0:05 Have you ever sat down and asked a question, who am I?
0:10 Who am I really beyond all the roles that I play?
0:15 And then when you really sit for that question,
0:18 you don't really come up with an answer. And I think that's one of the things that when we discover
0:24 meditation, we sit down and we observe our breath and we observe what's going on in the world. Suddenly, in
0:30 that moment, we're a meditator. And then something happens where we're just observing the breath,
0:38 we're just observing the world and the temperature and our bum on our seat and all those things.
0:46 But then we don't go deeper and wonder who is doing the observing. If
0:53 I'm not the meditator, then who am I?
0:57 That's what we're going to talk about on today's podcast. I'm Steven Webb and And welcome to Stillness in the
1:03 Storms, the podcast that helps you through difficult times by thinking differently and hopefully feeling differently.
1:11 So, first of all, before we get on with today's show, I want to thank the people that treat me
1:16 to a coffee. And this helps to pay for the podcast, pay for the equipment, the editing, and all the
1:22 other things. So Yuva, karen sue hj, Anita, Lorraine, Brandy, Jane,
1:30 Sergio and Irma, thank you so much. All of you are really appreciated. And all the
1:38 monthly donators, all of you just thank you so much from every single listener out there all over the world.
1:45 And if you want to treat me to a coffee and help keep the podcast free uh just head over
1:52 to StevenWebb.uk there'll be a link just under the show notes. And remember, I've got a new course coming out,
1:59 but I do have two courses. If you click on the link below, both courses are you donate what you
2:06 like and you can have them completely free if you want. All of my teaching is free, and it's up
2:14 to you what you want to pay, if you want to pay. So I love it when someone says something
2:20 really funny, but there's something deep and profound underneath it. And comedian Lily Tomlin said, I
2:28 always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been a little more specific. I love that
2:35 I thought that was so funny when I read that. And what's really funny about the joke? I I always
2:42 wanted to be somebody and now I realised I should have been more specific. She actually admits later on that
2:48 it was her husband that wrote the joke, which means it's even more funnier, actually, when you think about it.
2:54 So I've touched upon this subject from a few different angles, but I think it's really important to.
3:01 When we start on a spiritual journey, there's a few questions that we ask. And we ask them, first of
3:09 all from a very superficial level, which is good, because that's the only place you can You can only ask
3:15 the question from where you are at any given time. And that's nothing wrong with that. So when you first
3:21 ask the question, you start to realise, well, wait a minute, who am I beyond the roles that I do?
3:29 And one of the times this happens is when your kids move out from home or you suddenly lose your
3:35 job or you suddenly change careers because that career suddenly dried up or something. And
3:43 when your children move away. And I had an email this week from a listener saying, that child's going to
3:48 university. Who am I? What what do I do? It feels odd because You've had that role for so long,
3:56 that's who you become. And when I'm on the phone to my daughter, I'm Dad. When I'm on the phone
4:02 to my mom, I'm Son. When I'm on the phone to a resident, I'm councillor
4:10 Steven Webb. And we play all these different roles on a daily basis, and we flip between them without
4:18 a moment's notice. And
4:21 I don't know if you ever noticed that we just automatically do it without even thinking. And each role requires
4:29 a different set of skills. Fundamentally, underneath them are our foundational skills, our
4:36 foundations of who we are, those things that just don't change. And if you want me to do a podcast
4:43 on them, please email me and comment and I'll touch upon that subject it's a Subject I love, you know,
4:51 what are our fundamentals? What are the roots that make who we are? But that's. That's a slightly different. That's
4:59 about the ego. That's about how we're showing up in all senses of these different jobs. But
5:06 I'm talking about from a perspective of who we really are. Who is it's not even who is Steven
5:13 or who you are, it's who knows Steven. who is behind Steven who
5:21 is deeper down. You know, if a surgeon was to open up my head, he could dig as deep as
5:28 he likes. He can look all through my head. He's not going to find anywhere, Steven. It's not in there.
5:34 And when I'm in deep sleep, there's no Steven
5:38 When I was a child, even in deep sleep, then there was no Stevie. But
5:43 then we wake up and we come online and we boot up just like computers. Suddenly we have an operating
5:49 system, and we have all these thoughts and we become a Windows operating system, or we become a doctor, or
5:57 we become a dad or a mum, a brother. And
6:03 also we become the ginger-haired boy or the the person that annoys everybody,
6:11 the joker. So it's not only roles we play, it's the personalities we have. I'm the wheelchair user, you know
6:17 Steven the councillor the one in a wheelchair, you know, the one that did the 500 miles, the one that
6:23 was saved by the air ambulance. So people associate the roles we do with who we are.
