Can you have the good bits without the bad ones? No. And a small pond muddies far quicker than a big one, which turns out to be most of the problem.
At one end of the stick are the little joyous moments, at the other the mundane and the hard. Narrow your range and the water clouds at the smallest stir. Spiritual bypassing wants to bin the bottom half of the stick, and you cannot. We never thank the kettle for the three hundred and sixty five times it worked, only shout at it the once it did not.
One thing to try: Thank one thing today that has simply been working. The kettle counts.
In this episode
(0:03) Ninety eight episodes, and something special coming
(1:43) The universality of it, and both ends of the stick
(3:26) The little joyous moments, and the mundane hoovering
(4:51) The small pond that muddies at the slightest stir
(6:57) Spiritual bypassing, and wanting rid of the bottom half
(7:55) That is very Zen master of you, isn't it
(9:49) We never thank the kettle for the times it worked
(11:27) Accept the whole thing and you get some control back
With gratitude to
Kelly, Steiner and Laura.
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Can you keep the good bits of life and get rid of the bad ones?
You cannot, and the trying is what does the damage. This is an analogy I came up with years ago and still use more than any other.
The heart of it
Every experience you will ever have sits somewhere on one stick, from the best day of your life to the worst.
Cut the bad end off and the stick gets shorter. The bad things still arrive, they are just closer to everything else now.
A small pond muddies at the slightest stir. A big one takes it.
At one end are the ultimate highs. Coming in towards the middle they get smaller and more ordinary. Past the middle it is the hoovering, the dentist, being ill, and right at the far end the worst things, losing somebody.
What we all want is to saw off the left hand side. I do not want any of that, thank you, I would like the joy please. So we cut, and all that does is bring the bad end nearer. Then something horrible happens anyway, so we cut again. Eventually there is no gap between anything.
That is the pond. Drop your experiences into a big one and the water clears. Drop the same ones into a puddle and it never settles. You can be walking in a forest and have the whole of the bad end sitting right there with you, because both ends are now in the same place.
I would love it to work the other way. I did think, when I broke my neck, that the karmic typing pool would look at the ledger and hand me a good bucket for a few years. It does not work like that. I have thought I had had my fair share more times than I can count.
You cannot chop one end off and still expect to enjoy the highs.
I see the tidy version of this in spiritual circles. Cut the negative people out, remove anything that brings you down. There is something in it if you are drowning. The longer game is building enough resilience to be in the world with all of it and not be knocked over.
And I am no better at it than you. A few years into meditating, my daughter said something and I let rip at her. She took it, then looked up and said, that is very Zen master of you. Fair.
One small thing to try
Thank one thing today that has simply been working.
We shout at the kettle the one time it breaks and never once thanked it for the three hundred and sixty five mornings it did the job. Same with the car. Say thank you for starting.
Do three of those in the morning. It is not decoration. It slowly widens the stick, and a wider stick means the bad end has somewhere to sit that is not on top of everything else.
Questions people ask
Is this telling me to put up with bad things?
No. It is telling you that denying them makes them louder, not fewer. Accepting the whole stick is what gives you room to actually enjoy the good end when you are at it.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Using the practice to bin the half of life you do not fancy. Cutting out every difficult person, calling every hard feeling negative energy. It looks like progress and it is mostly just a shorter stick.
Can the stick be made longer?
Probably. I have not worked the analogy all the way through, and I say so in the episode. Gratitude and sitting quietly both seem to make more room between things, which amounts to the same thing.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
acceptance · suffering · resilience
Read the transcript
Welcome to episode 98 of Stillness in the Storms. Cannot believe it, 98 episodes already.
