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I was lying on the bottom of a swimming pool with a broken neck. At first I was terrified I was going to die. Then things went warm, and the fear went, because there wasn't really a Steven there to be frightened.

I was the pool. I was the people next to me. I was the field outside. It took me 20 years to find someone who could tell me what that was.

This episode is about the question underneath every other question. Who am I? Not the dad, the son, the councillor, the bloke in the wheelchair who did the 500 miles. Who is the one behind all of that?

A listener emailed this week. Their child is off to university and they are asking, who am I now? You hold a role for long enough and it becomes you. Then it goes, and you are left holding nothing.

A surgeon could open up my head and dig as deep as he likes. He will not find Steven in there. In deep sleep there is no Steven either. We boot up in the morning like a computer and the roles load in.

So I go looking for who is doing the looking. Who is watching the breath when you meditate. The onion, layer after layer, each one only able to see the one outside it. The Buddha's answer, anatta, not self. And Jack Kornfield's smoker who wakes from a stroke and cannot remember he ever smoked.

I am not asking you to wipe out everything you have built in your head. The cities of belief are fine. I just think there is something under them, and once you have seen it the roles become something you can play with rather than something you are trapped in.

My daughter found this terrifying when I told her. I find it the most freeing thing I know.

No adverts, no sponsors, and it stays that way.

What is in this one

• (00:00) Who is doing the observing, if I'm not the meditator?
• (02:00) Lily Tomlin always wanted to be somebody, and should have been more specific
• (03:00) The listener whose child is leaving for university
• (03:30) Dad on the phone to my daughter, Son to my mum, Councillor to a resident
• (05:00) The surgeon who could dig through my head and never find Steven
• (06:00) The ginger haired boy, the joker, the one in the wheelchair
• (07:00) Why I'm a councillor, and the move to Truro that started it
• (08:00) Toni Morrison, the onion, and the layer that cannot see five layers out
• (09:00) Your body knows how to relax, so who did the relaxing?
• (11:00) Are you aware? The gap at the end of the question
• (12:30) Anatta, the Buddha's name for what he could not find
• (13:00) Jack Kornfield's smoker who woke up from a stroke
• (14:00) The tents, the villages and the concrete cities in your head
• (15:30) The bottom of the swimming pool
• (16:30) The day I told my daughter and she said stop
• (17:00) Every moment is a rebirth, and the ego loves it
• (19:00) Your practice for the rest of the day

Your homework this week

Sit and ask the question, who am I? That's your practice for the next few hours. Every time you become aware, even slightly, just ask, what role am I playing right now?

And if you catch that little gap of pure awareness and hold it for a few seconds, you're doing brilliant. You're doing better than me.

Notable quotes from this episode

"If a surgeon was to open up my head, he could dig as deep as he likes. He's not gonna find anywhere Steven. It's not in there." (05:00)

"I know how to be a human because I am human. I don't wake up in the morning and go, okay, how do I become human today?" (09:30)

"What are the roles? They're just memories. They're just stories you tell yourself. They're chapters." (13:00)

"At some point, it wasn't a fact that I wasn't frightened. It was because I didn't really exist. There was like this weird awareness of everything. I was the swimming pool. I was the people next to me. I was the field." (16:00)

"Every single moment is a rebirth. In the morning, or when you answer the phone, you rebirth that person in that role in that moment." (17:00)

Links

• The companion meditation: Becoming the Observer, out in about a week
• Both courses, donate what you like or have them free: stevenwebb.uk
• Everything else, including the Weekly Calm newsletter: stevenwebb.uk
• Now on YouTube: search Stillness in the Storms
• If you want to treat me to a coffee, it is all at stevenwebb.uk

Thank you

Anita, Brandy, HJ, Irma, Jane, Karin, Lorraine, Sergio, Sue and Yuva. This podcast does not exist without you.

Have you ever sat down and asked the question, who am I?

Who am I really beyond all the roles that I play?

And then when you really sit with that question, you don't really come up with an answer.

And I think that's one of the things that when we discover meditation, we sit down and we observe our breath and we observe what's going on in the world.

