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

There are eight billion minds in the world, and not one of them was made to fit the same cushion.

Description

This week I want to talk about why meditation works beautifully for some people and barely at all for others, and why no single teacher, book or technique was ever going to be the answer for everybody. I tell the story of my own rock bottom at forty, a Saturday afternoon in town with a broken wheelchair and a security guard who said nothing but meant everything. From there to the slow accidental discovery of meditation through As a Man Thinketh, and what it really means to live with an ADHD mind that refuses to sit still. We're all on our own road. The world wasn't designed for you, or me, or any of us. But you can widen your road, push your boundaries, and stop trying to fit into a shape that was never yours.

Key Topics

• Why one meditation method will never work for eight billion different minds
• The night I hit rock bottom, and the kindness that started everything
• Reading As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, and why ten books saying the same thing is hard to ignore
• Neuroplasticity, and how you can widen your road even if you can't change it
• ADHD, dyslexia and finding ways to meditate when your mind refuses to be quiet
• Why accepting yourself is so much easier than trying to change everyone else

If this episode meant something to you, please share it, leave a review, or treat me to a coffee at stevenwebb.uk.

Supporters Thanked in Episode

Suzanne, Maria, Michael, Tiffany, Ellen, Kathleen, Edyll, Nicola, Jess, Lynette, Linda, Laura, Yavuz, and a few kind anonymous souls.

Special thanks: Jane, marking one year as a monthly supporter on 15th April 2026.

You keep this podcast advert free.

So 8 billion minds.

Why meditation doesn't work for everyone and what you can do

about it on today's podcast.

Hello, I'm Steven Webb and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the

podcast that helps you to find peace even in difficult times.

No fluff, no quick fixes.

Just honest and down to earth wisdom from someone who lives it every day,

so last week we went back to basics.

This week, I want to say something about what sits right next to that because we

are all different, I've grown up for so many years trying to change the world into

who I am without even realizing it that I had the answers, I had the common sense,

meanwhile, I didn't, I knew I didn't have all the peace and quiet.

I knew I did not have everything sorted.

But meanwhile.

I was trying to convince 8 billion people to think and be like me and to fit into my

box because as soon as everybody fit into my box, I would then feel comfortable and

life would be a damn side better for me.

And I laugh about it now, and it's, do you know what?

It's easier to accept yourself than it is to change 8 billion people.

Trust me, I've tried.

It's hard work and I don't think I managed it with even one person.

So there you go.

If you're still trying to change the world, good luck.

It's a long, hard slog.

So why does meditation work beautifully for some people and

it doesn't work for other people?

And

why does one teacher work for one person?

Another teacher work for another, and someone will give you a

link or give you a self out book and they'll go, it's brilliant.

It's done everything.

It's changed my whole life.

And then you read it and you go, mm, yeah, no, didn't get much from it.

And I always say the more self-help books you read, you're better off

just putting a pile of them sitting on them and work out how your mind works.

Because if you do that for five minutes a day, that'll be better

than 10,000 self-help books.

And there's a reason for that because every self-help book is wrote.

And every teaching memoir is wrote from the altitude that author is at that time.

And they could be amazing psychologists, psychiatrists,

they could be the best doctors.

They could well be way higher than you, way lower the altitude.

But what is true for all of them is that you can only write a

book from the altitude you're at.

You might be able to communicate with those below you.

But you can only hazard a guess at those above you, and

that's just the reality of it.

The same as this podcast, same as me talking to you, I can only give

you my reflection from where I am.

I'm so far up the mountain.

My viewpoint is what I can see?

If someone up the top of the mountain says, Steven, look over

there, look in the distance.

There's a nice something, there's a different mountain.

No matter how much I try, I'm not going to see that mountain.

I could visualize it.

I might be able have some kind of vague idea, but I'm not gonna see it.

And the same as if you go down lower, you're gonna see even less.

So I think this is really important.

Going slightly off topic now from the meditation side.

So what got me into meditation?

I've told the story a couple of times, but I think it's really important

because I think you'll relate to it.

So I, despite everything that gone through in my life, my broken neck and.

Being cheated on going bankrupt.

I lost my friend in my thirties.

I don't tell all them because I don't think my life is much different than most

people's, but none of that made me hit rock bottom, even becoming paralyzed.

What made me hit rock bottom was one day in town and my chair broke, and my chair

broke more times than I could imagine.

It broke down today twice and.

But we did sort it and I've got to go hold of, Cornwall Mobility tomorrow

'cause my chair's broke again.

Anyway, off topic again.

So I hit rock bottom at 40 and I was in town.

The chair broken down.

I had no money.

My credit cards were to the top.

I was bankrupt at the time and I had been bankrupt a number of

years before, so I couldn't borrow.

I couldn't do anything.

And my chair is my lifeline to get out.

I managed to get hold of a friend and they come down and they pushed me out to the

van, pushed me into it, and come home.

