EP1 - Stillness in the Storms of Life

Thank you, you are here from the beginning!

That's huge, in two years time you will be able to tell people that you are one of the founding listeners, and friends of the podcast Stillness in the Storms.

On this episode.

What is the podcast about?
What does it mean to have a foundation of stillness?
Who am I, Steven Webb your host?
How can you get the best out of this podcast?
This podcast is about you.

It is for you.

Although I want millions of listeners, change the world. Ultimately, this podcast has done its job if you can find more calmness and live in a more peaceful way.

No more regretting your actions, because you make wiser and better decisions.

You will not be caught offguard, and regret later.

It's about learning to love, understand, and live a life of compassion.

Then you will have genuine freedom, and live your life your way.

Topic: EP1 - Stillness in the Storms of Life

Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms. Your podcast to help you through the most difficult times in life as well as brush off those awkward moments so you can live your life with inner peace and a calmness that no one can take away from you. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and thank you for joining me today. On this podcast, we're going to talk about what the podcast is about. What does it mean to have a foundation of stillness and who am I, your host, so we can get to know each other a little better, how can you get the best from this podcast.

So first of all we're going to start looking at how are you, how are you doing? And thank you for joining me and one of the most precious things we have is time. So I want you to know how much I appreciate your time spent with me right now.

So what does it mean? What is this podcast about, Stillness in the Storms? We all like to live a still calm life. This energy of, we all like calmness, we all know the wise person that when everything is going wrong around them, they don't react and then regret it later. And you often see that in films, especially old westerns when you have a bar and a fight breaks out and someone comes in and says something and then someone is triggered and reacted and then you suddenly got this fight in the bar between everybody; everybody hitting bottles over the head of each other and one person punching another person and it's just a brawl between everybody.

But then you have this one guy at the end of the bar, just sitting there, swinging his whiskey or whatever he's doing and it seems like he's totally disconnected, not knowing what's going on, but it's quite the opposite, he knows exactly what's going on and he's keeping an eye out and then someone comes over near him and tries to involve him in it and he stands up right at the last minute and without further punch, he has the final say and walks out and it's what he says and what he does is what we remember and that's what we all want to be. We want to be that shade when everyone else is halted and everyone else is struggling and we want to be that voice of wisdom. 

But stillness in the storms is more about not just providing forever, it's not just given a stillness to a situation, it's about you being able to remain calm and respond in an emotional, skillful, loving way through understanding. So in order to have this stillness that I'm describing, we have to be more connected and more awake than ever before because a reaction is very subconscious. You know, something happens, our subconscious mind flips through the fighting cabinet, and it finds what it did last time and then it repeats it. It didn't kill you last time, so it must've been the right thing to do. The subconscious mind has no moral way of knowing what is right and wrong. It just repeats the same habits. Whereas the human side, the front bit of the brain has compassion and caring and morals and ethics and all the things that we should and shouldn't do and predominantly, it’s just more compassionate and understanding. So it's more about having stillness and being able to respond is moving to the more human side of the brain rather than the reptilian habitable brain.

So this podcast is about how can we do that? And I'll be interviewing people that have managed to do that a lot of the time. Nobody's perfect. I've yet to come across Zen Masters or anybody that spends all of their time in this perfect state of absolute calmness. You know, we are all triggered. If anybody says they're not triggered, well, they're probably disconnecting in some way. So, yeah, we'll be talking to hopefully some Zen masters, some other spiritual teachers and other people that have managed to generate their emotional wisdom and to grow a life of, I cannot think of another word, but just a life of stillness and calm and compassion and in a loving way that brings this calm to every situation. So I'll be talking to them and seeing how they do it and what tools and tips they can have for all of us that are on the journey and we're all trying to figure out these triggers and figure out why we react and what we're doing. I'm trying to figure out how not to react and then regret it later because that's very often what we do and that's what living a life of inner peace is, not having to regret it later because we created that gap between what arises and how we respond. So we're talking to lots of people and again their advice and tools of how they do it.

At the end of some of the episodes, there will be a small guided meditation, not all of them depending on the interview and things like that. So yeah, there's going to be great value in this podcast and there's going to be, if you want to live a more comfortable, more peaceful life, if you want to generate your own inner peace and take that into the world, then subscribe to this podcast. This podcast is for you. And I'm interested in your questions. I will answer any of your questions. The direct questions I will answer on my patreon website. And the reason why I'm going to do that is because the podcast, I'm going to ask you for support. I'm going to need support to do the editing, do all the other things as you'll find out I'm paralyzed from the chest down. So these things take me a lot longer than normal. So I am going to ask for support to help me with those things. 