Suddenly, in that moment, we're a meditator.

And then something happens where we're just observing the breath, we're just observing the world and the temperature and our bum on our seat and all those things.

But then we don't go deeper and wonder who is doing the observing.

If I'm not the meditator, then who am I?

That's what we're going to talk about in today's podcast.

I'm Stephen Webb, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you through difficult times by thinking differently and hopefully feeling differently.

So, first of all, before we get on with today's show, I want to thank the people that treat me to a coffee.

And this helps to pay for the podcast, pay for the equipment, the editing, and all the other things.

So Yuva, Karin, sue, hj, Anita, Lorraine, Brandy, Jane, Sergio and Irma, thank you so much.

All of you are really appreciated.

And all the monthly donators, all of you just thank you so much from every single listener out there all over the world.

And if you want to treat me to a coffee and help keep the podcast free, just head over to stephenweb.uk there'll be a link just under the show notes.

And remember, I've got a new course coming out, but I do have two courses.

If you click on the link below, both courses are you donate what you like and you can have them completely free if you want.

All of my teaching is free, and it's up to you what you want to pay, if you want to pay.

So I love it when someone says something really funny, but there's something deep and profound underneath it.

And comedian Lily Tomlin said, I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been a little more specific.

I love, I thought that is so funny when I read that.

And what's really funny about the joke?

I always wanted to be somebody and now I realize I should have been more specific.

She actually admits later on that it was her husband that wrote the joke, which means it's even more funnier, actually, when you think about it.

So I've touched upon this subject from a few different angles, but I think it's really important to.

When we start on a spiritual journey, there's a few questions that we ask.

And we ask them, first of all from a very superficial level, which is good, because that's the only place.

You can only ask the question from where you are at any given time.

And that's nothing wrong with that.

So when you first ask the question, you start to realize, well, wait a minute, who am I beyond the roles that I do?

And one of the times this happens is when your kids move out from home or you suddenly lose your job or you suddenly change careers because that career suddenly dried up or something.

And when your children move away.

And I had an email this week from a listener saying, that child's going to university.

Who am I?

What do I do?

It feels odd because you.

You've had that role for so long, that's who you become.

And when I'm on the phone to my daughter, I'm Dad.

When I'm on the phone to my mom, I'm Son.

When I'm on the phone to a resident, I'm counselor Stephen Ware.

And we play all these different roles on a daily basis, and we flip between them without a moment's notice.

And I don't know if you ever noticed that we just automatically do it without even thinking.

And each role requires a different set of skills.

Fundamentally, underneath them are our foundational skills, our foundations of who we are, those things that just don't change.

And if you want me to do a podcast on them, please email me and comment and I'll touch upon that subject.

Subject I love, you know, what are our fundamentals?

What are the roots that make who we are?

But that's.

That's a slightly different.

That's about the ego.

That's about how we're showing up in all senses of these different jobs.

But I'm talking about from a perspective of who we really are.

Who is, is not even who is Stephen or who you are, it's whose nose Stephen, who is behind Stephen, who is deeper down.

You know, if a surgeon was to open up my head, he could dig as deep as he likes.

He can look all through my head.

He's not going to find anywhere, Steven.

It's not in there.

And when I'm in deep sleep, there's no Stephen.

When I was a child, even in deep sleep, then there was no Stevie.

But then we wake up and we come online and we boot up just like computers.

Suddenly we have an operating system, and we have all these thoughts and we become a Windows operating system, or we become a doctor, or we become a dad or a mum, a brother.

And also we become the gingerbread boy or the person that annoys everybody, the joker.

So it's not only roles we play, it's the personalities we have.

I'm the wheelchair user, you know, Stephen, the counselor, the one in a wheelchair, you know, the one that did the 500 miles, the one that was saved by the air ambulance.

So people associate the roles we do with who we are.

And I think we get so used to doing that ourselves that we forget that we're something bigger and beyond that, but we're also something that we can choose to be.

Every one of those roles have been masked by our childhood, by different people around us.

