Be Water, My Friend

What if you could live your life with the grace, adaptability, and power of water? Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend invites you into that world through the life and philosophy of her father, Bruce Lee. She contends that her father was not simply a martial artist or movie star but one of the twentieth century’s profound philosophers. His core idea—to be like water—is a metaphor for living with fluidity, balance, and authenticity in an ever-changing world. But turning his poetic expressions into everyday practice is the challenge. Through personal stories, Bruce’s writings, and practical exercises, Shannon shows how you can embody this philosophy and awaken your own creative, resilient spirit.

The Meaning of “Be Like Water”

It’s easy to admire Bruce Lee’s famous quote—about water’s ability to flow or crash—but Shannon Lee reveals its deeper truth. Water is soft yet powerful; shapeless yet transformative. To be like water means to live without rigid limitation, to meet life’s obstacles with pliability instead of resistance. Her father discovered this insight as a teenager, frustrated during martial arts training with his teacher Yip Man. Told to relax and follow his opponent’s movement rather than force a strike, Bruce took a boat out on Hong Kong harbor and punched the sea in frustration. He saw that water yielded to his blows yet could erode rock and carve mountains. That revelation seeded his lifelong belief: strength lies in flexibility, not stubbornness.

Why It Matters Today

Though this was born from martial arts, Shannon argues that water’s wisdom applies far beyond combat—to creativity, relationships, personal growth, and resilience. We live in an era defined by speed, unpredictability, and emotional strain. The water metaphor reminds you to stay engaged but adaptable, powerful without being controlling. Life, she stresses, is not a static condition but a direction—a stream you navigate, not a dam you build. Adapting to change while maintaining your essence is the path to self-actualization, Bruce’s core goal. As Shannon puts it, Bruce didn’t want his followers to be Bruce Lee; he wanted them to be wholly themselves.

From Philosophy to Practice

Shannon structures her exploration through interconnected themes—awareness, pliability, openness, self-expression, and continual learning. Each chapter digs into aspects of “The Way of Water”: learning to empty your cup (open-mindedness), becoming the eternal student (humility), confronting your opponent (relationship as mirror), and discovering flow through obstacles and even tragedy. She translates Bruce’s seemingly paradoxical teachings—apply willpower and yield will; stay firm and be flexible—into psychological truths. Seen through her warm storytelling voice, the contradictions dissolve into a living ecosystem of balance.

A Human, Not a Saint

Bruce Lee’s humanity grounds the philosophy. Shannon shares that he could barely cook an egg or fix a light bulb, reminding us that mastery in one area doesn’t make demigods of mortals. His perfection came from process, not innate greatness. His discipline—hours of training daily, time spent cultivating his mind through reading—demonstrates how spirituality and physicality merge in practice. Shannon personalizes his teachings with humor, vulnerability, and reflection on identity—how being Bruce Lee’s daughter forced her to rediscover herself beyond his shadow, much as her father reinvented martial arts beyond tradition. The message is clear: you, too, can carve your canyon through rock, one drop at a time.

The Invitation

Ultimately, Be Water, My Friend is an invitation to join Shannon and Bruce in what she calls a “grand experiment” of life. It doesn’t promise perfection—it offers process. It’s not about controlling the current—it’s about learning to swim through it with awareness and joy. Each frustration becomes a teacher; each obstacle, a stream-rock shaping you. Like water, you can flow, adapt, and shine without losing your essence. Shannon turns Bruce Lee’s cinematic legend into a living, breathing philosophy you can practice daily: to stay present, fluid, and fearless, ready for whatever may come.

One of Bruce Lee’s most beloved parables begins with a Zen master pouring tea for a learned man. When the cup overflows, the master says, “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my tea?” Shannon uses this image to explore emptiness as openness—the art of creating space for new ideas, experiences, and possibilities. Emptying your mind doesn’t mean forgetting what you know; it means releasing rigid judgments and preconceived assumptions that block understanding.

Neutrality and Pure Seeing

The first practice is finding neutrality. Instead of labeling every moment “good” or “bad,” approach life as a scientist observing a phenomenon without bias. Bruce described this state as “choiceless awareness”—seeing things as they are. When you drop preferences and expectations, you encounter what he called “what is.” Shannon explains that this doesn’t mean passivity; it’s active awareness. She compares it to mindfulness practices found in Buddhism and psychology (similar to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now). When you’re present, you perceive reality rather than the stories your mind tells about it.

