Do you want to solve 99% of your problems? Then stop numbing them and go and find what is causing them.
We are very good at numbing. We put a plaster over the top and carry on. If you have a thorn in your finger, a plaster is no help. You have to take the thorn out. Meditation is not there to remove today's suffering. It is there so you can meet tomorrow's. We think we have five hundred problems. Really we have a hundred bigger ones underneath, and most of them share a root. It is like walking down the road complaining about the stone in your shoe.
One thing to try: Grab paper. List what is bothering you, then draw a line from each to what is underneath it. Watch the list shrink.
In this episode
(1:36) We want to numb, and numbing is the problem
(3:50) Meditation is for the suffering that comes later
(5:46) Accepting this moment is not pretending it is fine
(6:21) Brushing it under the carpet solves nothing
(7:38) The thorn in the finger and the useless plaster
(10:08) Five hundred small problems, a hundred real ones
(11:21) Take a piece of paper and find the root
(13:10) The stone in your shoe
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Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Do you want to solve most of your problems?
Then stop numbing them and go and find what is causing them. That is the whole episode, and it is harder than it sounds because numbing works briefly and looking does not.
The heart of it
A plaster is no use when there is a thorn in your finger.
Problems branch like a tree. Most of yours share a root.
Meditation is not there to remove today's suffering. It is there so you can meet tomorrow's.
Take the headache. You take a painkiller. It comes back so you go to the doctor and get a stronger one. It comes back again. At some point somebody actually has to work out why your head hurts.
We do this with everything. We put something over the top and carry on. A toxic relationship gets a wedding or another child rather than a conversation about what is wrong underneath it.
And there is a version of this in spiritual circles that I want to be clear about, because it sounds like what I teach and is the opposite. Accepting the present moment does not mean the present moment is fine. You accept it in order to see it clearly, and you see it clearly in order to do something about it. Brushing it under the carpet is not acceptance, it is avoidance in nicer clothes.
Here is how the arithmetic usually works. You feel as though you have five hundred problems. Under those are about a hundred bigger ones. Under those there may be two or three, and one job or one situation may quietly be generating most of it.
Solve the root and dozens of the branches disappear on their own, because they were never separate problems.
And I will give you the least glamorous answer available, which is also the most reliable. Sort your sleep out and eat sensibly. Everybody needs sleep, and going without it manufactures problems in every other part of your life.
One small thing to try
Take a piece of paper and follow one problem down.
Why is this happening? And under that, why is that happening? Keep going past the point where it feels obvious. The root is usually two or three levels below the thing you have been complaining about.
Then take the stone out of your shoe. We walk miles complaining about the stone. Stopping, sitting down and removing it takes forty seconds and we would rather limp.
Questions people ask
Is numbing always wrong?
No. Sometimes you genuinely need to get through the afternoon, and a painkiller is a reasonable thing. It only becomes the problem when it is the whole strategy, because the dose only goes one way.
What if I cannot fix the root?
Some you cannot. Knowing which ones those are is worth a great deal on its own, because it stops you spending yourself on them and frees you for the ones you can move.
Why does it feel like life keeps knocking me down?
Because we are often standing where the traffic is and hoping it stops. Awareness is what lets you step aside. It does not end the knocks. It considerably reduces the number of them.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
acceptance · present-moment · suffering · zen
Read the transcript
So you want to solve 99% of your problems, and I get that.
I understand that.
And, you know, who wouldn't?
And in this podcast, I'm going to help you to solve most of them.
And there's really just a couple of simple things we can do
that would solve nearly all of our problems.
To get rid of some of that suffering that we're having every
day, all the time, coming back, standing up and boom, you're
knocked down.
Standing up and boom, you're knocked down again.
You know, that is.
It seems to be so normal for so many of us.
So in this podcast, I'm gonna give you a different perspective,
a different way of looking at your problems, different way of looking
at how we can suffer less.
I'm Stephen Webb, your host of Stillness in the Storms, and I help
you to have a little inner peace in the most difficult times
in life.
When I'm talking about problems, let's say the analogy of
a headache.
You get a headache, you take some painkillers.