If we didn't have an experience of, I don't know, perhaps a counselor or something like that, when we are 10, 12 years old, we may not have ever grown up and wanting to be a counsellor.

My family was helped quite a lot by politics when we moved to Truro.

The local councillor and the MP at the time helped my mum find a property and we got quite involved in the Liberal Democrats.

So that probably had a lot to do with why I'm a councillor now.

And the same as many other things, our childhood experiences start to pave the way for who we become or who the ego becomes.

That story in the book, what Chapters and Natural Fact.

I think that's a brilliant analogy, actually, I'm going to use that one.

So your different roles are different chapters, different pages.

And when you think about it, we think we're all of these things and we're not.

We're just one of those things at any given time.

You cannot be doctor and mum.

Well, I suppose you can be if your child's just cut his leg, but you know what I mean.

You cannot play multiple roles.

You cannot be.

And I'm trying to think of an example, you cannot be now and now.

I cannot now that I said it, but I think you get my point.

I think Toni Morrison, I think she won one of the Nobel Peace Prizes for literature, she touched upon it from the surface level, where she says, you are not the work you do, you are the person you are.

But then that leaves an open question.

So if you think of.

We've probably heard the analogy when you're peeling an onion and every single time you peel the onion and thoughts get less and less and you become more and more into the center.

But every single layer is the observer of the.

Of the layer on the outside of that you take off that layer, you're the new layer, observing the next layer.

But the internal layers cannot see five layers out.

They can only see the layer they can see.

So who is this person?

The observer.

So when you sit in meditation, and in my meditation, I say you, you cannot.

You don't need to do anything with your breath.

Your body knows how to relax.

Then who's doing the relaxing?

If your body knows how to relax, who did it?

Well, no one, nothing.

It just knows how to do it.

Just like a cup sitting on the side.

It knows how to be a cup because it is a cup.

I know how to be a human because I am human.

I don't have to try to be a human.

I don't wake up in the morning and go, okay, how do I become human?

Today I already am.

And we often try to take on other roles.

But no matter how much you try, you're still human.

Then you can have different ways of going with that human.

How you dress, what you do, how you show up all those different things.

That's personalities, that's the pages, that's the chapters.

But the book, the human is still the human.

This is where you're showing up.

This is the body we have.

So when you sit there and become aware of your breath, who is it that's aware, the breath, who is watching the breath, who is becoming relaxed?

And here's the thing.

From that perspective, the eye cannot see the person, cannot see who it is.

You have no name, you have no identity.

And you notice from that perspective when you really sit with that you have no feelings either.

You have no happy or sad.

You're just, ah, you just are.

And that's it.

You can go even deeper into that if you want to, where you always become the observer of the observer.

But even that role of the observer drops away.

And then you start fading into everything.

That's when there's no self.

But when you are the observer, it doesn't see as in eyes, it doesn't see as in field.

It's just awareness.

That's how it sees, that's how it feels.

Just awareness.

And you can say it like, are you aware of your toe?

Well, then you suddenly become aware of your toe.

Then if I say, are you aware?

You have to literally become aware of everything.

And it's that little moment of the end of the question and the bit before answering the question.

So if I was to ask you again, now, are you aware?

And you may not get it because I don't know what you're doing right now.

And you may be.

If you get it, you'll realize that there's a little bit of a gap there.

That it's just.

It almost feels like nothing.

It feels like an emptiness.

It feels like a pure awareness.

And that pure awareness doesn't have feelings, doesn't have eyes, it doesn't have a body to see.

It's just, ah, if you can hold that for a few seconds, you're doing brilliant, you're doing better than me.

But just that awareness is just so peaceful and then you can go deeper.

So in Buddhism, when there's no self and you could not find one, and he was searching for who is the self, who is the person there, he gave that a name, he called it Anatta, which basically means not self.

You don't exist.

No fixed little statue of you sits inside.

There's nothing there.

Sitting there with the roles.

Because what are the roles?

They're just memories.

They're just stories you tell yourself.

They're chapters.

