Why are you exhausted after the supermarket? Hundreds of tiny decisions. Overwhelm is rarely one big thing, it is the small ones piling up unnoticed.

I went back to the Heart Sutra, which nobody wrote down for five hundred years, and then they had to add the Diamond Sutra because things got complicated. Your head does the same. Too many self-help books create a loop of needing to fix yourself, then not forgiving yourself for not having. If you are washing dishes, wash dishes. I am saying that while not doing it.

One thing to try: Take one thing off the pile today. Not organise it. Remove it.

In this episode

• (0:03) Recording a Zazen meditation without a script
• (3:22) Going back to the Heart Sutra after all these years
• (6:37) The loop of not forgiving yourself for not improving
• (8:06) They had to update it, because things got complicated
• (9:47) The middle way, and too many self-help books
• (11:19) Realising I was not listening, and it cost me
• (12:55) Hundreds of decisions a day, and why shopping exhausts you
• (14:32) If you are washing dishes, wash dishes

With gratitude to

Senga, Martin, Kira, Sandy and Diane.

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 a new episode of Stillness in the Storms. And I've just been recording a Sazen meditation,

guided meditation. And I've done it really not through doing a script or anything. And I've just, I've simplified

everything. We have thoughts, but we're not those thoughts. We have emotions and feelings, but we're not those emotions and

feelings. And it's just stepping back and becoming witness to what's happening. And it just made me think that I've

been struggling with the subjects for doing these podcasts on Stillness in the Storms. What really helps you? And

I've had... The thought of, why don't I just tell you what I'm struggling with and what is actually helping

me now? Well, I thought I had to go back and learn all the sutras, all the Buddhism again. I

got I went through my Kindle and my bookshelf thinking, I've got to read all these books. I've got to

go find all these videos that have helped me and all that. And it was like, just slow down. Stop.

What do I know? Take a step back and just don't complicate things. Life has become

far too complicated. There's far too much going on. And we don't even have time to like just go for

a walk without walking and being on the phone or walking and listening to a podcast. We just, just slow

down. But just before I talk about the podcast, I want to say thank you to um Senga Thank

you. You always support me so much. I'm deeply grateful to you. Martin, thank you for the coffee. Kira, thank

you for the coffees um Sandy thank you very much. And I'm sorry to hear about your story but I'm

glad I can help so much um Diane thank you to you so much. And really... I'm glad

I make a difference. It really makes a difference with the other podcast, Inner Peace Meditations. These guys treat me

to a coffee. They keep these meditations ad free and they keep them free for everybody. So deeply grateful. And

also to the regular members, Audra, Stuart, Leslie, that pay monthly into... Yeah,

into a membership that I'm not the world's best that updating on a weekly basis. But I'm deeply grateful to

you. Thank you very much. Right, let's simplify things. First

of all, if you want to support, just go to StevenWebb.uk. You can treat me to a coffee. That wasn't

what I was going to say. I just thought, how can I simplify this? Do you know, even with meditation,

over on Inner Peace Meditations, there's like nearly a hundred meditations or something there now. I have no idea. And

they're all different things. Meditations for anxiety, for stress, for sleep, for... You know, following a falcon,

which is an amazing meditation. All these different things, you know, that you can look up on the internet now.

There's meditations for literally having a sore toe or contacting aliens. You know, they are all available. Trust me. I

have not searched for either of those meditations, but I can guarantee you somewhere someone's written a meditation for those

two things. And the problem is we just get so far from the original teachings.

So I went back and I looked at the Heart Sutra, which is one of the originals Mayana teachings of

Zen Buddhism years and years ago. It was the one that it was never wrote down for like 500 years.

And they used to chant it daily. And that was the way they used to pass it down. That was

the way they used to teach their younger ones. And I just read it. And it just basically says, you

know, you have feelings, but you're not those feelings. You know, we are equally everything and we're equally nothing.

And it just simplifies things and it cuts through all the noise. It basically tells you, look,

you've got feelings. They come and go. They're not permanent. They're not like a tangible object. You know, even the

cup in front of me is not permanent. You know, in a couple of billion years time, that's not going

to be a cup it probably ain't going to be a cup wait before that happens. But it wasn't a

cup for billions of years. It's all just something. It's atoms. They're all the same thing. Me, you, our

brains, our matter, everything is just the same thing. It's atoms that have come together to create something that we

think is real. We look at the cup and we think, cup? It's not. It's just clay and things like

that, porcelain or whatever it is um That made me realise. I didn't realise porcelain is just clay after it's

been fired. Found out that the other day. Who knew that? I bet I bet everybody knew that apart from

me. And I bet it's not like simple either. But anyway, so going back to the sutras, it was just...

