What are you going to complain about once everything is fixed? If you sorted the entire world out tomorrow, what would you do with the rest of the day?

Somebody told me what STFU stands for and it was not what I expected. We are handed a blank canvas and immediately want to paint it a colour. On the road I was bored and cold and fed up, and then I started seeing the lines in a leaf, and a car going past making them jump and settle. Two bears, one with a machete and one with donuts. Focus on the right one.

One thing to try: Look at one ordinary thing until you see something in it you had not noticed.

In this episode

• (0:04) Hints and tips on getting through the difficult times
• (2:57) Asking him what it stood for, and the answer
• (4:41) Fix the whole world and what will you moan about?
• (7:07) The blank canvas, and wanting to paint it immediately
• (9:34) Bored, cold and fed up, going along that road
• (14:24) The lines in a leaf, and the leaves jumping as a car goes
• (16:59) Two bears. One with a machete, one with donuts
• (18:58) It is your interpretation, and somebody else has another

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

Thank you for listening.

Steven

Links to Steven Webb's podcast and how you can support his work.

• Donate paypal.me/stevenwebb or Coffee stevenwebb.uk
• Steven's courses, podcasts and links: stevenwebb.uk

Hello, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you through the most difficult times in life

and just gives you just some hints and tips on how to live life a little bit happy and a

little more with some resilience.

Today I want to talk about Zen and I come across this wonderful quote. Zen doesn't fix your life. It

stops you needing to. So I want to talk about that on today's podcast. What is Zen? How can we

interpret? How can we introduce a bit of Zen to our lives without it just being a meme on Instagram?

And does it really need us to stop fixing our lives? Is our lives broken? That's the kind of thing

I'm talking about today on Stillness in the Storms. But just before we start, I want to thank all of

you, my monthly donators, the people that join and promise to pay something every month and all used to treat

me to a coffee. Because really, this podcast would. I would have to put adverts. I really don't want to

put adverts in there. There's nothing worse than tuning into a podcast and you've got like 10 minutes of adverts

and eight minutes of podcast. Okay, I'm a bit exaggerating but you know what it's like. So thank you so

much to all of you. You are absolutely awesome and thank you for sharing and thank you for the emails

and, yeah, thank you for being part of my journey as well. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and what you

may not know about me is I'm paralysed just below my neck. I'm also a Cornwall Councillor now, so I'm

a politician. I'm also a terrible meditator. I try to meditate twice a day and I'm terrible at it.

But that's what makes meditation so challenging and that's what makes it so important for our lives. Because if I

don't meditate, I get teasy, I get argumentative, I get bothered, I get bogged down. I tend to get

more poorly. So, yeah. And what's my form of meditation? I just sit and shut up.

Stuff you. Stuff you. Jumpo used to say s-t-f-u. And I was like, for

weeks and weeks, I would keep saying to him, what, am I doing it right? Am I meditating right? And

he would go, just sit down and shut up. I'd be like, yes, but am I doing it right? He'd

say, look, sit down, shut up. Every time your mind wandered, bring it back to your breath. And I'd be

like, yes, I do that, but am I doing it right? Just

stifu, stifu. Just repeat that in your mind, and eventually your mind will slow down, your body will

slow down. And in the end, I said, so what does stifu stand like? He said, shut the fuck up.

That's what it stands for.

I was like, ah.

So then I asked him, can you do meditation wrong? And he said, yes, absolutely.

And I was like, okay, so am I doing it right? And he said, Steven.

And I'm going to say to you, every listener here, if you meditate, just sit down and shut up.

Just allow your mind to go quiet, allow your body to relax, and allow this moment to be exactly what

it is. And there you go. And that's what Zen is. It's allowing this moment to be what it is.

By allowing this moment to be what it is, you then don't feel the need to have to fix everything.

Now I'm paralysed. Can I can I fix that? To fix that, I would need to mend my broken neck.

I would have to walk around again. I'd have to do all that. And guess what?

