A summary of the nine chapters that make up the book.

1. Overdoing

Chapter one looks at ways we do far more than we need to, individually and as a species, and how that can keep us trapped in perpetual struggle and subject to unwanted consequences.

2. Principles of Divine Laziness

Chapter two outlines the principles that define divine laziness and act as guides in the art of living effortlessly. Those principles are Sensitivity and Effortlessness.

3. Developing Divine Laziness

Chapter three examines the process by which we gradually build Divine Laziness into the heart of our engagement with life.

4. Rules and Freedom

Chapter four reconciles the seeming contradiction between rules and freedom, and explores how using rules wisely is the only real hope we have of reaching for freedom.

5. Morality: Training External Behaviour

Chapter five interprets morality—a concept that has become very unpopular—as a powerful strategy for unfolding the art of living effortlessly.

6. Meditation: Training Internal Behaviour

Chapter six explores how the practice of meditation can grow effortlessness at the very source of our actions; our mental processes.

7. Mastery

Chapter seven investigates the state of mastery, where training has reached its destination, and freedom and ease are the natural state.

8. A Case of Divine Laziness: Wing Chun as an Art of Living Effortlessly

Chapter eight presents a specific example of how training in an art form can lead us to freedom and ease. In this case the traditional martial art of Wing Chun is put forward as a concrete example of how Divine Laziness may be "done" in our lives.

9. Already Free

Chapter nine suggests that, despite all this talk of doing this and not doing that, what we are at the realest level is actually already free.