Are you accepting your life, or quietly avoiding it? I wrote this at two in the morning and it caught me out.
I teach acceptance. And the one thing I have never accepted is my own disability. That is the elephant in my world. Giving in to an electric wheelchair was one of the hardest days of the early years. I have spent my life dodging labels, dodging pity and dodging the story people hand to somebody like me, and I am not sure whether that is freedom or avoidance. There is no right way. Half a million self help books and not one of them has landed it.
One thing to try: Name your elephant. You do not have to do anything about it today. Just stop walking around it.
In this episode
(1:18) Have I truly accepted my own reality
(2:34) The one thing I have never accepted
(3:51) Dodging labels, pity and the story handed to me
(5:21) Living in the present, or avoiding the future
(6:28) Half a million books and none of them got it
(7:58) It is in the not doing and the not knowing
(9:16) The gnarly branch finds the gap
(11:00) You have an elephant too
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Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Are you accepting your life, or quietly avoiding it?
I wrote a piece at two in the morning after about the twentieth night of coughing, and it caught me out. I read the whole thing out in this episode. It is called The Elephant I Cannot See.
The heart of it
I teach acceptance, and the one thing I have never accepted is my own disability.
There is no right way to do this. If there were, one of the half million self help books would have landed it by now.
I have been paralysed for thirty three years. Then I watched a film about somebody coming to terms with a sudden disability and something turned over.
One of the hardest moments of the early years was giving in to an electric wheelchair. My manual one was useless and I could barely push it across the carpet, and I clung to it, because giving it up felt like admitting I was disabled.
Decades on I have built a life where I forget I am paralysed. I compare myself to able bodied people. From outside it probably looks like optimism and pushing boundaries.
Maybe I have never actually come to terms with being disabled at all.
I do not go to disability groups. I do not join those conversations unless I have to. I sit in council meetings while somebody argues passionately for disabled rights, quoting the law, and I wonder whether I care. Should I? It feels selfish to say I do not want to be anybody's advocate, and that is how I feel most of the time.
You could put a label on that. Denial, avoidance, dysmorphia. The labels do not interest me. What interests me is whether I am suffering, and on the surface I am not. Though maybe that is because I avoid the thing.
Being ill for a month taught me something obvious. My body knows no more than I do, and the two of us are just doing our best.
Every living thing is running the same programme. You go to the doctor to suffer less. You read a book to suffer less. You put a jumper on to suffer less. A two year old has a tantrum about the wrong flavour ice cream for exactly the same reason. A branch finds the gap in the canopy for the light.
Maybe that is acceptance, or maybe that is avoidance. Either way, it is the path I am on, and I think I am alright with that for now.
One small thing to try
Name your elephant. You do not have to do anything about it today. Just stop walking around it.
Then sit down next to it and put an arm round it. I guarantee you have one, because I have never met anybody who has not, and it is always easier to see everybody else's.
Questions people ask
Is this episode you telling us you have got it wrong?
It is me admitting I do not know, out loud, which felt more useful than pretending. I do not have a tidy answer at the end of it and I decided not to invent one.
Should I be digging into the thing I avoid?
Not necessarily today. Sometimes when you dig you only find more questions, and there is nothing wrong with sitting with the not knowing for a while.
What actually is the spiritual journey then?
For me, one question. Am I suffering less? That is it. If yes, it is working, and the rest of the vocabulary is optional.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
In this episode
acceptance · resilience · suffering
Read the transcript
Hello and welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven, your host. And in a moment I'm going to read
a passage that I wrote about two o'clock in the morning the other night. And it's quite self-inspiratory. And I
shared it on Facebook and it's got a lot of reaction.
And I just wanted to give you a bit of an introduction rather than just start reading when. and I've
been poorly now for about four weeks and I'm feeling so much better I've been frightened to say that because
every time I thought I was feeling a bit better, the virus heard me and popped up and went, ah,
I'm still not gone yet. So yeah, the virus liked my company, so it's. I've had to
literally write off the whole of January. So I apologize for just not releasing any meditations or any
podcast or anything like that. Anyway, let's get on with it. This is me reading what I wrote the other
day and then I talk about it afterwards and how it fits in with the balance of life. Please enjoy.
The elephant I can't see.
For 33 years I lived paralysed. And yet watching a film about someone coming to terms with a sudden
disability stirred something in me. It unearthed a question I've never really been able to answer.
Have I truly accepted my own reality? One of the hardest moments in the early days
was giving into an electric wheelchair. My manual wheelchair was utterly useless. I could barely push it across the carpet.
And
yet I clung to it like my life depended upon it. Why? Because giving it up felt like
giving in. It felt like admitting I was disabled. Now, decades later, I've built a life where I forgot I'm
paralysed. I've constructed a world where I compare myself to able-bodied people, where my body doesn't realise
it's paralysed. To the outside world, I might seem optimistic, living as fully as possible, pushing boundaries,
chasing dreams. But here's the kicker.
Maybe I've never actually come to terms with being disabled at all. I don't attend disability groups or engage in
conversations about disability unless I have to. I keep my focus on the bigger picture.
Maybe it's Zen Buddhism that taught me to live in the moment,
to accept life as it is.
But the cruel irony is that the one thing I've never accepted, the giant elephant in my world,
is my own disability.
What's that about?
I could sit with a counsellor and get labelled with some condition or another. Denial, avoidance, dysmorphia.
The labels don't matter to me.
What matters is whether I'm Suffering. And on the surface, I'm not.