Judgment Versus Discernment

Most of us are quick to judge rather than discern. Judgment draws a hard line—right or wrong—while discernment asks deeper questions about meaning. Shannon contrasts these approaches to show how judgment shrinks us into defensiveness, while discernment opens space for understanding. She references Bruce’s warning against condemnation: awareness should be free play, not squeezed through past conclusions. The cure to our “sticky mind,” she says, is learning to let thoughts pass like birds flying over water—acknowledged, never grasped.

Meditation and Mental Kung Fu

To train mental pliability, Bruce meditated daily—sometimes sitting quietly, sometimes jogging softly through nature. Shannon reframes meditation as “mental kung fu,” the disciplined conditioning of the mind through awareness. She suggests you notice your thoughts as they arise, identify recurring patterns, and dissolve their grip. The goal is not mental silence but freedom from stickiness. In her own practice, she visualizes pouring out her cluttered thoughts as water emptying from a bowl—allowing clean light to refill it. This process creates serenity and insight, clearing away emotional sediment.

Emptiness as a Living Practice

Emptiness isn’t a void of nonexistence—it’s an ongoing process of spaciousness. Shannon emphasizes that even when you think you’ve cleared your cup, new thoughts will fill it. The practice is continuous: empty, refill, empty again. In this rhythm, you learn flexibility. As Bruce wrote, “To live with ‘what is’ is to be peaceful.” The takeaway? When you stop clinging to conclusions, you open your life to discovery. Every conversation, mistake, or challenge becomes fresh water flowing into your cup—usable, nourishing, and transformative.

In the chapter “The Eternal Student,” Shannon reveals one of Bruce Lee’s most defining qualities—his insatiable curiosity. He refused to be called a “master” because mastery implied an endpoint. “Once you say you’ve reached the top,” he said, “there’s nowhere to go but down.” Instead, he considered himself a perpetual student, peeling away layers of understanding every day. His humility in learning offers a model for growth: stay open, curious, and self-aware.

Learning Through Defeat

Shannon shares the story of Bruce’s pivotal 1964 fight with a challenger from San Francisco’s Chinatown. Though he won, Bruce sat outside afterward with his head in his hands, devastated—not from loss, but from revelation. He realized his traditional training hadn’t prepared him for a real fight; his conditioning lacked breadth and adaptability. That moment led him to abandon rigid systems and create Jeet Kune Do, his art of formlessness. The lesson? True learning starts when your ego drops and curiosity takes over.

Research Your Own Experience

This mantra—“Research your own experience; reject what is useless; accept what is useful; and add what is essentially your own”—became Bruce’s lifelong method. Shannon uses it to encourage you to be your own experiment. Every emotion, failure, and success provides data. She likens life to a research lab: you test, reflect, and refine rather than blindly follow dogma. The eternal student doesn’t pursue perfection but understanding. Curiosity becomes courage—a willingness to look directly at ignorance without shame.

Facing Ignorance and Ego

Much of our struggle comes from confusing ego with self. Shannon examines how “shoulds” and social expectations distort authenticity. When you act from ego—worrying what others think, chasing validation—you drift away from your essential being. Her own story of food addiction and healing demonstrates this. Behind her compulsions lay grief from her father’s death; once she dared to look inward, understanding replaced judgment. Bruce urged students to “understand your fear—this is the beginning of seeing.” Fear, not failure, blocks discovery.

Self-Help Through Honesty

Both Bruce and Shannon redefine self-help as self-responsibility. Not reading endless advice books, but taking ownership of your learning and behavior. As Bruce wrote, “The greatest help is self-help.” For Shannon, that meant journaling, therapy, and experimentation—treating life as a constant lab of improvement. Every fear examined, every strength balanced with weakness, becomes progress toward wholeness. Like water polishing stone, self-knowledge deepens slowly through friction, reflection, and relentless honesty. The eternal student, she argues, isn’t trying to arrive anywhere—just to see more clearly every day.

Who—or what—is your opponent? In martial arts, it’s the person attacking you. In life, Shannon shows, it’s anyone or anything that reveals your weaknesses and forces growth. “To know oneself,” Bruce said, “is to study oneself in action with another person.” Our relationships are mirrors. Each conflict, each irritation, reflects something we need to understand within ourselves.

