Wu Wei, Descent, and Living Mythically
Stop Trying To Master Your Life
The gospel of “you can create anything you want if you align your vibration” is beginning to unravel on a planet increasingly marked by ecological collapse, social upheaval, and religious and spiritual scandal. The idea, popularized by works such as The Secret, promotes the notion that reality bends to our mindset. With the right thoughts, we can attract perfect partners, abundant wealth, and endless health. We will set aside for a moment the ethical quagmire of applying this worldview to a grieving parent or a war refugee. But even in less extreme cases, affirmations eventually ring hollow, full moon rituals lose their sparkle, and every religious or mystical experience slides quietly back into folding laundry. This is usually the moment when the call to adventure slides into your DMs.
Contrary to modern thought, the existence of what many call magic, of living in a world that responds to our requests for help, is not a worldview passed on through modern psychology or even spirituality. It is carried primarily through myth. Myth is not primitive storytelling, nor is it “just a metaphor.” It’s a mode of knowing, a symbolic framework revealing a world dripping with meaning. Myth names the invisible forces shaping us — love, death, grief, renewal. It insists that surrender and shadow are not failures or pathologies. They are a part of the human journey. Arguably, the most important one. Like, pretty much the prerequisite for everything else.
Modern Western culture exiled this way of knowing. We prize mastery, productivity hacks, and optimization, as though psyche were a faulty app to debug. Cue Star Trek voiceover:
“Captain’s log, stardate: infinity. Psychonaut attempted transcendence through good vibes. Results inconclusive. Crew morale low. Still can’t bypass Hero’s Journey protocols. Systems failed.”
Psychologist James Hillman (2006) had this on his bingo card, describing the necessity of bringing attention to the whole life of our aesthetic responses, emphasizing that we must make room for our personal responses to both beauty and ugliness (143). Yet time and time again, we choose vibes over vision, and now what we have lost is the thrill, the rage, the grief, the bloody aliveness of being human. It has been numbed out, mindset coached, or diagnosed away, robbing us of the beautiful and heartbreaking rapture of living.
Buckle up, in 6 minutes or less, we’re gonna explore the Daoist concept of wu wei: the art of yielding, archetypal descent as it is taught to us through mythology, and finally, what it means to live mythically in a culture that worships certainty, but deeply longs for feral chaos.
Wu Wei and the Counterculture of Not-Trying
What if we stopped trying so hard? What if we tried easy? In a nutshell, this is the concept of wu wei. Commonly, wu wei is translated as “no doing” or “no trying,” which at face value sounds like a lazy Sunday in sweatpants. This is not dull inaction, however (Slingerland, 2014). It’s just saying: you’re burning way too much energy swimming upstream. Maybe let life carry you for once instead of thrashing against it… you feral little chaos salmon.
When you fall into the river of life and just float, you discover that the current carries you further than all your frantic paddling ever could. This force in our world is magnetic, alive, even a little mischievous. To live this way is to feel like you’re both doing absolutely nothing and somehow creating your most brilliant, prolific, intoxicating work. It’s the cosmic flex Dalí (1998) nailed when he said: “I don’t need drugs, I am drugs” (296). An awareness of the existence of wu wei can re-enchant the psyche, returning the mind to a sense of its mythic ground.
Arguably the greatest cinematic saga of our time, Star Wars sneaks this Daoist idea into one of its most quotable lines when Luke Skywalker says, “I’ll give it a try,” and Yoda shuts him down with the ultimate wu wei mic drop: “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try” (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980). It’s not about straining or forcing, it’s about slipping into that sweet spot where action flows so naturally it feels like no action at all. Stop muscling it! Flow with the Force, or don’t, but do not waste the galaxy’s time with all your frantic “trying.”
And we all know which part of us has an overabundance of try-hard. The Ego. Ego is the straight-A student who color-codes their planner and still cries in the bathroom because someone else got an A too. She’s forever auditioning for a role nobody’s even casting. But you know who’s a total baddie at living in a flow state? The Soul. Soul doesn’t check boxes; she checks the way the clouds are moving before choosing whether to tell the truth, or tell a good story. Soul belly-laughs at Aunt Jessie’s funeral and weeps when the mockingbird sings. Until it shifts into its car-alarm impression. Then she drops the top on the Chevy Corvair and heads out for an ice cream cone. Soul has never cared about impressing anyone because your Soul knows life is not a performance, it’s a dance floor with squirrels at a rave who all refuse all the Ego’s choreography. Because when Ego comes at Soul with a machete, Soul giggles and turns Ego into confetti.
