Why are you exhausted after the supermarket? Hundreds of tiny decisions. Overwhelm is rarely one big thing, it is the small ones piling up unnoticed.
I went back to the Heart Sutra, which nobody wrote down for five hundred years, and then they had to add the Diamond Sutra because things got complicated. Your head does the same. Too many self-help books create a loop of needing to fix yourself, then not forgiving yourself for not having. If you are washing dishes, wash dishes. I am saying that while not doing it.
One thing to try: Take one thing off the pile today. Not organise it. Remove it.
In this episode
(0:03) Recording a Zazen meditation without a script
(3:22) Going back to the Heart Sutra after all these years
(6:37) The loop of not forgiving yourself for not improving
(8:06) They had to update it, because things got complicated
(9:47) The middle way, and too many self-help books
(11:19) Realising I was not listening, and it cost me
(12:55) Hundreds of decisions a day, and why shopping exhausts you
(14:32) If you are washing dishes, wash dishes
With gratitude to
Senga, Martin, Kira, Sandy and Diane.
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Why are you exhausted after the supermarket?
Hundreds of tiny decisions. Overwhelm is rarely one big thing, it is the small ones piling up unnoticed until you are short with somebody at the till for no reason you could name.
The heart of it
Too many self help books create a loop. I need to fix myself, then I do not forgive myself for not having, then I go back to the book.
If you are washing dishes, wash dishes. I am saying that while not doing it.
I went looking for a subject for this episode and found myself scrolling my Kindle thinking I had to relearn all of it, every sutra, every video that ever helped. Then I stopped. What do I already know?
So I went back to the Heart Sutra, which nobody wrote down for about five hundred years because they chanted it instead. One page. It says you have feelings and you are not those feelings, and that everything is equally everything and equally nothing.
If everybody lived by that page, the entire Western therapy industry would be out of work in a fortnight. We are more complicated than that, so they had to add the Diamond Sutra, because things got complicated.
Reading it is not living it, though.
You do not listen to Jimi Hendrix. You feel Jimi Hendrix.
I read the wise thing, agree with it, go out and do exactly what I always did. Then blame myself, then not forgive myself, then go back to the book. Everybody doing this work is in that loop, and anybody honest will say so. I am one page ahead of you this morning, and that is all.
My daughter was about sixteen when I let rip at her. I had been working very hard at being a Zen master. She stood there and took it, and at the end said, well, that was very Zen of you. Every word I had said in five minutes became worth nothing.
A hundred years ago you walked between things. No headphones, no podcast, one decent self help book that you could read in a morning and forget by the following day. Now we check the phone before our feet are on the floor.
I am about to do five hundred miles round Cornwall, in a chair that many of you fundraised for four years ago, and I am stopping the news again for six weeks. My head has not got room for it. Trump will be doing the same thing next month whether I watched or not.
One small thing to try
Take one thing off the pile today. Not organise it. Remove it.
Then do one thing at a time for a couple of hours. The dishes, only the dishes. The book, only the book. No second thing running underneath.
Questions people ask
Is it wrong to read self help books?
No, and I would not be here without a few. It goes wrong when the reading becomes the thing you do instead of the thing they told you to do.
Should I stop watching the news?
That is my choice for six weeks, not a prescription. The test is whether knowing changes anything you can do. Mostly it does not, and it costs you the room in your head.
Why is the supermarket so tiring?
Forty odd thousand items, shelves arranged to catch your eye and your children's, and a no required at every one of them. It is decision after decision and none of them matter.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
overwhelm · stress · letting-go
Read the transcript
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Stillness in the Storms. And I've just been recording a Sazen meditation,
guided meditation. And I've done it really not through doing a script or anything. And I've just, I've simplified
everything. We have thoughts, but we're not those thoughts. We have emotions and feelings, but we're not those emotions and
feelings. And it's just stepping back and becoming witness to what's happening. And it just made me think that I've
been struggling with the subjects for doing these podcasts on Stillness in the Storms. What really helps you? And
I've had... The thought of, why don't I just tell you what I'm struggling with and what is actually helping
me now? Well, I thought I had to go back and learn all the sutras, all the Buddhism again. I
got I went through my Kindle and my bookshelf thinking, I've got to read all these books. I've got to
go find all these videos that have helped me and all that. And it was like, just slow down. Stop.