So what does it mean to live a foundation of stillness? What does it mean to have this ability to stay calm in the storms of life? And ultimately, what does it give you and the people around you? What benefits you have from this stillness?

Well, storms happen, life happens. You know that old bumper sticker, "shit happens," you know, from that film, it wasn't from the film, I just love the way they put it in the film, with Forest Gump and he just walked in and  they stepped in some dog poo on the floor and someone said, oh, you just stepped on; yeah, because shit happens and that's right, you cannot stop life from happening. Life just has got a habit of coming out and hitting you 4:00 PM Tuesday afternoon when you're least expecting it. So what we do is we work on ways in which we can be ready to respond to it, rather than be in reaction mode.

 If you take a progressive government and a reactionary government, one is always trying to put out the storms. One is always trying to run around and get, sort out the leaks afterwards, sort out the controversy, the things that are said and all that, that's a reactionary government and every government is very proactive. Well, what's going to happen over the next 10 years? How can we help to prevent it and how can we mitigate most of the circumstances?

And another example is like very much like the fire brigade, they have two roles. They have the role of putting out the fires when they're burning and they have the role of going around and trying to put as much in place as possible to prevent the fires. The idea is to have a balance between the two and living with a foundation of stillness means that you're aware that fires can happen and you're ready for them, but you're also doing as much as you possibly can in order to prevent them from happening.

Because you're not going to stop them, but you can reduce them and when they come along you can reduce the effects of them by not reacting.

So when we respond, we very much don't regret it later. We don't fall out with family, we don't say things that we should not have said, we do not get personal, we do not take it personally, we just allow these things to happen and we stop fighting it. Very often where a situation arises and we fight it, so like we just don't want it, I don't like this situation, I don't want to be part of this situation, how can I stop this situation? Well, very often the situation is already here and it's risen, so this is what living with this stillness means. It means that this has happened, how I do get through it in the best possible way for myself, in the most skillful way for myself and everybody else around me? How can I not put more fuel on this fire? 

I think that's what it comes down to more than anything else is; life’s stillness is not putting more fuel on the fire. You imagine how many times do you go to a family barbecue or Christmas lunch and you'll sit around the table and politics comes up or that family member that you don't overly get on with because they always push your buttons and it's like, I can't stand them, they always push the wrong buttons and they know how to trigger me, they know how to do these things. Well that's on you. It's not on them. They might know what buttons to press, but you're the one that's reacting to those buttons pressed, someone can press that button and nothing and then press the button again, nothing. In the end give up pressing the button, right?

So whose fault is that when they keep pressing this button and you keep reacting? Yeah, I'm sorry to say, it's your fault. If I keep being triggered, which very often for many years, me and my sister, oh my God, she used to trigger me and she still triggers me now, the triggering doesn't go away. She still presses those buttons and knowingly, unknowingly, I don't know, it's not my concern. That's her karma. But I know that I don't have to react when she pushes those buttons. The triggering still happens but I have awareness of that and I try my best not to, I'm aware of her triggering me so therefore with this awareness I can almost preempt it.

There's a really good poem by the Persian poet, 14th century Persian poet, his short name is Hafez, and I cannot pronounce his long name. So:

“Let your intelligence begin to rule whenever you sit with others using this sane idea: leave all your cocked guns in the field far from us, one of those damn things might go off.” 

What he's talking about here is he's talking about our triggers. He's talking about if you're going into negotiation, we have someone that you really aren't fond of, you have a really bleak opinion and belief of them, you don't agree with what they're doing, but you have to go in and negotiate some kind of deal. Leave your opinions and beliefs, leave your ignorance behind and go in there in a way that you can bring some kind of productive, progressive calmness and stillness in the situation. Because we very often go in there with, Hafez says, ‘with our cocked guns ready to fire.’ We go in there angry, we go in there with an agenda and well that'd be very difficult to not have any kind of agenda. We have to go in there with a sense of calmness and stillness and understanding and compassion. And this is what we do when we go to barbecues or when we go to Christmas lunch with family, you know, when they start talking politics or when they start talking; allow them to be right and allow them to have their say. Be triggered by it, but don't do anything with the trigger.

It's like anger is fine, violence is not.That's what it means to live a foundation of stillness. Don't think anybody that sat there still, don't think anybody that is really calm and still, that they're simply not aware or they're disconnecting or they're zoning out. They're very much, very often quite the opposite to that. They've been triggered. They're just as angry. They just got just as much of these things going on inside of them as you have or anybody else but they’re learning to control that fear, those triggers, those experiences in life. 