Feel, Don’t Think

Shannon highlights a scene her father wrote in Enter the Dragon, where Bruce instructs a student, Lao, to “Kick me. Don’t think! Feel.” The lesson isn’t just martial—it’s emotional. When Lao overanalyzes or displays rage, he’s disconnected. Only when he feels in harmony with his teacher’s movement does he succeed. “Don’t take your eyes off your opponent,” Bruce adds, meaning: stay present and relate directly. In all relationships, awareness sustains flow.

Competition Versus Collaboration

Bruce rejected competition as a life model. Rivals distract you from self-mastery, trapping you in comparison. “Water doesn’t seek to beat the earth,” Shannon notes, “it coexists and flows.” When life becomes an ecosystem instead of a battlefield, relationships transform from contests to co-creations. You learn through others, not against them. Even anger and jealousy—“the six diseases” Bruce defined, like desire for victory or craving for approval—are signals to return to balance.

“See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.” —Bruce Lee

Owning Your Sh*t

Shannon’s candid stories bring these philosophies to earth—especially her painful relationship lessons. In one romance, she realized she blamed her partner for neglect that mirrored her own self-neglect. Healing began when she owned her part. Bruce taught that “defeat is not shame; it is revelation.” Every argument or disappointment, she says, is chi sao practice—a sensitivity drill. Stay in contact, listen, respond. Don’t resist force with force; borrow its energy and redirect it. Relationships become dance, not war.

From Opponents to Mirrors

Ultimately, the “opponent” disappears when you realize both sides are one—yin and yang intertwining. Shannon calls this realizing “there is no me.” When you dissolve ego boundaries, you see others as reflections of the same universal energy. Like water holding the moon’s reflection, every person illuminates another. Relationship, then, is not opposition but shared movement. The practice: observe reactions, take responsibility, and respond with compassion. Through every connection, you meet yourself anew.

When Bruce Lee suffered a devastating back injury in 1970, doctors told him he might never fight—or even walk—again. For an athlete whose body was his livelihood, it was shattering. But Shannon shows how he transformed crisis into creativity, demonstrating the water principle in action. “Defeat,” he wrote, “is merely temporary; its punishment is an urge to exert greater effort.” What matters is not the obstacle but your reaction to it.

Walking On

Rather than despair, Bruce read voraciously, studied healing, and wrote Commentaries on the Martial Way. He even built a small stand by his bed—a card that read “Walk On!” His recovery became not just physical but philosophical. The reminder embodied resilience: keep moving. Shannon parallels this to modern setbacks—job loss, heartbreak, illness—that demand perseverance. When your stream hits rock, you don’t stop; you flow around it.

Pessimism Blunts the Tools

Bruce warned: “Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.” Worry, fear, doubt—they’re dams blocking your flow. Shannon recalls advising her daughter before exams that negativity makes hard tasks harder. Instead, return to neutrality. Obstacles are teachers asking: What do you need to learn? What habits must you change? Adversity becomes syllabi for inner education. The very boulder in your path sculpts your strength.

Patience and Spiritual Willpower

Bruce’s recovery required patience—what he called “concentrated strength.” He viewed will not as brute force but spiritual alignment: directing energy with the universe’s unfolding. To act with “spiritual willpower,” you must match inner intention to outer flow. Shannon expands this idea through everyday examples—dieting, creative projects, or pain—where discipline becomes devotion. Will guided by awareness transcends ego’s “should” into soul’s “want.”

Reowning the Dream

Though Bruce never fully escaped his pain, he healed enough to make Enter the Dragon. The injury didn’t end his dream—it clarified it. He integrated suffering into strength. Shannon reminds us: life may reroute your plans, but the destination—self-actualization—remains. Obstacles can refine your direction. As Bruce said, “With every adversity comes a blessing.” The key is to walk on, reform the formula, and harness the current instead of resisting it.

Late in his life, Bruce Lee summarized his philosophy as four stages of cultivation, culminating in Jeet Kune Do: the way of the intercepting fist. Shannon translates this progression into a map for personal evolution—from rigidity to mastery to self-expression—where freedom and flow converge. You can apply these stages to anything: art, leadership, love, or self-growth.

Stage 1: Partiality

We begin in unconscious rigidity. Like a beginner throwing a wild punch, we react without awareness—ruled by habits and extremes. Our thinking divides everything into opposites: success/failure, good/bad. Shannon calls this fragmented living. The cure is observation—realizing you’re stuck.