I'd replace being paralysed with other problems. Because

I'm guessing every single one of you that's listened to my podcast has your own problems. And are you all

paralysed? Probably not. And

that's what it comes down to. You know, being alive means to suffer. The Buddha would say, dukkha. Just by

being here, just by having an ego, just by having that desire to improve your life, to be happy, to

do something, to get out of bed in the morning, means there's going to be things that you want. There's

going to be things that you want to change. There's going to be things that you're uncomfortable with.

And that's what you want to fix. If you fix everything out there, if you fix the whole world, what

are you going to moan about?

What are you going to do all day? Sit on the beach in the beautiful sun well you're gonna moan

after a while when there's no rain, there's no flowers, you're probably gonna get bored of that and moan you're

Too hot, too much sand in your bum, or whatever. You know, whatever. Whatever we end up

doing, we're gonna moan about something. And that's what Zen is. Zen recognizes that. You know, Zen is just a

matter of, ah, there you go. It is what it is. And the one thing that helps me more than

anything else is I cannot change this present moment.

There's nothing you can do about right now. Right now you're listening to the podcast. Then you can turn it

off and do something to go to the next moment, but you can't do anything about this moment. You're already

here. It's already happening. But that's the one thing we're more annoyed about than anything else.

And Zen is not about sitting down and with groups of monks and incense sticks and sitting in silence.

Zen is about a direct experience of what is happening right now.

Zen is not about becoming better. It's about realising you never were broken. You are what

you are right now. You are the best version of yourself right now and can you become

a better version? Yeah. Can you become a worse version? Yeah, but that's intention. That's moving forward right

now. You are everything you can be in this moment. You

know, where does Zen come from then? Okay, let's back up a little bit, because I'm just jumping straight towards

zen is and there's thousands of books that try to explain Zen. And please don't take my definition of Zen

as any kind of answer to what Zen is or anything, because I don't really know. All I know that

All I know is that when we stop and we take a step back and just go, ah,

that's it. The

problem is we add everything to it. We want to paint it a colour. You know, if you're given a

lovely blank canvas, go, okay, let's put something on it. Rather than just go, wow, look at that blank canvas.

You know, when we look up the stars and the magic of the universe, we then want to add gods

to it. When we when we watch a really good movie, we're like, oh that's I hope version two comes

out. When we've had a really good season of our Tv show that we absolutely love, we're like, oh, when

does season two come out? We start looking up, are they making the season two of it? Because we want

more all the time. The desire to want more. And then just answers that by saying, you

don't need it. You don't need it in this present moment. And I think that's what helped me to become

more peaceful than anything else, that I'm into politics, politics more than anything else. And Trump has taken way too

much of my life for hey It's not Trump's fault you

know Trump's doing what he does, and I feel for anybody that is, like, gonna suffer at the hands of

him being in power. But

I've chose to be focused on Trump. I choose to scroll through the phone looking for little quick endorphin fixes

of somebody that's wrote an article that's calling him out on his stupidity. It's all

my choice in that moment you can't blame anybody else for it. So when we stop blaming. So

then when we stop blaming everybody else for our life, and I'm blaming Trump for taking too many years and

all that, you suddenly just start facing life, not the need to fix. We just sit with the pain

without needing to tidy it up. And when I was going 500 miles around Cornwall in my

electric wheelchair, towing a replica of the Cornwall air ambulance to raise money, I was doing it for

several different things. But most of the days were just miserable and cold. I would be in my wheelchair

going along the road at like 10 miles an hour, eight and a half mile an hour, if the government

are listening and any police are listening. And I was just there going along the road, and I was bored

half the time. I was cold. I was fed up. I remember going along one road and I was looking

ahead of me and there was this horrible clouds and rain. And I started thinking, oh, God, I don't want

to be in that. Oh, God it's gonna be a really horrible afternoon. What happens if. And I totally forgot

the fact that where I was in that moment was beautiful sunshine. And I was looking ahead

to, I don't know, three miles down the road. Well, that was half an hour off. I was doing about.

