How do you love yourself when society keeps telling you something is wrong with you? I was sat in the cathedral last night, and even a perfect cathedral has flaws in it.
How do you love yourself when society keeps telling you something is wrong with you? I was sat in the cathedral last night, and even a perfect cathedral has flaws in it.
It is not broken. It is a perfect cathedral exactly as it is. You have something like fifty six thousand thoughts a day, constantly arriving, and none of that means you are faulty. If you are a brilliant reader that is one thing, and if you are not, that is not a defect. Every time I accepted a thought and accepted the feeling, something eased.
One thing to try: Sit for one minute in the morning and ask what it would mean to love yourself today.
In this episode
(0:03) Loving ourselves, as individuals and as humans
(4:30) Building the YouTube channel, and the number I am chasing
(6:44) A perfect cathedral, with flaws in it, still perfect
(8:45) Fifty six thousand thoughts a day, arriving constantly
(11:12) Society telling you something is wrong when it is not
(15:53) Accepting each thought as it came, and what changed
(17:41) One minute a morning. What does loving myself mean?
With gratitude to
Senga, Audra, Sarah and Mark.
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
How do you love yourself when society keeps telling you something is wrong with you?
I was sat in Truro Cathedral last night with an hour to kill, looking down the length of it, and there is a kink in the middle.
The heart of it
It is not broken. It is a perfect cathedral exactly as it is, and if you look closely enough at anything you will find the flaw.
Love, as far as I can work out, is acceptance. If you love something you are not trying to change it.
The kink is real. They kept the trajectory of the eight hundred and fifty year old St Mary's church, realised halfway up that they were going to block the road, and adjusted. I noticed it on a map and thought the map was wrong. The chair of planning told me the story. Now I cannot unsee it, and now neither can you.
Then I thought about my dyslexia. I was diagnosed at seven or so, decided there was no point in reading, and faked the rest of my schooling. I would stand in the queue with the geeks and ask what they thought of the book, then use that in the lesson.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about dyslexia in David and Goliath as something that makes you navigate differently. And we only got the alphabet at all because rich people were fed up with their stock being nicked and wanted to count it. The poetry came later.
I have a mind that fires in about twenty colours at once. Right now, doing this, I am working hard not to follow every tangent it is throwing at me. That is a form of ADHD, which we labelled a problem, the same as dyslexia.
If you are a brilliant reader that is one thing. If you are not, that is not a defect.
And here is why loving yourself is the hard one. You have the inside knowledge. You know what you have done and what you think, and you know you are not the most compassionate person going. Spend a week in my head and you would find I mess up as much as anybody.
That is not a bad person. That is a human.
One small thing to try
Sit for one minute in the morning and ask what it would mean to love yourself today.
Hand on your heart if it helps. Then let whatever comes up come up, and accept each one as it arrives.
Every time I accepted a thought and accepted the feeling, something eased.
If the word love carries too much for you, swap it. What would it feel like to accept yourself entirely, exactly as you are?
Questions people ask
Does accepting myself mean never changing?
No, and it is the only ground from which change works. There is room to grow inside acceptance. There is none inside criticism.
Are dyslexia and ADHD really gifts?
I would not call them either good or bad. They are how some minds work, they only look like problems because they sit away from the average, and a fair number of the people we most admire in history had one or the other.
What if my thoughts are genuinely unpleasant?
Then you are like the rest of us. Most of mine are not kind or compassionate. Having them is not the measure. What you do with them is.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
self-compassion · love · acceptance · self-worth
Read the transcript
I want to talk about love. And I want to talk about, in particular,
how we love ourselves.
Not only as an individual, but as
humans, I guess.
And as I get older, I contemplate questions like that. Just the same as I think many people
do. And
I think we look at what love is and what it isn't and the older I get I think The
more I'm starting to narrow down that I feel love is just acceptance.
If you love something, you just purely accept it as it is. You don't try to change it. You don't
want it to be anything else.
In the last four weeks, five weeks that I've had a really hard time health-wise and since I was mayor,
it's been quite difficult transition for me.
Not... Moving so much from becoming mayor to a everyday
person. Still a city councillor, but being quite busy and then being quite ill. And
it's just given me a lot of room to think. I want to talk about it. I haven't done a
podcast for a little bit and I just want to have a conversation about what it means to love ourselves.
