Stillness in the StormsA podcast with Steven Webb Join Weekly Calm

Episode 2 · 13 June 2019 · 25:10

Building the Foundations of Stillness

Why does your calm hold in a traffic jam and vanish the moment your own family walk in? Because calm without foundations is just good weather.

Subject: Inner Peace Foundations

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Stillness in the Storms · Episode 2

Why does your calm hold in a traffic jam and vanish the moment your own family walk in? Because calm without foundations is just good weather.

You can build any house you like, but without the decking underneath it goes the moment the weather turns. I lost it completely with my daughter once, over something so small I cannot now remember what it was. Stillness is not the absence of trouble. It is having more control when trouble arrives. And your subconscious is not broken either. It has kept you alive this long.

One thing to try: Pick a trigger you meet every day. Red traffic lights work well. Every time you hit one, take two breaths on purpose.

In this episode

  • (0:01) The second ever episode, and what these foundations are for
  • (2:50) Build any house you like, but not without the decking
  • (5:12) Losing it with my daughter over something I cannot even remember
  • (6:31) Calm in the traffic jam, gone again a week later
  • (8:51) Setting up triggers, and why red lights are ideal
  • (10:09) Your subconscious mind is not broken, it has kept you alive
  • (13:00) Stillness is not quiet, it is control
  • (15:09) The tree that bends, and the one that snaps

Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk

Thank you for listening.

Steven

The question this answers

Why does your calm hold in a traffic jam and vanish the moment your own family walk in?

Because calm without foundations is just good weather.

The heart of it

  • You do not need stillness in front of Netflix. You need it when everybody wants a piece of you at once.
  • Stillness is not losing control. It is having more of it.
  • Your subconscious is not broken. It has kept you alive this long. It just has no moral compass.

Think of a house. It can have the big windows, the pillars, the lot. Build it on sand and the first storm takes it.

Or a tree. The one with shallow roots comes out of the ground the first bad night. The one that is properly rooted bends in the wind, stands in the rain, and keeps its own soil damp in a heatwave.

That is the difference between feeling calm and having a foundation.

Two years ago my daughter walked in and I went off on one. I still cannot tell you what it was about, which tells you how important it was. In my head I was shouting. She said afterwards I was not actually that loud. She waited for me to finish, about a minute or two, and said, that's not very zen of you, is it.

I laughed. She was right. I still had work to do.

That is the honest version. You get a quiet week, you keep your head in traffic, you think you have cracked it, and a week later you are back at square one. That is not failure. That is what happens without structure.

The tools are simple, and I go deeper into each one in later episodes.

  • Meditation. I could not do it for twenty years because I thought it meant no thinking. It does not.
  • Mindfulness in ordinary life. Washing up. Walking the kids to school. No cushion, no robes, no shaved head.
  • Two or three slow breaths when the wave hits. Easy to say. Not easy to do.
  • Triggers. Every red light, listen to the traffic instead of drifting off.
  • Journaling, and a list of the things you already know set you off.

All of it does one job. It puts you here, so you can see the reaction coming instead of finding out after.

One small thing to try

Do this now, eyes open.

Breathe in and lift your arms above your head. Let them down slowly as you breathe out, and rest them beside you.

Breathe in the word calm. Breathe out the word relax. Notice that your body loosens on the out breath on its own. You do not make it happen.

If your mind wanders, smile, say thank you for the thought, and come back.

Eyes open matters. If your calm only works with your eyes shut for five minutes, it will not be there in the middle of an argument.

Questions people ask

Is this only for naturally calm people?

No. When I hit rock bottom my mind would not stop, and I was asking my carers for a triple just to get to sleep. If I can get to this, so can you. I have taught people far more in their heads than me, and people who feel everything, and both get there.

Does stillness mean letting the world burn?

The opposite. It means you are present enough to respond properly instead of reacting and regretting it. Stub your toe and you hop about. That is not you deciding, that is habit. Stillness is getting a vote back.

