Our belief that we are doing things is so compelling that it's hard to think, as the wise are said to do: "I do nothing at all." So here are some musing around the idea of non-doership to shake the grip of this confining notion.
1. We need to start with understanding the relationship between the Supreme Reality and the creation: for this the metaphor of water/wave is useful. Water in its natural state is still. The question then is: where does the wave come from? Does water form the wave? No. Water stays as water and never changes its nature to become a wave. So where does the wave come from? Its source is the stillness of water which, when disturbed, rises to form waves. Waves resolve back into stillness. Stillness can be said to be the unmanifest form of wave. Wave is the differentiated and manifest form of stillness. Both, stillness and wave are totally dependent on water as the basis of its existence. Water is Brahman, the Supreme Reality, that is never disturbed or changed. Stillness is Brahman's unmanifest and undifferentiated potential for manifestation, called mAyA. And waves are the manifest and differentiated world of names and forms, the universe of objects available for sense and thought perception.
2. This universal triad – Brahman, mAya, cosmos – is the macrocosm which is paralleled at the microcosmic level of the individual as the triad of Atman, causal world, and mind-body sense complex. So the individual's mind-body-sense complex is the 'wave' that has arisen out of the causal world and is as good as non-existent without existence-consciousness Atman, the name given to Reality at the individual level.
3. With this understood, it becomes easy to see that the very truth of the individual, the pure-existence-consciousness Atman, never gets involved in activity because if it did it would change, but the ultimate truth never changes. Also, all activity is triggered by desire or need, and Atman, being limitlessness itself, is without desires or needs. Desire, need, sense of limitation resides in the body-mind-sense complex and, thus, this is where the notion of doership is located. So as long as the identity is limited to the mithyA mind-body-sense complex, one believes one is the doer. But when the truth of the self is known, all sense of doership vanishes.
4. So what gives us the sense of doership? It is the active principle, called rajas, of three qualities of nature called the gunas. All activity is the interplay of the gunas backed by pure existence-consciousness, and all the material cosmos is also made up of a mix of these very same gunas. When the wise person says, "I do nothing at all", the 'I' referred to is Atman. But when one says: "I am not the doer", this is NOT strictly accurate as the 'I' in this statement is Atman 'together with' the body-mind-sense complex. So by saying, "I am not the doer" one is throwing out the baby (Atman) with the bathwater (body-mind-sense complex).
These are the building blocks upon which to build an explanation that clears up any misunderstanding about doership.