What do I know? Take a step back and just don't complicate things. Life has become
far too complicated. There's far too much going on. And we don't even have time to like just go for
a walk without walking and being on the phone or walking and listening to a podcast. We just, just slow
down. But just before I talk about the podcast, I want to say thank you to um Senga Thank
you. You always support me so much. I'm deeply grateful to you. Martin, thank you for the coffee. Kira, thank
you for the coffees um Sandy thank you very much. And I'm sorry to hear about your story but I'm
glad I can help so much um Diane thank you to you so much. And really... I'm glad
I make a difference. It really makes a difference with the other podcast, Inner Peace Meditations. These guys treat me
to a coffee. They keep these meditations ad free and they keep them free for everybody. So deeply grateful. And
also to the regular members, Audra, Stuart, Leslie, that pay monthly into... Yeah,
into a membership that I'm not the world's best that updating on a weekly basis. But I'm deeply grateful to
you. Thank you very much. Right, let's simplify things. First
of all, if you want to support, just go to StevenWebb.uk. You can treat me to a coffee. That wasn't
what I was going to say. I just thought, how can I simplify this? Do you know, even with meditation,
over on Inner Peace Meditations, there's like nearly a hundred meditations or something there now. I have no idea. And
they're all different things. Meditations for anxiety, for stress, for sleep, for... You know, following a falcon,
which is an amazing meditation. All these different things, you know, that you can look up on the internet now.
There's meditations for literally having a sore toe or contacting aliens. You know, they are all available. Trust me. I
have not searched for either of those meditations, but I can guarantee you somewhere someone's written a meditation for those
two things. And the problem is we just get so far from the original teachings.
So I went back and I looked at the Heart Sutra, which is one of the originals Mayana teachings of
Zen Buddhism years and years ago. It was the one that it was never wrote down for like 500 years.
And they used to chant it daily. And that was the way they used to pass it down. That was
the way they used to teach their younger ones. And I just read it. And it just basically says, you
know, you have feelings, but you're not those feelings. You know, we are equally everything and we're equally nothing.
And it just simplifies things and it cuts through all the noise. It basically tells you, look,
you've got feelings. They come and go. They're not permanent. They're not like a tangible object. You know, even the
cup in front of me is not permanent. You know, in a couple of billion years time, that's not going
to be a cup it probably ain't going to be a cup wait before that happens. But it wasn't a
cup for billions of years. It's all just something. It's atoms. They're all the same thing. Me, you, our
brains, our matter, everything is just the same thing. It's atoms that have come together to create something that we
think is real. We look at the cup and we think, cup? It's not. It's just clay and things like
that, porcelain or whatever it is um That made me realise. I didn't realise porcelain is just clay after it's
been fired. Found out that the other day. Who knew that? I bet I bet everybody knew that apart from
me. And I bet it's not like simple either. But anyway, so going back to the sutras, it was just...
Fascinating to me just to go back and for probably three years and I read them
regularly and I go back to them. I place my hand on my heart but I didn't really read them
and it reminds me of that film White Man Can't Jump. Where Woody and Wesley were driving
down the road, and Woody puts in a tape with jimmy Hendrix on. And he's there, ah, can you listen
to it? Can you really enjoy it? And Wesley says, you don't listen to Jimi Hendrix. You
feel Jimi Hendrix. And Wesley or Willie was like, yeah, yeah, of course you do. You just listen to it.
And he goes, no, you feel it and they He ended up taking out the tape because it was like
a waste of time to feel Jimi Hendrix. And okay, the sutras are not about whether or not you
read them or hear them or see them or They're about whether you deeply live by them and understand them.
And it's like a poem or like a self-help book. You can read it and you go, okay, I get
it. Yeah, that makes sense. And then you go out and you do the same old thing and nothing really
changes. How many times that happened to you? It happens to me all the time. And I meet somebody and
they'll give me some wise, profound ideas. And even Jun Po, my teacher, you know, so awesomely wise ideas.