Fascinating to me just to go back and for probably three years and I read them

regularly and I go back to them. I place my hand on my heart but I didn't really read them

and it reminds me of that film White Man Can't Jump. Where Woody and Wesley were driving

down the road, and Woody puts in a tape with jimmy Hendrix on. And he's there, ah, can you listen

to it? Can you really enjoy it? And Wesley says, you don't listen to Jimi Hendrix. You

feel Jimi Hendrix. And Wesley or Willie was like, yeah, yeah, of course you do. You just listen to it.

And he goes, no, you feel it and they He ended up taking out the tape because it was like

a waste of time to feel Jimi Hendrix. And okay, the sutras are not about whether or not you

read them or hear them or see them or They're about whether you deeply live by them and understand them.

And it's like a poem or like a self-help book. You can read it and you go, okay, I get

it. Yeah, that makes sense. And then you go out and you do the same old thing and nothing really

changes. How many times that happened to you? It happens to me all the time. And I meet somebody and

they'll give me some wise, profound ideas. And even Jun Po, my teacher, you know, so awesomely wise ideas.

And I go about my normal day and I forget them all and I suddenly go... Damn it. I should

have been doing that. And then I do not forgive myself and I don't love myself and I don't accept

myself because I'm then feeling guilty and the cycle continues. Then I go back to read the book and I

blame myself. The constant battle of that circle. We're all in it you know If you think people like

me that are do these podcasts and all that are doing these podcasts and all that because we're all sorted

and we're going, hey, I'm all sorted. This is what you need to do. Think again because you know we're

struggling or any of us that are honest, we're struggling just as much. It just happens to be today, this

morning in my meditation, I got a page ahead maybe. So I may be sharing that with you today. But

I've got a the problem is everything over the past two or three years, I've got to the point where

I cannot walk anywhere without listening to a podcast. And I'm learning, I'm learning. And what I'm doing is I'm

just filling up my mind with so many more layers of stuff. I don't need it all. The sutra is

only, what, a page long. And

if everybody lived by the sutra, everybody would have... You would save the whole Western world millions and millions and

millions of pounds of money that's been paid to psychiatrists and all that. They would all be out of a

job within days. But the truth is, we're more complicated than that. We complicate everything. And then

you've got the original Heart Sutra. And then you've got the Diamond Sutra. It's like, oh, so they had to

update it. They had to add things because things got more complicated. Well, in the Diamond Sutra, you've got, they

talk about the sudden enlightenment. And they talk about no mind and non-duality and adding a direct transmission between the

teacher and the students and all those and practice and realizations and,

oh, take a step back. Then they're all right. Some people suddenly have that. They can be reading books.

They can study Zen Buddhism. They can study and go to teachers and therapists and all that for 10, 20,

30 years. And they might hear one sentence. And it just suddenly all clicks. It's like, I get it.

Ah,

I'm not real. But I feel real. I'm not real. Ah. And it just suddenly

dawns on a person like it suddenly did me. You know, I had that profound experience in the bottom

bottom of the swimming pool when I broke my neck. And I was lying there and I became the water

and I became everything around me. I realised that I don't really exist any more than this separate self

that's temporarily manifesting in any given moment. But I didn't understand the deep impact.

For another, what, 25 years. Because I had to hit rock bottom. I had to realise the ego was not

real. And it was the ego that was causing all my pain as well as the ego experience and all

the joy and love in life. So it's really one of those, the balance, the middle way.

Too many self-help books will literally just... Create a loop of I need to improve. I need to fix

myself. And too little of them and too little and no teachings at all. I don't know where that leads.

I haven't really been there, so. And I do know whenever I don't meditate or whenever I don't read anything

and whenever I just tune into the news and all those other things, I start suffering quickly. And the people

around me start suffering because I start to argue with them. I start to get annoyed by them. I start

to have a strong opinion on they're wrong, I'm right, and all those things while trying to be all zen

like It reminded me when I had a right moment my daughter. She was about 16 at the time and

I'd been working really hard. I was becoming this awesome Zen master. This was like 10 years ago or something.

And she came in one day and I let it rip at her. I just not really shouted because I

can't really shout, but I was like really going on to her. And she just stood there and she took

it. She took it so stoically. It was brilliant. And she just looked up to me in the end and

said, It was absolutely brilliant. She looked up to me in the end and just said, well, that was very

Zen-like of you.

Just like that. She cut me down. Every word that I said in that, like, five minutes of just going

on her just meant nothing. And it was like, all that work that I was doing what was it worth

it? No. I wasn't listening. I wasn't understanding. I wasn't being compassionate. I wasn't having

empathy for her and the situation. I was making it all about me.

And I think just that alone and I think... We just over complicate

everything A hundred years ago, you'd have had time to walk between work and on your lunch break. You didn't

have a constant distraction. You did not have the Tvs. You did not have but you had radio. Let's go

back another 40 years but you didn't even have radio. You had books. You had stories from grandparents.

