Can you detach from pain without going numb to everything else? No, and that is the catch. Deny the hard feelings and the good ones go with them.
There is the small mind that has problems and the big mind where nothing needs fixing. Trying to deny it all is like keeping a garden and never taking your shoes off. You never find out what the grass feels like. It is not nice watching somebody suffer, and if you have a big heart it is harder. I get lonely because I am wanting something I have not got, and solving it made it worse.
One thing to try: Let one uncomfortable feeling stay a while without trying to solve it.
In this episode
(0:01) Small mind and big mind on this episode
(2:28) The vast one where nothing needs fixing at all
(4:45) A garden, and never taking your shoes off in it
(7:24) It is hard watching somebody suffer when you care
(9:58) And what about detaching from happiness and desire?
(11:52) Feeling lonely because I want something I have not got
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Can you detach from pain without going numb to everything else?
No, and that is the catch. Deny the hard feelings and the good ones go with them. Which is why the people who feel things most deeply, who cry easily and carry a lot of empathy, tend to suffer less rather than more.
The heart of it
The aim is to feel all of it and not stay in any of it. Both and, rather than either or.
Say I am feeling sad rather than I am sad. It sounds like a small edit and it is not.
Imagine getting to the end of your life having only ever played one side of your favourite album, and somebody turns it over ten minutes before you go. Or being a painter with four colours and finding out on the last afternoon that you could have mixed them.
There is the small mind, the one that wants mint chocolate chip and wants everybody happy and wants the world fixed. And the big mind, which is vast and has no problems in it because it has no concept of a problem. You move between the two all day.
Somebody messaged after a recent episode to say they could hear sadness in my voice. They were right. It was the seven year old in me who still believes he can heal the world.
Denying all of this is like keeping a garden and never taking your shoes off. You never find out what the grass feels like.
Grief is the one that proves it. Grief is love with nowhere to put itself. You cannot have one without the other, any more than you can know warm without cold, or wisdom without having been ignorant first.
Loneliness is my own. I have family and friends round me and I can still feel it, because I am wanting something I have not got. Trying to solve it made it worse. So now I sit in it instead. What does lonely look like. What if there is nobody here. What if I take the planet away, and then everything else. And after a while the ego gets bored and says it is hungry.
To be totally awake and conscious is to be thrown out of the nest constantly.
Thich Nhat Hanh
One small thing to try
Let one uncomfortable feeling stay a while without trying to solve it.
Notice it arrive, name it, and get curious rather than busy. What is under it. Why is this here now. You are not required to do anything about it, and it will leave on its own, the same as happiness does.
Use all the crayons in the box. That goes for the emotions as well.
Questions people ask
Is this saying I should want to feel sad?
No. It is saying that trying to feel only the good half does not work, and costs you the depth of the good half too.
Are you not meant to be non dual about all this?
You can be, sat on a cushion, until you get hungry or cold. Living entirely there means never experiencing anything. Hold it loosely, experience it, do not become it.
Why does saying I am feeling sad help?
Because I am sad makes it your identity, and then getting rid of it means getting rid of you. I am feeling sad leaves you somewhere to stand while it passes.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
empathy · compassion · suffering · vulnerability
Read the transcript
Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps
you through the most difficult times in life.
I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and on this episode, I want to talk
about feeling things deeply and becoming whole.
It's a subject that I visit quite often on my podcast because
I think it's one of the main reasons why the people that feel.
Feel things deeply suffer a lot less.
And it seems counterintuitive.
The people that cry deeply, the people that have a lot of empathy,
a lot of compassion about them and what seemed like a weakness,
they often suffer a lot less.
And it's one of those things that if you feel everything and experience
everything, but don't stay there.
And I think that's the whole.
The point of it.
And Richard Roh always talks about both and rather than either
or.
And I sometimes feel sad and I sometimes feel lonely, and I sometimes
feel, you know, include them rather than.
No, I just want to be happy all the time.
I just want to be joyful and happy and, you know, just want to
be love.
I want to be all these wonderful things.
No, you know, although I wouldn't want anybody to grow up
feeling a whole lot of pain, a whole lot of hurt, but by feeling
all this whole lot of pain and a whole lot of hurt, you end up a
more whole person.
