Are you accepting your life, or quietly avoiding it? I wrote this at two in the morning and it caught me out.
I teach acceptance. And the one thing I have never accepted is my own disability. That is the elephant in my world. Giving in to an electric wheelchair was one of the hardest days of the early years. I have spent my life dodging labels, dodging pity and dodging the story people hand to somebody like me, and I am not sure whether that is freedom or avoidance. There is no right way. Half a million self help books and not one of them has landed it.
One thing to try: Name your elephant. You do not have to do anything about it today. Just stop walking around it.
In this episode
(1:18) Have I truly accepted my own reality
(2:34) The one thing I have never accepted
(3:51) Dodging labels, pity and the story handed to me
(5:21) Living in the present, or avoiding the future
(6:28) Half a million books and none of them got it
(7:58) It is in the not doing and the not knowing
(9:16) The gnarly branch finds the gap
(11:00) You have an elephant too
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Steven
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I'm Steven, your host and in a moment I'm going to read a passage that I wrote about 2 o'clock in the morning the other night and it's quite self explanatory and I shared it on Facebook and it's got a lot of reaction and I just wanted to give you a bit of an introduction rather than just start reading when and I've been poorly now for about four weeks and I am feeling so much better.
A bit frightened to say that because every time I thought I was feeling a bit better, the virus heard me and popped up and went, ah, I'm still not gone yet. So yeah, the virus liked my company, so it's. I've had to literally write off the whole of January.
So I apologize for just not releasing any meditations or any podcasts or anything like that. Anyway, let's get on with it.
This is me reading what I wrote the other day and then I talk about it afterwards and how it fits in with the balance of life. Please enjoy the elephant I can see for 33 years I lived paralyzed.
And yet watching a film about someone coming to terms with a sudden, sudden disability stirred something in me. It unearthed a question I've never really been able to answer. Have I truly accepted my own reality?
One of the hardest moments in the early days was giving into an electric wheelchair. My manual wheelchair was utterly useless. I could barely push it across the carpet. And yet I clung to it like my life depended upon it. Why?
Because giving it up felt like giving in. It felt like admitting I was disabled. Now, decades later, I've built a life where I forgot I'm paralyzed.
I've constructed a world where I compare myself to able bodied people, where my body doesn't realize it's paralyzed. To the outside world, I might seem optimistic, living as fully as possible, pushing boundaries, chasing dreams. But here's the kicker.
Maybe I've never actually come to terms with being disabled at all. I don't attend disability groups or engage in conversations about disability unless I have to. I keep my focus on the bigger picture.
Maybe it's Zen Buddhism that taught me to live in the moment, to accept life as it is. But the cruel irony is that the one thing I've never accepted the giant elephant in my world is my own disability. What's that about?
I could sit with a counsellor and get labeled with some condition or another. Denial, avoidance, dysmorphia. The labels don't matter to me. What matters is whether I'm Suffering. And on the surface, I'm not.
My life doesn't feel like suffering. But maybe that's because I avoid the reality of my situation. Maybe I'm running from the truth that I'm disabled.
The truth is, I don't know what it means to be disabled.
Sometimes I find myself in council meetings where someone passionately fights for disabled rights, quoting laws and tests, and I sit there wondering if I care. Do I? Should I? It feels selfish to say I don't want to take on that responsibility, but that's the truth. I don't want to be anyone's advocate.
I don't want to be the voice for disabled people. I know that sounds harsh, but that's how I feel most of the time. Why? Because that's not the life I want to lead.
I lived my life avoiding labels, dodging pity, and sidestepping the narratives that society often hands to people like me. But maybe freedom lies in acknowledging the limits, in recognising the control is an illusion. Or maybe it doesn't. I don't know.
And that feels like one of those Zen Cohens, an unanswerable riddle meant to shatter the logical mind. What is it like to truly accept being disabled? I don't think I'll ever solve that.
