Stillness in the StormsA podcast with Steven Webb Join Weekly Calm

Episode 178 · 20 September 2026 · 17:11

We're All Terrible Meditators: The Art of Doing Nothing on Purpose

Are you bad at meditating? So is everyone. The mind wanders because that is its job. Meditation is not quieting it, it is noticing you have gone and coming back.

Subject: How to Meditate, Inner Peace Foundations

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Stillness in the Storms · Episode 178

Are you bad at meditating? So is everyone. The mind wanders because that is its job. Meditation is not quieting it, it is noticing you have gone and coming back.

Support me with a coffee and join my Weekly Calm every Sunday: stevenwebb.uk

When I started, I thought meditation was sit down, be quiet, no thoughts, pure bliss. It lasted about 30 seconds. Then a teacher gave me the only instruction that ever worked: just sit and do nothing. His version had four letters. Your body knows how to breathe and your mind knows how to go quiet. The job is getting out of their way. Think of a snow globe. To settle the snow you do nothing, you just watch, and life will shake it up again anyway. Every time the mind wanders it is a happy accident, as Bob Ross would say. Smile, say thank you mind, and come back.

One thing to try: Get somewhere five minutes early and just sit in the car. Each time you catch the mind off in a story, smile, say thank you mind, and come back to what you can hear and feel. Five minutes, twice a day.

In this episode

  • (0:03) Winnie the Pooh, and why meditation is doing nothing on purpose
  • (1:19) The only instruction that ever worked: just sit and do nothing (his had four letters)
  • (2:22) The snow globe. To settle the snow, you do nothing
  • (3:45) You're being thought. What's your next thought going to be?
  • (4:23) We're all terrible meditators, and why that is fine
  • (5:47) Bob Ross and the happy accident
  • (9:24) 178 podcasts and I've yet to find the one little thing that fixes everything
  • (13:15) Calvin and Hobbes, do a bit more nothing, and five minutes in the car

With gratitude to

Jess, David, Angi, Jeroen, Jose and Jill, Helen, Tracey, Carol, Hayden, Sarafena, Cheryl and Strength from Within Yoga, and new monthly supporter Rowan

The companion meditation: Nothing to Get Right: A Peace Meditation With Little Instruction

Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk

Thank you for listening.

Steven

The question this answers

Why can't I quiet my mind when I meditate, and am I doing it wrong?

When I started, I thought meditation was sit down, be quiet, have peace, no thoughts, absolute bliss. It lasted less than a minute and I thought, yeah, stuff this. I only started because it was cool and trendy.

Then the breathing. The app says breathe in, and I have not finished breathing in yet. Now breathe out, and I already have, because I was hyperventilating. Even being told how to breathe never worked with me. I ended up lightheaded, or tired, or asleep.

What landed was my teacher saying just sit and do nothing. His actual words were four letters, and the last two stood for "up". It is that simple. My body knows how to breathe. My mind knows how to go quiet. My job is to get out of their way, again and again and again.

The heart of it

  • The mind wanders because that is what it evolved to do. You are not failing when it does.
  • You are being thought. Try it. What is your next thought going to be? You have no idea.
  • Meditation is not the quiet. It is noticing you have gone, and coming back.

I loved my snow globe as a child. When you want the snow to settle, what do you do? Nothing. You watch it. Keep shaking it, keep trying to make it fall a certain way, and it never settles. Life will shake it up again anyway.

We're all terrible meditators. We're all terrible at what we do.

If meditation means sitting there in peace and quiet and enjoying it, then yes, all of us are terrible. But it is not about that. It comes down to noticing the wandering. Ah, I have gone into a story. Sometimes you are five minutes into a party from twenty years ago, and what you should have said, before you notice. At that point you smile and say thank you, mind. It has done what it does. Bob Ross would call it a happy accident.

Here is the bit that matters. When the mind is off in story, it is cramming everything into this moment. The present you need to buy in two years. The thing you said wrong twenty years ago. Next week. The brain has no timeline. Years ago people came home from the fields, sat round the table, read a book, looked at the countryside. They knew how to do nothing. We are frightened of it now.

I have done 178 of these podcasts and I have yet to find the one little thing that sorts life out forever. I have got to the wisdom that it does not exist, and that is okay. What meditation does is smaller and better. It brings you back to this moment, where most of your problems are not actually here.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes

One small thing to try

Get somewhere five minutes early and sit in the car. Every time you find the mind doing something, bring it back and become witness to the breath. What can I hear? What can I feel? What is under my bum right now?

Notice your shoulders while you are there. Most of us hold them up all day, on guard, ready for the world. Let them drop.