And I go about my normal day and I forget them all and I suddenly go... Damn it. I should
have been doing that. And then I do not forgive myself and I don't love myself and I don't accept
myself because I'm then feeling guilty and the cycle continues. Then I go back to read the book and I
blame myself. The constant battle of that circle. We're all in it you know If you think people like
me that are do these podcasts and all that are doing these podcasts and all that because we're all sorted
and we're going, hey, I'm all sorted. This is what you need to do. Think again because you know we're
struggling or any of us that are honest, we're struggling just as much. It just happens to be today, this
morning in my meditation, I got a page ahead maybe. So I may be sharing that with you today. But
I've got a the problem is everything over the past two or three years, I've got to the point where
I cannot walk anywhere without listening to a podcast. And I'm learning, I'm learning. And what I'm doing is I'm
just filling up my mind with so many more layers of stuff. I don't need it all. The sutra is
only, what, a page long. And
if everybody lived by the sutra, everybody would have... You would save the whole Western world millions and millions and
millions of pounds of money that's been paid to psychiatrists and all that. They would all be out of a
job within days. But the truth is, we're more complicated than that. We complicate everything. And then
you've got the original Heart Sutra. And then you've got the Diamond Sutra. It's like, oh, so they had to
update it. They had to add things because things got more complicated. Well, in the Diamond Sutra, you've got, they
talk about the sudden enlightenment. And they talk about no mind and non-duality and adding a direct transmission between the
teacher and the students and all those and practice and realizations and,
oh, take a step back. Then they're all right. Some people suddenly have that. They can be reading books.
They can study Zen Buddhism. They can study and go to teachers and therapists and all that for 10, 20,
30 years. And they might hear one sentence. And it just suddenly all clicks. It's like, I get it.
Ah,
I'm not real. But I feel real. I'm not real. Ah. And it just suddenly
dawns on a person like it suddenly did me. You know, I had that profound experience in the bottom
bottom of the swimming pool when I broke my neck. And I was lying there and I became the water
and I became everything around me. I realised that I don't really exist any more than this separate self
that's temporarily manifesting in any given moment. But I didn't understand the deep impact.
For another, what, 25 years. Because I had to hit rock bottom. I had to realise the ego was not
real. And it was the ego that was causing all my pain as well as the ego experience and all
the joy and love in life. So it's really one of those, the balance, the middle way.
Too many self-help books will literally just... Create a loop of I need to improve. I need to fix
myself. And too little of them and too little and no teachings at all. I don't know where that leads.
I haven't really been there, so. And I do know whenever I don't meditate or whenever I don't read anything
and whenever I just tune into the news and all those other things, I start suffering quickly. And the people
around me start suffering because I start to argue with them. I start to get annoyed by them. I start
to have a strong opinion on they're wrong, I'm right, and all those things while trying to be all zen
like It reminded me when I had a right moment my daughter. She was about 16 at the time and
I'd been working really hard. I was becoming this awesome Zen master. This was like 10 years ago or something.
And she came in one day and I let it rip at her. I just not really shouted because I
can't really shout, but I was like really going on to her. And she just stood there and she took
it. She took it so stoically. It was brilliant. And she just looked up to me in the end and
said, It was absolutely brilliant. She looked up to me in the end and just said, well, that was very
Zen-like of you.
Just like that. She cut me down. Every word that I said in that, like, five minutes of just going
on her just meant nothing. And it was like, all that work that I was doing what was it worth
it? No. I wasn't listening. I wasn't understanding. I wasn't being compassionate. I wasn't having
empathy for her and the situation. I was making it all about me.
And I think just that alone and I think... We just over complicate
everything A hundred years ago, you'd have had time to walk between work and on your lunch break. You didn't
have a constant distraction. You did not have the Tvs. You did not have but you had radio. Let's go
back another 40 years but you didn't even have radio. You had books. You had stories from grandparents.
You know, if you're working out on the farm, you did not have something in your ears blasting away a
podcast or music. You did not have so many self-help books. You had one brilliant
self-help book I was written about then, As a Man Thinker, by James Allen. Brilliant book. But there wasn't hundreds
and they were quite short. You could read it in a morning and then put it in practice that afternoon
and forget it by the day after. It was bliss. It was brilliant. Whereas now, we feel the whole day,
from the moment we wake up, we might sit up in bed and we check our phones and we leave
down we go and sort ourselves. We sit down with our coffee and we check our phones, we check our
email. Before we've even got in the office, we've already done part of the day's work. And during the day,
we're making literally hundreds of decisions. Even driving somewhere now, you're making decisions constantly.
