Today, I’m diving into a big question: how can I look up and say I love you to someone I don’t even know? It’s a challenge for many of us, especially if we come from backgrounds where expressing love wasn’t a thing. I talk about how I’ve learned to send that love out into the world, even to strangers, and what that really means. I share how I see myself in others and how our struggles and desires are often so similar, even if our lives look different on the outside. By recognizing our shared humanity, we can start to love ourselves and each other better, creating a world with more understanding and compassion.

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

These are the questions I ponder in this podcast, and am I genuine when I say I love you?

Inner Peace Meditations

Steven Webb – Website

The podcast dives deep into the concept of love and connection, exploring how we can express love even to strangers. The host, Stephen Webb, opens up about his personal struggles with expressing affection, especially in his family where love was rarely verbalized. He shares how he has learned to say ‘I love you’ in a genuine way, not just as a phrase, but as a recognition of shared human experience. Stephen emphasizes that at our core, we all share similar desires for happiness, freedom, and understanding. He encourages listeners to reflect on their own lives and find connections with others, suggesting that recognizing ourselves in each other is key to fostering love and compassion. By the end of the episode, he challenges us to look deeper than our differences and to focus on the fundamental similarities we share as human beings. This heartfelt discussion reminds us that love transcends barriers and is essential for our well-being and for connecting with the world around us.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, I explore the idea of expressing love, even to strangers, and why it matters.
• I share my personal journey of learning to say 'I love you' and its significance for me.
• We all have similar desires for happiness and to reduce suffering, connecting us deeply.
• Recognizing our shared struggles can lead to love and understanding towards everyone around us.
• I encourage listeners to see themselves in others, fostering compassion and reducing judgment.
• Understanding our core values can help us realize we are all fundamentally the same, despite differences.

Foreign welcome to Stillness in the Storms.

I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and I want to talk about how I can look up and say I love you.

How can I look up and say I love you to someone that is listening to this podcast and I don't know you?

And that's what I'm going to talk about in today's podcast, because I even answer on my emails with much love, and that's something that has been alien to me all my life.

But I do it now.

Why do I do it?

And how can I say I love you to a complete stranger?

That's the topic of today's podcast.

So I come from a family that didn't really say I love you.

You know, we didn't hug much, and I don't think I've ever said I love you to my mum, even to this day.

And I've been talking about this to some of my friends online and some people that have been following me, and I follow them for a long time and we've become good friends.

I've said to them many times that I'm going to go and tell my mom I love her, and I. I haven't because there's some resistance there yet.

On a podcast, I can say to you that I love you.

I can reply to an email to someone I barely know, much love, and someone that comes on my life.

I can sign off my life saying, I love you.

Am I being genuine?

Am I.

Am I really loving that person?

Well, we'll all have our own shadows and projections about love and what love is and things like that.

Let me explain one thing that I've learned, and it's something that's given me a lot more freedom, and that is I do love you.

And we've got many things in common.

Let me guess.

You want to be happy.

You want to reduce your suffering.

You want to have more freedom in your life.

You want to be able to do more of what you want to do when you want to do it.

You want to be healthier and you want the suffering of others to reduce.

You want less enemies.

Have I done some kind of Jedi mind trick on you?

No, of course I haven't.

The reason why I know these things is because you're me and I'm you.

Your suffering is the same as my suffering.

Your hopes and dreams are the same as mine.

Yes, through experiences, we've got a little differences on what happiness means and what it means to reduce suffering and the kind of things we want to do.

My happiness is not lying On a beach in another country for two weeks on a holiday once a year, I like to just walk along a river and just enjoy the birds and the singing.

That makes me happy.

So we have differences.

We have different films we watch, we have different preferences on books and what we do for hobbies.

But the fact that we want to reduce our suffering, the fact that we want to open our hearts and we want to feel this freedom, means we're no different.

So when I say I love you, what I'm saying is I recognize myself in you.

I recognize that your struggles, albeit they may come from a different place, your desires may go towards a different thing, but the suffering is the same.

If we both.

If you split up in a relationship or you lose someone, you grieve and you suffer the same as I do.

We bleed in the same way.

It doesn't matter how old we are, it doesn't matter what.

The things that caused us to suffer, our aspirations and all are pretty much the same.

So, yeah, I do love you.

So when I say that, I mean it, because I'm looking at the core of the essence of the foundations of who we are.

That individual that hasn't got all the protections of all of the thoughts and opinions and beliefs and the groups and the tribes and the friends is that person that's alone, that just has the desire to be content and happy and have less suffering.

That's who I love.

Because I'm learning to love that person in me, that raw person underneath everything in me.

And what's that look like?

You know what that person looks like in me?

It looks exactly like you.

It really does.

So if you want to understand my suffering, have a look at your own.

If you want to understand my desires and what it means to be happy for me and how it feels.

How does it feel for you?

And that's when we start looking at each other and recognize that we're all the same.

You know, whether you're fighting in a war for something that you believe in, or whether or not you're fighting ecological war to improve the earth, and whether you're trying to get rid of plastic or whatever you're doing on a daily basis, you're still fighting a very similar battle.

When you take away what the actual beliefs and the desires and the outcomes, when you take away all those things, we're pretty much fighting the same thing.

We want to achieve something.

We want to have hope.

We want to improve the world in some way.

