Why do you not recognise yourself any more? Because your glass got filled by everybody except you.
You are born an empty glass. Then everybody starts pouring. Parents, school, the person who treated you badly at sixteen, the films, the adverts, the culture you visited once. By the time you look in it, you are drinking swamp water made of other people's choices, and it never quenched anything. When I hit the bottom, it was like somebody took the base out of the glass and emptied it. I still had food, care and health. I had no personality left at all. That turned out to be the good bit.
One thing to try: Name one thing in your glass that you never actually chose. Pour that one out.
In this episode
(1:33) The ego forms and the pouring starts
(2:38) Right down to the hair colour we look for
(4:12) Trying to cram new things into a full glass
(5:18) A glass full of everybody else's stuff
(6:20) Somebody took the bottom out of mine
(8:06) Swamp water never quenched anybody's thirst
(9:17) You are the empty glass. Being nothing, you are everything
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Why do you not recognise yourself any more?
Because your glass got filled by everybody except you.
The heart of it
You arrive as an empty glass, and it has no lid.
Everything anybody poured in is still in there, and the glass does not get bigger.
You are not the contents. You are the glass.
The usual question is whether it is half full or half empty, which misses the point entirely.
You are born empty. Then the pouring starts. Your parents. School. Their politics and their religion. The careers teacher. Somebody who treated you badly at sixteen, which is why you have avoided a particular hair colour ever since without ever quite knowing why. Films. Adverts. A fortnight in a country you visited once.
By your late teens it is full, and you are certain you filled it yourself. I was. Nobody could tell me anything at seventeen.
Then life carries on. You meet people, you travel, you find out things. And you want to put some of that in, and there is no room, so you cram it round the edges and end up overwhelmed.
Which is why people reach their thirties and forties and say they do not recognise their own life. They love their children and cannot work out where the last twenty years went, and none of it looks like what they wanted at nine.
What is in there is swamp water made of other people's choices, and it has never once quenched anything. So we drop something nice in and hope it seeps through. A night out, a new phone, a new relationship. It helps for a few hours. It is still a swamp.
Mine got emptied for me. Not by breaking my neck, not by going bankrupt, not by being cheated on. Somebody ended a relationship, and overnight it was as though the bottom had come out of the glass.
I still had a roof, food, care and my health, and none of it mattered. Ask me to describe myself as a person and I could not have told you.
That turned out to be the good bit.
Being nothing, you are everything.
Kalu Rinpoche
One small thing to try
Pour some of it out, one thought at a time.
Next time a strong opinion turns up, ask whose it is. Oh, that is my dad's. That is my careers teacher's. That is a film I watched at fourteen.
Then leave it with them. You do not have to carry somebody else's luggage for forty years.
And then start filling it deliberately. What you choose has a completely different taste from what you were handed.
Questions people ask
Do I have to lose everything for this to happen?
No, and I would not wish it. Mine went the fast way and it was not pleasant. The slow way is sitting quietly and emptying it a bit at a time, which is less dramatic and considerably kinder.
Are all my opinions somebody else's?
Not all. But go through them honestly and you will find fewer of them are yours than you assumed, and the ones you defend hardest are often the ones you inherited.
What should I fill it with?
Whatever actually nourishes you rather than whatever is nearest. The test is simple. When you drink it, are you less thirsty afterwards?
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
letting-go · ego · purpose
Read the transcript
Hey, welcome to this week's podcast.
The podcast that gives you a little inner peace when you need it most and you have it least. I'm
Steven Webb, your host, and the podcast is called Stillness in the Storms. Now I want to talk about a
metaphor this week and a concept that I've been talking about quite a bit in the Inner Peace Academy that
I run. And throughout October, you can join the Inner Peace Academy Half Price to celebrate going over the
50,000 likes on Facebook. I know it isn't about the numbers, but it is about the numbers and it isn't,
if you know what I mean. It makes me makes my ego feel good. I still have an ego. We
all have an ego. There's nothing wrong with an ego. It's just how we use it and what we do
with it. So if you can share this podcast, if you can support it by giving it giving a review
or even just putting a comment, really, really appreciate that. But I want to talk about this
metaphor of, we often get asked that, is your glass half full or half empty? I want to change that
metaphor around a little bit and think of it as your life. When
you're very young, when you're born, you're an empty glass. That's
what you are. You're a blank canvas. Pure emptiness. Or some might say you're pure love. But you're pure you
You haven't got your thoughts and beliefs. You haven't got your personality yet. In effect, your ego.
That doesn't develop yet for a few months. You just want safety, warmth, food, nourishment.
But as you grow, especially when your ego starts to form, we start to fill this glass with what we
think cleanses our thirst. And as we fill this glass, we're choosing what goes into it. What we like we
put into it. But unfortunately the glass has no lid and it has no choice but to receive whatever's
given to us. So if we end up with Figure in our lives that are beating us. That also goes
into the glass. Or somebody that is forcing us to have a certain belief, that goes into the glass. Or
perhaps religion or a belief that a certain thing is right. You know, you may have a certain way of
looking at politics, your parents. And as we're growing up, they put that in the glass as well. And then
we have we form opinions on virtually everything. You know, whether it's the type of films we like. Type of
music we like. Any kind of entertainment. Even right down to in that glass it's whether we like certain hair
colour on the kind of partners we're seeking. We might date someone when we're 15, 16 years old
and they might treat us not very nice and therefore the rest of our lives we won't go with somebody
with the same colour hair as them because it gives us a trigger and a reaction whenever we come across
them again. So that's what this glass has been filled with. And it gets filled up with everybody else's opinion,
everybody else's thoughts. From our parents to our grandparents to our careers teachers to our friends, our
peers, our enemies or what we deem as enemies. Disney movies. Everything. Everything is filling this glass.
