Episode 1
Stillness in the Storms of Life
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Finding Your Calm: Stillness in the Storms of Life
Ever feel like you're caught in a whirlwind? Life throws curveballs, triggers us in unexpected ways, and sometimes, it feels like we're just reacting, not responding. It is easy to end up regretting our actions later. But what if there was a way to navigate the storms with a sense of inner peace, a calmness that no one could take away?
That's the heart of my new podcast, "Stillness in the Storms," and something I'm incredibly passionate about sharing. This isn't about pretending everything's rosy when it's not. It's about developing a foundation of stillness within yourself, so you can meet life's challenges with grace, understanding, and compassion.
Think about those old Western films. The saloon is in chaos, a brawl erupting, but there's always that one character, quietly sitting at the bar, seemingly unaffected. They're not disconnected; they're deeply aware. They see everything, but they choose not to react. They respond, thoughtfully and purposefully, when the moment truly calls for it. That's the kind of stillness we're aiming for.
What Does Stillness Even Mean?
It's not about being passive or detached. Quite the opposite! It's about being fully present and connected, but from a place of inner stability. It's about recognising our triggers – those things that set us off, those buttons that certain people seem to love to press – and choosing to respond, not react.
A reaction is subconscious. Something happens, and our brain flips through its "what did I do last time?" file and repeats the pattern. It might have kept you alive in the past, but it might not be serving you now.
The human side of our brain, the front part, is where compassion, empathy, and wisdom reside. Stillness is about accessing that part of ourselves more often, shifting from the reactive, reptilian brain to the thoughtful, human one.
How Can You Cultivate This Stillness?
This is where the journey gets really interesting! The podcast is designed to explore this very question. I’ll be chatting with people who have cultivated this stillness in their own lives – Zen masters, spiritual teachers, and everyday folks who've found ways to navigate their inner and outer storms. We'll delve into practical tools, techniques, and tips that you can apply today.
One core principle is understanding that life will throw things at you. "Stuff" happens, as the saying goes. We can't stop the storms, but we can learn to weather them differently. We can prepare ourselves, build resilience, and choose to respond from a place of clarity rather than blind reaction.
Think of it like the fire brigade. They have two jobs: putting out fires and preventing them. We need to do both in our lives. Be ready to respond to the inevitable challenges, but also proactively work on reducing their impact.
Why This Matters: It's Not Just About You
Living with a foundation of stillness isn't just about personal peace (though that's a huge benefit!). It's about bringing that peace out into the world. It's about responding to difficult situations and difficult people with more understanding and less fuel for the fire.
Imagine that family gathering, the one where politics inevitably comes up, or that particular relative who knows exactly how to push your buttons. Stillness allows you to be present, to listen (even if you disagree vehemently!), and to choose your words and actions carefully. It's about not adding to the drama, but instead, bringing a sense of calm and groundedness to the situation.
My Own Journey to Stillness
I haven't always been this way. I've been bankrupt, I've attempted suicide, and I know what it's like to feel completely overwhelmed by life's storms. A pivotal moment came when I was 40. I was newly single, broke, and my wheelchair tyre burst while I was out. There I was, a grown man, crying in the doorway of a busy supermarket, feeling utterly lost.
That was my rock bottom. It forced me to look inwards, to examine my own reactions, my own contribution to the chaos. I started exploring meditation, reading about inner peace, and slowly, painstakingly, began to rebuild my life from a place of greater self-awareness.
I started reading and seeing about meditation, stillness and inner peace. I thought I would never have inner peace until I sorted the world out first. It was everyone else fault I was like this.
Join the Conversation
This podcast is for you if you're tired of reacting, if you're seeking a more peaceful and fulfilling way to navigate life's ups and downs. Subscribe and listen on your favourite podcasting platform, and join me on this journey. Also you can visit https://stevenwebb.uk/ where you'll have access to bonus content, including videos, and the opportunity to ask me your questions directly.
Remember, your time is precious. Thank you for spending some of it with me. Let's learn to find stillness in the storms, together.
Take care, love deeply, be still, and above all, do what's right for you.
Namaste.
Transcript
Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms, your podcast to help you through the most difficult times in life, as well as brush off those awkward moments so you can live your life with inner peace and a calmness that no one can take away from you. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and thank you for joining me today on this podcast. We're going to talk about what the podcast is about.
What does it mean to have a foundation of stillness? And who am I, your host. So we can get to know each.
Steven Webb:Other a little better. How can you get the best from this podcast? So first of all, we're going to.
