To begin the Joy Diet, you must do nothing for at least fifteen minutes a day.
‘Something is missing from my life.’ This is the most common reason people give me for seeking my life-coaching services. Rarely do clients come to me with a clear dilemma to resolve or a simple goal to achieve. Sometimes the sense of ‘something missing’, seems vague and inexplicable, like the phantom ache an amputee might feel in a limb that no longer exists. On other occasions, when a client is facing some kind of loss, choice, or crisis, the compulsion to find the Missing Something may be as keen and painful as glass in a wound. Often, the people who ask me to help them find the Something have travelled thousands of miles and spent substantial amounts of energy, time, and money on their search. I have nothing to offer them. Fortunately, this is exactly what they need.
Nothing, nothing at all, is the first ingredient you must add to your life when you go on the Joy Diet. Whether you're doing the program as an overall life enhancement, or using it to face some kind of trauma, I'm almost certain you need nothing – a good, strong dose of nothing, and soon. Okay, enough coy wordplay. What I mean is that the best way to break through any barrier is to access a point of perfect stillness at the centre of your being, a self deeper than your senses or your mind. We modern, scientific thinkers are rarely taught that such a thing exists, much less how to connect with it. But every ancient tradition holds that from this still core of the self, this infinitely fertile emptiness, springs all that is authentic about you: your identity, your ability to recognize truth, the real operating instructions for your life.
Worshipping the Holy Something
I know all this enthusiasm about nothingness may be baffling to some of my readers, who have been socialized from the cradle to think that doing just about anything is preferable to doing nothing. Many of my clients think that a person who spends a day accomplishing nothing, thinking nothing, trying nothing, and planning nothing has just wasted twenty-four hours. A lot of them balk like irritated camels when I ask them to do the crucially important work of learning to be still. You may be chafing a bit yourself, planning to skip this step and move right on to something ‘more productive’. I put that last phrase in quotation marks because, actually, doing nothing is the most productive activity you will ever undertake. The rest of the Joy Diet can't have its full effect until you have made it a habit.
To do this, you'll have to violate some deeply ingrained cultural rules. We share a powerful collective resistance to nothingness, and feel more virtuous the more somethings we do. You can trace the sociological development of this attitude in Max Weber's classic tome The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Which I strongly encourage you not to read, especially if you are a lover of mellifluous prose. Weber observed that the central value of hard, unstinting work – the ‘Don't just stand there, do something!’ approach to life – catalysed many of our society's phenomenal accomplishments: decoding underlying laws of nature, curing diseases, walking on the moon, inventing the Thighmaster, and so on. No question about it, our cultural obsession with doing something has yielded spectacular results.
The problem is that perpetually doing, without ever tuning in to the centre of our being, is the equivalent of fuelling a mighty ship by tossing all its navigational equipment into the furnace. Fully occupied by the process of achieving innumerable goals, we lose the ability to determine which goals really matter, and why. Only by connecting with our innate sense of truth can we ensure that the astonishing wealth and power human beings have created will be used for intelligent, benevolent ends. That is why throughout history, everywhere on Earth – even in Max Weber's modern Western Europe – an enormous variety of human cultures have venerated the teachings of a few wise souls who happened to be extremely good at doing nothing.
Nothing doing: accounts from the experts
Mystics, saints, and philosophers consistently tell us that the experience of doing nothing, I mean really doing nothing, is impossible to articulate. This is partly because it takes consciousness beyond the reach of verbal thought. Scanning imagery shows that, for example, during meditation, the areas of the brain usually involved in verbal thinking become quiet, and a completely different area ‘lights up’. As this occurs, the meditating person may have a sense of the ego both dissolving and connecting with the entire universe. Chip Brown, a journalist who spent years researching alternative healing, complained that whenever he set out to describe this sensation, he ended up ‘bludgeoning the ineffable’. Perhaps this is why the Buddha's first words upon achieving enlightenment are said to have been, ‘This cannot be taught’. Nevertheless, words can be the vehicles that take us close to the experience of nothing-doing, and some of the human race's most treasured writings include verbal approximations of what it means to add nothing to your life.