Do that twice a day for five minutes, ten if you can. There is a meditation that goes with this one, Nothing to Get Right, and it barely says a word.

Questions people ask

My mind will not go quiet. Am I doing it wrong?

No. The mind has evolved to think, and if it finds a gap it fills it. You are not failing when it wanders. The practice is the catching, not the quiet. Catch it, smile, come back. That counts.

I can't follow the breathing instructions. What should I do?

Ignore them, honestly. Your body has breathed on its own your whole life. Sit, do nothing, and let it. If a teacher's count leaves you behind, you spend the next 30 seconds trying to catch up, and that is the opposite of the point.

Is a bath or a walk the same as meditating?

They are lovely and I recommend them, but no. Peace and quiet is a nice side effect. Meditation is noticing that the mind has gone into thought and the body has tensed, and stepping back from it. You can do that in a car park.

How long and how often?

Five minutes twice a day. Ten is better. You will have less hassle, you will be kinder, and people will drive you crazy a bit less.

Read along

The transcript

It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.

meditation-how-to · mindfulness · present-moment · overthinking · acceptance

Read the transcript

"Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something," Winnie the Pooh.

And I know he's a little bear, and I know he's not real, but I think he's got more wisdom than most of

us put together, let's be honest.

Because that is what meditation is about.

It's about doing nothing, on purpose.

Not sitting there daydreaming.

And when I started meditation, I thought it was sit down, be quiet, have peace, no thoughts, no nothing,

just absolute bliss.

It lasted less than, I think, 30 seconds, maybe one minute, and it was like, "Yeah, stuff this."

I think I actually started doing it just to be cool and trendy.

But when I try breathing the way the app said or the way the teachers now said, it's like, "Okay, breathe

in, and now breathe out."

I'm like, "No, wait a minute.

I haven't finished breathing in yet."

And, "Now take a deep breath, breathe in now."

I'm like, "Yeah, okay.

Well, I've already breathed in."

"Ready to breathe out?"

Yeah, I had to breathe out a moment ago because I was hyperventilating.

So even when they're telling me how to breathe, it just never works with me.

I end up lightheaded or tired or fall asleep.

And that's when it landed.

That's when I think my teacher just said, "Just sit and do nothing."

He said, "STFU.

STFU."

I was like, "What's that?"

And he said, "S-T-F-U.

Shut the fuck up."

And it's that simple.

And when I realised that my body knows how to breathe, my body knows how to relax, and even my mind knows

how to go quiet, all I need to do is learn to get out of its way again and again and again.

I'm Steven Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms, and I help you through some of the more difficult

times in life.

And this week's meditation that goes with this week's podcast barely says a word at all.

And I just wanted to do the simplest, bare essentials guided meditation that I could do, and that's why

I recorded it, and the link to it is in the show notes.

But if we pick an analogy, and I love analogies.

Anybody that listens to my show regularly, I love a good old analogy.

And one thing I always used to love it when I was a child was the snow globe.

Absolutely loved my snow globe.

And when you think of a snow globe, when you want it to go all peaceful, when you want the snow to drop,

what do you do with it?

You do nothing.

You just watch it.

You allow it to do it.

You don't sit there and tell it how to drop the snow, and if you keep shaking it and you keep doing it,

and if you try to do it certain ways, the snow doesn't all fall properly and all that.

And I'm not gonna milk this analogy anymore but you know exactly what I mean.

Just allow the snow globe to do what it does.

Just let it relax, because life will shake it up anyway.

So very often we don't end up meditating, or we don't end up sticking at it 'cause we think we're doing

it wrong.

We think we're not quiet in the mind, or a teacher comes online and says, "Right, now breathe in, and

now breathe out."

And you're like, "Wait a minute.

I haven't caught up with you yet."

And then for the next 30 seconds of the meditation, you're trying to catch up.

You just need to allow these things to happen.

The mind is going to wander.

Guess what?

The mind has evolved to think.

The subconscious mind has evolved to go, "What's happening now?

Let's analyse it.

Let's tell you what I'm thinking."

And then the mind thinks.

You're being thought.

You're not actually doing the thinking.

Because if you were doing the thinking, you'd know the next thing you're thinking.

You don't even know what word you're gonna say next after you're saying each word.

If I said to you, "What's the last word of the next sentence you say?"

You have no idea.

You just cannot know it.

And if I said, "What's the next thought gonna come into your head?"

You don't know.

It's a real good way of getting a bit of silence, actually.

"So what's your next thought?"

And then nothing.

And I often use that trick if I, if my mind doesn't go silent enough.

But in all fairness, we're all terrible meditators.

