Can you feel everything deeply and still not be knocked over by it? That is the whole trick, and it is not the same thing as going cold.
We admire the person who stays cold and gets on with business, but nobody actually wants to be disconnected. The deeper you let yourself feel, the more joy is available at the other end too. There is an unhealthy version, where you become a victim of your own empathy. Empathy is you feeling them. Compassion is about us, and what could we do.
One thing to try: Name what you are feeling right now, in one word. We are always feeling something, and mostly we ignore it.
In this episode
(1:35) Be emotional, but not disturbable
(4:09) Wanting to feel the grief as well as the good
(5:27) The deeper you feel, the more joy is available
(6:47) The unhealthy version, and becoming a victim of your empathy
(9:31) Naming the feeling, because we are always feeling something
(12:15) Empathy is about you. Compassion is about us
(16:09) Reacting last night, and still turning it over
(17:49) The ten thousand voices, and not having to do anything with them
With gratitude to
Audra, for the donation thanked in this episode.
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Can you feel everything deeply and still not be knocked over by it?
We all half want to be the person at the end of the bar in a western. The brawl goes on, they finish their drink, deal with it, leave the money and walk out. Nothing touches them.
Except nobody actually wants to be that. Not really. What we want is to feel it all and not be run by it.
The heart of it
The deeper you let yourself feel, the more joy is available at the other end. It is one dial, not two.
Feeling something and reacting to it are separate events, and there is a gap between them.
Empathy is you feeling them. Compassion is about us, and what we might do.
Think about a concert, the moment the song you were waiting for starts. You want that. You want to be in it. And grief is the same machinery running the other way, which is why I would find it stranger not to grieve somebody than to grieve them.
I would hate to reach the end of my life and be told there were hundreds of feelings available and I only ever used five.
There is an unhealthy version, and it is worth naming. When you feel everything for everybody everywhere and cannot function, you have become the hero of your own victimhood, and that is very hard to spot from inside.
I asked Doshin once to Zen out the difference between empathy and compassion, because I talk far too much and he is quicker than I am.
Empathy is about you. Compassion is about them and us.
Doshin
Somebody says they have had a rough day, and you say, so have I, you will not believe what happened to me. That is empathy doing a handbrake turn back onto you.
And the undisturbable half. We dress for rain. We check the forecast and put a coat on. Then we walk into a family Christmas with no preparation at all and wonder why it went the way it did.
One small thing to try
Name what you are feeling right now, in one word.
We are always feeling something and we mostly walk past it. Ask somebody how they are feeling, properly, and watch them stall. Fine is not a feeling.
Then remember the second half. You have named it and you do not have to do anything with it. Anger can be there and be right and still not need acting on this minute.
Red traffic lights are good practice. Nothing you do changes it, so you may as well take the pause.
Questions people ask
Is this the same as being calm all the time?
No, and that is the misreading I am arguing against. Cold and untouched is not the goal. Feeling it fully and still choosing what happens next is.
What is unhealthy empathy?
When feeling for everybody stops you doing anything for anybody. It looks like caring more and it usually ends with you needing looking after and nobody else being helped.
Do you manage this yourself?
Not reliably. I reacted to something the night before recording this and I was still going over it while I talked. Working on it and having finished it are different things.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
anger · acceptance · mindfulness
Read the transcript
Welcome to Stillness in the Storms podcast. I'm your host, Steven Webb. And this show gives you a different perspective
on life, helps you to get through the most difficult times and gives you that little inner peace when you
need it most. And I'd just like to give you a different, I can say, perspective and see things a
little bit differently. I've been paralysed for 30 years and... I have a, you could say a difficult
life, but I'm pretty happy and I enjoy it. And on a daily basis, someone said to me yesterday, how
is your day going? And we said in a conversation, well, we have good and bad days. I was like,
well, it's getting to the point where I have good and bad hours. You know, literally an hour before that,
I was having quite a terrible time. So yeah, I just... I just want to give you a different way
of looking at things sometimes. But I want to talk about not been disturbable And I don't know if it's
a word. It sounds like it's not a word, but I'm sure it is a word. Disturbable. And it's... A
way in which we can be that. You know the old movies where you've got that western movie and you've
got the guy sitting at the end of the bar and you've got a big brawl and a fight and
you've got this wise guy that just sits there and doesn't take any notice and then stands up and just
deals with it in a cold manner, leaves the money on the bar and doesn't take any notice and doesn't
let the external world affect him internally. He stays cold and just deals with his business. And we all want
to be like that, but we we don't want to be disconnected. So that's what I want to talk about
in today's podcast. You know, be emotional, but not disturbable. So just before we start, I want to say thank
you to Audra for signing up to a membership on Buy Me a Coffee. And thank you very much. Really
appreciate that. It makes a difference. You really helped me to get my podcast edited and get more out there.
