Water is the softest and most yielding substance. Yet nothing is better than water, for overcoming the hard and rigid, because nothing can compete with it. Lao Tzu Western civilization is, at its core, a civilization of resistance.
We tend to resist aging, death, discomfort, uncertainty, and even our own emotions. We strive to control and predict, molding the world to fit our expectations. When things don’t go our way, we push harder.
And if life throws obstacles in our path, we view them as problems to be conquered. The ancient Taoist sages observed that resisting the natural flow of life often—though not always—does more harm than good. We create unnecessary suffering when we resist what we cannot change.
In Taoism, resistance implies hardness and rigidity—an unwillingness to move with the currents of existence. Instead, the Taoist sages encouraged non-resistance, a key aspect of a broader concept called wu wei. The idea of non-resistance is a theme in the great Taoist scriptures, such as the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, which show us that yielding and accepting are often more beneficial than force and opposition.
So, how could yielding be better than defying, especially considering all the evil and injustice in the world? How does the power of non-resistance work? We’re about to explore the Taoist art of non-resistance, which offers a radically different view of how life works and how to approach it.
Even though I tried, I couldn’t resist telling you about my brand-new book, Taoism for Inner Peace. It contains my collected works inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Taoist sages, edited and improved for print. You’ll find a link in the description.
Thank you. And I hope you’ll enjoy this video. Taoism teaches that everything is in constant flux—the natural state of the universe.
All things are interdependent; every action triggers an effect, and every effect sparks a response. Life follows its course, and from the moment we’re born, aging begins. We are placed in a world beyond our control, facing the realities of human existence.
Yet, people often struggle to accept change. We embrace it when it suits us but resist when it doesn’t. We see change as good, but only if it happens on our terms.
So, we spend our lives trying to control fate, forcing the world to bend to our will. We resist reality, trying to impose our will on its natural flow. We want to fight it.
We want not to give an inch. While the Western world sees a ‘hard stance’ as a sign of strength, Taoists recognize that such rigidity can just as easily be a weakness. A famous example from Lao Tzu is the brittle, dry plant—its inflexibility leads to its downfall, while softness is its true strength.
The idea of non-resistance stems from the power of softness and flexibility. Often, it’s wiser to flow with events rather than resist, even when resistance feels like the instinctive choice. Resisting reality rarely works.
What must happen happens. We can’t stop it. That doesn’t mean we cannot influence our circumstances, but we don’t control the outcome.
If we did, we’d all be millionaires, every Joe would find his Jane, and hardship wouldn’t exist. But life doesn’t work that way. And often, resisting isn’t just futile—it could also make things worse.
Think of the energy wasted trying to prevent the inevitable, the stress of fighting change, and the frustration when it happens anyway. As the Taoist sage Liezi observed: “People try too hard to make things happen or not happen, because they do not understand the natural order of things. They believe they can control the outcome of things, and in the end, after a lot of effort, they find their hard work produces the opposite effect.
” End quote. Resisting the natural flow can cause stress, exhaustion, and disappointment. Unnecessary struggle and effort will only get in the way rather than help.
From a Taoist viewpoint, it’s often better not to resist, let things unfold naturally, and intervene skillfully when necessary. As Lao Tzu stated: “Mastery of the world is achieved by letting things take their natural course. You can not master the world by changing the natural way.
” End quote. Ideally, we can use the situation to our advantage—leveraging the force we resist, like a sailor adjusting their sails to the wind rather than fighting against it. Now, how does this work in practice?
How can we apply this in our daily lives? Let’s explore several situations in which we often instinctively resist, why this may be problematic, and what would be the Taoist thing to do instead. How often have you felt distressed when life didn’t go as planned?
If you’re like most people, probably quite often. We tend to resist adversity, even though most (if not all) forms of hardship are (from the Taoist perspective) perfectly natural. Hence, this natural change of circumstances isn’t the problem; our attitude toward these circumstances causes suffering.
Here’s a Taoist story I’ve featured before that illustrates this well: Confucius and his students once passed through a village on their way to the sights of Mount T’ai. There, they met an old man who seemed extraordinarily happy, singing and playing a lute. Curious, Confucius asked why he was so content.