What if I can only feel calm when someone else is guiding me?

That is a belief, not a fact. When I take you through a meditation, you are doing all of it. You simply believe you can while I am there. The foundation has to be one you carry, not one that depends on who is in the room.

Is my subconscious the enemy here?

No. It kept you safe. Its only flaw is that it asks what worked last time, not whether it was kind or good for you next year. Your job is to add the missing bit, not to fight it.

Read along

The transcript

It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.

mindfulness · resilience · healing · personal-story

Read the transcript

Welcome to Stillness in the Storms. The podcast that helps you to find that little inner peace when you have

it least and you need it most. I'm Steven, your host, and thank you for joining me. This is the

second podcast, and today we're talking about building the foundation of stillness. now How do you cultivate that much

needed foundation that when things do go wrong you're ready and you can respond

in a calm Nice Enjoyable manner instead of reacting and then regretting it later.

That's what this show is about. So on this show we're going to cover what is the foundation of stillness?

Can anybody have this foundation? Or is it just reserved for calm, quiet people? Why

is the foundation so important? And how can we start today? And I'm going to end today's podcast with a

little meditation to give you an experience a little... Sense of what this stillness is all about. Because

unless you experience and you know what it's about, you don't know what you're going for. You don't know what

it feels like. And I'm a great believer in teaching that I could do a hundred podcast episodes and I

can tell you all day long, every day, what it's like and how you can do it. But unless you

experience it, it's like there's no point. It's like it's very much like me telling you that water's hot. No

matter how many times I try to explain what it feels like, just putting your hand in it, you're gonna

know instantly. And that's what the meditations are about. So yeah, let's start. First of all, thank you for being

here. Thank you for supporting me on this podcast. As I said, this is the second episode and you can

head over to Patreon. Subscribe and you get the whole podcast without the outtakes and With the outtakes, I

mean. And you get to hear more of when things go wrong and when things go right. And

I answer your questions. And you also get standalone meditations. And that's a way of me

thanking you and me of helping you to create a little more stillness in your life. So let's get on

with today's show um Let's first tackle the subject of what is the foundation of stillness.

Well, foundation is very much like when you build a house or you build a building. You know, the building

could be amazing building it could be It could have the most elegant design. It could have really large

windows. It could have the pillows in front of the doors. It could be this big mansion or whatever you

decide for it to be. But if it hasn't got the foundations and you haven't given it a firm decking

to build the house, it's gonna be no good when things start going wrong. It's like when they say building

your house on sand. The

sand moves the house is going to move. Your house is going to fall down that's going to be no

firm foundation for your house. So that's what I want to do. I want to help you do is

build the foundation of stillness. So it's not when you're sitting on the cushion or when everything's going well, that

you need the calmness. You know, you don't need it when you're sat down in front of Netflix watching your

favourite program. It's when things are going wrong, when you need it, when you're in a traffic jam or when

you're at work and your colleagues and your boss are all demanding something from you. It's when all the kids

are hungry and you're hungry and everyone around you is wanting a piece of you and then your partner comes

in and then the phone goes. The building of the foundation is so that in those times you've got the

tools and you've got the experience and you are ready to deal with them. In a skillful way rather

than just

go away. Leave me go. Can't deal with this right now. I've had enough of this right now. I'm tired.

Just, yeah. So yeah, it's about building this awareness. And when we

have this awareness, we're no longer buffered and we're no longer reacting. We're no longer we're no longer running around

putting fires out. We don't start the fires. And that's the main thing. And living with this foundation means you're

just going to be more understanding and caring. You're going to be more loving. The people around you will have

more of a sense of enjoyment because they won't be treading on eggshells anymore. I've been in relationships where

I've been frightened to know what to say um Whereas with a calmness, I feel now I don't have to

say everything I'm thinking I can I can take a step back and go, that won't be kind. So I

choose not to say it. Even sometimes now, I'm almost there now um And I can

remember two years ago, my daughter came in one day and I I lost it um I cannot

remember what it was about. It was something so insignificant. I laugh now, but it wasn't insignificant at the time.