When we finally take off our warrior armor and stop arguing with Soul about the path we are on, we don’t actually die in our surrender (OK OK, we kinda do but we will leave that rabbit hole with Alice for now). More accurately we wake up inside a living world where the stones do in fact speak, the brook babbles our name, and maybe, just maybe, the birdies actually will help us with our laundry. Because in the end, the deepest form of devotion to Soul isn’t about holding on tighter and buying another online “Master Your Fate” course. Devotion to Soul is about loosening our grip and trusting The Force enough to see that Soul never cared if your lightsaber form was perfect. Can we manifest the life we hope for? Sort of. But it is a living system, not a vending machine. Sometimes, the most sacred thing you can do, is stop pretending you know where any of this is going, and just live it. Like Skywalker, all our studying, rehearsing, and “trying” will never get us to the “Do it!” that Yoda is pointing him toward. You’ll never be ready. You just start.
How Not to Plan Your Life (ft. Catholic Guilt and Star Wars)
The best (and probably most sexist) advice I ever received on this front was from my Theological Studies advisor as an undergrad at a private Catholic university in the Midwest. Exasperated at my lack of direction, and a mountain of debt with no job prospects in sight, I asked him, “what the hell am I going to do with a degree in Theology if I hate teaching?” He inquired, “Didn’t you just get married?” “Yeah,” I answered quizzically. “Do you want to have kids?” I shrugged, “I mean, one day when we’re ready.” His kind chuckle echoed down the stairwell of Derham Hall as he retorted, “Oh, Lori, you’re NEVER ready to have kids. Especially not if you think you are. Just have your babies now while you’re young. Otherwise, you’ll be in your 40s with a mortgage and tenure and struggle to get pregnant at all.”
My daughter Lily was born 11 months later.
She likes Star Wars even more than I do.
I still grapple today with the brazen way in which I made that decision and whether it was right or wrong of him to suggest it. In the end, it didn’t really matter. I wouldn’t necessarily give that advice to a 22-year-old student today, but hey, it worked out fine. She still hasn’t let me hold the remote during a Star Wars marathon, but it’s fine, really, it’s fine. This was my first experience with the reality that when you just take a leap in any given direction, the principles of wu wei apply and Soul will answer your action with a nudge toward the next thing…and then the next…and then the next. If the Jedi Council disapproves, you will be redirected. Promise.
Admittedly, the recognition that we lack perfect control can feel chaotic. At times it can be flat-out heartbreaking. Many “nudges” feel more like a shove (sometimes off a cliff). In one moment, you are riding the wu wei river with ease, and in the next, it hits rapids, whirlpools, and the occasional waterfall. Rivers don’t just meander through meadows forever. Yes, effortlessness is real when we hit the sweet spot. But descent is a necessary threshold as well. The current will eventually drag us down, whether we have learned how to use the Force or not. “Trust the Force” is a bitter instruction to swallow. We don’t like to trust forces that bring about discomfort or deep suffering. Usually, we name them as “evil” actually. Myths hold the complexity of this tension, and align us with the ancient Daoist wisdom of wu wei by reminding us of the surrender clause in every hero’s contract. As Joseph Campbell (1949/2008) pointed out, myth doesn’t point us toward escape but insists we descend into the belly of the whale: “Instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, … the hero is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died giving emphasis to the popular motif that passage through the threshold is a form of self-annihilation” (90). Eventually, we will be summoned to say no to endless self-alignment and yes to Soul-imposed undoing.
Episode V½: The Descent Strikes Back
When things fall apart, we usually think we went wrong somewhere. We harden, we get jaded, the dream dies, and we head off to find a Shaman in the Andes Mountains, assuming we’re broken and in need of healing. When we fail, or the world fails us, it’s uncomfortable, but not surprising. But when the magic we have grown accustomed to wielding fails us after all the answered “Our Fathers”… that can spin us into an existential crisis. Thing is, the flow state we get used to living in collaboration with will always start waterboarding us eventually. No matter how respectfully we genuflected at its altar.
Therein lies the invitation. Descent is a required part of the design. The work of becoming whole cannot be done by climbing higher. We must climb the roots. Every true myth, no matter how much glitter Disney throws at it, contains a descent. Every myth worth remembering demands it. Not a glow-up. Not a five-step morning routine. A collapse. A loss. A Soul-led undoing. The old myths didn’t pretend otherwise: Persephone was dragged screaming into the underworld and forced to wear both winter and spring for the rest of her life. Psyche was betrayed by love and sentenced to impossible tasks she could not accomplish alone, and was only bailed out by the natural forces around her (cough wu-wei cough). Inanna, queen of heaven, chose her descent like a damn warrior and was stripped of her power at every gate until she wound up dead and dangling from a hook. Even the more sanitized Christian myths don’t escape this pattern: Job was wholly betrayed by God’s silence, Noah floated upon the drowning and death of his world, and Jesus himself was stabbed in the back by the people for whom he turned water into wine. Never BYO miracle.