And it frees up my time to do read more books and do the other things I do in life.
I'm still the mayor of Truro and that's a voluntary role that takes up a lot of my time at
the moment. I love it. It's a brilliant role. Really does. Yeah, but it does take up my time. It's
a voluntary thing, so I really appreciate your support. Thank you, Audra. You're the hero this week um So you
can also download the Five Simple Practices written a piece on StevenWebb.uk. And you can also listen to my other
podcasts. You can also get 30-day guest pass for Aura, which is where all my meditations are on this app
on the phone, as well as many other teachers and many other people. They've got some amazing things. And I've
just released on there a brand new sleep meditation. My old sleep meditation has been listened to by millions of
people. Who knew I had a talent for putting people to sleep
took way too much. But yeah, I have a talent for putting people to sleep. So yeah, head over to
StevenWebb.uk and you can see all the links and find all the links on there. But let's get on with
today's show. Be emotional, not disturbable. So first of all, let's talk about being being emotional emotional now then when
I say about being emotional, I don't mean to say that whenever anything happens out... In the world and all
that that we're crying and we're a mess and we cannot handle things. What I mean is we want to
be able to feel things deeply. You know, when you go to a music concert, you want to be able
to feel the music, feel the sounds. You want to be part of the evening and you you want to
be, you want to feel that emotion, don't you? You know, that big hit when it comes on at the
end of the night and you work up into that real deep. Feeling of yeah You know what I
mean. You know exactly what I mean. When you put your headphones on or whatever whatever whatever cultivates that deep
feeling of either joy, of whatever that feeling is. We want to be able to feel that.
And equally so, although we may not want to feel it, we want to we either feel our emotions when
we're feeling sad or grief. You know, if we lose a loved one or we lose... Something that we're quite
attached to we we almost We almost enjoy grief in a weird way,
because if we're grieving someone, it means we love them deeply. I think it would be strange not to grieve.
I think it would be strange not to miss someone if we're attached to them and, you know, a family
member or a partner or something like that, if anything happened to them. You know, so to feel these things
deeply, imagine that's one of the greatest things about being human is to be able to feel things immensely deeply.
And I wouldn't like to get to the end of my life and suddenly somebody look up and go, oh,
by the way, you know, there's five feelings you experience. There's hundreds of others on a deeper level I'll be
like, oh, so I've missed out. So it's a matter of how can we really
Become this deeper lake of feet of feelings and emotions. Because I also
think that the deeper you feel these things, the more joy you have on these levels. You know, it's almost
like, oh, that was a nice feeling. And then that was a really nice feeling. And it's like almost all
body.
I'm sure you know what I mean. You know um you might have something that is intimate. And, you know,
you've got a kiss and then you've got more intimacy and things like that. They involve more of the body,
more of the feelings, more of you, more of the mind and everything. And it's just, okay, that was good.
You know what I'm talking about um I don't know what time of day you're listening to this podcast. Maybe
it was a long time of day, but you just, you want to feel things deeply. And that's what I
mean by being emotional. You know, really understand, feel the room, feel the people around you. Feel what
what other people are feeling. You know, have a deeper sense of empathy. There's nothing wrong with empathy. I have
done a podcast on the difference between healthy empathy and unhealthy empathy because there is an unhealthy version
of feeling things deeply you know If you're allowing it to control you and you're allowing it to control all
your decisions and what you do in life and you're avoiding life and all that because you don't want to
feel things, well, that's an unhealthy way of feeling things deeply. If you're becoming a victim of the empathy and
say, well, I feel everything so deeply for everybody around the world and all that, and I cannot function. And
I'm just a hero and all those other things. I know we don't really be seeing in that way, but
we very often become the hero in our own victimhood that is very difficult to see
sometimes
um I'm
just wondering whether to carry on going there or not. No, I might do another podcast on that another day
Stay tuned it's It's really about feeding things deeply. So you imagine a really deep
pond and the deeper you go it's better fish and they're more elaborate and they're more colorful and they're more
like it's just more vibrant and it's just it's more intense. You know, that kind of thing. And we're
always looking for that more intense, aren't we? We're looking for the... We're waiting for our favourite musician to bring
out the next album or the next movie and we're always disappointed when you get... I don't know who say
You've got a brilliant movie that had so many great feelings and everything like that and then suddenly they bring
out a sequel and 20 years later and it's just doesn't give us those same deep feelings. You know um
it reminds me of Lion King with my daughter where she watched the original Lion King and then the new
one come out. And clearly the new one is way better. You know, you can see the hairs on the
animals. You can see it's just massively better. But does it have the same impact? Well, probably not because when
you're five, six years old and you have that feeling of Simba and that hero's story and he goes away
and he comes back and he becomes... You know, that grown up and he he becomes the hero and he
overcomes all his problems and for fin like that against the odds. You have this wonderful feeling of I can
do this, you know that there's hope and then you And then you watch the same story years later. But
it's not the same because it you weren't in the same place to See you haven't experienced the same. It
might be clearly a better movie in the way that it's been done, the way it's been... Written and,
you know, the amount of pixels on the screen things like that. It doesn't mean to say it conjures up
the same deep feelings. So it depends on where you're to and what you're experiencing and what it means for
you. So, you know, be emotional. Really get to deeper Really start embracing all the
different feelings. Naming the feelings. Naming how you're feeling in this moment and all that. Because we're always feeling something,
but we tend to ignore it we tend to brush it away or something like that. So become the deepest
of deepest pulse But on the flip side, we need to remain undisturbable.