Steven Webb:Start, you know, how are you? How are you doing? And thank you for joining me. And one of the most precious things we have is time.
So I want you to know how much I appreciate your time spent with me right now. So what does it mean? What is this podcast about? Stillness in the Storms? Well, we all, we all like to.
Steven Webb:Live a still, calm life.
Steven Webb:This energy of, ah, you know, we all like that calmness. We all know the wise person, that when everything is going wrong around them, they don't react and then regret it later.
And you often see that in films, especially old Westerns, when you have a bar and a fight breaks out and someone comes in and says something and then someone is triggered and reacted. And then you suddenly got this fight in the bar between everybody.
Steven Webb:You got everybody hitting bottles over the.
Steven Webb:Head of each other and one person punching another person, and it's just a brawl between everybody. But then you have this one guy at the end of the bar sitting there swigging his whiskey or whatever he's doing.
And it seems like he's totally disconnected, not knowing what's going on. But it's quite the opposite. He knows exactly what's going on and he's keeping an eye out.
And then someone comes over near him and tries to involve him in it, and he stands up right at the last minute and without throwing a punch, he has the final say and walks out. And it's what he says and what he does is we what we remember. And that's what we all want to be.
We want to be that, that shade when everyone else is hot and everyone else is struggling. We want to be that voice of wisdom.
But Stillness in the Storms is more about not just providing for others, not just giving a stillness to a situation. It's about you being able to remain calm and respond in an emotional, skillful, loving way through understanding.
So in order to have this stillness that I'm describing, we have to Be more connected and more awake than ever before. Because a reaction is very subconscious. You know, something happens.
Our subconscious mind flips through the filing cabinet and it finds what it did last time, and then it repeats, didn't kill you last time. So it must have been the right thing to do. The subconscious mind has no moral way of knowing what is right and wrong. It just repeats the same habits.
Whereas the human side, the front bit of the brain, has compassion and caring and morals and ethics and all the things that we should and shouldn't do. And predominantly, it's just more compassionate and understanding.
So it's more about having a stillness and being able to respond, is moving to the more human side of the brain rather than the reptilian, habitable brain. So this podcast is about how can we do that? And I'll be interviewing people that have managed to do that a lot of the time. Nobody's perfect.
I've yet to come across Zen masters or anybody that spends all of their time in this perfect state of absolute calmness. You know, we're all triggered. If anybody says they're not triggered, well, they're probably disconnecting in some way.
So, yeah, we'll be talking to, hopefully some Zen masters, some other spiritual teachers, and other people that have managed to generate their emotional wisdom and to grow a life of. I. I cannot think of another word, but just a life of stillness and calm and compassion and in a loving way that brings this calm to every situation.
So we talk to them and seeing how they do it and what tools and tips they can have for all of us that are on the journey.
And we're all trying to figure out these triggers and figure out why we react and what we're doing, and we're trying to figure out how not to react and then regret it later, because that's very often what we do. And that's what living a life of inner peace is, not having to regret it later, because we created that gap between what arises and how we respond.
So we're talking to lots of people and getting their advice and tools of how they do it.
Steven Webb:At the end of some of the episodes, there will be a small guided meditation, not all of them, depending on the interview and things like that. So, yeah, you're gonna. There's gonna be great value in this podcast, and there's gonna be.
If you want to live a more calm for more peaceful life, if you want to generate your own inner peace and take that to the world, then subscribe to this podcast. This podcast is for you and I'm interested in your questions. I will answer any of your questions.
The direct questions I will answer on my Patreon website. And the reason why I'm going to do that is because the podcast, I'm going to ask you for support.
I'm going to need support to do the editing, do all the other things. As you'll find now, I'm paralyzed from the chest down. So these things take me a lot longer than normal. So I am going to ask for.
Steven Webb:Support.
Steven Webb:To help me with those things. But let's move on with today's podcast. So what does it mean to live a foundation of stillness?
What does it mean to have this ability to stay calm in the storms of life? And ultimately, what does it give you and the people around you? What benefit do you have from this stillness? Well, storms happen.
Steven Webb:Life happens.
Steven Webb:You know, that old bumper sticker, you know, happens, you know, from that film. It wasn't from the film. I just love the way they put it in the film with Forrest Gump.
And let's see, he was walking and he stepped in some dog poo on the floor and someone said, oh, you just stepped in. He just looked up because, yeah, happens. And that's right. You know, you cannot stop life happening.
You know, life just has got a habit of, you know, coming out and hitting you 4pm Tuesday afternoon when you're least expecting it.
Steven Webb:So what we do is we work.