And in two weeks time we got a special episode. It's not so much going to be a big fanfare
but a really important message that many people need to hear. But that'll be in two weeks time, 1st of
September, 32 years to the day since I broke my neck. And today's show is about embracing the full stick
of life. It's how do we live the full spectrum of all the feelings, all the emotions, really
about becoming a whole person, a whole human, and to experience all we got on offer. But before
we get on with the analogy, I want to thank Kelly, Steiner and Laura. You guys are absolutely awesome. Thank
you for donating this week makes a huge difference. And it helps to pay for the hosting, pay for the
editing, and all the programs that you have to pay subscriptions with to do the recording and do all the
editing and everything. So without you and without all the donators, it would be really difficult to do this show
so Thank you. You're awesome. Kelly Steiner And if you're not signed up to my Weekly
Calm newsletter, head to the link in the show notes and you can sign up to that. It comes out
every single Friday in a similar way to the podcast comes out. And it's just a bit of background about
my life. A little few things I've learned this week. Some wisdom, just little things. It's your Weekly Calm. All
kinds of interest. And you get to find out how my book's going. The Gift of No Choice. So, let's
move on with today's show. Otherwise we're having a really long intro and I don't like long intros. I like
to get on with the show. So, the universality of life's dualities. Everybody knows about
the light and dark and the yin yang and the day and night and the good and bad. Alan Watts
talks about the yin yang all time You have that circle with the two fish. One fish is black with
a white eye and one fish is white with a black eye. And they're swimming in this pool together. We
know it's not so much, we like to think they're all equal. We like to think that it's all a
balance and all that But it's very rarely a balance. It's very rarely equal. Some people have some of the
good or some of the white. The light and some people have more of the, you know, that's life. It's
not fair. And if you're expecting it to be fair and exactly all yin and yang and perfect for everybody,
it's just not going to happen. But the reality is you cannot have one without the other. And this is
where years ago I came up with the analogy of A stick. Then you imagine your life is
a stick. Your emotions are along that and all your experiences and all your joys and lows all along this
one stick. One end of the stick, you've got all your brilliant experiences. Right at the very end are your
best experiences. The ultimate highs in life. And as you go down slowly towards the centre, those
joys become slightly less, slightly... are just not so powerful, but little joyous moments, the little
things and all that. And then as you go towards the other end, they're the thing more mundane things that
do in the hoovering, things you don't enjoy that much.
visiting some family, or maybe visiting the doctors, or when you're sick, or when terrible things happen to you, getting
to the right to the end, which the most awful things, or maybe you lose a loved one, things like
that and That's the stick. It's the stick of life, the stick of spectrum, whatever you want to call it.
I don't know. But the problem is what we want to do is we try to chop the stick in
half and we try to get rid of the half that we don't want. I don't like any of those
things. They're horrible. I only want the joyous ones. I just want to be happy. So we want to be
on the right hand side of the stick all the time. So what we do is we try to deny
the left side of the stick by chopping it off. All that does is bring the end of all the
bad things closer. And
then we get more annoying we chop it off again and brings it closer. Until you end up with a
stick that's so short that you cannot experience the life on the both ends. It becomes so muddy. So
you imagine you've got this massive huge pond and you're putting in all kinds of things from your life, the
good and bad experiences. And it starts muddying the waters and all that. And then you try to clear it.
If you've got the extremes, that's not too bad. You've got a big pond. But if the pond is that
small and the stick is that short, there's no room or there's no gap, there's no space between the experiences.
But all the experience is still going to be there. You're not going to chop that end of the stick
off and then not have bad stuff happen. It just doesn't work that way. I really wish when I broke
my neck and the all the million monkeys were up there typing away on their karmic typewriters and they went,
ah, Stevie's had a bad time. We're gonna just give him a good bucket for the next couple of years.
It doesn't work like that. I thought I had my fair share and the amount of times I thought, I've
had my fair share. That's done now. Surely it's got to be better now. Surely things have just got to
be on the up yeah More comes along. You can guarantee that. Almost guaranteed like taxes. I can't
remember someone saying, Mark Twain or someone was guaranteed bad news and taxes or something. But yeah, you cannot chop
one end off and then still expect to enjoy the highs, enjoy with the wonderful things with the things the
other end not there. So the whole idea is don't deny them.
Love whatever arises, whether it's on the left side or the right side, whatever it is, go, where am I?
Where am I to my stick? To the right is where happiness and experiences exist because
happiness is not contentment. Contentment is just, huh, everything's okay.