Undisturbable. I don't know if that's a word. What do I mean by undisturbable so You can feel
it, but you don't have to be controlled by it. You don't have to react to it. And the easier
emotions that we can talk about now is when we get angry or we see something on the news or
someone shouts at us or someone doesn't do something the way we expect them to do. We get angry and
we want to shout and we want to react to it. You know, we want to blame somebody else. You
know, you see children do it. You know, a child will walk into a table and they'll bang their head
and they're bad table. Like as if it's the table's fault. Like as if the table was suddenly jumped out
and hit them now How dare you do that to me? Bad table. And they'll even slap the table and
It's like they realise the table has just hurt their hand now as well.
And the whole table has got like something against them. You know, and then, you know, and if they're,
especially if they're a boy, they'll go away and sulk now because of the table. You know.
And just going back to the emotions, I don't mean feel emotions that you got a self-importance like
um narcissist when he didn't love anything and all that. I'm not talking about coming so in
love with emotions like, oh, I love myself and I'm just so wonderful I'm so amazing. I'm not talking about
that. I'm talking about feeling the emotions and experiencing emotions not
um Loving the emotions in a way of um narcissists when Because he didn't love
anything. And the myth goes that he's seen he's seen his reflection in the water and he just fell deeply
in love with it and just stared for us through his life. And he used to get angry at anybody
that would come along and disturb the water in any way. That's the way the myth goes, I think, something
like that and Just everything was about him. Everything was self-importance, that self. Adulation and things like that. It's like,
yeah that that's what that's where the narcissist comes from. But, you know, even in that narcissism, there's an element
of I love myself I I love who I am. I love my feelings. I love my ability to do
these things. But not make it all about me. You know, that's the difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is
about um well I'm feeling for you. Compassion is I'm feeling for us. You know, it's about, and what could
we do about it? How can we reduce the suffering? That'd be an interesting podcast, wouldn't it? Empathy versus compassion.
I
said to Doshin one day, one of my Zen master teachers, I said to him that because he's always saying
to us, he always looks up at us to us can can you Zen it out?
Because we always talk way too much. And here I am on a podcast.
And he always says, can you zen it out? You've been talking way too much. So I asked him a
question. I said, okay, can you zen out the difference between empathy and compassion?
And he thought about it. He thought about it.
I'm giving this a really dramatic kind of da-da-da-da-da. But really, he didn't think about it too long, actually. He's
quicker and wiser than I am. And he just looked up and goes, empathy is about you. And compassion is
about them and us. Or something like that, he said.
And what does he mean by empathy is about you? Well, it's because when we're deep in empathy we're it's
us feeling their emotions it's like So we sit down with somebody and and they say, I'm having a really
bad day. And you go, yeah, you know, I recognise that. I feel that too. You'll never believe what happened
to me. Yeah, I feel it too. You'll never believe what happened to me. This, well, you're immediately turning it
onto you rather than, ah, yeah, that
sucks, doesn't it?
That's compassion. You know yeah you're feeding their feelings, but you're not immediately turning it back onto you
um But anyway. Yeah, listen to healthy, unhealthy empathy versus healthy empathy.
It's an interesting podcast. I may not have any of these right, okay? You know, I'm not an expert on
any of these things. It's just my observations and what reduces my suffering a little bit may help to reduce
your suffering a little bit. So let's talk about not being disturbable. Undisturbable.
