What Rises When You Stop Pushing

Speaker A: 00:00:02

Hello, and welcome to stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb and I help people find steady ground when life gets hard.

No gimmicks, no life hacks, just honest conversation that will bring you peace when you need it most. So happy Easter if you celebrate it. And if you don't, happy Sunday. Happy April. Happy.

Clocks have changed and it's light past 7 if you're in the UK, I don't know when the clocks change over in the States or in Australia. So I want to talk about something that spring always reminds me of. When the daffodils start appearing on the roadside.

Especially in the places that I forgot they were last year. I forgot the buds were just waiting in dormant all winter long. They just start appearing. It's like all, oh, that's nice, just give me that warm.

And I love the fact that it's so bright and so yellow. It's such a simple.

And they give us such a life lesson that, hey, you know, I might be beside a roadside, I might even be leaning on the pavement, but I'm going to bloom anyway. Yeah. I don't care what you say. I don't care if my neighbor beside me is taller and brighter than me. I am going to blossom anyway.

And I think that's weak. Learn so much from just that alone.

So when all these times when we look and think things are done and things are over, you know, the daffodil comes up and says, I wasn't done. I was just waiting. And I think that's what I want to talk about today.

What rises, what comes back, what returns to us, not because we force it, but because that's what life does when we stop standing in its way.

And because it's Easter and whatever your relationship with that is, whether it's a deeply meaningful to you or just a long weekend off and some chocolate, you know, it is a mix of chocolate and a long weekend and reflection. For me, there's something in this story that I think is worth sitting with. And even if you're not religious, even if you're.

It's not anything in particular. The central image of Easter is something about coming back to life. Something that was dead, something that seemed dead or was buried, rising again.

And you don't have to believe in the literal resurrection to feel the pull of that idea, because we've all experienced it. So think about it. Think about something in your life that you were sure was over. Maybe it was your energy, even.

Maybe just through a period of illness, grief or burnout or depression, whatever it Was. And you genuinely thought, do you know what? I'm not going to feel myself again. That's it. I'm never going to feel better.

There's times when I felt that in hospital last week. And there's times when it's really cold outside. I'm like, do you know, is summer ever going to be here again?

Are we ever going to hear the birds again? And we do. We do think those things at times is only human nature. And it must have been a morning where you woke up and you. And the dread.

Wasn't there an afternoon where you caught yourself laughing and thought, oh, there I am. There you are. So maybe it was even a relationship. Maybe it has gone cold or distance.

Or maybe it was a friend or something like that that just suddenly called you out the blue because they were doing something that reminded you, or they just sent you an emoji or whatever it is, and it just cracked open again. A conversation, a crisis moment of unexpected honesty. You know, all of these things just have a tendency to suddenly come back.

Some of them great, some of them celebrated, some of them not so perfect, and some of them not like before, but alive nevertheless. Or maybe it was curiosity, that feeling of being genuinely interested in something, wanting to learn to read and explore.

It goes away sometimes, doesn't it? Sometimes I read in books and I cannot put a book down. Other times I think, I haven't picked that book up for months. I suddenly get back into it.

Music. I was listening to music the other night, and I was listening to Don't Fear the Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult. And I didn't know they said Reaper.

I thought, don't fear the rebirth. And now I heard it on TV and it had the subtitles and it said Reaper. And I'm like, oh, wow, how obvious is that? Now I cannot unhear it now.

I just hear Reaper. Now it's correct. But, yeah, it's. These things just suddenly come back and we enjoy them. We sit in them. These things remind us of things.

And a distant memory. And Alan Watts and, you know, I like listening to Alan Watts.

He's another one that I don't listen to for months and years and then suddenly go back and I cannot put his teachings down. And he talked about this rhythm constantly.

He saw it everywhere in nature, in psychology, in the way human beings actually live when they're not trying to control everything. I think this is important. When you stop controlling, life has a way of. I don't drive along the road and go, where are those daffodils?

Come on, Pop up. I don't look at the bear tree and go, where's your leaf? Come on, what you're doing. I just trust the spring will come along eventually.

And he used the image of waves. A wave rises, crests and falls. And if you're watching just one wave, you might think, well, that's it, it's gone.

But of course another wave comes in and another. The ocean doesn't run out of waves. It just doesn't work that way.