And she came in and she looked at me and... I went off on one and I was, in in

my world, I was shouting. I was being quite loud, but I wasn't actually being that loud, she said to

me afterwards I went off for about a minute, two minutes, and she just stood there and goes, hmm, that's

not very zen of you, is it?

And I laughed. And she knows I've been trying to deal with that side of me

um Trying to deal with the the monkey brain, the subconscious mind that reacts to these moments.

So that was a wonderful reminder that I still have work to do. And what we always do, and this

is why we need a structure and a practice. This is why we need the foundations put in place. Because

we often think we can... A moment of calmness where we do a little bit of practice. Then we get

into traffic jam we remain calm and we're chilled. And we're like, I've got it. I understand now. It's cool.

I'm... I've got this calmness and stillness in storms and things like that, you know? But

then a week later

back to square one. So that's why we need some structure and some kind of tools in place.

So what are some of these tools? Well,

meditation. I hate to say it. No, I don't hate to say it. It's just difficult saying it because so

many people believe they cannot meditate and that was me for many years. I said in the first podcast about,

you know, I was reading all these books and in the books it said about do meditation.

That would help you. Meditate, meditate, meditate I kept turning the pages just thinking oh God, a solution that I

cannot have.

It's a solution that I it's not available to me because my mind thinks too much. I've always got something

on my mind. Something's always happening. And my mind would not go peacefully, sit down. So I couldn't sit there

and have nothing. But I've learned now that it's not about that. And I'll cover meditation more in depth in

future episodes. But I want to briefly outline how you can build some kind of foundation this one. So I'm

just going to just touch upon them. So mindfulness practice is another one.

And meditation, mindfulness can be done in everyday life. They can be done washing the dishes, walking the kids to

school, doing everything. You don't literally have to go out and buy a cushion, get some monks robes. You don't

have to shave your head. You don't have to. Instantly, they used to shave their heads. Not because of some

kind of practice or anything. It was purely so the teachers would know when one of the monks would run

off. They could instantly recognise because they were the ones with the bald heads. Or so was told um

I believe there's some truth in it, but I don't know.

There's breathing techniques we can use. Just go into our simple breath when things are overwhelming us

or when we're angry, we can just pause and take two or three deep breaths. And although that's easy to

explain now, it's not so easy to do. We

can also set up triggers in our lives. Perhaps traffic lights, something like that. Whenever we get traffic lights and

they do turn red, that we just take a few deep breaths and we take notice of what's going on

around us. Perhaps we listen to the other cars for just a moment instead of automatically going to our subconscious

mind because that's what this is about is building The stillness into our conscious mind

instead of allowing our subconscious mind to continually go back to the habits that he's used to doing. And

there's more in-depth things we can do. We can do journaling, we can have lists and other things that

we know triggers us, we know that gets to us. And it's all about, and I've said it a couple

of times, it's all about knowing. It's all about being here, present and knowing what's actually happening. That

is the only way of really intercepting it and cutting off these

habitable reactions that we've been doing for so long in our lives. And there's nothing wrong. The subconscious mind is

not broke. It's kept us alive it served us really well. Very often when you hear these advice in the

spiritual world, it's like, ah, subconscious mind. It'll get us in trouble all the time. No, it's it's kept us

safe. The only thing... That we could improve with the subconscious mind is give it some moral compass.

It has no moral compass it just how do I stay alive? How do I repeat what I did last

time? It worked. It doesn't matter whether you get in trouble or whether it hurts somebody or whether or not

it's damaging you long term. It's all about instant gratification and how do I react in this moment? What

did I do last time? Whereas the human mind is all about, well, how do I do things in this

moment to improve my later on? So it goes from instant gratification to eating healthier, being

more healthier, having a healthier mind instead of just going with the thoughts. We work with the thoughts. We

we are in control of what we do with them. So can anybody have this stillness?