Steven Webb:On ways in which we can be ready to respond to it rather than be in reaction mode. And if you take a progressive government and a reactionary government, one.
One is always trying to put out the storms, you know, one's always trying to run around and get, sort out the leaks afterwards, sort out the controversy, the things that are said and all that. That's a reactionary government. Another government is very proactive. Well, what's going to happen over the next 10 years?
How can we help to prevent it? And how can we mitigate most of these circumstances? And another example is very much like the fire brigade. They have two roles.
They have the role of putting out the fires when they're burning, and they have the role of going around and trying to put as much in place as possible to prevent the fires. The idea is to have a balance between the two.
And living with a foundation of stillness means that you're aware that fires can happen and you're ready for them, but you're also doing as much as you possibly can in order to prevent them from happening, you know, because you're not going to stop them. But you can reduce them, and when they come along, you can reduce the effects of them by not reacting.
So when we respond, we very much don't regret it later. We have family. We don't fall out with family. We don't say things that we should not have said. We do not get personal. We do not take it personally.
We just allow these things to happen and we stop fighting it. Very often where a situation arises and we fight it so, like, we just don't want it. I don't like this situation.
I don't want to be part of this situation. How can I stop this situation? Well, very often the situation is already here and it's arisen. So this is what living with this stillness means.
It means that this has happened. How do I get through it? In the best possible way for myself, in the most skillful way for myself and everybody else around me.
How can I not put more fuel on this fire? I think that's what it comes down to more than anything else is a life of stillness is not putting more fuel on the fire.
You imagine how many times do you go to a family barbecue or Christmas lunch and you'll sit around the table and.
And politics comes up or that family member that you don't overly get on with because they always push your buttons and it's like, I can't stand them. They always push the wrong buttons and they know how to trigger me. They know how to do these things. Well, that's on you. It's not on them.
They might know what buttons to press, but you're the one that's reacting to those buttons pressed. Someone can press that button and not nothing. And they press the button again. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
In the end, they'll give up pressing the button. Right. So whose fault is it when they keep pressing this button and you keep reacting?
Steven Webb:Yeah, I'm sorry to say it.
Steven Webb:It's your fault, you know, if I keep being triggered, which very often, for many, many years, me and my sister. Oh my God, she used to trigger me and she still triggers me now. The triggering doesn't. She still presses those buttons.
And knowingly or unknowingly, I don't know. That's not my concern. That's her karma. But I know that I don't have to react when she presses those buttons. The triggering still happens.
But I have awareness of it and I try my best not to. I'm aware of her triggering me. So therefore, with this awareness, I can almost preempt it. There's a. There's a really good Poem by The Persian poet.
14th century Persian poet. His short name is Haviz and I cannot pronounce his long name.
So let your intelligence begin to rule Whenever you sit with others using this sane idea, leave all your cocked guns in the field far from us, one of those damn things might go off.
Let your intelligence begin to rule Whenever you sit with others using this sane idea leave your cocked guns in the field far from us, one of those damn things might go off. What he's talking about here is he's talking about our triggers.
He's talking about, you know, if you're going into negotiation with someone that you really aren't fond of, you have a really bleak opinion and belief of them, you don't agree with what they're doing. But you have to go in and negotiate some kind of deal.
Leave your opinions and beliefs, leave your ignorance behind, and go in there in a way that you can bring some kind of productive progressive calmness and stillness in the situation. Because we very often go in there with what have it says is with our cocked guns ready to fire. We go in there angry. We go in there with an agenda.
And although it'd be very difficult to not have any kind of agenda, we have to go in there with a sense of calmness and stillness and understanding and compassion.
And this is what we do when we go to barbecues or when we go to Christmas lunch with family, you know, when they start talking politics or when they start thinking, you know, allow them to be right, allow them to have their say, you know, be triggered by it, but don't do anything with the trigger. It's like, anger's fine, violence is not. That's what it means to live a foundation of stillness.
You know, don't think anybody that sat there still, don't think anybody that is really calm and still, that they're simply not aware or they're disconnecting or they're zoning out, they're very much, very often quite the opposite to that. They've been triggered. They're just as angry.
They just got just as much of these things going on inside of them as you have or anybody else, for their learning to control that fear that those triggers, those experiences in life.
And we'll dig deeper into this on the second podcast about triggers and what they are and where they come from and what we can do about some of these things. But I want to move on to who am I? Who am I to be sat here talking to you on this podcast?
And it'll give you a sense of Why I do this podcast and why I do what I do, why I'm an inner peace mentor. You know, I've had lots of experiences in life. You know, I've been bankrupt, I've attempted suicide.