For example, ancient Chinese philosophers encouraged seekers to attain a condition known as mu, which literally means ‘uncarved block’ – in other words, a something that bears, holds, or represents nothing. Japanese Zen masters use the phrase ‘the empty mirror’, the image in two reflective surfaces set perfectly parallel to one another. This, they say, is your original face, the face you had before your father and mother were born. By returning to it, you can sink the foundations of your character and your actions deep into the radiant stillness that will allow you to handle life's vagaries with wisdom beyond the scope of ego or intellect. Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism, put it this way:
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the centre hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
In case these Asian metaphors aren't ringing your archetypal chimes, you can find the same concept expressed throughout the Muslim and Judeo-Christian traditions. One of my favourites is contained in the Old Testament story of Elijah. This particular prophet was hiding in a cave, muddling over problems that were probably at least as bad as yours (a multiple-murder rap and a gang of would-be executioners), when he heard God calling to him. This is how the Book of Kings describes it:
And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks into pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.
Even if you've never heard a Bible story, you may recognize Elijah's experience. In fact, I'd be surprised to learn that you haven't lived it, in one way or another. Almost all of us have been assaulted by hurricane winds, rapacious fires, and shattering earthquakes of some sort; we live on that kind of planet. Do you remember the last time your preconceptions were blown to smithereens, your heart burnt to a cinder, your confidence shattered? Look back on it now (or if you're in the middle of it, look around), and see if in the midst of that devastation – right in the centre of it – you half-sense something still and small. Listen for it. Beneath, around, even within the cacophonous chaos of your life disintegrating, something infinitely powerful and surpassingly sweet is whispering to you. It is when all our somethings are collapsing that we may finally turn to nothing, and find there everything we need.
Almost everyone seems to use this kind of paradoxical language to describe the effect of doing nothing. Saint John of the Cross, one of the more eloquent nothing-doers of the Christian tradition, spoke of travelling to a destination ‘where, waiting for me, was the One I knew so well, in that place where no one ever is'. He called the One who met him there ‘the beloved', an ambiguous label that certainly meant God, but could just as accurately mean the true self that was divinely loved, since in that empty place, the poet wrote, ‘the lover and the beloved change bodies'.
Whatever metaphor you use to conceptualize the experience of doing nothing, I hope that these brief descriptions have convinced you it is far more interesting than you may have been led to believe. If you are currently in any kind of pain, you may find something oddly compelling about the words of the great nothing-doers. Though they make no logical sense, they have an irrational resonance that sticks to the suffering soul even after the mind has forgotten them, the way nectar remains on your fingertips after you've held a flower.
When nothing makes sense
I myself became interested in nothingness at a particularly stressful time of life. I had grown up firmly opposed to doing nothing, steeped in the American work ethic, positive I could find fulfilment through effort, optimism, stringent calisthenics, and a high-fibre diet. This attitude brought me many good things, but in the end, it proved ineffective at warding off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. By my mid-twenties, I was utterly exhausted, sick as a mad cow in both body and soul. Chronic pain in my muscles and joints had rendered me almost bedridden. I was working twenty slow, crippled hours a day, trying to revive an academic career that had been mauled nearly to death by the multiple preoccupations of early parenthood. One of my three preschool children had Down's syndrome, which meant he would never do many of the somethings I'd always thought were essential for happiness. My life was full to bursting, and yet the more I crammed into my schedule, the more desperately I felt that there was something missing.
I finally became so exhausted that certain words and images began to pierce the armour of my get-things-done belief system. It happened almost against my will; a series of oddly persistent coincidences seemed bent on teaching me how to do nothing. I'd be sorting through textbooks I had used as an undergraduate Chinese major when an odd line of Taoist poetry, something I'd never noticed before, would practically leap off a page and grab me by the hair. On my frequent emergency-room visits, I always seemed to get stuck with the maddeningly flaky doctor who prescribed ‘mindfulness' instead of the good old-fashioned morphine I'd requested, I felt unexpectedly drawn to people who, once I got to know them, always turned out to have a habit of seeking stillness on a regular basis. It couldn't help but sink in. I gradually learned how to do nothing, though I had not talent or practice. If I can handle the job, trust me, you can too.
From The Joy Diet copyright 2003 by Martha Beck, published in the UK by Piatkus Books Ltd.
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