It's why we're exhausted when we do our grocery shopping. I was talking to the checkout girl the other day
and she was saying about an experience she had a few days before. And she was saying she doesn't understand
why so many people by the time they get to the checkout, they seem to be quite teasy and they
quite short-tempered and all that. And I was saying about, I am as well. All the work I've done on
myself, and here I am. I'm raring to get out of here. I've had enough. There's like 49 000 items
I've got to choose from, and I only went in there to get a sandwich. You know, 28 pounds later,
I went in there to spend about five pounds.
And you just, it's decision after decision. All the shelves are set up for the kids so the kids can
pick up the items that the parents cannot afford. So you've got to say no constantly. The kids don't want
to be there. Everything's about enticing our eyes and putting us. We're being controlled. Ah, it's no
wonder we're done for.
It's no wonder we're done for. And so that's why I recorded this guided meditation. Just
return to sarzen and return to I have a thought. I don't have to do anything with it. I have
a feeling I don't have to do anything with it. And it's simply about spending a few hours a day
just doing what you're doing instead of doing and doing something else at the same time. If you're washing dishes,
just wash dishes. If you're reading a book, just read the book. And I'm saying this as I'm projecting
because it's the one thing I'm not doing at the moment. I think that's the one thing I'm struggling with.
And in six weeks time, I've got the huge pressure of doing 500 miles around
Cornwall because I want to do this challenge. I want to get out and I want to have some time
really out in my chair that was fundraised about four years ago by many of you that listen to this
podcast. And I can't think of a better way of saying thank you to go out and doing a challenge.
500 miles, 25 to 30 miles a day. Just in my wheelchair, enjoying. I'm going to be going live. I'm
going to be doing all those things. And I had a friend around this morning. He said, what can I
do? Can we join you can we I was like, no I just Let me just do this. Granted, I'm
going to be doing it for charity. I'm going to be doing it for the Air Ambulance that saved my
life 33 years ago. Not the same Air Ambulance. They've updated it since then, luckily. But it's still the same
charity service that saved my life and saved countless other lives after me. I set off exactly 33 years.
So my mind's like there as well. So I've decided this next six weeks and I'm recording this podcast to
set that off really, to go, do you know what? I'm gonna stop watching the news again. My brain hasn't
got room for it. I'm literally filling my empty vessel in my head with all the things I don't really
need to know. You
know, if I don't know what Trump's doing, it's still going to be the same Trump doing in a month's
time, whether I know it or not.
That's the reality. We feel like if we don't if we're not in the know, if we don't know what's
going on, then we won't be able to have influence or change it. We don't have any influence. Wait to
the election. Put you across Beyond that, we don't have much influence. We
don't even have influence on the other person that we're talking to because they're not really listening. They're waiting for
their turn to say what they think. So
yeah, just take a step back. Simplify things. You can try that meditation. I'll put a link, StevenWebb.uk, which you
can also treat me to a coffee if you want or share or do this podcast. I just help you
to find a little more inner peace when you need it most in life. And I'm just so grateful you're
here. I'm so grateful that you... Persevere with me because I'm not, with
everything that's going on in my life, I I struggle to get these podcasts up every single week. I'm still
a city council I'm still doing all those things. I love what I do. But it's a lot of pressure
and I just need to take a step back. And that step back is not from the podcast, not from
the sutras and the heart sutras and things like that. It's from the news and doing all the other things
that I don't really need to fill my head we're doing so by what by me doing that, I'm saying
you do that as well. Because we're filling our minds with so much that we don't need to. And that's
why we're exhausted. That's why we're more stressed. That's why we have more anxiety. That's why we're feeling overwhelmed.
And I get overwhelmed all the time.
There you go. I don't know whether this will help you in any way. I don't know whether you'll relate
to it in any way. But I just want to say deeply, I'm so grateful for you there. Thank you
for allowing me to just offload some of these thoughts from my head and maybe they're a little clearer just
by being able to do this podcast. If you can see me now, I've got my eyes closed, got my
hands together. It's like deep bow. I love you and have an amazing week and thank you