Stage 2: Fluidity

Once you recognize patterns, you enter fluidity. You start practicing awareness, creativity, and compassion. Bruce’s yin-yang symbol here represents balance—two halves moving as one. Shannon ties this stage to learning, humility, and adaptability: the ability to move with instead of against life. Every frustration becomes practice; every obstacle, feedback.

Stage 3: Emptiness

Emptiness is mastery—spontaneous wisdom. Actions flow without overthinking. Shannon compares it to the samurai Musashi’s intuition: “ultimate reasoning that goes beyond reason.” You make decisions without friction, acting from instinct refined by discipline. Emptiness becomes a living void—a state of total readiness and peace. You hit “all by yourself,” meaning your actions express the moment’s truth naturally.

Stage 4: Jeet Kune Do—Personal Expression

The final stage is artful individuality. Bruce’s credo—“Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation”—embodies creative freedom. Shannon recounts how he refused to film Enter the Dragon until Hollywood used his rewrite, asserting his authenticity even at great risk. This was “holding to the core”: integrity over comfort. Jeet Kune Do wasn’t just about fighting—it was Bruce himself, in motion.

Living the Stages

Through these stages, Shannon guides you to live your own Way. Recognize where you’re stuck. Practice awareness and sincerity. Empty yourself of illusions. Then express your essence fully. Freedom is not escaping life but flowing through it as yourself—unlimited, formless, and alive, like water that reflects the moon yet remains the stream beneath it.

Shannon’s most heartfelt chapter, “The Rainstorm,” connects Bruce’s philosophy to her own grief over her brother Brandon’s death. She recounts the chaos of that loss—the numbness, depression, and eventual revelation that healing required embracing pain rather than resisting it. Through this deeply personal lens, she teaches how to turn suffering into the soil of transformation.

The Medicine Within

Among Bruce’s writings, Shannon found a line that changed her life: “The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the very beginning.” This realization—echoing Stoic and Buddhist wisdom—taught her that the cure to despair lies inside awareness, not escape. Facing grief head-on revealed healing potential as “self-fuel, consuming itself like the candle.” For years she resisted life; then she allowed herself to feel and began to live again.

Faith and the Eightfold Path

Shannon bridges Bruce’s ideas with the Buddhist Eightfold Path: Right View (see what’s wrong), Right Purpose (decide to be cured), Right Speech (speak healing), Right Action (do the work), Right Livelihood (avoid toxicity), Right Effort (steady pace), Right Awareness (stay conscious), and Right Meditation (use the deep mind). These steps form a practical guide to navigating trauma—transforming chaos into clarity one intention at a time.

Enthusiasm Is God

After she stepped through grief, Shannon found joy rekindled by enthusiasm—the creative fire her father called “the godhead within us.” Enthusiasm turns survival into aliveness. Passion and curiosity become acts of worship toward life itself. As Bruce wrote, “Faith maintains the soul.” Shannon teaches that believing in your ability to heal—no matter how stormy the seas—is an act of faith powerful enough to illuminate darkness. The rainstorm doesn’t destroy the seed; it helps it grow.

The book concludes on a note of unity. “Do you know how I like to think of myself?” Bruce once said. “As a human being, because under the heavens there is but one family.” Shannon uses this to weave together all of her father’s lessons—awareness, flexibility, honesty—to emphasize compassion. To be like water ultimately means to connect: with others, with yourself, with life’s flow.

Friendship as Philosophy

Bruce often closed letters with “my friend.” Shannon reads it as more than politeness—it embodied kindness, equality, and human warmth. He helped friends like Taky Kimura and Ted Wong improve their lives, seeing mentorship as friendship. “True mastery is service,” she writes, meaning that your personal excellence uplifts others. The water metaphor, again: when one wave rises, all waves rise.

Beyond Prejudice and Division

Bruce’s universalism was radical. In a 1971 interview, he admitted Hollywood’s racism but refused bitterness: “I understand”—and then, he acted to show the world who he was. Shannon connects this to the statue of Bruce Lee in postwar Bosnia, where different factions chose him as a symbol of unity: “One thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.” His message transcended race, politics, and creed—embodying humanity as family.

Kindness and Courage

Living as your authentic self means also living kindly. Shannon urges that how you treat anyone—neighbors, strangers, opponents—is how you treat everyone. Compassion doesn’t mean passivity; it means responding without hate. Fighting prejudice with understanding is the true way of the warrior. As Bruce taught: “Man, the living creature, is always more important than any established style or system.” To be water, finally, is to be humane—to flow together as one.