Being, Not Doing: How do we DO that?

By Jeff Glover

Recently a client in our therapy session expressed, “I’ve heard the whole ‘I’m a human being, not a human doing’ thing, but…’ he paused and then exclaimed, ‘But I understand how to do. That makes sense to me. I’m not sure I know how to just be!’” 

I suppressed my impulse to smile. (Because I try to be professional, naturally—I am a therapist, after all!) But then he went on, “Jeff, how do I do that?!”  

I love being a therapist. I love doing therapy. But there are moments when I swear life is playing a joke on me. When, on occasion—and I hope appropriately—my clients see me smiling or even chuckling, I explain that I’m not laughing at them or their problem; my humor is grounded in my personal identification with their struggle. I often wonder: How do I do that? Just be!? Furthermore, I joke with my clients about my hesitation in even talking about this, because I know that whatever comes out of my mouth next will have to be applied to my own life!

Regardless of which side of the conversation we’re on, we all need people who we identify with.  Yes, that’s me! I struggle with that, or I want that for my own life, or whatever it is. It’s as fundamental as our need for identity. Who I am? What do I have? What do I need? What do I want? For myself? For my loved ones? For our world? To identify is like finding a proper diagnosis in medicine. It helps appropriately point to the next set of questions: What now? How do I get there? It helps define what we need to DO next.  

So we tend to define ourselves by what we DO. It isn’t always helpful. We need to remember the practices of simply being. At the same time, while we need to practice identifying qualities of being, perhaps inherent qualities of what it means to be a human being, to “just be” can still take at least a little bit of doing. 

At least, that’s true for me. I hope I’m not alone.