If the headache gets worse or it's persistent, you go to the doctors.
The doctor gives you some more painkillers, stronger ones, and you
take them for a while, and then the headache comes back and
you go to the doctors.
And the doctor at that point might listen a little more.
He might decide to diagnose it and may even give you an X ray or
something or some kind of scan.
And then he may put you on some stronger painkillers until eventually,
at some point, you got to deal with a headache.
The problem is, we want to numb our suffering.
We want to numb problems.
When you look at the world at the moment, you know, the whole reason
why we have Black Lives Matter, the whole reason why we have
the.
The whole reason why we have the protests and the violence and
the looting and the anger and the frustration is simply because
we never dealt with the problems.
We tried to numb them.
We tried to put sticky tape over them.
Now, basically, you build your house on sand, it's going to fall.
You build your house on rock and firm foundations, and it's going
to be okay.
Well, the problem is governments are one of the biggest
organizations that are guilty of this.
They.
They build their house on sand.
And I say that.
And let me explain.
Nearly every policy they make, nearly every decision they make is
based on a reaction, just like going to the doctors and the doctors
prescribing the tablets.
That's what government's doing.
We have a problem arise.
Covid19 the government says, how can we deal with this?
How can we react well, they say respond, but really they're reacting
and they're always on the back feet.
They're always trying to guess, primarily because, and I don't
want to make this political, but both the UK and the US got rid
of the pandemic committees and the organizations in government.
They unfunded them in America, I think it's about two years ago,
and in the UK it was about six months before the pandemic.
And that is.
That's basically building your house on sand.
You know, you're basing it on what's happening now.
You know, if you want to get rid of 99% of your problems, base
what you're learning now on anything that might arise in future.
You know, when you're looking at sorting out your suffering, you
know, you're doing the meditation not to get rid of your
suffering now, but to be able to deal with the suffering later.
You're always going to have pain, you're always going to have
problems.
Life's always going to take its turn for the worst.
Life's always going to hand you something you don't want, hand
you something that is going to cause pain.
You know, when I broke my neck at 18, I wasn't planning that.
When my bankruptcy come, although now I can see the signs
of it, I wasn't planning it.
You know, hindsight afterwards, I can see, yeah, I can
see where that was going.
But at the time I couldn't.
I was trying to avoid it.
But I now realize that these things happen a lot of the time because
we didn't do our homework, we didn't build that foundation, we
didn't.
We didn't have the core roots.
And I talk about this quite a lot, the core values that are the
roots that hold the tree down.
A tree is the perfect example.
It has deep roots.
And when it does have deep roots, it doesn't have to worry about
the weather, it doesn't have to worry about the storms.
It can weather them no matter what.
When, when we have the core values in place, when we're ready
and planned for the future to some degree now, then, okay, you
cannot plan for everything and I cannot fix the problems you currently
got.
But there's a huge culture in the spiritualism, and I think it's
in most religions, and that is to brush everything away, to almost
accept things as they are.
Everything is okay, everything is fine.
And some of my teaching is about.
It's not my teaching, but some of the things that I find works for
me is to accept the present moment for what it is.
But that doesn't mean to say the present moment is okay, how it
is.
This is the paradox of Zen and the paradox of the real spiritual
world.
You have to accept the present moment, you have to see it with awareness
in order to be able to do something with it.
And just brushing it under the carpet, to use a phrase, just.
Just pretending it's not there, or numbing it or putting yourself
in a bubble, it's not going to deal with the problems.
It's not going to deal with your suffering.
You first have got to face the suffering face on.
And if you don't turn around and face your suffering and see the
suffering for what it is, how can you deal with it?
And going back to the headache analogy, you know, you can go to
the doctors, you can get the painkillers that'll make you feel
better temporarily, but at some point that headache is going
to come back.
Unless it's something temporary in your life.
You just had a headache for just a moment.
But in general, if there's an underlying cause of the suffering
of headache, until you deal with that underlying cause, you're
going to have to keep up in the painkillers, making them stronger,
stronger.
It's never going to go away.
It's just going to grow.
