Taoism honours easy. Wu-wei [effortless action] is mentioned recurrently in Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching. My favourite translation of Tao #64 is “Knowing nothing needs to be done is the place we begin to move from. Osho wrote a translation of Chuang Tzu “Easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. Continue easy and you are right. The right way to go easy is to forget the right way and forget that the going is easy”.

Erickson told me that as a teenager he was told this it was not his job to dig the farm vegetable patch, and that it would take two long days and break his back. Not one to suffer hardship needlessly, he walked to each corner of the patch and dug a square, then dug a strip to join each corner, then a square in the middle, which he joined to each corner, then from the middle to half way along each side, then to half way along each diagonal and so on, creating triangular shapes which he then dug randomly. He reported that after two short days, he’d had fun making patterns.

Erickson wrote “In the process of living, the price of survival is eternal vigilance and the willingness to learn. The sooner one becomes aware of realities and the sooner one adjusts to them, the quicker is the process of adjustment and the happier the experience of living.”

At MRI [Mental Research Institute] there is an invariant approach to any problem - apply constrains; “Don’t change”, “Don’t change yet”, “They are not ready to cope with you changing”, or “If you have to change, do so as slowly and as little as possible”. This derives from their assumption that all problems result from our attempt to solve them, so all solutions result from not trying to solve them. Their most difficult task is to convince someone to give up their ineffective struggle and settle for the easy option of stopping trying. When the trying is abandoned, the solution then has an opportunity to emerge naturally and easily. It’s no surprise that Erickson had a profound effect on their thinking.

I have enjoyed supporting many people in their healing by saying something like “The most difficult part of your solution is going to be to discover how easy it was”.

Yours in honouring easy

Rob