And I say this in a warped way because it doesn't fit My thinking.

But even the person that does some of the most dreadful things believes they're improving the world.

Think about that for a moment.

I'm not saying I agree with the actions, of course I don't.

But they are still believing they're trying to improve the world.

And that's what we're all doing.

So that's why I can look up and say, I love you.

Thank you.

Get to the core of who you are and learn to love the core of who you are.

Because when you learn to love that, you'll be able to see that in everybody else.

You meet everybody, even the people you don't ever meet, you will recognize that same core value and belief.

Even on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, the opposite sides of the religious spectrum.

You'll recognize that we aren't that much different after all.

We all bleed.

We all have the same organs inside, things like that.

We all recognize that on a very physical sense.

But we actually have the same fundamental desires and.

And beliefs and griefs and pain and suffering.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, in my own.

In my own gibbering way, is that below all the opinions and beliefs, below the desires for objects and successes and everything like that, look at the fundamental core of what drives those things, and you'll recognize everybody else on the planet is you, and you are everybody else on the planet.

And this is what it means by learn to love yourself.

Because when you love yourself and you start to recognize that your suffering is part of who you are, and the.

The desire to reduce that suffering is also part of who you are and the desire to love and be loved.

When you recognize those things in everybody else, you see everybody else as you.

Because everybody else is.

You know, we just may wear different clothes, we may have different thoughts.

We may have got to different places in different ways through different experiences in life of the things that hold us together.

The roots of trees are the same.

They do the same thing.

They may look different, they may have different structures to them, but they're doing the same thing.

So what Your foundational core values of who you are.

The deeper you look, you'll realize that everybody has the same ones, but we often forget about them.

We often judge people on their actions, we judge people on their mistakes, and we judge people on what they want to do to be happy.

And just because it's not what you want to do to be happy, they must be wrong or they must be different to you.

They're not different.

They're just learning to be they're learning to improve their life in this moment.

And as Carl Jung says, even the rotten potato in the basement shoots towards the light.

You know, someone that is trying to avoid life through substances, alcohol or drugs or something like that, they're just trying to improve their lives.

So no matter where we are, no matter what our starting point is, if you take a snapshot of anybody's life right now, we all just want to be a little happier, or we want to have a little less suffering, or we want to have someone to understand us and listen to us.

And even if you're not where that person is right now, you've probably been there.

And it may be in different circumstances, but if you really dig deep beyond the actual what is actually going on, like, somebody may be using drugs to avoid life, you may use Netflix to avoid life.

You know, on.

On a judgmental thing, you could say one's worse than the other, but really they're the same thing.

You're just trying to improve your life in that moment.

What am I going to do right now?

Well, I'm going to have this drink, or I'm going to watch Netflix.

We're just trying to improve our lives right this moment.

So when I say I love you, I love you, because you're doing the same as what I'm doing, I'm doing the same as what you're doing.

And we are all in this together.

And when we realize that, we all stop fighting, we'll stop making enemies out of each other, we'll stop judging each other based on the actions, and we'll open our hearts to each other based on who we are behind the actions of who we are.

Fundamentally, at the core of who we are, if you sit in meditation and you go deeper and deeper and you take away the opinions and beliefs inside your mind and the thoughts and the emotions, all that, you're left with a deep caring.

You know, the first thing that arises out of emptiness is a deep caring and a desire, a desire to improve our lives, a desire to be happier, to love more, to be loved more.

If that's a crime, to want to be loved more, love more, or open our hearts, then everybody on earth is guilty.

I'm really sure of that, even if it's hard to recognize it in others.

Some people have built up so many walls and barriers, and they've done that out of fear.

Well, show me a person that doesn't fear something.

Show me a person that doesn't fear being hurt or fear suffering more or fear being ill or something.

Like that.

So we're all the same.

We're all the same fundamentally below our opinions and beliefs and our stories and our egos.

So that's why when I say at the end of my life, or when I say I love you, I can say that because I recognize myself in you.

We're not separate people.

We're just maybe slightly separate in where we are what we're desiring and the stories that we're making up in our minds.

That's all.

So that's my podcast for this week and I hope you enjoyed it.

And I hope if it resonated with you in any way, let me know in the review or the comments.

If it makes sense, if it makes you think that you can love a little more, you can open up.

Do you recognize yourself in others?

Just spend the next week or so just whoever you come across, see if you can recognize yourself in them.

Because when you truly do, it will change your life and you will end up a lot happier because you'll end up with no enemies.

You'll end up with a lot more understanding, compassion.

It's not empathy.

It's beyond empathy.

It's deeper than empathy.

You'll end up with understanding and compassion.

And that's the way we improve the world.

That's the way we lift the world.

When we take away the stories and all the thoughts of desires and aversions and all those things, life just gets a little better.

A lot better.

Amazingly better.

Take care guys.

Head over to my website and you can download the five Simple Practices for Inner Peace.

It's a small little book I wrote, StephenWeb.com and if you want to book in for a coffee with me, just a 15 minute coffee, it's completely free, I don't charge or anything and I've got nothing to sell.

You just head over to my website, click on the Book ofcoffee and stephenweb.com also I have another podcast, Inner Peace Meditations Podcast.

I will put a link in the show notes underneath this podcast which I just upload my meditations.

It's quite simple.

It's just Inner Peace meditations.

Take care guys.

I love you and namaste.