My life doesn't feel like suffering. But maybe that's because I avoid the reality of my situation.
Maybe I'm running from the truth that I'm disabled. The truth is, I don't know what it means to be
disabled.
Sometimes I find myself in council meetings where someone passionately fights for disabled rights, quoting laws and tests,
and I sit there wondering if I care.
Do I? Should I? It feels selfish to say I don't want to take on that responsibility, but that's the
truth.
I don't want to be anyone's advocate. I don't want to be the voice for disabled people. I know that
sounds harsh, but that's how I feel most of the time.
Why? Because that's not the life I want to lead.
I lived my life avoiding labels, dodging pity, and sidestepping the narratives that society often hands to
people like me.
But maybe freedom lies in acknowledging the limits,
in recognising the control is an illusion.
Maybe it doesn't. I don't know.
And that feels like one of those Zen koans. An unanswerable riddle meant to shatter the logical mind.
What is it like to truly accept being disabled?
I don't think I'll ever solve that. Maybe I shouldn't even try.
Because sometimes when you dig too deep, all you find is more questions. And frankly, I
don't want to spend my energy on this right now. For
now, I'll sit with the elephant in my world. I'll sit with not knowing. Maybe that's
acceptance, or maybe that's avoidance. Either way, it's the path I'm on, and I think I'm okay with that for
now.
That's something I wrote last night when I couldn't sleep
for coughing for, like, what seems like the 20th night in a row.
These podcasts and what I Talk about is often about acceptance and about love and about how we deal and
live in the present moment.
And there's a paradox to that.
Why are you living in the present moment? Are you avoiding the reality of life? Are you avoiding what's coming
at you at a great speed? Are you avoiding what's happened in the past?
And how do you touch the present moment without the knowledge of what's coming and what's been?
I say the word paradox a lot because the more I think about it, everything is. And then it's relative
to a person. It's relative to you.
You know, everything is what's going on in your life. How do you deal with it based on your depth
of knowledge about how to deal with it. And everybody around you would tell you how to deal with it.
I come on these podcasts and do meditations and I tell you how to deal with it. But the reality
is no one really knows how to deal with it. There's no right way. If there was a right way,
surely the half a million self-help books now one of them would have hit the nail on the head and
got it right. But
there isn't one, there
isn't one podcast, there isn't one wise quote, there isn't one guru teacher that's come up with the answers. And
I think the best we got now is deep breath.
And I think this past month been really poorly. If it's taught me one thing, it's taught
me that the, the dead obvious things that I, I'm in this life, my body doesn't know any more than
I know. And together we're still, we're battling and we're doing our best. And when we accept
that, whether it's an atom, my body, my mind, my thought, whether it's the outside world or
whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, it's all in the exactly the same struggle
just to accept, just
to be. And in the film last night that I was watching,
one of the wise teachers just said, you know, just find that bit of stillness I think if there is
an answer, the answer is in
not fighting, not struggling, not trying, not reaching,
not even trying to accept.
It's just in the not doing,
in the not knowing.
And it just sounds blah.
That's the reality.
What is the spiritual journey? I come to this quite often. It's a brilliant question. Well, it's relative to you,
but the spiritual journey to me is, am I suffering less? And if I'm suffering less, there you go.
You go to the doctor to suffer less.
You read a book because you want to learn something. Even if you read fiction. You want to suffer less
because you want to take yourself out of the moment. You watch a film because you want to disconnect from
life and suffer less.
You know, you're thirsty, you take a drink because you want to suffer less. You're cold, you put on a
jumper because you want to suffer less. Everything comes down to I want to suffer less. I want to improve
my life in this present moment. It's why the two-year-old has the tantrum when you give it the wrong, wrong
flavor ice cream,
because it's suffering, because it wanted the other flavor and And what a Beautiful driving force in nature
for
the leaf to have relief, to get more sun. The gnarly branch finds the gap
to get more nutrients, the root finds the gap. They work together to suffer less, the animals work
together and they fight with each other just because they want to fill their bellies or they want to find
that peace and they want to bring up their young. And so as much and as complicated as life is,
if you boil it right down to the essence, and I cannot boil it down
any more than this, apart from. To the emptiness itself,
out of emptiness, you have this essence of just, ah.
And the moment that ah passes, everything is suffering
because everything is a pull to something
or a push from something.
And the more you can
recognise and
enjoy the dance, as what would say you know, learn to dance in the rain and all
those lovely memes that in the moment they change our lives for about half a second.
Ah, if
only a positive Instagram feed would.
And yeah, this Stillness in the Storms podcast just helps you find that little
peace in life's turbulence, in life's pull and struggles. And I don't know if what I wrote last night helped
you in any way, but I sure as hell guarantee that you've got an elephant in your life that you
cannot see or you're avoiding or you're learning to live with or whatever, because
I've never met anybody that hasn't
and. But the thing is, it's easier to see everybody else's.
Yeah,
I wonder what it's like just to sit down with that metaphorical elephant, to put your arm around it and
go, hey,
how's it going?
Because I sure as hell guarantee is the same struggle as you're having.
Anyway, that's
my podcast for this weekend. Thank
you for all the support. If you can support the podcast and keep it free, keep it with no adverts
StevenWebb.uk I've also done my stillness in the storms course in a way that
fits the Dharma and I'm happy with and I can sleep at night with. And it's a pay as you
go model. You pay what you like.
If you want to pay, and if all you can afford is nothing, pay that. If you can afford to
pay a bit more, pay that. Because that helps the people that cannot pay, and I'm good with that. In
