. With my newly sharpened awareness, I noticed myself slipping into one of my most common thought patterns, what I call “the audit,” when my mind replays everything I did that day, scrutinizing my performance like a panel of olympic judges, pointing out every flaw and deducting points.

If it amazes me how pervasive this "not good enough" storyline is in our lives, it would not have amazed the Buddha. Because with the first of the four noble truths, he really tried to cut to the chase on this one. Although the first noble truth is commonly translated as “There is suffering,” what the Buddha actually said was “There is dukkha.” The “Du” of dukkha means “bad” and “ka” means “wheel.” There is bad wheel. In other words, the metaphor Buddha invoked as the keystone of his teachings is, in essence, that life is going to be a bumpy ride. The Buddha was careful to choose a word that can not only hold the obvious forms of suffering, like aging, sickness, and death, but also the much more prosaic and subtle pall of dissatisfaction that pervades our lives. That constant nagging feeling that something, or everything, is not good enough.

The cure for this is outlined in the rest of the four noble truths, the 8 fold path, and of course, attaining Nirvana would be super helpful. But since most of us have a long way to go on that road, on our way we’re still going to have to get through a lot of very human days filled with the more personal, quotidian version of not enoughness, the kind we so often turn on ourselves. The dissatisfaction with what we’ve accomplished and who we are.

Viewed from the perspective of human evolution, our chronic dissatisfaction is driven by the fact that we’re hardwired with a 'negativity bias' that heightens our awareness of potential threats and insufficiencies—in other words, not-enoughness. Being constantly prodded by the thought that maybe gathering just a few more berries would be a good idea probably increased the chances of our species survival. But it's not very helpful if you're comparing yourself to others on social media and constantly feeling inadequate.

Gratitude can be a powerful antidote to this negativity bias. Gratitude practice is consciously recognizing the good that is present in your life, despite whatever lacks and challenges it might also contain. If practiced regularly, there are scientifically proven benefits that are, by now, pretty widely known. Studies have shown that regular gratitude practice can lead to everything from better sleep to stronger relationships to increased resilience. Underpinning all these improvements, I would argue, is that by practicing gratitude, we’re exercising our “enoughness” muscles, developing an ability to cultivate a sense of happiness that does not depend on everything being perfect. It takes conscious effort, but by developing a habit of intentionally noticing what’s going right we can kind of counterbalance our tendency to focus only on what's going wrong. 

Gratitude is a double-edged sword, though. We have to be careful to discern the difference between what we truly feel grateful for vs. what we think we should feel grateful for, and that can sometimes become a slippery slope, where feelings of should quickly transform into just another way of judging ourselves. Paradoxically, gratitude practice can sometimes morph into just one more assignment, one more item on the impossible to-do lists that keep us perpetually feeling like we’re not enough. 

And speaking as someone who has maintained a consistent if somewhat spotty gratitude practice for literally years, it’s interesting to notice how infrequently I look within myself for things to be grateful for. It’s a lot tougher to feel gratitude for myself than it is to notice how pleasant it is to sip a cup of hot coffee on a cold morning. For the particular flavor of not enoughness with which Jason was so casually lacerating himself, or that I employ in my nightly audits, gratitude practice seems to bounce right off of it.

One of the biggest impediments to being at peace is the nagging feeling that we don’t deserve to be. If a moment of peace should dare to descend, many of us experience an immediate impulse to pressure check it. Poke at it. Run diagnostics.

This experience is beautifully and hilariously captured in the opening essay of Caitlin Moran’s “More Than a Woman,” which is titled “The List.” She begins with describing how she sets her alarm to go off five minutes before her kids get up so she can do her gratitude practice, which calls “Being Thankful.” 

“Being Thankful is quite relaxing. You simply make sure you’re comfortable—and then mentally list all the things in your life that make you happy. I like lists, and I like being happy, and I’m extremely good at lying down, so it immediately appealed to me. I now do it every day. It’s very satisfying.

Today’s list runs as follows:

I’m not homeless.

I’m not ill.

My family isn’t ill.

My husband is a pleasant and amusing man.

I still haven’t been fired.

Time for coffee!”

But then, before she can even take that first grateful sip, she sees what she calls simply: “The List.”

“I instantly de-relax. The List is the one constant in my life. In many ways, The List is my life. The List is the eternal note I keep open on my phone—the running totalizer of all the jobs that need doing, but which I haven’t got round to yet. The List is the shadow self of Being Thankful. Being Thankful is about rejoicing in what you are. The List is, essentially, a running apology for what you are not. All middle-aged women have a list like this:

Blinds for bedroom

Kids’ passports

Cut cats’ claws

Clean gutters

Tax return

START RUNNING

Buy coat hooks

Find leggings that fit

Light bulbs: bathroom, hall, bedroom

MEDITATE???

Leaky toilet fix

PELVIC FLOOR EXERCISES

INVOICES!

…”

It goes on like this for five pages, she tells us.

“These are all the things that stand between me and a perfect life," she writes, and only when everything is checked off can her "real" life finally begin.