Happiness is, hey, I'm really happy. This is a good experience. Like listening to your favourite song or you're driving
along in the car and your best tune comes on and it's like, that's a happy experience. You're not going
to stay there all the time because that's not life. But we expect and want to be there. That's the
problem. And now on the other side you get all the negative, the things are not quite so nice. And
you cannot deny them. And I see this in the spiritual realm quite a lot. Not in the traditional spiritual
realm, but in the bypassing spiritual realm where you want to get rid of all the negative. Get rid of
negative people in your life. Get rid of anybody that's bringing you down and things like that. And there's some
merit to it if you're not able to cope with your life. But the idea is to build up a
resilience, to build up a wisdom and a heart that you can be in the world, be with them, but
not be affected by them. When
you work that out, let me know. It's not so easy. And I can sit here and I could talk
about it and I can do all that. I can do all the work. But I don't find it easy
find it quite difficult at times. And I always remember after a few years of meditating doing work.
My daughter come in and she told me something. She said something. And I let it rip. I chowed her
And she stood down she took it. And she took it. And she just looked up and said at the
end, that's a very Zen master of you, isn't it? And I don't know if I laughed, but I think
I did. But yeah god right back at you. But we're not saints. We're humans. We're trying our best. We're
a work in progress. Even Zen masters I know are work in progress. They don't always get it right. Their
wisdom is knowing you're not always going to get it right. If you muddy the water too much
with too short a stick you end up with a life that you're so overwhelmed and
you'll that you cannot tell the difference between a good and bad experience. Everything seems to be one. You might
be out walking in a forest, but you're bringing all the bad with you because both ends of the stick
are in the same place. And can you grow the stick? Probably. I don't know. I haven't thought the analogy
completely through. But you can certainly sit down and meditate. And there's ways you can embrace and grow the stick.
Or grow space between the experiences. Because experiences on very often not multiple things.
They're either one place on the stick or another place. One place in your spectrum of highs or lows.
Experiences. So, practical tips that you can do to help create a gap
between these things. Practice gratitude. Just every morning, think of three things in your head that you're grateful for.
Your pillow, your quilt, the house. The next day, the kettle or the water,
the electricity. You know about those things, you wouldn't be getting your coffee, would you? Get in the car and
go, thank you for starting. We blame the car when it doesn't. We didn't thank it the other 365 times
that it did start. We
tend to only ever go at the kettle when it breaks down. We don't go, hey, thank you kill
Some of us may, but I don't think a lot of us do. I do it sometimes
um So practicing gratitude rewires the brain to be appreciative of the whole stick. So you no longer don't want
to be in the bad areas because you can appreciate the fact you don't stay there. I spoke about that
a lot in the last week's podcast. And seek a perspective. Understand that
everybody's trying their best. Everybody's doing what they can from where they are. No one's got it sorted.
No one's waking up every day and having a blissful, wonderful day. Even if they may say they are on
social media, trust me, they're not. The other way you can do is mindfulness and meditation. Head
over to, I'll put a link in the show notes, but Inner Peace Meditations podcast. There's about 30 meditations there
now that you can go over and listen to. They're meditations that I've wrote, I've set them in, and ones
to put you to sleep, ones to wake you up, ones to get you through the day. And the latest
one is A Body Reset for more energy, calmness, and confidence. So
the other thing and and the final thing I've really got to embrace the whole stick is acceptance.
Accept the whole stick, all the experiences. Don't try to deny any of them. The more you accept them all,
including the negative, including the bad times, accept it for what it is. And then
you can embrace it. Then you take control of it. You take control of your life. And then you really
enjoy the better times. You actually enjoy the better times way more when you keep including the rough times in
your life as well, rather than denying it. So that's the stick analogy. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope
you got something from it. If you did, leave a review. That would be awesome. Thank you to Kelly, Steiner
and Laura for donating a coffee this week. You too can support the podcast. Just go to the link below
in the show notes. thankyousteven.com. If you want to join up to the weekly newsletter, go to the link in
the show notes where you can sign up as well.
Take care. I love you and I hope you have an awesome week.