What it means for you to love yourself and Humans as a whole, there's a lot of hate in the
world. There's a lot of anger in the world. And what would it mean if we just turn
that love that we've got for so many others around onto ourselves first?
And that's what I want to talk about today in today's podcast. And if you stick go around to the
end, perhaps I can talk through my my own ignorance and share with you. Some of that ignorance
that you might be able to love yourselves a little bit more. I don't know. Who knows? I'm working on
it. But just before I do that, I'm Steven Webb and welcome to Stillness in the Storms podcast. It's been
about six weeks since I did an episode and it's purely because, like I said, I've been struggling with my
health quite a bit. And being paralysed, I'm in the position that I'm in. It's really, sometimes the
body doesn't want to play ball with my head and other things, and I've got to realign. And I just
want to say thank you to everybody that's just emailed me, wondered how I am, you know, Senga, Audra,
so many of you, Sarah. You know, Mark and everybody that's donated, emailed,
done a little review and just asked how I am and checked in with me. You guys, I just want
to give you such a big hug. Thank you. Feel that hug. Feel that bit of love because it means
so much. I do this podcast on a basis that I'm helping people through difficulties. But
I'm only a chapter ahead, that's all. And sometimes I'm not even a chapter ahead. Sometimes sometimes I'm right in
the mix with you guys. So, you know, people say maybe I relate a little bit more. Maybe because
I'm still not sorted and I don't think there is any sorted. So I just want to say a huge
thank you. It means the absolute world. And some amazing news. My Inner Peace Meditations podcast is
number one in Australia under religion. Go figure. This looks like 32 000
listens I've got a talent for putting people to sleep. Who would have guessed? Don't fall asleep in this episode
though. Stay awake in Stillness in the Storms. Head over to Inner Peace Meditations. There'll be a link in the
show notes to StevenWebb.uk with all the links to my podcast, ways you can help, ways you can follow me
and different things. Trying to build up my Youtube channel to a thousand um Likes followers, subscribers, whatever you
call it over there. Because I got about 620, but I just want to build it up a little bit.
So this podcast is actually a video as well, so you can watch it over there as well. But anyway,
going back, just like big thank you to you all. Let's get on with today's show. So I
was sat in the cathedral last night. I had a meeting. I had about an hour to kill. So I
sat in true Cathedral And it reminded me, when I was looking down the whole of the cathedral, there's a
kink. And these are beautiful buildings that this was the first cathedral built of this style
and this grandeur for 850 years in the Uk. The last one was Salisbury Cathedral. So go figure, we built
this cathedral. I say we, I didn't. But people from Cornwall built this cathedral 120
years ago. It was complete about then and so it's it's kind of crazy to think
when you sit in the cathedral and you got like people that would have been great granddads of people that
are alive today helped build the cathedral. Anyway, I digress slightly. But a couple of years after I joined the
council, I became the vice chair of planning. And suddenly I was looking of buildings around Toronto in a completely
different way. Who built that there? Why did they put that there it's something I had a whole new perspective
of the city that I grew up in. And I was looking at the cathedral on Google Maps I was
like, it's been halfway long it's crooked. That's never right. Perhaps the map's wrong. Perhaps the
photograph's wrong. And I mentioned it to the chair of planning and Morris Fellow, and he said, yeah they were
that when they were building it, you had the saint mary's church was the original 850 year old building They
didn't take it down. They kept on that same trajectory, and they realised that they would block the road, so
they had to change it halfway through. So you cannot... The problem is, now I know, and now I'm sharing
it with you, you cannot not see that kink. But it's not broken. It's fine it's It's a perfect cathedral
just the way it is. And if you look deeply on anything, even the most perfect cathedrals, they'll have flaws.