Yes. Anybody

can have this stillness. When I hit my rock bottom, my mind was giving me so many questions and pain

and feelings. It was awful. I was having a drink just to go to sleep at night. And that drink

become more and more and more until I was so embarrassed to ask the carer for like a treble please

I was drinking spirits um just to get to sleep, just to shut my mind up. It was too much

for me. There was too much going on going on. And they were not just thinking, they were painful thoughts.

So when I sit down to meditate or sit down to try to even just have a little bit of

moment's peace, I couldn't even get a disconnection when watching movies or anything like that because every movie

reminded me of the pain I was going through. So I was really struggling.

So if I say I can get to this place of stillness, I know you can too. And I know

people that are even more... Thinkers than me over thinkers Real in their head, stuck in their head people. And

real emotional empaths that feel everything. I've helped all sorts from all the way

from in the head to in the heart find stillness and normally through some kind of meditation.

So yes, it's possible um And I want to bust one of the myths about stillness.

Stillness doesn't mean losing control.

It doesn't mean stepping back and allowing the world to just burn. Stillness is more control.

Stillness is

remaining calm, present, totally with it. So therefore you actually have more control over what's going

on. You've got the control to respond properly. You

know when you stub your tail on the bed and you jump up and down ah Who's doing that? You're

not doing that. It's your subconscious mind just like, hey, dance on one foot for a moment because your toe's

hurting. So I don't know where that reference comes from. But it's in there now.

So there's more control of it and And there's an awareness with the control of the outside world. What can

you do about the outside world? Well, very little. When people say they're not in control, it means they're not

in control of the outside world and what they want to do out there. Really, we need to learn to

control ourselves inside so that when you see something out there that you don't like or not the way you

expect it to be, you can be okay with it. You can be like, well, you know, it's not the

way I think it'd be ideal but it is the way it is and I'm not going to work myself

up about it.

And I know you're capable of doing it because at least once in your life you've done that. Not my

monkey, not my circus.

So it's possible but some people it just might take a lot more practice than others. It may not be

so easy with some people.

Now then I spoke a little bit about the foundation of stillness and what it is for you. I want

to talk about why build the foundation now

um and And the best thing to do with that is compare ourselves to nature sometimes. You take the tree.

A tree that hasn't got a decent roots and a decent foundation. It's

going to get torn up at the first time of any kind of storm. It's going to get tore out

of the ground it's going to If kids go climbing it and all that, it's going to not going to

last long. It's going to break down. It's the trees that have a decent rooting on the ground, in a

decent ground that can grow taller. They can bend in the wind and bend with all the rain and the

storms and all the different weather yeah

even protects itself in the hot sun because the ground below won't dry up.

So tree is a perfect analogy for building a foundation.

However, we don't want to build a foundation that we cannot move and we're not flexible. We want to have

this foundation that we can take with us. And the foundations cannot rely on other people around you. Well, I

can stay calm in Steven's presence. I very often get it. How can I do it with you? How can

I feel this calmness? And I cannot do it by myself. But you can. It's not dependent on me. You're

the one doing it. If I take you through a meditation in a minute or when I take you through

a meditation in a minute, you really are doing it yourself. You

just believe you can do it when you're with me and that makes a difference. And you don't want to

end up like a weeble wobble. Can you remember those weeble wobble things? I think that's what they're called.

These silver things that you spin around and they just... I think that's what they are anyway. You don't want

to end up like that, that you've been pushed around by everybody so much that you don't even know what

direction you are in and you don't even know what to do. So I hope that makes sense. Let me

know in the comments um Let me know review how am I doing on this podcast.

And the final thing I want to cover

before we go into a little meditation is how do we build this foundation? Well,

listen to this podcast. Subscribe to this podcast for one because

We're going to be talking about how to build this foundation and what this foundation looks like and different practices

and techniques. And we'll be going deeper and deeper and deeper into them. So don't miss them. So that's one

of the major ways in which you can build a foundation.