6:31 And I think we get so used to doing that ourselves that we forget that we're something bigger and beyond
6:38 that, but
6:41 we're also something that we can choose to be. Every one of those roles have been masked by our childhood,
6:48 by different people around us you know If we didn't have an experience of, I don't know, perhaps a
6:56 councillor or something like that, when we are 10, 12 years old, we may not have ever grown up and
7:01 wanted to be a councillor I had My family was helped quite a lot by politics when we moved to
7:08 Truro. The local councillor and the MP at the time helped my mum find a
7:16 property and we got quite involved in the Liberal Democrats. So that probably had a lot to do with why
7:24 I'm a councillor now. And the same as many other things, our childhood experiences start to pave
7:32 the way for who we become or who the ego becomes. That story in the book,
7:39 what Chapters and I Natural Fact. I think that's a brilliant analogy, actually, I'm going to use that one.
7:46 So your different roles are different chapters, different pages. And when you think about it, we think we're all
7:54 of these things and we're not. We're just one of those things at any given time him You cannot be
7:59 doctor and mum I suppose you can be if your child just cuts leg but you know what I mean
8:05 you You cannot play multiple roles. You cannot be. And I'm trying to think of an example, you cannot be
8:13 now and now. I cannot now that I said it, but I think you get my point. I think tony
8:20 Morrison I think she won one of the Nobel Peace Prizes for literature, she touched
8:27 upon it from the surface level, where she says, you are not the work you do, you are the person
8:33 you are. But then that leaves an open question. So if you think of. We've
8:41 probably heard the analogy when you're peeling an onion and every single time you peel the onion and
8:49 thoughts get less and less and you become more and more into the centre. But every single layer is the
8:55 observer of the. Of the layer on the outside of that you take off that layer, you're the new layer,
9:02 observing the next layer. But the internal layers cannot see five layers out.
9:10 They can only see the layer they can see. So who is this person? The observer. So when you sit
9:17 in meditation, and
9:19 in my meditation, I say you, you cannot. You don't need to do anything with your breath. Your body knows
9:25 how to relax.
9:27 Then who's doing the relaxing? If your body knows how to relax, who did it? Well, no one, nothing. It
9:35 just knows how to do it. Just like a cup sitting on the side. It knows how to be a
9:39 cup because it is a cup.
9:42 I know how to be a human because I am human. I don't have to try to be a human.
9:48 I don't wake up in the morning and go, okay, how do I become human? Today I already am. And
9:56 we often try to take on other roles. But no matter how much you try, you're still human. Then you
10:02 can now have different ways of going with that human and How you dress, what you do, how you show
10:08 up all those different things. That's personalities that's that's the pages, that's the chapters. But
10:16 the book, the human is still the human. This is where you're showing up. This is the body we have.
10:23 So when you sit there and become aware of your breath.
10:28 Who is it that's aware of the breath? Who is watching the breath?
10:34 Who is becoming relaxed? And here's the thing. From that perspective, the eye cannot see,
10:42 the person, cannot see who it is. You have no name. You have no identity.
10:49 And you notice from that perspective, when you really sit with that, you have no feelings, do you? You have
10:56 no happy or sad. You're just, ah, you just are. And that's it.
11:03 You can go even deeper into that if you want to, where you always become the observer of the observer.
11:10 But even that role of the observer drops away. And then you start fading into everything.
11:18 That's when there's no self. But when you are the observer, it doesn't see as in
11:26 eyes, it doesn't see as in feels It's just awareness. That's how it sees, that's
11:34 how it feels. Just awareness. And you can say like are you aware of your toe? Well,
11:42 then you suddenly become aware of your toe. Then if I say, are you aware? You have to literally
11:50 become aware of everything.
11:54 And it's that little moment of the end of the question
12:01 and the bit before answering the question. So
12:05 if I was to ask you again, now, are you aware? And you may not get it because I don't
12:11 know what you're doing right now. And you may be. If you get it, you'll realise that there's a little
12:17 bit of a gap there. That it's just. It almost feels like nothing. It feels like an emptiness. It
12:25 feels like a pure awareness. And that pure awareness doesn't have feelings, doesn't have eyes, it doesn't
12:32 have a body to see. It's just, ah, if you can hold that for a few seconds, you're doing brilliant,
12:40 you're doing better than me. But
12:43 just that awareness is just so peaceful and
12:48 then you can go deeper. So in Buddhism, when there's no self and you could not find one, and
12:56 he was searching for who is the self, who is the person here he gave that a name, he called
13:02 it anata which basically means not self. You don't exist. No fixed little
13:09 statue of you sits inside. There's
13:14 nothing there. Sitting there with the roles. Because
13:19 what are the roles? They're just memories. They're just stories you tell yourself the chapters If someone come in and
13:25 rubbed out all those chapters and you woke up tomorrow, you wouldn't know what role you play. And Jack cornfield
13:33 explains this by. I don't know if it's a story or imagining it. So you imagine if you've been a
13:41 smoker all your life and you suddenly have a stroke and you go in hospital and that stroke caused the
13:47 bit of your brain that knows it's a smoker to wipe itself out and it
13:55 wakes up and your wife or somebody, like, sits there and says, you haven't asked for a cigarette for days.