You know, it's one of those things that I'm really happy I failed at. It's over nearly. I'm trying to work out now for my age. Yeah, coming up 30 years ago now. So I've had 30 years more life because I failed at that.
At the age of 18, I broke my neck. I dived into a swimming pool and ended up severely paralyzed.
And you can hear but more about my story on stephenweb.com and my story would grow as the podcast grows and I will share more and more experiences from my life. But that wasn't the big thing that pushed me over the edge of my life. It wasn't the thing that, you know, spent most of my life teetering on.
Between having a great life and feeling really quite depressed. There was times when I really just did not want to carry on and times when my life was absolutely amazing. You know, that's life.
You know, it is a fluctuation, it's a balance. But at 40, I hit rock bottom. And that was the thing that did push me over the edge. I, I found myself single. I found myself broke.
My chair had broken down. I was sat in the shop, sat in the door of a supermarket and my tire had burst.
And this is a 40 year old grown man bawling his eyes out, not knowing where to go. I had no money on my credit cards, they were full. You know, my, my finances were an absolute disaster. My life, I felt, was a complete disaster.
And there I was, sat in a wheelchair in the doorway of a busy supermarket, crying and a security guard saying, you know, you're right, what's, what can we do? That was the final straw really of my rock bottom. That was when I realized I had to do something in my life.
So I, I fought back after trying to shut my mind up because I just finished a relationship or they finished a relationship with me. And at that point, my mind was working overtime. I was thinking far too much.
I was reacting to everything in life and all I was doing was trying to get through the day. If I got through the day, at that point, it was a success. But it wasn't really because I didn't look at it as a success.
I looked at my life as it sucked. You know, I was very much, if there was a question in my mind, it was, how are you Going to kick me today life.
So I was really feeling depressed all the time. I was drinking alcohol to go sleep. I was drinking more and more of it. And not only that, it was in.
It was starting to be embarrassing asking the carers to put more and more alcohol into the glass just to be able to go sleep. Of course, my sleep wasn't working. I was waking up two hours later and all that. It was just.
So I started reading and I started seeing everywhere about meditation, about stillness and inner peace and all that. And I was like, what? I need to sort the world out. Once this world sorted out, I'll be all right. Once I get rid of the.
In my life, once I get rid of the people that not treating me with respect, once I get rid of all these people that are tagging along and dragging me down. You see, I was in the blame game, and I was blaming everybody for everything. You know, if it wasn't the government, it was my dog.
If it wasn't my dog, it was my neighbor. If it wasn't my neighbor, it was my finances or it was the president or, you know, it was. Everybody was out with a big conspiracy to get me.
The only person that wasn't to blame was me. Me. And then I realized that it was stemming from inside of me. So there's a lot more to my story in regards to, you know, I did find a solution.
Every book told me to meditate and to look deeper inside and to sort out my triggers and sort out my shadows and to. To not only wake up, to start cleaning up. Of course, I did not believe any of that because simply, simply put, I couldn't stop thinking.
So meditation wasn't for me. I was a thinker. But it wasn't until I read it again and again and again that at some point I said, ah, I better give it a go. I got no choice now.
Um, so, yeah, I gave meditation a go. It was what I thought was a complete disaster for a long time. And I found teachers to help me, guide me.
And I realized meditation wasn't about sitting there and not thinking. You know, that's. That's sleep. That's deep sleep while you're awake. Even in meditation, there is focus and thought and concept, concentration.
But we'll talk about that more because it's a big part of the stillness. We'll talk about that over the coming weeks. And I want to wrap today's podcast up, and I want to tell you how to get the best out of the podcast.
First of all, subscribe. Subscribe. And leave an honest review. Let me know. Head over to connectwithstephen.com that why I'm pointing over there.
If you're on my Patreon website, you can see videos of these podcasts. Not only just my audio, you see the outtakes and also I'll answer your questions directly. Whatever you're struggling with regarding inner peace.
Head over to connectwithstephen.com and all the information is there. And that's my podcast, Stillness in the Storms of Life.
That's let's get to a place in life where we're not buffered around by anybody else, where we generate the stillness inside of us that we can bring the best compassionate understanding and love to any given situation, you know.
Steven Webb:But most of all, thank you.
Steven Webb:Your time is the most valuable thing you have. It's the one thing that you cannot get more of. It's the one thing that seems to disappear more the older we get.
So I really appreciate you being here on this podcast with me here today. Thank you. Take care. Love deeply, be still, and above all, do what's right for you. Namaste.