The man replied that he had countless reasons to be happy: He was human, gifted with wisdom and a long life—but that wasn’t all. I quote: “Finally, I don’t care whether I am rich or poor, and I know that birth and death are but the natural order of things. While many people are worried about being poor and are afraid of dying, I am not bothered by these things.
That is why I am always happy. ” End quote. The old man didn’t concern himself with the things that usually cause pain: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame, and disrepute, also known as the Eight Worldly Winds in Buddhism.
These rise and fall beyond our control. He was happy because he accepted their inevitability and made the best of whatever he found himself into. So, why worry?
Why resist what cannot be changed? Why always try to get somewhere instead of embracing where we are? A Taoist sage flows along with the circumstances instead of trying to resist them.
When he turns out to be in a position of wealth, that’s great. Poverty? Also, great; he’ll join most of humanity in that same condition.
If he gathers a lot of friends and people love him? Awesome. If he doesn’t have a lot of friends and spends most of his life in solitude, that’s also fine; more time for fishing at the riverbank.
A sage knows that resisting whatever situation he’s in, always striving to be somewhere, and being discontented with one’s circumstances make him unhappy. Therefore, he doesn’t resist changing personal circumstances, even poverty, illness, or death. That doesn’t mean one should be passive.
In Taoism, it’s OK to have goals and guide one’s life in a particular direction or try to prevent illness by living a healthy life. It’s wise to improve one’s situation when possible—but without forcing things or resisting what is beyond one’s control, which sounds ambiguous, I know. In Taoism, there’s also something called “effortless action,” which is part of wu wei, which focuses on doing without striving.
It’s the Taoist way of achieving without resisting the natural flow. You’ll find an in-depth exploration of wu wei in this video. So, when it comes to our circumstances, what’s something most of us resist, often daily?
I think it’s other people. One of the most significant sources of unhappiness must be our fellow human beings. These could be people close to us, strangers, or people in positions of power we often see on the news.
Take, for example, the close family member who gossips behind your back and mistreats you, the stranger who cuts the line in the supermarket, or the politician whose policies are damaging. Or how about someone we disagree with politically or ethically? Let’s go with the latter.
Suppose you’re a citizen of, let’s say, San Marino, a microstate surrounded by Italy and the world’s oldest republic. Your colleague, the one sitting in the same aisle as you, is a die-hard Christian Democrat. Every day, he rants about the evils of the Socialist Party, arguing that their vision for public spending will ruin the country—all 61 square kilometers of it.
When inquiring about his views, you conclude he isn’t well-informed. He commits logical fallacies and presents questionable information as facts. But the more you go against him, trying to convince him he’s wrong, the more irritated he gets.
He raises his voice, you get angry, and he starts yelling, so you’ve ended up in a very unpleasant conversation that led nowhere, making you both feel bad. In this situation, it seems that hardness can’t overcome hardness. So, are there different ways to approach this situation?
Consider the following line from the Tao Te Ching: That which offers no resistance, overcomes the hardest substances. End quote. So, how can non-resistance help in a situation like this?
Let’s first stop resisting what we can’t control—like people with different opinions, no matter how uninformed they are. Ultimately, you can’t control what they think or say. Resisting their existence is futile; they’ll always be there.
So, one way of approaching this is accepting it, and ignoring and avoiding such people. But a genuinely skillful person could even turn that non-resistance into change. By allowing someone’s opinions, listening to them, showing empathy and compassion (as far as that’s feasible), and finding common ground, chances of change in views and opinions in both yourself and your opponent may occur.
The very thing you tried to resist may actually be the force leading to change or, at least, a meaningful exchange of thought, benefitting both. Non-resistance overcomes the hardest of substances. Now, let’s move on to another common source of resistance: global events.
Worrying about global events isn’t new. People have feared wars, disasters, and societal breakdowns for centuries. Take, for example, worries about an apocalypse within a religious context, the threat of war and natural disaster, or the possible collapse of one’s society.
Or what about the advent of technofeudalism, which we explored in the last video? These topics have been on people’s minds, most likely since the dawn of time. The Liezi contains a story about an anxious man who spent much of his time worrying about the sky crashing down and the Earth breaking up one day.