I recognize this list. You probably recognize it too. While this drive to get our lives in order can be helpful at times, most of us feel haunted by our to-do lists. Whether we write them down or they visit us as nightly personal audits, in their nagging constancy, as an embodiment of “not good enough” they could give Buddha’s bad wheel a run for its money. 

To me, the pervasiveness of to-do list mind points to our very human, but also misguided, attempts to “do” our way into a feeling of enoughness. It’s a very deeply ingrained behavior in most of us, the idea that if we just do everything right, we can outwit dukkha. But we wind up just running ourselves ragged, trying to do all the “right” things, prepare more, fix everything, nail down the exact resources we’ll need, all in the mistaken notion that this will somehow allow us to finally relax and start living our “real” lives.

At the heart of mindfulness meditation practice lies another antidote, a remedy for to-do list mind. It’s the concept of non-doing, often called “non-striving," and it is the intentional cultivation of acceptance and letting go of the need to achieve or change anything in the present moment. Allowing thoughts, feelings, and sensations to arise and pass without judging or making any effort to change them. It’s about embracing a state of being rather than doing.

Non doing is a lot harder than it sounds, though. Faced with almost any kind of suffering, our first instinct is to try to “do” our way out of it. And when that suffering is based in our feelings of not-enoughness, that can be like trying to heal an ankle injury by running a marathon.

Renowned meditation teacher and author Narayan Helen Liebenson describes a pivotal moment in her own practice when she went to a retreat led by Ajahn Maha Bua, a highly revered Thai Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition. She recounts how Maha Bua defined nirvana, awakening, enlightenment and all the other synonyms as simply “enoughness.”

“This very unusual definition changed my practice entirely,” Liebenson said. And she offers it to all her students hoping it will do the same for them. She continues: “Because we know Dukkha is translated as a sense of being incomplete, as perhaps not being enough, of nothing being enough. Maha Bua defined the inadequacy and insufficiency of Dukkha as feeling like a constant squeeze. And don’t we know the truth of that.”

She goes on to say that framing both awakening and dukkha in terms of enoughness and not enoughness helped her to see that the first step toward some liberation from the constant squeeze was to become aware of it. Because only when we feel that squeeze and notice it can we begin to work on releasing it. In this way, the squeeze itself is pointing to where the enoughness can be found. But our to-do list conditioning has us looking in the wrong place. We cling to the idea that if we can just check everything off that list, we will experience enoughness. When the truth is it can only be found in being willing, for a moment, to not do anything.

And it is in this deceptively simple, surprisingly difficult practice of non-doing that we can begin to access the elusive comfort of true self compassion, of loving and being grateful to and for ourselves. In “a letter from love,” one of my all time favorite meditations on self compassion, written by psychotherapist and meditation teacher Mar Healy, she gently cajoles us into loosening our grip on the “eternal background hum of something’s wrong.”

Speaking to us in the guise of our own innate and indestructible capacity to love, she says:

“... it’s understandable that you find yourself frantically spiraling into anxiety and overwhelm. It is as though your wheels are in the mud of life spinning fervently but never getting anywhere. So my dear, darling, brave one, I invite you to stop. Entirely. Turn the engine off and wait. Trust in the counterintuitive nature of what I’m asking of you. Call all that life force you have been spending on trying to get somewhere else and instead allow the whole of your being to surrender to being fully here… and as you gradually release the grip of this striving … you allow the terrain to renew, for the mud to dry and fresh ground to emerge, solid and workable and ready to carry you onward when you are ready. Less, my darling, much less is needed. In this world of pushing and forcing and fighting and striving, your surrender … will be a quiet act of rebellion. Your softness is what’s needed now, your willingness to trust the innate intelligence of life and know in your bones that you are working with this force and not against it.”

Trust in the counterintuitive nature of what I’m asking of you. Call all that life force you have been spending on trying to get somewhere else and instead allow the whole of your being to surrender to being fully here. It seems no matter what’s written on the door to freedom, when we open it we find the same thing: Just be here, now, and let the rest go. 

The great Zen master Rinzai would famously ask his students “What, at this moment, is lacking?” This powerful question does not require an answer. It’s designed to take your attention deeply into the now. A similar question in the Zen tradition is: If not now, when?

These are wisdom questions, meditative questions. What, at this moment, is lacking? When you ask this question, you could actually probably come up with a pretty long list. But the practice is to ask the question and then to not answer it. To ask and then… do nothing. Just rest in the little bubble of non-doing that it leaves in its wake. What, at this moment, is lacking? If not now, when? As Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet, "Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you, because then you would not be able to live them.”

Living in the questions helps us stop leaning forward. Striving toward the next moment, the next breath, the next sit, when we can really practice. Or a perfect day when our to-do lists are all checked off and our real lives can begin. These questions are meant to help us take our foot off the gas, stop our wheels from spinning in the mud. They help us create that little bubble of now where we might meet each new moment with a willingness to let it be just as it is. To just soften and allow. Soften. Allow. Soften. Allow. Every sitting, every moment, is an opportunity to practice making peace, again and again and again, with what is happening, right here, right now. To gather our energy and attention in the only place where we can ever truly be whole, ever truly be enough. Because if not now, when?