If this were my last podcast, what would I want to leave you with? Let everything happen to you. No feeling is final.
That is Rilke, and it is where this one started. No script, just a cup of coffee. You cannot change the present moment. You cannot grow your hair, lose weight, get younger or stop the rain in this second, and yet we spend enormous energy arguing with what has already arrived. Imagine a rainbow with only two colours in it. That is a life lived in a narrow band of feeling. Watching the film Albatross and hearing the ending changed how I think about all of it.
One thing to try: Ask one question today. What small colour can I let into my life?
In this episode
(2:53) You cannot change the present moment
(4:06) Arguing with what has already arrived
(5:17) The hero on the uncomfortable cushion
(6:44) The good times need nothing from you
(7:39) Born, pain, desire, joy, rain, shine. All of it
(9:12) Not every voice is healthy, but all of them carry weight
(10:37) Rilke, and go to the limits of your longing
(12:44) A rainbow with only two colours
(15:28) What would love be without loss
(18:06) What small colour can I let in
With gratitude to
Senga, Jess, Anita, Sue, Evelyn and Glenn
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
If you had one more chance to say something useful, what would you say?
That is the question I sat down with. A cup of coffee, no script, and a line from a Rilke poem that had stopped me flat that morning. Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
What follows is the short answer, from being paralysed, being bankrupt, being cheated on, and the days that ended up in hospital.
The heart of it
You cannot change the present moment. You can only change what you do next.
Every voice inside you is valid. They do not all carry the same weight.
You cannot grow your hair in this moment. You cannot lose weight in it, get younger in it, stop the rain in it. You cannot even change a thought once it has turned up. And still we spend enormous energy arguing with what has already arrived.
I used to preach the other thing, turn your negative thoughts into positive ones. It does not work like that. Half the thoughts we file as negative are something in us doing its job, keeping watch, and we throw them out as rubbish.
If we exile half the emotions that we don't like, we lose half of the information.
The second half of it is about range. Imagine getting to the end and being asked why you only chose to see half the rainbow. Why you only played the first two albums by your favourite band. Most of us narrow life down to the feelings we like and then live in that thin band.
Grieving and love is the same thing. It's a strong emotion, just the opposite ends. It's the same stick.
I understood that properly watching the film Albatross, when the narrator said that for the first time he knew what grieving meant. You cannot saw off the end of the stick you do not want.
I heard a good question the other day. Somebody asked a chatbot why the painful memories stay when the happy ones fade, and the answer came back that the happy times already did their job. The hard ones stay until you learn from them.
I do not tie this one off neatly. The episode wanders, and so does the thinking, and I am fine with that.
One small thing to try
Ask yourself once today: what needs accepting right now?
Then something from the other half of it. Put on an album you would never choose. Ask somebody what their favourite book is and read it even though you are sure it is not for you. Pick up a colour you do not like. What small colour can I let into my life is the question I would leave you with.
One more I try to live by, while I am here. Meet people where they are, instead of expecting them to come to where you are.
Questions people ask
Is this really the last episode?
No, and I sincerely hope it is nowhere near. It was a thought experiment on a quiet afternoon with a cup of coffee.
Do I need to know the Rilke poem?
No. I read it out and explain why one line of it knocked me sideways. It is called Go to the Limits of Your Longing, in the Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows translation.
Is it a heavy episode?
Less than the title suggests. It ends with me heading off to a family barbecue, and asking you to write in and tell me your favourite barbecue food.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
acceptance · vulnerability · spiritual-journey
Read the transcript
Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling
is final.
I'm just sat here with a cup of coffee next to no script, and I just want to record a
podcast based
on partly what I've just read, a poem by Rainer Rilke. And that
line literally stopped me in my tracks and blew my socks off. I will return to that line and that
quote at the end of the podcast, and I will read the poem to you.
But if this was my last podcast, which I sincerely hope it is not,
what would be the one or two bits of advice at this stage in my life that I would leave
you with, that I think would be most beneficial?
And I think it'd be a couple of things.
Hi, I'm Steven Webb, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you to suffer a little
bit less.
So today is about living. Today is about a little bit of wisdom and advice. It's about acceptance, and it's
about not becoming stuck. It's about getting on with life, no matter what your situation you're
in. But just before I move on to the podcast itself, I've got to thank some dear
friends and dear friends of the podcast and the meditations. Without them, you'd be listening to adverts now,
and Christ knows what they would be about. So I want to thank Sangha, Jesse, Anita, Sue, Evelyn,
and Glenn. Glenn, huge donation. Thank you so much. You
guys keep the adverts away from all my podcasts. I've always said I'll never put adverts in them, but there's
so many downloads now that there's no way I could do it without you guys. So thank you so much.
