Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee

by Shannon Lee

When man is living, he is soft and pliable; when he is dead, he becomes rigid. Pliability is life; rigidity is death, whether we are speaking of the body, the mind, or the spirit. Be pliable.

And so it is with water. Water is gentle yet powerful. Soft, yet strong. Flowing, yet deep. And so it is with life. Life can be joyful and sad. Beautiful and ugly. Exciting and terrifying. And yet, these are the extremes of the whole experience. If we resist one half of the experience, we may never reach the heights of its rewards or the contentment of its balance. But when we strike a balance within the interplay of these extremes, we find peace and harmony. We find ease.

The idea of being present is the idea of being fully aware and in touch with what’s happening right now. Not letting your mind, for example, jump into the past to compare what you are doing right now to a similar thing you did last year. And not jumping ahead into the future and thinking about what you’re going to do this afternoon or next week or thinking about how what you’re experiencing now will benefit you later. The practice of mindfulness is focusing one’s awareness on the present moment and experiencing it fully.

So rather than try to beat down our thoughts and feelings, which gives them more power, we want to merely notice them, allow them, and let them pass through as we stay with the present moment.

This is the first major step in the journey to discover and maximize your human potential. And that first major step starts with this small one: What are you thinking about right now?

To live with “what is” is to be peaceful. There is “what is” when there is no comparison at all. Require not just a moment of perception, but a continuous awareness, a continuous state of inquiry in which there is no conclusion. Just watch choicelessly and in the watching lies the wonder. There is an awareness without any demand, an awareness in which there is no anxiety, and in that state of mind, there is perception. And it is perception that will resolve all our problems.

Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a constant state of learning.

Each man must seek out realization himself. No master can give it to him.

Set life up like an experiment, investigate and be open to the findings, and the heaviness of living may ease just a bit.

He goes on to say that “the enemy of development is pain phobia—the unwillingness to do a tiny bit of suffering. As you feel unpleasant, you interrupt the continuum of awareness and you become phobic.”

What is your experience of life and how can you make it better wherever you find yourself? So when you are standing in front of another person and you’re all caught up in being better than or just as good as they are, remember that all that comparison is a reflection of the limited game you are playing.