Just very much like being in a toxic relationship, you know, just
trying to stick the plaster over, just trying to perhaps have
another child or get married or do any of those things that you
think will repair a toxic relationship, just simply won't.
You have to deal with the underlying issues of what is causing
the problems.
You know, it's.
It's very much to keep the analogies going.
You know, if you get a thorn in your finger, it's no good putting
a plaster on it.
You got to take that thorn out until you take the thorn out.
You know, you could put numbing cream on it.
You can take painkillers, you can do all the things, and I'm sure
it'll make you feel better temporarily, but it won't solve your
problems.
What you have to do to solve your problems is to become aware
of what is causing them.
Become aware of where the anxiety is coming from, why the anxiety
is there, why the stress is there.
You know, if it's a particular thing causing you 90% of your stress,
ask yourself, why?
Why is this thing causing me my stress?
Is it congruent with how I feel?
Is it congruent with what I'm doing?
You know, if you're slogging yourself out at a job and not being
able to pay your bills, yet you're doing that job just to pay
your bills.
You're not going to be happy, you're going to be suffering.
And just looking for a quick bonus is not going to pay your bill.
It's not going to solve the problems.
Yes, it might mean you can pay your bills this week.
All right, next week, the week after, you're going to be suffering
again.
Your problems are going to be back.
So really, it does come down to becoming aware of what's underneath
your problems, what is causing the problems.
And once you become aware of that, so many of your problems will
go away and disappear.
And your problems tend to be like trees in the way they branch
out.
You'll have a couple of real big core issues underneath.
And when you solve those, most of the other ones will disappear
and they'll just disperse.
They won't be there anymore because problems escalate.
You know, you have two problems today and four problems
tomorrow and eight problems the next day, and they escalate from
the same origin.
So it's going back to.
It's almost the levels of problems.
You know, we're stressed today because we have 500 problems when
really we have 500 little problems and we have 100 bigger problems.
And those 100 bigger problems are the ones we look at.
And then you go underneath them and go underneath them.
And you might find your one job that you're doing that you're
really stressed about is creating 80% of your problems in
life.
So look to your life where you're most stressed.
Look to you in life where you're most struggling, you know,
and, and I can tell you now, you can solve most of your problems
by sorting your sleep out.
Sleep out and eating sensibly.
If you can get the amount of hours you need for your sleep, you'll
sort most of your problems out.
Every human, everybody needs sleep.
And you know, if you're not getting enough sleep, you will end
up with a knock on of so many other problems.
So to recap and wrap up this relatively short podcast, I just
want to just become aware of the root of a lot of your problems.
Just grab a piece of paper, you know, take some time out, look
at what is going on in your life that is causing most of your
problems.
Because, look, unless you become aware, unless you become aware
of what's really going on, you're really, you're never going
to be able to solve them unless you become aware of what's
creating the headache.
You're just gonna have to continuously take painkillers and
that.
That's the analogy of standing up in the road and get run over and
standing up in the road and getting run over.
And that's what it feels like.
It feels like life hits us again and again and again.
And it's hitting us because we're giving life the best chance
of hitting us.
You know, we're not edging our bets.
We're not.
We're not getting out of the way of the cars, to use that analogy.
We're not helping to tip the balance in our favor.
We're just hoping.
We're just hoping to.
At some point, things will let out, let off, let go.
I'm not quite sure of which one, which one of those I should
use, but, you know, that's the reality.
I just hope life would stop knocking me on my butt.
So we sit back and we wait for that time to happen.
Well, life is going to knock you on your butt, but it'll do it
a lot less if you become aware of what you can change and the best
chance and best odds.
So that's the way to solve 99% of your problems.
Become aware of what's causing them, what's creating the problem.
You know, we're basically walking down the road with a stone
in our shoes, complaining about the stone in our shoes.
You know, stop, sit down, take your shoe off, take the stone out,
put the shoe back on, and get back on with your journey.
I think that's the point.
And I know that's a simple analogy, but it works.
I'm Stephen Webb and I want to say thank you to my patrons.
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I'm trying to build up enough that we can do a Q and A each month.
I help you to find a little inner peace.
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This is Stillness in the Storms and I'm Stephen Webb and My