Maybe I shouldn't even try, because sometimes when you dig too deep, all you find is more questions. And frankly, I don't want to spend my energy on this right now. For now, I'll sit with the elephant in my world. I'll sit with not knowing.
Maybe that's acceptance, or maybe that's avoidance. Either way, it's the path I'm on, and I think I'm okay with that for now.
That's something I wrote last night when I couldn't sleep for coughing for, like, what seems like the 20th night in a row. These podcasts and why Talk about is often about acceptance and about love and about how we deal and live in the present moment.
And there's a paradox to that. Why are you living in the present moment? Are you avoiding the reality of life? Are you avoiding what's coming at you at a great speed?
Are you avoiding what's happened in the past? And how do you touch the present moment without the knowledge of what's coming and what's been?
I say the word paradox a lot because the more I think about it, everything is. And then it's relative to a person. It's relative to you. You know, everything. That's what's going on in your life.
How do you deal with it based on your depth of knowledge about how to deal with it. And everybody around you will tell you how to deal with it. I come on these podcasts and do meditations and I tell you how to deal with it.
But the reality is no one really knows how to deal with it. There's no right way.
If there was a right way, surely the half a million self help books now one of them would have hit the nail on the head and got it right. But there isn't one, there isn't one podcast, there isn't one wise quote, there isn't one guru teacher that's come up with the answers.
And I think the best we got now is deep breath. And I think this past month been really poorly.
If it's taught me one thing, it's taught me that the, the dead obvious things that I, I'm in this life, my body doesn't know any more than I know. And together we're still, we're battling and we're doing our best.
And when we accept that, whether it's an atom, my body, my mind, my thought, whether it's the outside world or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, it's all in exactly the same struggle just to accept, just to be. And in the film last night that I was watching, one of the wise teachers just said, you know, just find that bit of stillness.
And I think if there is an answer, the answer is in not fighting, not struggling, not trying, not reaching, not even trying to accept. It's just in the not doing, in the not knowing and it just sounds blah. That's the reality. What is the spiritual journey? I come to this quite often.
It's a brilliant question. Well, it's relative to you, but the spiritual journey to me is am I suffering less?
And if I'm suffering less, there you go, you go to the doctor to suffer less. You read a book because you want to learn something, even if you read fiction.
You want to suffer less because you want to take yourself out of the moment. You watch a film because you want to disconnect from life and suffer less. You know, you're thirsty, you take a drink because you want to suffer less.
You're cold, you put on a jumper because you want to suffer less. Everything comes down to I want to suffer less. I want to improve my life in this present moment.
It's why the two year old has the tantrum when you give it the wrong, wrong flavor ice cream, because it's suffering, because it wanted the other flavor. And what a Beautiful driving force in nature for the leaf to have relief, to get more sun.
The gnarly branch finds the gap to get more nutrients, the root finds the gap.
They work together to suffer less, the animals work together and they fight with each other just because they want to fill their bellies or they want to find that peace and they want to bring up their young. And so as much and as complicated as life is, if you boil it right down to the essence, and I cannot boil it down any more than this, apart from.
To the emptiness itself, out of emptiness, you have this essence of just, ah. And the moment that ah passes, everything is suffering because everything is a pull to something or a push from something.
And the more you can recognize and enjoy the dance, as Alan Watts would say, or, you know, learn to dance in the rain and all those lovely memes that in the moment they change our lives for about half a second. Ah, if only a positive Instagram feed would.
And yeah, this Stillness in the Storms podcast just helps you find that little peace in life's turbulence, in life's pool and struggles.
And I don't know if what I wrote last night helped you in any way, but I sure as hell guarantee that you've got an elephant in your life that you cannot see or you're avoiding or you're learning to live with or whatever, because I've never met anybody that hasn't and. But the thing is, it's easier to see everybody else's.
Yeah, I wonder what it's like just to sit down with that metaphorical elephant, to put your arm around it and go, hey, how's it going? Because I sure as hell guarantee it's the same struggle as you're having. Anyway, that's my podcast for this weekend. Thank you for all the support.
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