Because when you average out the speed, I was doing about six, seven miles an hour. On a good hour,

I might do eight miles. And that was half an hour away. And there I was already in the rainstorm

while sat in the sun. And that's what the mind does. It takes us to the places we don't want

to go because we're frightened of losing the place. And when we're in a terrible time, we're like, oh, my

God, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to. Instead of just going, well, I know this

moment's going to pass. It's going to pass just as quick as it does, whether or not I hate it

or not. And I think the Buddha, I heard a story of the Buddha was saying, or may not be

the Buddha. Dalai Lama was saying, if you think time is relative, you spend just 10 minutes sat on

a sofa talking to a person that you love, their company. Or you spend four seconds sat on a hot

stove. You know, that hot stove will seem like a lifetime. And that 10 minutes sat on the sofa with

somebody that you really enjoy, their company will seem like a few seconds. And that's what everything is. Life is

relative, relative to how we're feeling, what we're doing. And this is where Zen and stoicism

is very similar. It's facing life exactly how it is.

And when we do face life exactly how it is without, I'm not saying don't feel emotions because Zen Stoicism

isn't about not feeding emotions This is where it often gets a bad rap. You know, it's not about being

stoic and stiff upper leg like the British maybe, you know, look at me. Well, I can't joke, I can't

smile. Much like the the quick the king's guard isn't it? And when they they cannot smile, they can't do

anything. They're just like sat there rigid. That's not stoicism.

Stoicism is feeling everything but not being controlled by those feelings. It's

ah, a feeling of discomfort is arising. What

is that discomfort? Where is it coming from? Being inquisitive but not having to immediately fix it or

change it because it'll go.

Have you ever noticed the way you can have a real bad headache or you can have a real big

pain, or you know something's going on in the outside world and then you stub your toe do you know

Nothing else exists in the world. The minute you stub your toe, that's it. It's like if you want to

get rid of all of your worries and all of your problems, go and buy a pair of shoes that

are too small for you and go and walk two miles in them. I can guarantee within half

a mile you won't be thinking about all your problems. You'll be thinking about that that sore foot with that

um blister on it that will be giving you agony. So everything is relative. And

this is what Zen does. Zen just brings everything back to this moment, what it is now, in this moment,

without having the need to fix it.

You're just holding the raw moment for what it is. And when you do that, something magic happens. Suddenly

you start seeing the world, the universe within. You start feeling the wind

on your face, you start feeling the heat. You start seeing life for what it is. And you start seeing

it through without

not so much through lens, like lens tinted glasses, where you're just trying

to see all the best and everything. You're just seeing it for what it is. And therefore you don't feel

the need to change it. And it becomes even more magic than what it was before. You suddenly see the

lines in a leaf. You see the way a car goes past and the leaves jump up in the air

and then they all just settle back down.

You see the trees and the branches of the trees, the way they wander and weave. Every single one of

those branches is at war with the other branch.

You think nature's nice and peaceful? Oh, look again.

There isn't a bare nature that isn't at war with the next bare nature. And

we hear these stories of the way the trees talk to each other. They'll feed their own offspring. They'll do

all that. No. Well, yes, but they're they're at war with the other trees in the forest.

And we often talk about the way 10 of the world ends up with most of the stuff in the

way of humans, people. But that's what nature does, too. Not saying it's right, it's just

what it is. You look at any single forest or wood, 90 of it is one particular species of tree.

It's just a reality. That's what it is. But we could go into a forest to go I want different

types of tree, and I want different types of flowers. And I want the river to be more weaving, and

I want a few more waterfalls and

Just enjoy the forest. How

would you know the days when you get out of bed in the morning and you go, oh, wow, my

body's not feeling pain today. I

remember when I was going to college for about four months doing an introduction to counseling course, and they used

to check in each morning and they go around the room and you do a check-in And I remember sat

there one morning and my check-in was do you know what? I'm really feeling good today because I got no

pains in my hands. My hands are not feeling like they're in burning hot tar, which is what I get

a lot of time with my root pain.

And the room was like, oh, wow. Yeah. And they were surprised by the check-in What

That, you know, because I didn't have pain, it was like. But

so so many people, and even myself, I focus on what I'm not liking about this moment.