So we get to a stage where this glass is a full To say, the glass doesn't grow this This
is the other problem. Your glass can only hold so much. So you get to a point as a teenager,
you're happy with your glass. You filled it. You don't realise everybody else has filled it, but you think you
filled it. And then you start going through life. Because as a teenager, you know everything. I did. As a
teenager, my glass is full. I'm not interested in your opinion. I've got my opinion and I'm sticking to my
opinion and that's it.
As we start to go through life, we start to come across other people. We experience different things. We start
opening up. We develop more empathy and compassion we We experience more things in life. We might go on
holiday and experience a different culture. And then we're kind of wanting to put this in the glass, but we
don't really have much room.
We're trying to cram it in the glass. We're trying our best to fit it in here and fit it
in there. But it doesn't work. So we end up overwhelmed. We end up like... And we end up
wanting to be a bit more like the new things we're discovering. But
the glass is so full we don't even recognise who we are. So... It's the reason why so many great
teachers in the past suddenly realised in their mid-30s
that I don't recognise myself.
And we go wandering and we're looking for ourselves. We don't recognise the life we're living. You know, we love
our kids, but we're like, what happened? I blinked my eye and here I am. Here
I am 20 years later. I'm not living any of the things I thought I was going to live when
I was nine ten years old with all those ambitions in my life. So
we've ended up with a glass that's full of everybody else's stuff. And
that's why we don't recognise ourselves. But here's the thing, what do we do about it?
We have to realise that that's not us. We
have to realise realise that it's not us and we have to empty the glass. And this is the most
terrifying thing. And you hear about people waking up overnight. Eckhart Tolle was one. I would say I
had the same thing with A Dark Night of the Soul when I was 40. When I found myself single.
And it can happen at any point to anybody and it doesn't have to be a big thing in life.
You know, I broke my neck and ended up paralysed I didn't do it. I went bankrupt I didn't do
it. I was cheated on. That didn't do it. But someone finished with me and it just took away everything.
I'd wake up in the morning and I had, I felt like I had nothing the roof over my head.
Still have food. Still had my care. Still had my health. But none of that mattered. I'd lost everything.
And my it was like overnight someone had taken the bottom out of the glass and emptied it.
I was no personality at all. If someone come and said to me, well, explain to me as a person,
I'd go, I don't know what I am.
So I had that moment of, ah, now I can fill this glass with what I want to fill it
with. Unfortunately, not everybody gets that opportunity of what's called the dark night of the soul where the ego says,
I give up. You're on your own. Everything I've done for 40 years hasn't helped, so I'm out of
here for a few days to give you this opportunity to step in. So
if you haven't got that, you're gonna have to do it the hard way. You're gonna have to literally get
rid of the water bit by bit. And you do that by sitting down on the cushion You do that
by meditating. You do that by reading books. Recognising what you aren't, which is really fundamental.
Recognising that you're not all these thoughts and opinions and beliefs. Recognise who those thoughts are. Oh, that's
my dad's opinion. Oh, that's my uncle's opinion. Oh, that's my career's teacher at school opinion. That's theirs let Leave
those opinions to them. Don't take them with you. Don't do their heavy lifting for them. Do yours.
And then it comes down to when you do start doing this, you can then rebuild and fill that
glass with what truly gives you your nourishment. What truly clenches your thirst.
Because that swamp water in your glass that's made up by everybody else doesn't clench your thirst. That's why you're
unhappy. That's why you're miserable. That's why you find it really hard to find happiness. We're putting in
the odd little nice thing we enjoy, hoping that it's gonna to seep through to the rest of our lives.
It doesn't. It's temporary. The good night out. The new boyfriend. The new girlfriend. The new um
stereo the The new phone. The upgrades. They're all shoved into that swamp that makes us feel a little bit
better for a few hours. We're still in the swamp. So we got to drain that swamp completely, nearly. And
I come across a wonderful poem by Kula Rinpoche. And it goes like this. You live in an illusion
and the appearance of things. There is a reality, but you do not know this. When you understand
this, you will see that you are nothing.
Fundamentally, you're none of the things in the glass. You are the empty glass. And
being nothing, you are everything. You
can fill the glass with what you want. So
if you want to fill it with love and compassion and self-help books and the movies you want, do it
with what floats your boat, what clenches your thirst. So the thing is, if you fill that glass with what
you want, when you drink it, you feel fulfilled. You feel like as if that
thirst is nourished. If
somebody else gives you the meal of their choice, you're like, yeah, that was all right. But if you choose
the meal, if you choose the drink, the problem is we haven't chose the meal or the drink. We've chose
to allow other people to fill our glass for us. If this makes sense, let me know.
Now then you can support my work if you go to my website and go click on the top, Patreon,
and you can support me there. Just the price of a cup of coffee per month will help to support
my work helped me to release more guided meditations and podcast And it helps me
to produce more by maybe I can employ someone to do better editing. But I really appreciate you
listening. Share the hell out of it. I want the whole world to hear it. You know, my ego is
still alive and well. But fill your glass with what you choose to put into it. But first of all,
you've got to empty some of it out. And you do that by finding the gap in your thoughts. Finding
the gap in your opinions. Check
out my other podcast. Check out a podcast that... If I think too much, can I still meditate? Because that
will help you to create the gap. To enable you to do this. Take care guys. I do a new
podcast every Monday night. Yeah, check out my website for free meditations and I would love for you to become
a patron. Go to StevenWebb.com. Links are at the top. Have an amazing week. Namaste.