14:03 So what do you mean ask for a cigarette I don't smoke. It's
14:08 like, oh. And that can happen. It happens quite a lot when something goes wrong, when we have some kind
14:14 of trauma. So
14:17 all of these cities in our minds, you know, when you're really young, when you're a baby, you have vast
14:23 pastures of nothing in there. And then as time goes on, you build up these little tents, you build up
14:31 these little villages. And then as time goes on with religion and beliefs and
14:38 and politics whatever it is, the more people give you information, those little tents become little
14:46 houses, and then those houses become towns, and then they become concrete cities. And these cities are like
14:53 just patterns in your head
14:56 and it's really hard to undo them because who are you before you built all these cities? When I say
15:03 these cities, these cities are religion. They're your thoughts and beliefs. They're your. Who you think you are.
15:10 And I'm not saying wipe out all those cities. I'm not saying have like the worst Earthquake and wipe everything
15:16 out. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's realising what the gift is here is you recognise that you
15:24 are profoundly something deeper than just your thoughts, just your roles you play. So
15:32 when you suddenly feel alone or you suddenly feel like, who am I? Do it with excitement and curiosity.
15:40 And
15:42 I think what's wonderful about this perspective, when you truly understand this perspective, and I'm not sure I do
15:50 truly understand it, but when you do. Because sometimes I have moments like this. When I was lying on the
15:58 bottom of the swimming pool when I broke my neck
16:01 at First I was frightened, then I was petrified. Then you. I'm only joking. That song got to my mind
16:09 then. But first I was terrified that I was gonna die I took a deep breath, and it was, like,
16:16 really painful. And then things started fading away, and things started to become warm. And then at some point, it
16:25 wasn't a fact that I wasn't frightened, because I didn't really exist. There was, like, this weird awareness of
16:33 everything. I
16:36 was the swimming pool. I was the people next to me. I was the field. And
16:44 it's really hard to put it into words. And it was a good 20 years before I would ever be
16:50 able to talk to someone and go, this is what I experienced. And they said, yeah, you experienced no self.
16:57 There's
16:59 no real Steven there But this isn't terrifying. When I spoke to my daughter about this, about, I don't know,
17:06 10 years ago, it terrified her what do you mean? There's no kemba? That's that's terrifying Don't tell
17:14 me anymore so But the reason why it's exciting is because you
17:21 can play with the roles. Every
17:25 single moment is a rebirth. In the morning or when you answer the phone, you rebirth that person in
17:33 that role in that moment. It comes and goes. You
17:39 pull your resources from the cities you're having to show up as. So I will, in about a week's time,
17:46 I will release a meditation that will help you to softly understand this. Because I
17:54 love this concept. The ego loves this concept because he can play with it. He can show up as what
18:00 he likes. You know, he doesn't have to be the meditation teacher. He doesn't have to be the councillor He
18:06 doesn't have to be dad. He can choose to be, and then you can choose what fundamentals
18:14 that you bring along with it. I like to bring along a caring, a calm. I think
18:22 fundamentally, I'm a loving, caring person. Am I always loving and caring? Absolutely not.
18:30 But
18:32 fundamentally, that's what I feel below everything. If I go even deeper. I haven't got any of those things, but
18:39 when the ego first comes online, that's what I first feel and associate with. So I'm gonna leave it there
18:47 for today because it's quite a deep subject and it's a really interesting subject. It's a subject I love and
18:53 there's so much teaching we can do about the self and the no self and the observer. And
19:00 I just love the fact that we can be different roles in different moments. Be the most
19:08 awesome mom in the world, be the super mom be the superhero, put on a cape, laugh, have fun.
19:16 But
19:18 you don't have to be that all the time. On
19:22 that note, become the observer sometimes just sit back, watch the world go by. I
19:30 want to say thank you to everybody that donated. You are awesome. And I'm just going to leave it there
19:36 and just sit and ask the question, who am I? To your practice for the next few hours,
19:44 Just every time you become aware, slightly just go, what role am I playing right now? On
19:52 that note, have
19:55 a lovely day and thank you for listening this far. Please leave a review, hit thumbs up or
20:02 star or follow and share if you can. If not, just thank you for listening
20:10 and I love you.