We're all terrible at what we do.

We're all...

if meditation is about quieting the mind and sitting there in peace and quiet and enjoying it, we're all

terrible.

But the truth is, it's not about that, and I'll talk about that in a minute.

But it's just, it comes down to noticing the wandering.

Ah, I've gone into story.

Ah, I've caught myself.

Sometimes you might end up in a story for five minutes.

You might ended up going to some party you went to 20 years ago, and what you should have said, what you

didn't do, and all those other things, and then suddenly you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, I'm sat here

meditating."

And at that point, you just smile and go, "Thank you, mind," because the mind has done what it does.

If the mind finds a gap, it tries to fill it.

Very much like we do with even, our stories.

Whenever there's a gap, it's like, "Oh, I must put something in there.

I cannot leave any holes in any explanation or any facts or things."

Facts or...

You know what I mean.

And although you can get meditation wrong, you can do it terribly wrong.

But in all fairness, if you're sitting down and just going, "Do you know what?

I'm just gonna sit here and just catch my thoughts," you're not gonna go far wrong.

You're not gonna get it far out of it.

It's like, what did Bob Ross say, the painter, with all that hair?

I used to, his shows were like a meditation in themselves, weren't they?

Used to love them.

I think I still miss them, and I think they were, 20 years before I even started watching them.

I didn't realise I was watching a 20-year-old show when I'm watching them in the '90s when they come over

to the UK.

But what do you say?

We don't make mistakes.

We just have happy accidents, and that's it.

Every time the mind wanders, it's a happy accident.

It's just that's what the mind does.

Get used to it.

Catch it more often and go, "No, we're sat here now."

And then when we start to do that, what we realise is when the mind's in that story and it's thinking

about all the hundred things we need to do, that birthday we need to buy a present for in two years' time,

or that party that we said something wrong at 20 years ago, or that discussion that we had last week,

or something we need to do next week, all of those things, the mind is cramming them into this moment.

Right, while you got a moment to think, we need to do all these things.

The mind doesn't know where you're actually sat or what you're actually doing.

It just thinks you've gotta do all these things.

It hasn't caught up with today and the way we live.

Years ago people used to work on the farms or in the fields, and they would come home.

They didn't have a doom scrolling thing to go through their phone.

They didn't have TV to entertain them.

They'd sit down and just have a chat round the table and then they would go and sit in quiet, read a book,

just look at the countryside, go for a walk.

They knew how to do nothing for a while, but we don't do that anymore.

We're so frightened of doing nothing.

And this is the problem, the brain has no timeline.

Like I was saying, before I got off onto another tangent, the brain doesn't know that there isn't this

linear thing that we can do all things...

We cannot do all things in one go.

So what meditation teaches us, if we come back to this moment and go, "Ah, I cannot do that thing in two

years' time because it hasn't even happened yet.

It's not even gonna be here.

It's not even important because I'm not gonna do it anyway."

And I cannot re-go back over that conversation I had 20 years ago, and I can't do all these things.

But that's all the story.

That's where we end up getting caught up by it all.

Meditation is about bringing it back and going, what's happening in this moment?

What's happening right now?

Not fighting the world, not fighting this moment, not fighting that we did not do exercise last week,

not fighting that we didn't say the right thing or we haven't got this done or anything like that.

It's just about what's happening right in this moment.

And then when we realise in this moment that we realise the world is not actually burning.

Well, it is burning, but there's nothing we can do about it in this moment.

There's terrible things happening all over the world.

There's beautiful things happening all over this world.

There's all sorts of things happening at any one time.

But we can't do anything about most of it.

We can barely do anything about our lives, let's be honest.

Most of us are just staying afloat.

We're trying to stop overwhelm.

We're just trying to have a bit of peace and quiet.

You're here on this podcast probably because you're overrun, you're tired, you've had enough, and you're

looking for a bit of wisdom that may...

You can cling onto and go, "That's it.

I can sort my life out now that I know that one little thing."

Well, when you find it, please tell me, because I've been doing, what is it?

178 podcasts now, and I've yet to find that one little thing that is gonna change everything and make

my life peaceful and sorted forever.

I think I've got to the wisdom now that it doesn't exist, and that's okay.

But this is where meditation takes us away from these tangents and these thought patterns that, do you

know what?

Right now isn't that bad.

If I can sit here and listen to a podcast, or if I can sit here and just do nothing for five minutes,

then life is not that bad.

Life is pretty good in this moment.

And that's what we're doing all the time.

And the meditation is if you want peace and quiet, go and have a bath, go for a walk, go and light some

candles.

Get some incense sticks.

