Ego vs. Essence: Finding Peace Beyond Your Labels

Steven Webb: 00:00:05

So I was asked a really good question a few years ago, and it's really come back at the moment as I'm thinking about my life and all at the moment. And the question was, who are you without your story? Who are you without your story? I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

So we're going to discuss that on today's podcast. I'm Steven Webb.

This is Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you to get through life's toughest challenges with a little bit of inner peace.

So just talking about that question, because I like to dive straight into my podcast rather than have lots of other things going on and just imagine waking up and suddenly realizing you did not have no history, but the whole world was an adventure that you could do anything in. And I think that's what it felt like when someone said, who are you without your story? But where does our story come from?

So, okay, when we're born, we are a blank canvas. You know, yes, we got some of the leftover genes and all that from our parents and grandparents and grandparents beyond that.

And yes, they all have a bearing on us to some degree, but not really.

In our story, there is some evidence that whether we're having a substantially good time or a substantially bad time in the generations previous, if they had a really rough decades, that that may be passed down to some degree. But I'm talking about the surface level story of when someone says, who are we?

And we say, oh, well, I'm a doctor, or I'm a carer, or I'm currently disabled, or what we think we are at any given moment. For example, I'm a dad, I'm a granddad. I'm also, I do some charity work, I'm a city councillor.

And all of those come with a story of why and how and how I become it. But what would I be, what would I do today if I did not have that story?

So just going back to where the story comes from, and the story is the ego, the who are we, who am I?

And it comes from our childhood influences, you know, from the friends we hang out with to the friends of our parents, to our parents, grandparents, our teachers, our peers, all of them have a bearing on how we live a life, what we believe in, what we do. And I think we end up accumulating so many different labels of our professional student, professional parent.

And those things all help shape our lives and to some way that they highlight how these stories become our constraints and limiting what is potential and things like that.

So the wonderful analogy that I Like is, you imagine you are born a blank canvas and you've got that canvas on the wall, and that canvas, that picture is going to tell your story. The people that hand you the colors are your parents, what colors you can use, for example, what religion you are.

Maybe depending on where you were born and what parents you were born to, they'll land you a specific colour that you can paint. Or maybe they have a certain belief. Maybe your parents say, well, I was no good at maths. Your grandparents were no good at maths.

There's no point in trying to study math, so they'll hand you another colour and they hand you all these colours that you can paint your picture.

So you're not painting the picture with every possible thing that you could do, you're actually painting the picture with what people are handing you.

So although you think you've got your story, your story is really mostly everybody else's story, because you could only write it in the constraints of what was handed to you. Everything you learned, everything you did and everything you're doing today, just the same as me, I'm no different. Everything is based on our past.

You know that wake of the ship, as Alan Watts would say, you know, that wake of the ship is our story, is how we got there.

You know, anybody studying the ocean wouldn't have to see the ship to understand, just by looking at the wake, to understand roughly what went before it.

So you can look at a person's life and what they're doing and their story and all that to tell you what kind of person and how they would react in certain situations. So you become that story. So with a blank canvas, you end up painting a picture and then we end up living up to that picture.

If someone comes in and says, well, look, let's try a different color again. No, no, that's not me. That's not who I am. It's like, well, how do you know it's not you? How do you know it doesn't fit?

How do you know that colored top that you don't normally wear would look terrible on you? Because you're putting yourself in this category or labeling it in a certain way because someone said to you, it won't look good or won't.

I tried a hat on the other day and it's quite an unusual type hat. I don't know how to explain it, really. I have no idea what it's called. It's got a peak and it's quite flat on top and all that.

And I put it on Facebook as a midlife crisis. And I put the picture up and loads of people come back and say, that really suits you. That looks really awesome. But I feel like it's not me.

Why would that be me? And getting changed into these clothes and then going out and about and being part of that, it'd be like.

Feels uncomfortable because we become comfort comfortable in the story of what we are so trying to drop that story. Yes, it opens up to all these possibilities, but that's where it comes out of our comfort zone.

But I want to talk about it in more of a context of reducing our suffering, because that's what stillness in the storms is all about.

You know, if you can find that stillness when everything else is going wrong and we're trying to live up to this current situation with the framework and the tools we have, then it becomes hard work because maybe we don't have to change the situation. Maybe we can relish in a different way. Maybe if we did have different colors, we can paint a whole new picture.

So it's like resetting the whole trajectory. You know, you can at any moment, you can change direction at any moment. You could go, no, I've always used that color.

But let's try a different color. Let's wipe the canvas clean. What would you create if you had a brand new blank canvas now? So you wake up tomorrow not losing all your knowledge?

You have all your knowledge to function in the world, but you just don't know the structure and the framework of your story. So you don't know what you like and you dislike. You don't know what foods you like, you don't know what careers and things like that.

You don't even know what experiences normally you like. So you suddenly have this opportunity to try things. Do you think you would find out about new things?

Do you think you would find out about new foods and new colors? Do you think you would end up with a different canvas? But then you end up with another story, another. A masterpiece, I guess, another ego.

But here's the thing with mindfulness and the thing with reducing suffering is at any given moment, you can paint the canvas in whatever colors you choose. So in this moment, I might choose.

I'm going to paint this canvas with compassion and I'm going to paint it in lovely greens and blues and calm colors. Another day I go, wait a minute. What if I want to paint the canvas a different color?

And while I'm using the analogy of painting the canvas, it's just a way of showing up. Pick your three colors. Pick Your three moods, Pick your three voices. And we all have these massive amounts of voices inside of us.

I talk about this on the podcast quite a bit. You can choose which fingerprint of voices. Let's say you got a thousand voices.

Some of them are more abrupt, some of them are more compassionate, some of them are more wiser, some of them are a little more brave. And they all have a certain length between naught and a hundred. And every single day, they're going to be a slightly different number.