It's good that humans have got a negative bias because otherwise we would have probably not survived this long. If

you've got two bears running towards you, one with a machete and one with donuts, you're gonna

want the one with donuts. But you better focus on the one with the machete, otherwise you're never gonna get

the donuts.

You're not gonna get rid of that image out of your head now, are you? You know, so just a

reminder, two bears running towards you one with donuts maybe a grin on his face, and one with a machete

Probably still got a grin on his face because why wouldn't he have? So we've got to focus on negative

but you don't have to um I'm just thinking, does the Zen work with a bear running towards you with

a machete? Just sit and be, ah, don't worry, it's fine. Just be all Zen about it. Okay this situation

is when not But

in general, if you haven't got a bear running towards you with a machete, be Zen, be chilled.

Very similar to what the Stoicism says, control what you can and accept what you can't. Well, accept the

present moment, because you cannot control the present moment.

Zen says, there is no separate you doing the controlling.

Really think about there's no separate you doing the controlling.

Ah,

you are part of the process. And Epictetus, which is one of my favourite teachers,

he says, it's not events that disturb us, but our opinion about them is

not events that disturb us, it's our opinion about them. So when you take the present moment, and if you're

choosing to not like it, or choosing to want to avoid it, move on from it, hate

it, because something's happened in our past, and I don't like this moment. It's your interpretation of it,

and I know it's your interpretation of it, or mine or any other person, because another person can be sat

in exactly the same moment and they can enjoy it. So bringing all this back to daily life, if you're

doing dishes, just do dishes Just

have those silent mornings. Just walk quietly, get in the car and don't turn the radio on

and just listen to the road.

It's worth remembering that. Just take a breath.

And Zen is just taking that breath. In the middle of chaos, you

don't become calm. You remember calm.

You're already calm in this moment. It's just. You're not remembering that you're calm. You're in the middle of

everything that's going on. And if you just go, ah,

you can go there below it, and you can see it and you can be aware of it. Be that

person at the end of the bar that everything else is going on. You know, you've all seen that Western,

Western, where I probably grew up on Westerns. But that person at the end of the bar was a big

fight going on. And that guy sitting there with his whiskey, everything's going on. He's just there, calm. And right

at the end of the fight or at the end of the whatever, he downs his whiskey, leaves the money

on the side and just walks out. Wouldn't

you like to be that? That's what being Zen is, it's not about disconnecting. It's not about being not part

of it. It's not about running away. It's about facing the moment as what it is.

And then at that point, who is the one holding that opinion? Who is the one facing that moment?

Who

is the one sitting here listening to the podcast? Because it's not who you think it is.

It's just awareness.

And when you bring this moment back to a witnessing awareness, you suddenly realise that life doesn't need fixing,

the moment doesn't need fixing. It's perfectly okay the way it is. And

suddenly that's when you can start to dive in in our life and play with it a little bit. Play

with the fact that you're sad or lonely or fed up or really happy and realise that all of those

are just experiences just slightly away from this Zen quiet moment

now Happiness is not something you can attain. Happiness is an experience. Happiness

really is in the mundane. I

do a whole podcast about that, the happiness line.

Happiness is not something you achieve because the minute you achieve happiness, you won't be happy anymore

it's really is. It really is a paradox. You know, you cannot want to be

happy and happy. And if you are happy, you're not going to be happy for long because that happiness will

become the normal.

Yeah.

So right now, without fixing anything, you can just be here as it is. And I go back to that

quote. Zen doesn't fix your life. It just stops you needing to. And how do you practice Zen? I

just recorded a guided meditation for you to just sit with a Zen moment and

just be here observing, being aware and just take away that needing

to fix things. I'll

upload that to the Inner Peace Meditations podcast. There'll be a link just below. If you go to StevenWebb.uk

you'll find all my links there. Thank you. And thank you for listeners Stillness in the Storms.

And

thank you for donating and keeping it free. You are awesome. Take care and have a lovely,

peaceful Zen week.