We can look the other way, whistling past the underworld by thinking positively, or downloading a new app. But the pattern is clear: if you want to be whole, you don’t ascend — you fall. In many of these stories, the hero or heroine appears to be suffering the unjust wrath of a god or goddess; however, symbolically, the descent is not punishment. It is initiation. Campbell invites us: “As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think” (Campbell, 1991, p. 19). As much as we have been taught to pathologize these moments of darkness and seek help or healing, we must remember: descent isn’t a pathology. It’s a calling. It is the journey Soul sends us on to be ripened, ruptured, and rewoven. Bypass it for a quick-fix solution, and you end up like Orpheus: a cautionary tale. His failure wasn’t that he refused to descend; it’s that he couldn’t stay with the not-knowing. He reached too soon for certainty, for control, for a happy ending. And in doing so, he lost the thing he loved most.
We are not here to master life. We are here to be mythically dismantled by it. If you’re looking for an exit strategy, myth has none. To my knowledge you won’t find a hero or heroine in mythology who just needed to do some mindset work. Eventually you’re going to need a torch to carry underground so you can stay in the underworld with Hades for a bit. We don’t have many modern examples trying to sell us on this. The world of myth is where you can find them. These sacred stories can be deeply unsettling, terrifying even!
They also offer us the comfort that it is not all for nothing. The reward for trusting in this process and letting oneself be carried by Soul is nothing less than communion with the process itself. Your life, your you, becomes myth, and enters into the storyline of the myths of all time. This mystical union of self with the divine wrecking ball writing this saga is what Christians call kenosis or transfiguration, emptying the ego so the truer, divine self can emerge. Jung described the same mystery in terms of participation mystique, the collapse of the ego’s separateness as consciousness descends into union with the collective psyche, and the alchemical coniunctio, where we no longer even experience ourselves as separate from the world (CW 14, Para. 759).
Living Mythically Means Living Creatively: Get weird with it
How do we live mythically? To live mythically is to recognize that the forces in these ancient stories are still active today. It is to experience the building of a meaningful life as a co-creation rather than a conquest, to see ourselves not as detached individuals but as participants in a world that is alive, responsive, and storied. There is no need to dissect or interpret myth in order to understand what it means. Mythology doesn’t obey the scientific method of inquiry. As Rainer Maria Rilke (1903/1933) begs: you must live the questions…do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live them until someday, almost without even noticing it, you live your way into the answer (p.35).
Living mythically lends itself naturally to animism — the belief that the world is enSouled, that rivers, trees, animals, and even seemingly inert objects possess presence and agency. Animism does not mean projecting human qualities onto “things,” nor is it a nostalgic return to superstition. It is a reorientation toward reverence, synchronicity, and reciprocity with the more-than-human world. A world that, when we pay attention, is constantly showering us with signs, synchronicities, images, and symbols for us to play with it! The world is not a puzzle to solve or a ladder to climb; it is alive! Just like you! A living presence that longs to be in relationship with us. To live mythically in a mastery culture like ours is to commit heresy. We may not be burned at the stake or nailed to a tree, but we are asked — again and again — to surrender to forces beyond our control. To let ourselves be carried instead of endlessly chasing shiny ego tasks like “healing” or “health.” Meanwhile, Soul is waiting for you in the forest, setting all the participation trophies on fire, waiting for you to finally give up.”
When you first start carving out time in your calendar to hug trees and consult the insects about big life decisions, it will feel like madness (especially when they start giving you advice and you heed it), but it’s also the beginning of authentic creative living. Living mythically, paying attention to the signs all around you, cracks the concrete of your long-held shoulds and should-nots and lets wild shoots grow. In this way of walking in the world, that ancient (slightly scary) thing that stirs in you and guides your flow, is creativity. Living mythically is inseparable from living creatively, because both require trust in what cannot be managed. Is it a little crazy? Sure, by western standards. But it’s also artistry. It is to accept that we are not just painters; we are canvases. Creativity is the skin; myth is the scars. One keeps us porous and alive, the other shapes how the body moves through the world. Letting your life itself become a work of art demands descent and dismantling so that creativity can breathe oxygen into our pores, reminding us we are not managers of our existence but participants in our unfolding myth.