Not disturbable. Whatever way you want to put it. It's, you can have these feelings, feel these feelings deeply. You
don't have to do anything with it. And for example, we go out in the weather, you know, it's raining
today. I've got to go out for a meeting in about an hour and 15 minutes. Well, I'm gonna put
on some extra clothes. I'm I'm gonna prepare myself. I'm gonna do something to protect myself from the weather. But
we don't tend to do that from emotions. You know, if we're going into an emotional environment, you know, we
may be going and staying with family. We may be doing And always returning to family is always an emotional
thing. You know, Christmas lunch. Like Mother theresa say if you think you're enlightened, go and stay with your family
for a week
let's see how that goes. Very often you'll realise that you still got a lot of work to do
because the spiritual journey is always about on our work, not about other people's work. Other people's work's got nothing
to do with us. So, and the more we work on ourselves you'll be surprised how much nicer other people
become. It's really weird. It's really weird how that happens. But it happens, nonetheless. These things
arise within us. We
have this little gap where we don't have to do anything with it. It's really simple, but it's quite profound
when you live by that notion then I'm still working on it, so when you work all this stuff out,
let me know. You know I I reacted last night to something and I'm kind of regretting it now. I'm
trying not to go over it too much, but it keeps cropping up. But the more and more we can
try not to react, we try not to... So we have these feelings and we jump back to shadows and
triggers from years ago and we immediately relate to what's happening now, to what happened before and how we reacted
last time and all those other things. Ah, just take a deep breath and go, do you know what? I
don't have to do anything with this. It's a different time, a different situation. I
can feel joy, but I don't have to do anything with it. I don't have to grab hold of it
and make sure it stays. I
can just allow it to be joy. I can feel anger and just... I'm feeling anger and so I should.
This is an injustice. I
can feel pain. I can feel um ecstasy I I can feel real joy, real
excitement and desires, and I don't have to do anything with them. How
wonderful is that what What a concept that is. And you can remain calm and you can be agitated in
a room full of people. You know, I'm a politician. I spend time in rooms with other politicians. You know,
we're all ego driven Sorry fellow politicians. If any of you listen to this podcast, I doubt wherever you would.
If any of you, my friends and all that list I love you all. But we're very ego driven by
nature of, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here as mayor if I didn't have an ego the size of
the universe. But when that ego arises, when that voice arises, I don't always have to do anything with it.
I don't have to love it. I don't have to die just go, ah, there it is. You know, the
10 000 voices as Buddhism would say 10 000 voices they you know They're all in us. When they arise,
you don't have to do anything with them
take away from this podcast is be emotional. It's fine to be emotional. It's okay to be emotional
you know And if it's okay and appropriate, cry.
If it's okay and appropriate, laugh. Have fun. Enjoy them. Play with them.
But you don't have to also be disturbed by everything that's going on. You don't have to grab hold of
it. You don't have to react to it. You don't have to shout at the table, bad table, because it
banged into you when you walk past it.
You know, you can really feel these things deeply and you just don't have to react. And
you can practice that by every time you come across a red traffic light. Sit there and go, oh, thank
you for giving me a time out. Nothing you can do about it. You might end up making you a
little bit later, a few seconds. Well, there's nothing you can do about it, whether you react to it or
not. You know, if you're stuck behind a slow car, you're stuck behind a slow car
isn't worth risking your life for, you
know it's It is what it is,
you know? And cultivating emotional intelligence, because that's what we're talking about really and now It can lead to deeper
connections with your friends can lead to greater creativity and better understanding of your own
emotions and the emotions of those around you, but especially your own. It can foster
deeper and meaningful relationships for your family. Greater empathy for others and
for yourself. And you can understand yourself and you become a deeper version of who you are, a deeper foundation
of who you are. You know, it's like the oak tree knows it's got leaves, it knows it's got a
trunk I think how well does it know its roots? How well does it know its foundations of where it
really comes from? And
that's what it is about feeding things deeply is recognising when these feelings come up and erupt and when they
arise within you, embrace them. Let
me know if this helps. I'm not sure if it helps or not, but these kind of things, just recognising
my emotions have helped me immensely. I enjoy them. I play with them more um Well when they're here, I'm
like, this is what I'm feeling. Even have conversations with people. How are you feeling now? And sometimes when I
say, how are you feeling, people go, what do you mean how I'm feeling? It's a weird question. No, I'm
interested. What are you feeling right now? Close your eyes. What are you feeling?
How are you today? And people go, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. We hear that all the time.
But
yeah, just how are you feeling? How am I feeling? What feelings are arising? Great questions to ask. And then
remember, you don't have to do anything with it. That's sort of really really important. You don't have to do
anything with that.
So, feel things deeply. Be not disturbable or undisturbable. I'm determined
to make that a word
you know Thank you for listening look Have a wonderful week. And don't forget, you can head over to StevenWebb.uk
and you can listen to my other podcast, which basically is just guided meditations. You can download the
five simple practices for inner peace. And you'll also join my newsletter that Take care, my friend. Stay safe.
Enjoy your week. And I love you. And stay
true to who you are. Listen to your feelings and enjoy them. You don't have to do anything with them.