They're going to be roughly the same. What if you could just. Do you know what? I want to bring a completely different set of voices to my experience today.

And by doing this, you just mindfully start choosing to experience a love life a little bit more instead of trying to mold the situations into your story and your framework of who you are. You know, you're not your thoughts. You have thoughts. You're not your thoughts. You have a story, but you're not your story.

You have this ego, but you're not the ego. The ego is just something that's been constructed to help you to survive in the world. And what an incredible job it's done. You're here now.

You listen to this podcast. You've been through all kinds of stuff in your life, and you're here.

And because you're here, you probably want to reduce your suffering a little bit, improve your life in some way, or just take your story a little, a little less seriously. Very much. People would say to me, so what's Stephen like? Well, he's very laid back.

And I remember they used to say, he's so laid back, he may as well be lying down. And really that was just an ego, a story that I created that because many people told me that I lived up to that.

If people tell me when I was a child that I was some kind of evil and I was naughty and I was always. I would have lived up to that as well. Not saying I wasn't naughty, of course I was.

I was one of those children that was pleasure to have in the class, just wish you would do some work. And the teachers used to be really annoyed with me whenever I'd done something really wrong. And they had to.

So sorry, Stephen, to have to give you lines and all that, but you've broke the rules like the rest of them. You really need to do it. And they were always apologetic when they were punishing me. I guess I took it nicely. I guess that's a good thing.

It's like, I'm so sorry, Stephen. But you're going to have to do lines at lunchtime where you're going to have to have a detention at lunchtime.

And the rest of them, like, you can stay in here. That's it. I'm so sorry, Stephen. You got to as well. Just makes me laugh now when I look back. And all I did was I learned to play the game.

I have a sister that seems to be very much at war with the world. And being a younger brother, I just learned to. Well, they're at war with the world. How do I do it?

And I've done it through humor, I've done it through listening, I've done it through compassion, I've done it through being a little more flexible. Not because I'm some kind of better or worse than her, it's just because I learned a different way. She's learned her way, her story, her ego.

I've learned my way, my story, my ego. It's our canvas. That's what we're showing the world. But we don't have to live up to every single moment in that framework.

You know, look, I've got my framework for stability, but I want to step out of it. I know I can step back into my story.

And I know at times I have to be the grandparent, I have to be the parent, I have to be the podcast host and all that. I get that I have to take on these roles, but what if there's moments where, hey, what if I bring a new role to this moment? What if I.

When I'm going out for a walk and I'm looking around, I look at it through a different eyes. What if I take the role of bird? You know, what can the bird see looking down from a tree?

And I think these, when we look at life a little more in that way, when we question what would we do today if we did not have a story? There's another way of looking at this, and that is when people say, you should take each day as if it's your last day.

And I'm like, no, that's terrible advice. If this was my last day on earth, I'd be like, freaking out. I'd be like running the doctor and going, what's wrong with me?

Why am I going to die today? But if you've seen today as if it's a brand new day, wow, I've got a canvas. Wow, what a brand new color. Wow. I can paint what I want.

I can tell my story. So then we become friends with the ego and we can play with the ego.

We can play with the story, we can invoke the story for a healthy way, and we can drop the story when we need to. And it's beneficial. We don't have to stay so rigid with it. And that's what it means more about dropping your story.

It doesn't mean forgetting who you are. It doesn't mean not knowing your family or not knowing any of your past history. It means take it less seriously.

It means that just because you've got the wake and you are the ship, it doesn't mean to say you can't change direction and then change it back and then a bit more and then. And the more we do this, the more we just play with the ego. We play with the self, we play with who we are.

And children do this all the time because they haven't, they haven't had that direction of. The older they get, the more they fit into the category, the more rigid they become, the more structure and ego and story they have.

And when you, when you speak to someone a bit older, oh, I've been doing it 30 years. You're not going to change me. Why not? You're only.

The only reason you're saying that is because it's uncomfortable to change or that you're just comfortable and you're happy with your life or whatever. And you may not even be happy, but it's more comfort knowing the devil you know than risking finding out about new devils, I guess.

Not sure if I got that phrase right, but you know exactly what I mean. It's easier to be the victim. It's easier to be, oh, that's who I am.

Nothing I can do about it now because doing something about it feels like hard work, but it isn't. You don't have to actually do anything, you know, have a blank canvas, you don't have to paint the canvas, leave it blank.

You know, today I'm going to let everyone else paint my story. I'm going to sit back and watch. And tomorrow I may paint it myself. And the day after that, I have no idea.

And then you can slow it down to each given single moment. In this moment, I'm going to show up as compassion, because that's what the world needs.

In this moment, I'm going to show up as something different because that's what the world needs. In this moment, I'm going to be grandparent, doubting over my granddaughter, 11 months old, because that's what the world needs.

And then also it's what I need. What canvas do I need. What colors do I need to reduce my suffering? To enjoy life in this moment?

So to recap, to drop your story doesn't necessarily mean you have to become a brand new person and write a new story. It means that you have the possibility to write the story in any given moment.

Your story was wrote by the people that handed you the words you can use, the pens you can use. They wrote the chapter for you, but you're just trying to put it in your words.

What I'm saying is you have a blank page or a blank chapter, you know, put it in your words, take your words, use what you want, Pick the colors of your choice in this given moment. It doesn't mean they're a permanent fixture. Doesn't mean if you pick those three colors today, that's it for the rest of your life.

But this is what most people think with stories and ego. Well, that's me. That's who I am. Says who? You. Because you're attached to your story. So that's my podcast today.

I'm Steven Webb and this is Stillness in the Storms. And thank you for supporting me. You are absolutely awesome.

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