Some people tried to reassure him that this would never happen. But the man didn’t buy it; he believed the possibility existed. Then, the sage appeared.
At first, the sage agreed with the man, saying that the sky could come crashing down and the Earth could be destroyed. After all, nothing is impermanent, so we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the possibility. However, the sage found the man’s worries unlikely to materialize soon and advised him not to dwell on them, saying: “Whether they will perish or not is something we don’t know.
If heaven and earth will not perish, that’s great. We can live our lives without worry. However, if they will perish, that’s something we can’t do much about, so why worry about it?
” End quote. I feel where the anxious man is coming from. Ever since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, I’ve been open to the short-term possibility of a third world war, starting in Europe.
But people around me claimed that this won’t happen. “The world has never been so peaceful! ” some said.
“Nah, we’re past that. It’ll probably just be some form of digital warfare. ” But I never ruled out the possibility of a global conflict with bombs and invasions, which could even go nuclear.
Denying it would be intellectually dishonest, in my opinion. Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I was about to celebrate Carnaval with my cousin. Standing in the backyard in our animal suits, I pulled out my phone and showed him an article about Putin preparing his nuclear arsenal, which bothered me at the time.
But my cousin shrugged his shoulders, sipped his beer, and said: “Well, if it happens, then so be it. ” First, I was a bit shocked by his nonchalance. I thought about it the rest of the day, eventually admiring the wisdom of his comment.
He quickly recognized that what I shared with him was out of his control. He could be upset about it, let it ruin his day, but that wouldn’t change anything. And if it indeed happens, well, he’d probably figure out how to deal with the situation as it comes.
The Zhuangzi, one of the main Taoist scriptures, contains a story about a farmer who never judged events as good or bad. He was aware that every event we consider unfortunate could actually be fortunate and vice versa, which is shown in the story. The sage in the story about the anxious man would have agreed with the farmer, as he stated that we don’t know what it’s like to be dead, and when we’re dead, we don’t know what it’s like to be alive.
So, why even judge the prospect of a disaster? We don’t know what it’ll lead to. Who can say death doesn’t lead us to something better?
It’s just another reason not to resist what we consider catastrophes. We never know how things truly play out. We don’t even know what it means to be dead.
When researching this topic, I stumbled upon an academic paper titled “Non-Resistance the Taoist Way,” written by Cheryl L. Chrisman. The paper explains the art of non-resistance as “the way of water.
” The paper explores non-resistance from the viewpoint of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and concepts such as Qi, yin, and yang. It says that when we resist unpleasant situations, such as the things we’ve discussed so far, Qi will stagnate. When Qi stagnates, it disrupts the body’s balance—particularly in the heart and liver—leading to various emotional and physical ailments, such as frequent illness, fatigue, and asthma attacks.
“The main result of Qi stagnation varies basic dominant constitutions but in all cases resistance produces pain and suffering,” Chrisman states. Simply put, resistance to what is can make us sick, mentally and physically. Resistance cuts off from the Tao.
It disturbs our balance. So, how do we solve this? “To be like water and let things pass easily through you,” Chrisman states.
“Think of a stone dropped into a bucket of water. The water yields to the stone and parts but quickly returns to its original state unharmed. ” End quote.
The article contains several steps on practicing non-resistance, which I won’t share due to copyright reasons. Instead, I’ll share my own interpretation of how being like water could mitigate unpleasant situations. Take bodily pain, for example.
When in pain, we experience discomfort. But we usually add another layer of discomfort by resisting the pain. We think, “I don’t want this!
I don’t want to feel this! ” But if we just let the pain flow through us without resisting it, we still feel pain, of course, but a lot less than if we’d also resist it. Eventually, our bodies adapt, like water adapts to any circumstance.
We can apply this to unpleasant emotions like anger, fear, interactions with people we dislike, and other circumstances that evoke distress. Instead of resisting or fighting, we stay receptive and yielding, allowing the experience to dissolve and restoring calm and balance. From that state of calm and balance, aren’t we far better equipped to act and make decisions?
The Taoist sages show that non-resistance isn’t weakness—it’s the art of letting go, adapting, and flowing with life. It’s the smart way instead of the hard way. Thank you for watching.