They'll diverse in some little way. And
it just made me think when I was sitting there thinking, right, well,
how do we love this cathedral? We just love and accept it the way it is. And
then I thought about my dyslexia. And I thought about the book that I read by Malcolm Gladwell, David and
Goliath, where he says about dyslexia in there was really it's a good trait to have because it helps us
to navigate life in a different way. Let's face it, we didn't have the alphabet until, what, the Persians come
up with the alphabet because the rich people were fed up with people nicking their stock. So they come up
with the alphabet in a way of writing, not for poetic song or poem reasons and all that. It was
literally so they could stock take to keep an eye on the minions that were stealing their stock. Yeah, that's
humans for you. Progress is not always the most romantic way but then We got
poetry and we got music because of diversity and because of differences we
got We probably even got fire because someone had a crazy idea, hey, let's light a fire. And everyone around
went,
what's that? It's like, so all these differences, all these diversities and like
just my dyslexia. And because of the way I think, so literally this is my head I'm going to share
with you now. And I know whenever anybody sits down and meditates and all that, their mind stinks and everything
like that. I think that's quite the average for the mind that The more you sit down, the more you
try to quiet in your mind or do any of those things, the more the mind thinks. You know, the
average person has what? 56 thoughts per minute or something like that. It's like 56 000 thoughts a day it's
It's something crazy. They're just constantly bombarding us with thoughts. No, it's 46 thoughts and 40 and 46
but anyway so so if you think of, I suppose, the average mind, we often look at it as
a couple of colours. Well, my mind is like 20 different colours. And they're all firing at the same time.
And like right now I'm doing this podcast and I'm focusing so hard on not going down every tangent story
that my mind's literally throwing at me. While I'm talking to you, my mind's going, go there, go there, go
there, do this, do that. What you're gonna fatigue And it's constant. And it's why, and I
was looking up and reading I was speaking to my doctor and things like that. And a friend of mine
About this mind and the way it works. And apparently it's a form of ADHD, which
we've labeled for years as a problem. Same as dyslexia, we've labeled for years as a problem. But
it's not. It's just the way the mind works. It's not good nor bad. It's not a problem or not
a problem. It's just that's how that mind works. But we look at it because it's away from the average.
That it's a problem. And you can go back to history and just before this podcast I I
done a bit of research and you you look at the people in history that we really look back on
now and that really change things. Now elbert Einstein believed to have dyslexia. Einstein's unique way of thinking
revolutionized physics with the theory of relativity um leonardo dovinsky He had dyslexia as well.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He had Adhd um Sir Isaac Newton. He
had characteristics of autism um Charles Darwin. Autism as well. Emily Dixon, the poet.
Agoraphobia. And I could go on and on and on. And there's so many of them. The list is so
long. It's just, we look at... We try to put people in a box and we try to put ourselves
in a box. And I think this is where
society tells us that there's something wrong and there's not something wrong.
You know, if you're a brilliant reader and you can do that all the time and everything like that, you're
no more broken or better or worse than someone that isn't a brilliant reader because they can do something else.
And music and art and
anything that's different out of the norm came from these things. You
know, they're almost gifts. And I I looked at an article by Sir Richard Branson just a couple of weeks
ago on Linkedin. And he was saying dyslexia and forms of Adhd is actually a
trait that some companies are looking for now because they want to be able to see things differently. Then I'm
picking on these two because these are two in particular that I've been looking into recently for me. Because I've
been trying to understand myself a little bit more and But for years I grew up thinking that because I
couldn't read properly and what I read, I couldn't focus on it. I could read a whole page and, you
know, between the age of seven nine ten I never really read anything because I was diagnosed dyslexic. So I
thought why can't read, there's no point. So I faked my later schooling. When the teacher would
ask us about the book we read at homework at night, I would make sure I was in the queue
with a few of the geeks and I would ask them about what they thought about the book. And I
would use that in the lesson. So I brilliantly found ways to circumnavigate it. You know
that there's a gift perhaps that's helped me deal with my being paralysed and all that. I I don't know.
But going back to loving ourselves and society as a whole I I think we're
told that these things are not that they're broken or that there's something wrong with us. But the quirkiness, we're
not broken. No one's broken. Humans are brilliantly diverse the way we are. With
all our experiences, all our things, we're creating an Ai now that has diversity built in
deliberately. Otherwise it would be just pumping out the same stuff.
So we're actually trying to build this in simply because we're now seeing it as qualities.
So going back to the contemplation of love, how
do you love something? You accept it.
You know, you don't see a teddy on the bed and go, I wish you had a longer leg or
wish you had bigger eyes or I wish you didn't. You just love it. Your kitten, your dog, you just
you just love it, don't you? The way it is. And because we're told by so much of
society that... These traits within us if you If you have a thought that is just seemingly crazy,
and literally my head's bombarded with thoughts all day long that are crazy. You know, if I was to share
my thoughts with you and what comes into my mind on a daily basis I I feel like I would
be locked up.