The more we live our way into this understanding, the more that the descent and dismantling process our Soul was leading us through re-orients our approach to life-making. Creative burnout, whether personal or professional, often creeps in because we slowly, unconsciously, begin treating creativity like a job description. I have to write this novel, crank out that content, produce that song, drag something out of the depths and force it into form. Suddenly, this whole “living mythically” thing makes us personally responsible for rearranging the universe. When we relate to creativity this way, descent is inevitable. And of course, the questions flood: Why? Why write another song when there are already too many? Why paint another painting when the world is drowning in images? And suddenly, the muse feels less like a lover and more like an overbearing boss who keeps sending Slack notifications at midnight. No wonder we’re jaded and exhausted. The abyss doesn’t even offer overtime pay. Crushing, I know.
While we can’t skip the underworld, we can avoid getting knocked on our ass and dragged down again and again by realizing we aren’t the creator; we are the co-creator. The act of co-creating our myth means realizing our place in the archetypal inheritance of myth-making. Creativity is in the cosmos itself. These archetypal energies are seeking to move through us in endlessly new ways. From an archetypal perch, it doesn’t matter if we’ve written 100 songs, or 1000 poems, or 10,000 books (I’m looking at you Stephen King). The impetus for another creative expression isn’t for us to decide, nor does it arise from the post-it note affirmations around the house we are pathetically trying to will into being. The will to create isn’t ours. We are being willed to create. Creativity on our part, then, is an acceptance of this, a noticing of what’s happening around us, and in us, and then a tending-to rather than a making-of. We don’t have to stir it in ourselves; we have to be stirred. And this is precisely what it means to live mythically: to recognize that we are not the sole authors of our lives, but characters in a story larger than us. Currents in a river that carry us whether we thrash or float. It is the Soul that moves us, not Ego; myth that animates us, not mastery. To live mythically is to live creatively, because both require surrender and the humility to be moved by what longs to be born, rather than the arrogance of deciding what we think the world needs. You are not its architects. You are its offspring.
Closing Arguments From A Woman In Pajamas
Live mythically. Vibe aimlessly. Be humble enough to be shaped, reckless enough to be carried, and wise enough to know the story was never yours to control in the first place. The story will never be finished. Myth is not static; it will shift with culture, reflecting collective anxieties and desires. Inanna knew it. So did Persephane, Psyche, Greta Thunberg, Barbie, and Malala.
Day by day, if you stay awake — if you pay fierce, aching attention to the small ruptures of beauty that stop you in your tracks. The songs that split you open. The smell of rain that undoes you. The stranger’s laugh that cracks something open in you. The ugly cry you didn’t plan on having when that cat on the sidewalk finally lets you pet it . You will remember: life is not asking for mastery, it’s asking for participation. This is the way of wu wei: not forcing, not rushing, but consenting to be moved by what longs to be born through you. It is Soul, not Ego, that directs this artistry, reminding us that our work is not to manufacture meaning but to notice, tend to, and stay in it long enough for the myth to reveal itself. Soul was never waiting for you to get your shit together. It was already ambushing you in the cracks and tears of your beautiful, boring, everyday life. Every chore, every heartbreak, every time you scooped the litterbox, you’ve been in the myth all along. Less the author, more the character, and damn lucky to be white-knuckling it on the raft.
So maybe stop giving Soul your to-do lists and just say thank you for the beautiful miracle of the DMV finally calling your number.
Rewilding Journal Prompts
When was the last time you let yourself be carried by life, without trying to direct it?
What does surrender feel like in your body? Where does it feel tense, and where does it feel freeing?
What stories, myths, fairy tales, saints, gods, goddesses, or Disney characters have accompanied or haunted you in your life so far?
How do you define ease, and when do you allow it to flow in your life?
Unritual
Schedule a day this month for an “unschedule.” I know it’s an oxymoron, just go with it. Let the day guide you. No plan. No goal. Just wake up and follow each intuitive “yes” as it arises in your body.
Works Cited
Campbell, J. (1991). A Joseph Campbell companion: Reflections on the art of living (D. K. Osbon, Ed.). HarperCollins.
Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library. (Original work published 1949)
Dalí, S. (1998). Dalí: The collected writings (H. Finkelstein, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Hillman, J. (2006). City & soul (R. J. Leaver, Ed.). Spring Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Vol. 14). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1955–1956)
Kershner, I. (Director). (1980). Star Wars: Episode V — The empire strikes back [Film]. Lucasfilm; 20th Century Fox.
Rilke, R. M. (1993). Letters to a young poet (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1903)
Slingerland, E. (2014). Trying not to try: Ancient China, modern science, and the power of spontaneity. Crown.
Wood, M. A. (Ed.). (2022). The archetypal artist: Reimagining creativity and the call to create. Routledge.