I don't know, go and get your favourite meal or some nice afterwards or something.

I call it afterward, dessert.

Go and get some nice, I don't know, ice cream or something, and have a nice quiet moment to yourself.

That's not what meditation's about.

Meditation is about recognising that the mind is going into these thoughts and the feeling in the body,

and it's becoming distracted, and we're getting hooked up on all these things.

And meditation is about, no, let's take a step back.

Not in this moment.

And the more we do it, the more peace we have, because the less things that are stacking up on top of

us.

We realise 99% of the things are not our problem, and the other 99%...

I'm really shit at maths now, as you can see, 'cause we've now got 198%, which is impossible.

I'm doing maths like Trump now.

I've lowered the prices by 800%.

Yeah.

Sorry, I couldn't help to go there.

Anyway, right, bring it back, and, well, I don't even know where I was to.

But it's about realising that most of our problems we don't even have to think about.

We can't do anything about at the moment.

It's just sitting back and realising, do you know what?

How much of today can I leave go?

How much of my anxiety and my stress is really just about things that are not important, about things

that I can do nothing about.

And I just think we don't spend enough time doing nothing.

And when I say doing nothing, I'm not talking about a daydream meditation.

I'm talking about every time you find your mind doing something, bring it back and just become witness

to your breath.

That's where the meditation is, witness to the breath, witness to this moment.

What can I hear?

What can I feel?

What is my, underneath my bum right now?

Or were these things that we can just be in this moment to be?

We don't have to do anything with this moment.

And the body's just crying out for that.

If you notice, when you allow your body to relax, your shoulders drop, your body relaxes.

I bet you don't realise that nearly all day your shoulders are tense and your eyes are tense, your ears

are tense, your nose is like, "Oh, everything's ready to just take on the world at any time.

I'm ready.

I'm on guard."

We're almost in a state of complete readiness.

We can't allow a thought, we can't allow a person, we can't allow the news or anything to let us take

down our guard because what if something goes wrong or what if we let somebody in?

And that's the reality.

And I like what Calvin said from Calvin and the Hobbes.

He's a, I don't know, he's what?

Seven, eight years old, and he's wiser than most of us, just the same as the bear.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Do a bit more nothing.

So take the five minutes when they're there and just sit in the car.

Get somewhere five minutes early and just sit in the car and train your mind to bring it back to this

moment.

Train your mind to go, "I am deep in thought now and deep in story that's probably not even true."

'Cause that's what we're doing, we're always rethinking everything.

So just before I wrap up this podcast, I wanna say something really important.

And I wanna say thank you to Jess, David, Angi, Jeroen, Jose and Jill, Helen, Tracey, Carol, Hayden, Sarafena,

and Cheryl just this morning.

Thank you to all of you for donating a coffee.

You guys, you mean the world.

You mean the world to me and the listeners, and especially listeners on Inner Peace Meditations that enables

them to be advert free.

And also from Strength from Within Yoga this morning, and a couple of anonymous, and a new monthly supporter,

Rowan.

And I'm gonna mention a special thank you to Helen.

After last week's World Suicide Prevention Day episode, she donated to Andy's Man Club, so thank you.

And my stepdad's called Andy.

He's awesome.

So thank you, Helen, that means a lot.

And to all the monthly supporters, you are awesome, and thank you.

You all mean the world.

And if you wanna support or find out more about other meditations and join the Weekly Calm, just go to

stevenwebb.uk.

It's that easy.

All the links are there.

And this week's meditation, and it's linked below, is nothing to get right.

Just very little instructions.

Just sit, listen.

And every time you go off on a thought, just bring it back.

Smile gently and say, "Thank you, mind.

That's what you do.

Thank you."

You don't get mad at your heart for beating.

You don't get mad at your body for breathing.

You just get annoyed when it's doing it when you don't want it to.

In reality, that's what the mind's evolved to do.

It's what the body and the heart, they've evolved to do what they do.

So I've got a question for you.

Just message me.

When you first started meditating, was it what you thought?

And meditation can go way deeper than this.

There's so many types of meditation.

This is far from the beginning, the end, and everything.

You can go much deeper.

You can do what you want with meditation.

But if you do this twice a day for five minutes, twice a day for 10 minutes, even better.

You'll have less hassle in your life.

You'll be more peaceful.

You'll be kinder to others.

You won't wanna rip apart your kids quite so often.

People won't drive you crazy.

I might have to cut that out of the podcast.

I'm not sure.

But yeah, you'll just find life a little bit easier.

So thank you.

And if this has helped, please share it with someone else.

You never know if it might help them.

Look, take care of yourself and each other, and I love you.

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