If someone come in and rubbed out all those chapters and you woke up tomorrow, you wouldn't know what role you play.

And Jack Kornfield explains this by.

I don't know if it's a story or imagining it.

So you imagine if you've been a smoker all your life and you suddenly have a stroke and you go in hospital and that stroke caused the bit of your brain that knows it's a smoker to wipe itself out and it wakes up and your wife or somebody, like, sits there and says, you haven't asked for a cigarette for days.

So what do you mean, astral cigarette?

I don't smoke.

It's like, oh.

And that can happen.

It happens quite a lot when something goes wrong, when we have some kind of trauma.

So all of these cities in our minds, you know, when you're really young, when you're a baby, you have vast pastures of nothing in there.

And then as time goes on, you build up these little tents, you build up these little villages.

And then as time goes on with religion and beliefs and politics, whatever it is, the more people give you information, those little tents become little houses, and then those houses become towns, and then they become concrete cities.

And these cities are like just patterns in your head and it's really hard to undo them because who were you before you built all these cities?

When I say these cities, these cities are religion.

They're your thoughts and beliefs.

They're your.

Who you think you are.

And I'm not saying wipe out all those cities.

I'm not saying have like the worst Earthquake and wipe everything out.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's realizing what the gift is here is you recognize that you are profoundly something deeper than just your thoughts, just your roles you play.

So when you suddenly feel alone or you suddenly feel like, who am I?

Do it with excitement and curiosity.

And I think what's wonderful about this perspective, when you truly understand this perspective, and I'm not sure I do truly understand it, but when you do.

Because sometimes I have moments like this.

When I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool when I broke my neck.

First I was frightened, then I was petrified.

Then you.

I'm only joking.

That song come to my mind then.

But first I was terrified that I was going to die.

I took a deep breath, and it was, like, really painful.

And then things started fading away, and things started to become warm.

And then at some point, it wasn't the fact that I wasn't frightened, because I didn't really exist.

There was, like, this weird awareness of everything.

I was the swimming pool.

I was the people next to me.

I was the field.

And it's really hard to put it into words.

And it was a good 20 years before I would ever be able to talk to someone and go, this is what I experienced.

And they said, yeah, you experienced no self.

There's no real Stephen there.

But this isn't terrifying.

When I spoke to my daughter about this, about, I don't know, 10 years ago, it terrifies you.

Say, what do you mean?

There's no kemba?

That's terrifying.

Don't tell me anymore.

But the reason why it's exciting is because you can play with the roles.

Every single moment is a rebirth.

In the morning or when you answer the phone, you rebirth that person in that role in that moment.

It comes and goes.

You pull your resources from the cities you're having this show up as.

So I will, in about a week's time, I will release a meditation that will help you to softly understand this.

Because I love this concept.

The ego loves this concept because he can play with it.

He can show up as what he likes.

You know, he doesn't have to be the meditation teacher.

He doesn't have to be the counselor.

He doesn't have to be dad.

He can choose to be, and then you can choose what fundamentals that you bring along with it.

I like to bring along a caring, a calm.

I think fundamentally, I'm a loving, caring person.

Am I always loving and caring?

Absolutely not.

But fundamentally, that's why I feel below everything.

If I go even deeper.

I haven't got any of those things, but when the ego first comes online, that's what I first feel and associate with.

So I'm going to leave it there for today because it's quite a deep subject and it's a really interesting subject.

It's a subject I love and there's so much teaching we can do about the self and the no self and the observer.

And I just love the fact that we can be different roles in different moments.

Be the most awesome mum in the world, be the super mum, be the superhero, put on a cape, laugh, have fun.

But you don't have to be that all the time.

On that note, become the observer sometimes just sit back, watch the world go by.

I want to say thank you to everybody that donated.

You are awesome.

And I'm just going to leave it there and just sit and ask the question, who am I?

To your practice for the next few hours, Just every time you become aware, slightly just go, what role am I playing right now?

On that note, have a lovely day and thank you for listening this far.

Please leave a review, hit thumbs up or star or follow and share if you can.

If not, just thank you for listening and and I love you.