You imagine growing up and getting to the end of your life and
you've only listened to one side of the album of your favorite
band and someone comes up and turns it over 10 minutes before you
die and goes, hey, there's a whole new side there.
There's loads of other things you could have experienced.
It's like the artist only having four colors and someone coming
along.
You could have mixed them.
Oh, wow.
I've lived my whole life and I did not know that.
So you don't want to do that.
You want to experience all these emotions.
And this is where the balance.
I did a meditation and I released it on inner peace meditations.
And it was about balance between the small mind, like the
ego, the fixer, the seven year old self that wants and desires,
the person in me that gets angry and all those things and identifies
with Stephen, who I am.
And then the big mind that's vast and it's open and there's no
issues and there's no problem and it includes everything.
Nothing needs fixing.
Everything's fine.
Well, not everything's fine.
Everything just is what it is.
Because there's no fine, because there's no broken, because
there's no.
You get my point.
It's Difficult to articulate it, it's easier to sit in it.
But you're balancing between those two things all the time.
And David Hawkins has an emotional scale, like starting at
20, that's like shame.
And they're moving through guilt and fear and anger.
And then you slowly move to courage, which is like a transformational
point courage, the first thing where you start to be brave and you
start to look outwards.
And then you've got other emotions where you start to feel
happiness and joy and enlightenment and desires and all
those things and they flow, you move between them.
And the problem is the one thing you don't want to do is stay
at one of them too long.
So an enlightened being moves between them, fills them deeply,
but doesn't stay there.
They almost not revel in it, because that's the opposite.
So when I released a podcast a couple of days ago, someone guarded
me and said, I hear sadness in your voice.
And they were right.
My voice was feeling sad because the meditation was reminding
me of the seven year old self that cannot fix and heal the world.
I'm still working on that.
I still think that it's possible.
But do I think, does big mind think it's possible to heal the world?
No, because it doesn't think.
It doesn't.
It has no concept of that.
But the small mind does, the ego does.
You know, the ego wants mint chocolate chip ice cream.
It wants to fix things.
It wants everybody to be happy.
It wants to be happy, it wants to be joyful because we're promised
all these things.
So it doesn't want to be sad.
But you know, there's nothing wrong with being lonely or sad.
You know, it's much like if you're going to try to deny all those
things, it's much like having a garden and always wearing shoes.
You'll never know what it's like to walk barefoot in the sand
or barefoot in the cold grass.
And being human is just to experience.
So you don't want to not experience sadness and grief, you
know, why would you not want to experience grief?
Grief is just that beautiful emotion that reminds you of love.
I don't think you can have grief without love.
Can you have joy without sadness?
Can you have happiness without content?
Can you have enlightenment without ignorance?
You first need to be ignorant to have wisdom.
To understand what it means to be warm, you've got to feel cold.
And I could go on all day with these things.
So the idea is to feel these things and be okay with these things,
but don't stay There, experience them all.
That's what it means to be human.
When you look at animals and when you look at other things, trees
and nature, they don't get to experience everything that we do.
You know, a tree is a whole tree.
Many humans are not whole humans because we deny our human
side.
We deny that moving through emotions.
And I refrain from saying I am sad or I am lonely or I am happy.
I mess up sometimes, but I try to say I'm feeling sad.
I'm currently experiencing sadness.
You know, I'll sit here and listen to a song and I'll cry.
And sometimes it's sadness, sometimes it's happiness, sometimes
it's just overwhelming emotions.
I wouldn't want to not do that.
I wouldn't want to live in a world that I suppose as a child my
parents said to me, you know, stop crying.
You know, it's because they felt awkward when they were seeing
a child upset and sad.
That made them feel sad and they didn't want to feel sad.
So stop crying.
Pick your chin up, you'll be okay.
And it's not nice seeing someone else feeling sadness.
It's not nice seeing someone else lonely.
It's not nice seeing someone else suffer because it makes us suffer.
And if you do care and you have a big heart, it's really, really
difficult.
And I'm a firm believer and I don't always get it right, I get
it far from right.
But I'm a firm believer and try not to cause any more suffering
if you can help it.
And sometimes I make mistakes and sometimes there is suffering
at some of my actions and decisions.