Who I’m I?

I'm going to dig deeper into this on the second podcast about triggers and what they are and where they come from and what we can do about some of these things but I want to move on to who am I? Who am I to be sitting here talking to you on this podcast? And it'll give you a sense of why I do this podcast and why I do what I do, why I'm a peace mentor. 

You know, I've had lots of experiences in life, you know, I've been bankrupt, I've attempted suicide and that's one of those things that I'm really happy I failed at. Coming up 30 years ago now. So I've had 30 years more life because I failed at that. 

At the age of 18, I broke my neck, I dived into a swimming pool and ended up severely paralyzed and you can hear more about my story on Stevenwebb.com and my story will grow as the podcast grows and I will share more and more experiences from my life. But that wasn't the big thing that pushed me over the edge of my life, it wasn't the thing that I spent most of my life teaching on between having a great life and feeling really quite depressed.

There were times when I really just did not want to carry on and times when my life was absolutely amazing, you know, that's life, it really is a fluctuation, it's a balance. But at 40, I hit rock bottom and that was the thing that did push me over the edge. I found myself single, I found myself broke, my chair had broken down. I just sat in the shop beside the door of a supermarket and my tire had burst and this is a 40 year old grown man bawling his eyes out, not knowing where to go. I don't have money on my credit cards, they were full in that, my finances were an absolute disaster. My life, I felt was a complete disaster and there I was, in a wheelchair, sitting in the doorway of a busy supermarket crying and a security guard saying, "You know, are you all right? What can we do?"

That was the final straw really of my rock bottom. That was when I realized I had to do something with my life. So I fought back after trying to shut my mind up because I just finished a relationship or they finished a relationship with me and at that point, my mind was working overtime. I was thinking far too much, I was reacting to everything in life and all I was doing was trying to get through the day. If I got through the day, at that point, it was a success, but it wasn't really because I didn't look at it as a success. I looked at my life as it sucked. If there was a question in my mind, it was, “How are you going to kick me today life?”

So I was really feeling depressed at the time, I was drinking alcohol to go sleep. I was drinking more and more of it and not only that, it was starting to be embarrassing, asking the carers to put more and more alcohol into the glass just to be able to go to sleep. Of course, my sleep wasn't working, I was waking up two hours later and all that. So I started reading and I started seeing everywhere about meditation, about stillness and inner peace and all that and I was like, whoa, I need to sort this world out, once this world sorted out, I'll be all right. Once I get rid of the ass I was in my life, once I get rid of the people that’s not treating me with respect, once I get rid of all these people that are tagging along and dragging me down.

You see, I was in the blame game and I was blaming everybody for everything. You know, if it wasn't the government, it was my dog. If it wasn't my dog, it was my neighbor. If it wasn't my neighbor, it was my finances or it was the president or it was everybody was out with a big conspiracy to get me. The only person that wasn't to blame was me and then I realized that it was stemming from inside of me.

So there's a lot more to my story in regards to, I did find the solution. Everybody told me to meditate and to look deeper inside and to sort out my triggers and sort out my shadows and to not only wake up, to start cleaning up. Of course, I did not believe any of that because simply put, I couldn't stop thinking. So meditation wasn't for me, I was a thinker. But it wasn't until I read it again and again and again that at some point I say, “Ah, fuck it, I better give it a go, I got no choice now.” 

So yeah, I gave meditation a go. I thought it was a complete disaster for a long time and I found teachers to help me, guide me and I realized meditation wasn't about sitting there and not thinking, you know, that's sleep, that's deep sleep. While you're awake, even in meditation, there is focus and thought and concentration, but we'll talk about that more because it's a big part of the stillness. We'll talk about that over the coming weeks and I want to wrap today's podcast up and I want to tell you how to get the best out of the podcast.

First of all subscribe, subscribe and leave an honest review, let me know, head over to connect with steven.com that's why I'm pointing over there. If you're on my patreon website, you can see videos of these podcasts, not only just my audio, you see the outtakes and also I'll answer your questions directly. Whatever you're struggling with regarding inner peace, head over to, connect with steven.com and all the information is there and that's my podcast, Stillness in the storms of life.

Let's get to a place in life where we're not buffered around by anybody else, where we generate the stillness inside of us that we can bring the best compassionate understanding and love to any given situation. But most of all, thank you, your time is the most valuable thing you have, it's the one thing that you cannot get more of, it's the one thing that seems to disappear more the older we get. So I really appreciate you being here on this podcast with me here today. Thank you. Take care. Love deeply. Be still and above all, do what's right for you, Namaste.