Whether it's in our own lives, whether it's in our own spiritual journey and growing more compassion or a country or anything when it comes to progress, I think it's much like the tide coming in. You get one big wave and it's like, wow, this is new, this is amazing.

And then the tide comes out, go back out and it readjusts and it comes back in and it comes back in slightly further. And then for each wave advances slightly more. But it's never perfect. And then I'm really milking this metaphor now, but I'm going to carry on.

It's my podcast, I'm allowed. And then you've even got the tides themselves.

It's like everything humans do, like whether it's the Internet or whatever we do, when the telephone first come out, everybody panics and AI now people are panicking, people are thinking, the end of the world. Or we've had things for the last 80 years that would destroy mankind. I have a trust that we will sort it out, but it'll be messy.

It's gonna mess up the beach, it's gonna mess up some people that weren't ready for it, that didn't realize the waves were coming in. And it's not gonna be good, it's not gonna be pretty.

But eventually a tide will come in and we'll go, we're okay with this now, we've got it sorted, we got some rules.

And yeah, I'd say that we're really heavy heart at the moment because I think as Margaret Thatcher said, if you don't have international law, you then have nothing left. And I'm starting to worry about international law at the moment.

I always thought the western countries would always abide by international law, but hey, here we are, that's a different story. So going back to Alan Watts, great insight. I do have to keep going back to year after year and it is not separate to the rhythm.

We are that rhythm, the rising and folding of energy, of mood, of hope, of creativity. It's not a simple problem to be solved. It's not like, oh, I need creativity. It's here. It's here forever. It comes and goes.

Everything is in those waves. The trouble comes when we get attached to the crest, when we think the high point is real and that's where we are and that's where we need to stay.

That moment of, I've got it now. I'm happy, I'm in that brilliant place.

Then we grip the good feeling and panic when it fades and we fall off it and we fall off our surfboard, just to go even deeper on the metaphor, because of course, it fades. Everything does. But fading is not the same as dying. It's just another wave, another way of coming back in, another way of improving things.

It's just another chance.

And at this point, I want to say something to anyone who's at a low point right now, anyone who is in that falling part of the way, because I know some of you are. And Easter can be a difficult time when you're struggling.

All of this talk of new life and renewal and fresh starts, it can feel like pressure, like everyone else is rising and you're still in the ground, still buried, still waiting for something that doesn't seem to be coming. Especially if you had a particularly harsh winter and maybe lost somebody you loved or something like that. And I want to say this clearly as I can.

You're not behind, you're not broken. You're not failing to rise on schedule. The seed doesn't bloom just because someone stands over it and says, come on, hurry up, it's spring.

I know I'm really milking these metaphors this week, but I like metaphors. They work for me. Things bloom when they're ready, when conditions are right.

And you may not even be somebody that likes the spring and the winter because of something happened. That's okay. But there is pressure. And when the warmth reaches the depth, that is enough for you. That's it. But it has to be individual.

And that's the point of all these things. Not all trees bloom at the same time. You know, you often drive down the road and most of the daffodils have already bloomed and out.

And you get one on the end just coming through again. Hey, wait for me. That's okay. Your job by now is just not to force it.

I just wanted to say that and make it clear that just because spring comes along and everybody feels better. And then, of course, in the.

Over in Australia, which a lot of you are listening for, I love you guys over there, and you're going into winter so it's completely different for you. So really, really, what you should do is not listen to my podcast for six months and then start listening to them, and then they would make sense.

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God, I feel my heart beating fast, like as if I'm really nervous today. Don't know why. It's like as if I'm recording this podcast in front of thousands of people and I'm just talking to you, just me and you.

So what does it mean in practice? What does it actually look like to let things rise rather than forcing them?

Well, I think it starts with paying attention, really paying attention to what's actually happening, what's already happening, rather than what you think should be happening. And spring is a good teacher here. Nobody tells the daffodils when to come up. Nobody schedules the dawn chorus.

These things happen because the conditions are right and life does what it does. Those chemical balances in the trees that just sat there and waited.

And if you actually watch spring not as scenery, not as a background, but as something to pay real good attention to, you started to notice that renewal is not dramatic. It's not a sudden explosion of color and energy that we seem to think it is. It's slow, it's gradual, it's one bud at a time.