But then I realized that I'm only responsible for mine.
I'm only responsible for what I do.
And being human is all part of that experience and finding that
balance between all, because it will come and go, but almost.
We grew up in a world that wanted to deny all the sad feelings
and replace them with all the good feelings.
When I grow up, I'll be happy.
When I have this, I'll be happy.
That's almost saying that that's the only time in that state
of happiness, in that state of experience is the only time this
life is worth living.
It's not.
How can you know happiness if you haven't known sadness?
And I know this is living in the duality of things.
And many people say, don't live in the duality, you know, go
to a non dual state and all that.
Well, you know, then you get hungry or you get cold, you know,
to live in a non dual state you'll be in a state of limbo all
the time, just sat on your meditation cushion and you'd never
eat and you never do anything.
You never experience anything.
But the whole, whole idea is to hold everything loosely in a way
that you can experience it, but you don't become it.
And very often when we have feelings, when we're not very mature
with those feelings, we become so enrolled in it, we become the
emotion and we try to get out of it.
We try to deny it like some sticky treacle that we're trying
to.
I don't like this.
Well, if you don't like.
If you think you are sadness and you don't like to be sadness,
that's to say I don't like to be human because I don't like to
experience anything.
And that would have to equally go with happiness, joy, desires,
and how do we detach from these.
Okay, great question, great question.
What?
That's where meditation and mindfulness comes in.
It's.
It's sitting back and just recognizing a thought when it comes
in the head and going, ah, there's a thought.
It's recognizing the emotion when it comes up.
Ah, there's an emotion.
What's under the emotion?
Why am I feeling sad?
Why am I feeling joy?
Why am I feeling desires?
Why am I feeling grief?
And be okay with it?
Play in the story.
Because that's what it wants.
Sadness wants you to recognize that emotion that comes up and the
ego recognizes it.
It wants to be seen and heard.
It wants to be seen and heard.
The soul wants to have some kind of rigidity or some kind of
system that it can express itself to.
The world wants to leave a legacy.
It wants to be something.
It wants to be seen.
But that's small mind.
And you know, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's just if you just identify with that and that is your whole,
and you look at it as something to solve, you know, I need
to solve my sadness, I need to solve my loneliness.
And very often, like, loneliness is a big one for me in
my life and loneliness is relative because someone could come
back and say, well, I'm more lonely or less lonely.
It doesn't matter.
It's.
It's relative to the person.
It's relative to you.
And I have family around me, I have friends, but I can still feel
incredibly lonely.
And I have done at times.
And I feel lonely because I'm desiring something I haven't got.
And when I used to try to solve that, it just made it worse.
So I Do a meditation.
Now that I sit in, the loneliness.
Ah, lonely.
What's that look like?
Well, it looks like no one's here.
What does that look like?
If I go totally alone and I go away from the planet and somewhere
else in the solar system and there's no one here right now.
What if I take away the planets and it's just me?
What if I take away everything?
It's just me.
Oh, wow.
It's just nothing.
Not even dried up old trees.
And then after a while, the ego goes, okay, I'm done with this
now get back and let's go.
It'll say, I'm hungry or I'm cold or it'll move on.
But it's okay to feel it's becoming whole.
And that's what Big mind is, that's what enlightenment is and
all those things.
It's when you're ultimately whole with everything else and you're
not attached to any of it.
And there's a paradox with it, because when you're whole with it,
you are it, but you're not is what it is, because you cannot be
it.
It's, you know, the English language is really difficult with
this level of understanding.
Either that or I don't understand it.
And that's okay, that's okay.
But what I do know is that the more I don't identify and the less
I get attached to my feelings and emotions and what's happening
out there and within, the less suffering I have, the less time I
stay there.
Because I can guarantee you, whether it's sadness or happiness,
it will go, it will disappear.
Something will come along and knock yourself out of it.
I think Thich Dan hat said a brilliant quote.
He said, to be totally awake, unconscious is to always be thrown
out of the nest constantly.
Wow, that cuts through, doesn't it?
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Well, I don't do adverts on my podcast or the Inner Peace Meditations
podcast.
I do it because I struggle with adverts on podcast.
15 minute podcast.
You got six minutes of adverts.
No, thank you.
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