Luckily, that friend was a bit of an engineer and he could help a little bit,

and I remember sat in the busy doorway.

I literally balled my eyes out.

Saturday afternoon, I was in boots.

It's a, like a wellbeing store, a really big superstore in the uk.

And there was a security guard stood on his little higher platform near the

door and he walked over and he grabbed on my shoulder and he didn't say a word.

I don't think he knew what to say.

There was this 40-year-old in a wheelchair just ball out crying.

Crying like a 2-year-old, like as if the world had absolutely ended.

And I managed to compose myself after what seemed like hours,

probably only two minutes.

But that security guard meant the world.

He just squeezed my shoulder and it was like, I know there,

I've got you.

And that I even tear up now thinking about it, but that meant a lot to me.

I got home and I didn't think for two weeks, almost day and night.

I was just stuck observing life.

Didn't feel anything, want, angry want.

I just did not have any emotion for like two weeks and I

wasn't even working stuff out.

I was just literally observing like one long awesome, deep meditation.

And then when the thoughts and I started creeping back in, they were

so painful, so horrible that I started reading self out books or I started

doing all these different things.

Just to get some sleep.

In actual fact, just before that, I started drinking and asking the

carers for a drink every night I ended up drinking three or four Southern

comforts every night just to go sleep.

Two hours later, I was awake in the middle of the night.

I wasn't gonna call a carer down to get another drink.

After a while, I just started reading As a Man Thinketh to

go to sleep and been dyslexic.

I'd never read anything since school and reading it word by word, reread in

paragraphs again and again and again.

Eventually I had fall asleep and I'd done that for several weeks,

and in that book it's about 120 year old book by James Allen.

And he just basically said, you are not your thoughts.

So I started looking into meditation a bit more rather than when I tried it in my

twenties to try to do something popular.

When every single book tells you that, the answer is in meditation, when

one book tells you, you go, yeah.

Maybe when two books tell you, you go, Hmm.

But when 20 or 30, when every single book turns the page and says, if you want

inner peace, if you want a quiet life, you want to reduce your suffering, meditate,

at some point, you cannot ignore it.

It's like if you're sat in a room with no windows and doors and nine people walk in

independently and say, raining, and one person walks in and goes, ah, it's sunny.

Why you are stupid if you don't grab a coat?

That's the reality.

If enough people are telling you it's meditation,

but I've got, well, I now know I've got a DHD or a DD, according to

another book I read and with me, my mind's just utterly chaos and a mess

and it's thinking everything, it's doing more and more things by the day.

And it comes up with ideas day and night, and they're just random and

they're ridiculous and they're, if you ever go walking with me

anywhere, I literally do not stop.

I will be talking about the butterfly on the leaf to a big challenge to

Trump, to everything, to, to how my, why my toe works the way it

does to my eyes, and how they see.

To the universe and how Pluto is not our planet, right back to the butterfly

sitting on the leaf and the birds hearing.

And I've, I've learn to just allow it to be what it is and my mind.

But when I sat down and meditate, it's like silence it and I just couldn't.

It's like telling kids in the backseat of a car to stop laughing.

Not gonna work.

It's like they have a group of kids in school to sit down and stop fidgeting.

Worst thing you can do, you know, tell 'em I fidget for five

minutes and then they get bored.

And so meditation, I thought was off the cards, but I sat down and

I, I found my ways of meditating and sometimes I need guided me.

Sometimes I need to just stare at a leaf.

Sometimes I need to really think of something like even go on a story

deliberately to visualize something.

Other times I can have a lot those moments between my words and you.

You all recognize those moments of just peace, like if you listen

to every single word I say now.

From this one

to this one.

In between waiting for that word, you had a moment of just waiting awareness.

And the problem is with all of this is we do see the world

through the image of who we are.

So we think we, look at productive people and go, how are you productive?

We look at people that meditate and go, how can you meditate?

We don't know what's going through their mind while they're

sitting there meditating.

Most of 'em are faking it.

I bet most of 'em are just sitting there thinking, I wonder

if they've got their eyes open.

I wonder what they're thinking about.

I wonder if they're thinking about tears.

Same as me.

I wonder if they got a bad back.

I wonder if they, I'm sure I seen them move a minute ago.

And even when you go on retreat and you see 10 people, if you look around long

enough of when you're supposed to be meditating, you'll see people just open

their eyes slightly and things like that.

And I even think the teacher is sitting there thinking.

All different things, but the point is, is to bring it back, bringing it back,

bringing it back, like I spoke about last week, so I'm not gonna go repeating.

If you didn't listen to last week's and you struggle with meditation

anyway, I really suggest you listen to last week's podcast, but it's

8 billion people, 8 billion minds.

They're all on a spectrum of one side to the other, whether

it's autism focus or anything.

On one end of the spectrum, you've got somebody that was born with,

mental illnesses and all that where the chemicals just don't fire, right?