You know, if you're working out on the farm, you did not have something in your ears blasting away a

podcast or music. You did not have so many self-help books. You had one brilliant

self-help book I was written about then, As a Man Thinker, by James Allen. Brilliant book. But there wasn't hundreds

and they were quite short. You could read it in a morning and then put it in practice that afternoon

and forget it by the day after. It was bliss. It was brilliant. Whereas now, we feel the whole day,

from the moment we wake up, we might sit up in bed and we check our phones and we leave

down we go and sort ourselves. We sit down with our coffee and we check our phones, we check our

email. Before we've even got in the office, we've already done part of the day's work. And during the day,

we're making literally hundreds of decisions. Even driving somewhere now, you're making decisions constantly.

It's why we're exhausted when we do our grocery shopping. I was talking to the checkout girl the other day

and she was saying about an experience she had a few days before. And she was saying she doesn't understand

why so many people by the time they get to the checkout, they seem to be quite teasy and they

quite short-tempered and all that. And I was saying about, I am as well. All the work I've done on

myself, and here I am. I'm raring to get out of here. I've had enough. There's like 49 000 items

I've got to choose from, and I only went in there to get a sandwich. You know, 28 pounds later,

I went in there to spend about five pounds.

And you just, it's decision after decision. All the shelves are set up for the kids so the kids can

pick up the items that the parents cannot afford. So you've got to say no constantly. The kids don't want

to be there. Everything's about enticing our eyes and putting us. We're being controlled. Ah, it's no

wonder we're done for.

It's no wonder we're done for. And so that's why I recorded this guided meditation. Just

return to sarzen and return to I have a thought. I don't have to do anything with it. I have

a feeling I don't have to do anything with it. And it's simply about spending a few hours a day

just doing what you're doing instead of doing and doing something else at the same time. If you're washing dishes,

just wash dishes. If you're reading a book, just read the book. And I'm saying this as I'm projecting

because it's the one thing I'm not doing at the moment. I think that's the one thing I'm struggling with.

And in six weeks time, I've got the huge pressure of doing 500 miles around

Cornwall because I want to do this challenge. I want to get out and I want to have some time

really out in my chair that was fundraised about four years ago by many of you that listen to this

podcast. And I can't think of a better way of saying thank you to go out and doing a challenge.

500 miles, 25 to 30 miles a day. Just in my wheelchair, enjoying. I'm going to be going live. I'm

going to be doing all those things. And I had a friend around this morning. He said, what can I

do? Can we join you can we I was like, no I just Let me just do this. Granted, I'm

going to be doing it for charity. I'm going to be doing it for the Air Ambulance that saved my

life 33 years ago. Not the same Air Ambulance. They've updated it since then, luckily. But it's still the same

charity service that saved my life and saved countless other lives after me. I set off exactly 33 years.

So my mind's like there as well. So I've decided this next six weeks and I'm recording this podcast to

set that off really, to go, do you know what? I'm gonna stop watching the news again. My brain hasn't

got room for it. I'm literally filling my empty vessel in my head with all the things I don't really

need to know. You

know, if I don't know what Trump's doing, it's still going to be the same Trump doing in a month's

time, whether I know it or not.

That's the reality. We feel like if we don't if we're not in the know, if we don't know what's

going on, then we won't be able to have influence or change it. We don't have any influence. Wait to

the election. Put you across Beyond that, we don't have much influence. We

don't even have influence on the other person that we're talking to because they're not really listening. They're waiting for

their turn to say what they think. So

yeah, just take a step back. Simplify things. You can try that meditation. I'll put a link, StevenWebb.uk, which you

can also treat me to a coffee if you want or share or do this podcast. I just help you

to find a little more inner peace when you need it most in life. And I'm just so grateful you're

here. I'm so grateful that you... Persevere with me because I'm not, with

everything that's going on in my life, I I struggle to get these podcasts up every single week. I'm still

a city council I'm still doing all those things. I love what I do. But it's a lot of pressure

and I just need to take a step back. And that step back is not from the podcast, not from

the sutras and the heart sutras and things like that. It's from the news and doing all the other things

that I don't really need to fill my head we're doing so by what by me doing that, I'm saying

you do that as well. Because we're filling our minds with so much that we don't need to. And that's

why we're exhausted. That's why we're more stressed. That's why we have more anxiety. That's why we're feeling overwhelmed.

And I get overwhelmed all the time.

There you go. I don't know whether this will help you in any way. I don't know whether you'll relate

to it in any way. But I just want to say deeply, I'm so grateful for you there. Thank you

for allowing me to just offload some of these thoughts from my head and maybe they're a little clearer just

by being able to do this podcast. If you can see me now, I've got my eyes closed, got my

hands together. It's like deep bow. I love you and have an amazing week and thank you