Some of them come out early and that's it, they're done. Because they misjudged it. I think.

I shared two weeks ago, a week ago, the Scandinavian Proverb that winter returns in spring seven times before summer. Well, tell that to the daffodil that shot up early, poor thing. I just go out and hear those bird songs at the moment.

I still think they're genuinely arguing and they're just doing what we're doing. Moaning about what's for tea, what we're going to eat next. And, you know, my brother got bigger worms than I did and things like that.

You know, the kind of thing that they'd be more arguing about, you know. Well, if I live with my friend, he's got a nest that's higher up and he can see the valley anyway. And that's how it works in us too, I would say.

The return of energy, of interest and joy and peace. Whether. Whether it's spring in you, whether it's. It just really doesn't matter, but it creeps in sometimes without even knowing it.

And if you're not paying attention, you will miss it. You'll miss those little moments of compassion, those moments of just understanding.

And I was reminded that Jumpo, one of my teachers, that one of the main teachers that I knew personally, he passed away five years ago now. It's like, wow, I had no idea. I thought it was like two years ago, but.

And he spoke about what arises out of the initial of any given moment, and whether that's grief or anger or compassion or all these things just arise. And he says the first thing that arises is always caring.

After that, the noise creeps in the story, the things I creep in, and they turn that caring into anger or all the other things. Because if you're angry about something, you care about it. I've never met an angry person that doesn't care.

It may not be caring about what you care about, but they still care.

And the one way of defusing an angry argument, and I'm not very good at this, remembering it when I'm in it, the one way of doing it is just looking up and going, do you know what? You could be right. I can tell you really care about this.

Explain to me why you care and whether that's a parking spot, whether or not that's something else. Anger always comes from a place of deep caring. But again, it's that arising. It's that coming up. And I think that's so important to pay attention to.

And there's a lovely poem by Tony Hoagland, and it's called the Color of the Sky. You'll have to look it up. Maybe. I'll see if I can find a link to it or put it in the show notes.

But there's a line in that poem, it says the end turned out to be the middle. Here's the thing. We don't know whether things will return. We don't know.

And the Easter story, we don't know at the point of Friday, they didn't know he was going to rise on the Monday. And whether you want to take the story literally or take the story, it's just a story, it really doesn't matter. And that's not the point.

They will always come back and return in some form, in some way. And if there's any way that Jesus did return through compassion, through saying on the cross, forgive them. They don't know what they do.

The same as the Buddha, when he was spat at in front of all his students, his tutors are really angry. And the Buddha says down in the he, he didn't spit at me. He spat at his version of me.

And when he come back and apologize the next day, he said, that's okay. You didn't spit at me. You spatter yesterday. Your version yesterday and me. And that's what it is. I think everybody's ignorant.

I'm mixing stuff up now, but that's okay. Anybody regular to my podcast, you know, I do that anyway. That's what the mind does, and that's okay. But the end turned out to be the middle.

And I think that's a lovely Easter message, stripped of all its theology and just lay bare the thing that you thought would finish the season. The energy, the part of yourself it might just be in the middle. Not the end, the middle. With more still to come. And who knows?

So I'm going to draw this close now. Running out of breath. I'm getting older. I can't talk this long constantly for like 15, 20 minutes anymore. So here's your takeaway from today.

And it's a gentle one. And it feels right for a Sunday, I think.

Pay attention to what's arising, not what you think should be happening, not the transformation you're trying to force, just what's actually happening quietly beginning to show itself. Maybe it's energy, maybe it's curiosity, maybe it's a willingness to try something you've given up years ago.

Maybe it's just a morning where you feel, for no particular reason, slightly more alive than you did yesterday. That's the bud, that's the crocus, that's the wave beginning to rise.

You don't have to make it happen, just have to notice it and stand and not stand in its way. That's important. Thank you for being here today. Thank you for listening.

I'm Stephen Webb and the companion meditation for today's podcast is going to be on inner peace meditation. There'll be episode 97. It's called what Rises?

A spring meditation, and it takes everything we talked about today and it gives you the quiet space to sit with it. You can find it wherever you listen to podcast or@stephenweb.uk take care of yourself, Stay curious, keep an eye on what's arising.

And I love you,