Also, become aware of what's going on around you. Just become aware. Just sit there every now and again during

the day and go, that's a cup. That's in my life because it holds my drink.

What am I feeling right now? What am I seeing right now? What's happening outside right now? What can I

hear right now? When you ask these questions, it brings you to the present moment because it forces you to

answer the question. You know, you cannot, what can I hear outside right now and not be present to what

the sounds are outside. Not the sound 10 minutes ago or a week ago. It's the sound right now, whatever's

going on right now

um You can also download three meditations that I recorded. To help you find a little calmness very quickly.

One's five minutes, a peaceful place. And you just literally take a few breaths and you're straight there and You

can head over to connect with Steven and there's a button right in the middle of the screen. So you

can download and listen to them anytime, completely free

um Apart from that you know we can open our hearts and live a genuine

freedom. And when we live like that, it opens us up to whatever's happening as opposed to the way we

want things to be. And I'm going to talk about expectations in the next podcast because expectations, very

often we say that we should get rid of all expectations, but no, we shouldn't. Some expectations are healthy. Some

expectations are not healthy. Some of them are you down. Some of them, yeah, people need to bloody respect and

have, you need some expectations of some people um So we'll be talking about that in the next episode. But

until then, head over to connectwithsteven.com. There's a link there to my Patreon page. And that's a way you can

support this podcast. So you can help me to get more You can help me to edit it. Apart from

that, thank you. Your time is the most valuable thing you have and you spent it with me today. So

I'm really deeply humbled and honored with that

So So let's just have a little stillness and we'll sit together now and The easiest way of doing

this is we bring our attention to our breath and we move our attention from our mind and our thinking

down through our body. And

during this practice I urge you to keep your eyes open, wide open in front of you because we want

to establish this stillness in life not only when we can close our eyes.

It's no good every time we're triggered when every

time we feel like reacting, we have to close our eyes for like five minutes and just breathe. They

do that on the comedy shows. Whereas

we need to do it and stay calm in the midst of that storm. And

we do it like this.

So if we just do this now, if you take a deep breath in and put your arms above your

head.

Now as you let your arms down beside you, just... Breathe out slowly in a controlled way

and place your arms down next to you so they're just relaxed. And

now just recognise that you're breathing in and

you're breathing out.

And you can even breathe in the word calm and

breathe out the word relax.

Breathe in calm and breathe out relax.

And notice how your body just relaxes around every breath that is released. Notice how when you're

exhaling your breath,

notice how when you're breathing out, your body naturally relaxes. You

don't have to make it happen.

Just stay been aware what's happening in this present moment. You're breathing in and you're breathing out.

If your mind wanders and it thinks about anything else, just smile and bring it back to your breath. Say

thank you for the thought, but we're just breathing at the moment.

And you may notice a calmness. Everything just suddenly starts to get a little quieter around you. The body just

lets go a little bit. And your mind just humors at the moment and just says okay let's just

I'll focus on the breath.

And what we notice is the gaps between the breathing and the gaps between the thinking.

See, there's no such thing as no thinking.

It's a matter of focused awareness.

And that's where the stillness is, this focused awareness.

And you recognise that softness.

There's not the harshness in the body of when you're uptight or stressed or anxious. There's a

softness of letting go.

And this is what stillness is about is about letting things be. Nothing

is different in this moment than what it was a few moments ago. Apart

from you're aware and alert and relaxed.

Thank you.

And I hope you get time to subscribe to this podcast and you can head over to my website

connectwithsteven.com. and download some more meditations completely free that

will help you to create this stillness quickly when

you have it least and you need it most. Thank you.

So till next time, take care, love deeply, strive to understand and above all be kind to

yourself.

Take care. Namaste. And

don't forget to subscribe. Hit the review button if you heard enough that you like the podcast. Give me an

honest review. Give me some feedback if you would like me to change it up in any way. And if

you can, head over to connectwithsteven.com. You can go to the Patreon site and support the podcast. And

that'd be amazing. Thank you. Take care.

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