But I don't think I'm any different. I think you're probably listening to this podcast going, yeah, me too. Because
I think that's the reality of being human. But
how do you love something like that when we've been told that
it's not right? They're not kind thoughts they're not Not all my thoughts to loving and kind and compassion. Trust
me. On the contrary, most of the minds um Does that make me a bad, terrible
person? Or society have said for such a long time, yes. No, it makes me human. It
makes me, I was gonna say normal then. It's not normal. It just makes me human. There is no normal.
There's the average. And
yeah, this is my podcast that I'm coming back with because I'm really excited by this. I sat down in
my meditation this morning and I just, just for five minutes, I just, what does it look like to love
myself?
And everything that come up, every thought, every light that come on in my head, I just tried to accept
it. And every time I accepted the thought and accepted the feeling and accepted the thought,
more and more it was just, ah. And there was an easing with it.
The problem is, and I said at the beginning of the podcast that I I will say some of my
ignorance that might help you to love yourself. The reason why I think it's so difficult to love ourselves because
we have inside knowledge. We know some of the things we've done. We know some of the things we think,
and we know that we're not the most compassionate person. Trust me, I'm working on it, but boy, am I
not compassionate. You
know, I try to be I try to be kind but
spend the week in my head you'll you'll think I messed up as the next person. But I'm starting to
realise that's beautiful, and that's what we need.
You know, we're sharing a world on society on social media that is fake. It's not real.
And
I think we're on a brink of really embracing these differences with humans and going, it's
okay. Accept people for who they are. Accept them for their struggles because, trust me, there isn't a person I
know that's not struggling. There isn't a person I know that hasn't been bombarded with thoughts and... All these different
things. It's just when we take them too seriously
and when you just ease that burden on ourselves and we just go, do you know what? I'm going to
try to love myself just a little bit more today. So
my advice to you is just sit for one minute every morning and just go, what does it mean to
love myself? How
does it feel to love myself?
Accept myself with all my flaws, all my um Brilliantness All my craziness.
What does it feel for you? What would it look like for you? Just to simply, just put your hand
on your heart now and just go, do you know what?
Take a deep breath and go, do you know, what's it like to love myself? What's that feel like? And
just imagine loving yourself right now.
And do you know what that feels like to me? It just feels like a burden lifted because
loving ourselves doesn't take effort. It's
not something we have to do. It's something we we are the natural state, the natural relaxed
state is love, is acceptance. When
you accept your body just sat here, when you accept this moment just sat here,
that in itself
is love, isn't it?
If you've got a different take, let me know. I don't know if I'm right. You know, I'm more ignorant
than the average person. I'm
just trying to work out stuff myself and stay ahead of my suffering. That's all I'm doing.
Yeah, what does it feel like to love ourselves? That's my podcast. I am so happy to be back. I
have so much more energy. I'm eating brown flakes every morning. And that's another form of loving myself. No sugar,
just brown flakes. Taking one for the body. But yeah, it's... I love you guys.
I love doing this podcast and thank you for the reviews. Tell me where I'm doing it right. Tell me
where I'm doing it wrong. Share it with your friends. If this helps you, it may help somebody else. And
ultimately, deep bow and thank you to all the donators that
buy me a coffee, that join as a member and that have persevered and stuck by me in
recent weeks when my health hasn't been good.
I'm just glad to be back. And now you have an insight into my mind and why I get overwhelmed
and why I get every single given moment. It's just like, whoa, party time
that's okay. The committee of 3 000 in my head. And you've probably got exactly the same.
Let me know. Head over to StevenWebb.uk. You can support the podcast. You can
check out my other podcast with the meditations. And you can also message me. There's a few messages I haven't
replied to yet, which I'm going to get to over the weekend. But you guys are just awesome and I
love you. And above all, just feel what it's like feel what it's like to love
yourself.
Feel what it's like to accept yourself. Take the word love out if it has too many connotations with you.
What does it feel like to accept yourself wholly as you are? As the brilliant human you are.
With all the flaws and the imperfections and the indifferences. And the quirkiness and the craziness and the