If you wanted to support or you wanted to hear about the Inner Peace meditations or join my weekly calm,
just head over to StevenWebb.uk or step One thing that I've learned more than anything else, being paralysed,
being bankrupt, being cheated on, being in severe pain, bleeding, and
having the most horrendous days ending up in a hospital and in the most dire situations, is
accept the moment wholeheartedly for what it is. Because guess what? You cannot change it. There's nothing you can do
to change the present moment. You cannot grow your hair longer. You cannot lose weight in this moment. You cannot
get younger. You cannot change the weather. You cannot change the colour of your house
there's just nothing you can do once the moment has arrived. You cannot even change your thoughts.
I talk about this quite often about people
always say, and I used to preach this all the time, just change your negative thoughts into positive thoughts. Just
think positively. Well, it just doesn't work like that because when you have a thought, and what's deemed negative is
very often actually positive thought because it's protecting you or, like, alerting you to something, and we have a
bad judgement of it. We're like, that's bad. We don't want those thoughts when really we do need those thoughts
sometimes.
So you cannot change, even change a thought. So when it's arrived. It's there already.
You can change what you do with it, the same as the present moment.
So as soon as the present moment is already here, we spend so much of our strength and so much
of our mind power and our energy arguing with was already here.
I wish it wasn't this way. I wish it wasn't raining.
Just, grab the umbrella.
It's used so much that I don't know if I even like the phrase anymore. It's like learn to dance
in the rain, but it's true. There's so much depth to that brilliant quote.
It's learn to get comfortable on the cushion you're on, but not too comfortable.
Don't get too comfortable dancing in the rain, you never want it to stop raining.
But while it's raining, dance. While it's uncomfortable, be uncomfortable.
You know, if you're deep in meditation, scratch the itch. I never want to be alone. Don't worry about it.
Don't worry about getting rid of some of your suffering, because trust me, pain will come along sooner or later.
You won't get rid of it all. But what we can do is just learn to accept that moment.
And very often, sometimes we become the hero of all that pain. I spoke about this quite a length
last week. That hero that suffers from the uncomfortable cushion, yeah, give
it some energy. Give it some, I
don't know, some empowerment, but don't give it too much because you won't be able to move on from it.
That hero also has to have the drive to not only accept the present moment, but also to have the
drive to change the present moment. And suffering either pulls us inward, and
we rest there, or it pushes us forward and allow for both to be true because both are true, and
both of them change simultaneously and change during the day, change during the hour. If you're anything like me or
every human I've ever come across, you know, your energy and your energy levels can change quicker than the weather
can change. I heard a great question the other day. It was a guy having a conversation with ChatGPT,
and he asked ChatGPT, why do I remember the tougher times when I'm embarrassed or when I'm in
shame or when I was feeling hurt over the times when I was happy?
And ChatGPT replied with, well, the times you were happy already did their job.
And boom, just like that. Absolutely.
When things are happy, when things are okay, there's nothing you need to do with that. It's already there. That's
it. It's okay But the times of hard, the times of pain, they, they stay
there until you learn the lesson. They stay there until you've either suffered enough and
you do something about it,
or at some point in your life, a similar pain will show up and you've got the muscles there, and
you go, I know what to do with this moment because that happened years and years ago And there's no
permanent end to the pain or wanting
it's Samsara is, samsara is like the map of the conscious life. It's just
the constant cycle of born, pain, suffering, desires, wanting,
happiness, sadness, the rain and shine. That's life. That's what's so beautiful about life.
It's all of it rolled into one.
It's that, the whole spectrum, the
whole rainbow, the whole emotions, from pure enlightenment to shame and guilt, and
everything in between So when I talk about life and sorry this podcast is going a bit here and there
and flipping to and throw but
you know, grab a pillow and experience it. Enjoy the ride, no matter if the ride is a bit uncomfortable
We're
partly in control. We're partly in control of what happens next So if you do grab a wonderful metaphor, actually,
just thinking about my head. Wonderful matter is grab a pillow, get a little comfortable, but keep your shoes nearby.
That's the whole point, and When we start embracing all of our voices and all of our emotions inside of
us, and I'm not saying give them all equal weight. I'm not saying every emotion is valid and every emotion
is equal, every truth is the same truth, and every truth is perfectly equal. No, they're
not. And every single voice is not equally, how can I say Healthy
But all of them do have some weight somewhere. And depending on where you're to and what you're doing, you
know, if you're climbing a mountain, that voice of hunger is probably not the most important one to have.
The voice of fear or anxiety, absolutely, that has a lot of weight in that moment. But if you're sat
and you've got nothing to do, and you're having to eat for four days, and things are relatively comfortable, that
voice of, hey, I'm hungry. What's in the cupboard That voice is valid and got weight in that moment.
So all voices and all of our emotions and everything that we experience
should be just experience it, enjoy it, embrace it, and
learn to treat every voice as a friend in some way.
Hey, what are you telling me? Why are you showing up now?
Thank you for being here for me.
And it's the same with emotions. If we exile half the emotions that we don't like,
we lose half of the information.
And it brings me back to Rainer Rilke. He was a Bohemian Austrian, and he was a poet
rather than a traditional spiritual teacher. But I think he'd done so much for the spiritual teaching, and
it comes from the poem, go to the Limits of Your Longing And
the poem appears in one of his books, and it was translated, so it may not be perfect words. As
far as I understand and what I read about him, because when that poem just blew my mind, I had
to go and find out a bit about him. And he had a lot to do with the Russian spiritual
teaching and the English translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Burrows, I think.
I'm trying to do it off the top of my head now.
But the line, let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror, just keep going. No
feeling is final. And I think living life means experiencing everything, being part of everything.
No feeling needs to be banished. No feeling needs to get the run of the whole house either. I think
that's really important. You know, it's like a rainbow. Just imagine if
Now, I don't know what the afterlife is, and I don't really take much time in thinking about it.
I think my version of what the afterlife is is completely irrelevant because we've got to think about we're living
here now. And, but you imagine if you did have an afterlife and there was 30 seconds or
the elevator pitch, as some people might say, and you had that opportunity and someone had that opportunity to say
to you, and imagine if they looked up and said to you, oh, by the way, why did you only
choose to see half the rainbow
Why did you only play the first two albums of your favourite band?
That's what it would be like not living your life to the full, just living in the low
spectrum of emotions or living in the high spectrum of emotions. Do you imagine spending your whole time just walking
through forests and loving life and loving everybody and never experiencing the despair and the pain?
That wouldn't be much joy either, because it'd become normal.
And I think the more we realise that we have this whole spectrum of emotions. So you take
evolution. For several million years, if not more than that, humans didn't have these
complex emotions. You know, dogs and cats have a few emotions, but they don't have many. They don't laugh and
smile. They don't play, tell jokes. They're not scheming and plotting. Well, maybe cats are, but I don't think dogs
are. You know, they have a feel good or they have a feel fear, but they don't have all the
complex emotions that humans have. So we're living in a most amazing time where humans are
now experiencing the biggest range of emotions that any evolved living thing on
the planet has ever experienced, and you are at the cutting edge of that. You are literally at the most
forefront of all of these emotions. You can see more colours. You can see in more details
but You can literally look across the room and see in such details anything you
look at with your eyes. How incredible is that? With your ears, you can hear music and different notes. You
can feel emotions. We
spend too much time trying to narrowed down how we're living life because we want to narrow it down to
just being happy or just being comfortable or the paints that we like and the
colours that we like. We have a favourite colour then I have a favourite colour, earthy tones. You know, green
and say to my favourite colours. They happen to be in now, which is brilliant because I think all decorating
has suddenly caught up with me, or they're my favourite at the moment. I don't know. But I think we
just narrow down what we like, and we stay there.
I would love to try different things. It Doesn't mean to say I'm going to like them. It doesn't mean
to say I love feelings of depression or feelings of sadness and shame and guilt.
But what would life be if you did not experience them?
What would love be if you did not experience pain and loss? And when I watched the film
Elbatross and the narrator at the end talking about the birds on Midway Island not able to leave because of
the plastic pollution, when
he looked up and said, for the first time, I understood what
grieving meant
Grieving and love is the same thing. It's a strong emotion, just
the opposite ends. It's
the same stick. It's the same
experience We don't want to chop the stick down to just the end we want because how
will we know the difference? I think I'm going to leave the podcast there because my daughter's just turned up,
and it's great to see her, and we're going to head up to her family barbecue. Seems like I'm always
having barbecues at the moment, but it's summer. That's what we do. I love the burnt barbecue food. Um, drop
me an email, drop me a comment on any of these in the review. And in the review, just tell
me your favourite barbecue food. Look, just if this was my last podcast, it would
be learn to be comfortable with the present moment because you cannot change the present moment,
and try to experience everything. Put on a new album. Pick
up a different type of paint if you're an artist. You
know, experience different feelings. Ask the uncomfortable question. Read a book by an artist that you've never even thought about.
Say to someone, what's your favourite book And just read it, even if you don't think it'll fit you You
might be surprised Other wisdom I could offer? And just some simple, like little things. Meet people where they
are. Stop expecting them to meet us exactly where we are. Try to understand rather than
overstand Remember there's multiple truths. Remember all voices are valid, but they're not all got the same weight.
And if I was to leave you with a small practice this week, it would be, just ask, what needs
accepting right now? What needs accepting right now?
Is there a feeling? Is there a voice?
What am I refusing to see or hear? What small colour can I let into my life? So there you
go. That's my podcast, and hopefully it's not going be my last. But that's my thoughts. You know, accept this
moment completely and wholeheartedly
and expand your range. Just start to enjoy everything. Stay awake, enjoy life,
see the little leaf on the tree, see all the colours.
Ah, yeah. And just thank you to everybody that donates and supports and the emails.
Thank you to everybody on my weekly calm, and Look, take care. I'll speak to you soon, and