And they would find it very difficult to live in the world,

and they may not get beyond the age of one or two years old mentally.

On the other end of the spectrum, you've got someone that we deem as

incredibly amazing with an IQ of 200 that can focus, that can read a booking.

Like ours that can remember the most amazing things.

They may not be emotionally as intelligent, but we deem them as

brilliantly productive, amazing people, and we put them on a pedestal.

And everywhere between those two things is everybody else.

There's the people that can focus at times.

There's people that could never focus.

There's people that can get in the flow and get things achieved.

But only in the right circumstances.

And the thing is, with the 8 billion people, there's 8 billion roads and

each one of us is on our own road.

Then you can go from one side of the road to the other.

You can go towards, you can be pulled towards other people's

roads, but you ultimately cannot change the road you're on.

Your mind is wired the way it's wired.

You can rewire parts of it.

You can.

Train it to become more focused.

You can train it to become more spontaneous and more

bewildered and curious.

You can train a closed mindset to be more open, but you'll never be able

to move from one end to the other.

You just cannot do it.

It just doesn't work that way and.

I've spoke about when I think in about the 1950s or sixties they had

every 10 years they have a group of people they put together and they

follow them every 10 years of their life and they ask them questions.

They do things well.

In the fifties or sixties, they had a group of people they scan the minds

of the first time, scan the sides of their brains, and when they got to

the nineties, they scanned them again.

This other group.

And the ones that played the piano and played music when they were really

young, they noticed they had an extra part of the brain somewhere near the

bottom, and this brain was linking the ears and the hands and the coordination.

And the people that didn't play music didn't have these by the brain, so

they thought, oh, it's a born talent.

But then they scanned them again, this same group of people.

And because it is comparing and these group of people that are all kinds all

over the world from different things, there's hundreds of them and then they

scan them again at 20 and 30 years old.

Now the ones that did not have that part of the brain, but they had it at 30

because they started playing music at 20.

So they learn for the first time a thing called neuroplasticity.

Your brain will change.

If you meditate more, you'll add more focus.

If you read more, you'll become better at reading.

When you left school, you could add 37 and 39 up quite easily.

You asked me to do that.

Now it takes me about 20 minutes and I haven't got enough fingers to do

it, but if you ask me to do maths on a daily basis, after a few months,

I'll be able to do that quite easily.

So we can vary.

We can move from side of the roads to the other, but you cannot get off

your road and get in some, someone that really finds life difficult.

'cause life was set up for the, the middle of the focus side, if you say

on the right or the focus people on the left or the scattered people.

Society liked the people on the right because they could be controlled,

they could be put into factories, they could build things, they

could be okay with working for 50 minutes, not working for 10 minutes.

The bells worked with them and they were deemed as the brilliant ones.

Everybody else they're the problems and they're the ones that cause trouble.

The irony is now if you, are the one that causes trouble and

changes the world, you're a hero.

It your crazy idea hits a home run.

Then you are genius.

If your crazy idea goes nowhere, you are a lunatic.

The world's mental,, the world is just so messed up, but it's

not, it's brilliantly human.

And that's the point.

And this is where you fit in.

You don't fit into the world.

The world is terrible adapting to who you are and where you are.

Do you stay where you are?

No.

You change and mold.

It's not like star signs.

You're born a Sagittarius.

And then from then on, luck is gonna be behind a red door.

I do believe in the Enneagrams, the nine types, because you move in and

out of them and they depend on how you think in life, not where the

planets were when you were born.

I don't believe in Mercury retrograde, I don't believe in all of these things

that planets are having an effect on you, that the moon has an effect on

you because it's pulling the water in your brain, one side or the other.

Turn around.

It pulls it the other way.

But on the other hand, why does crime go up on a full moon?

I'm just ranting now, but I'm gonna have my rant.

Why does crime go up on a full moon?

Because burglars like to see what they're doing.

Simple as that.

If you turn the lights out in villages, they don't get burgled.

When the street lights are on late at night, they get per good.

It's that simple.

Do you know what else reduces crime in the winter or the summer?

Rain.

Yeah.

There's a direct correlation to how much crime there is and how much

rain there is and how cold it is.

Yeah.

And that has nothing to do with the planets.

So I'm gonna wrap this up.

We've done 20 minutes now, and I, I think you get my point.

We sometimes put labels on things just to help us fit in and I

was really pleased when I was, I was labeled dyslexic at school.

ADHD or anything like that didn't come into play, but it has done now and it's

made me see my life so much clearer because I tried to be that focused

person that fits in because that's what society told me a good person is.

And now I realize there is no good or bad people in that respect.

It's just that's the way we work within our road.

Then you can, going back to that metaphor, you can widen your road.

You can have influence, you can temporarily use other people's

roads, but you cannot change fundamentally who you are.

So when it comes down to meditation, if guided meditation helps you let it be.

If meditation just one minute at a time, let it be.

Do that.

If meditation on 40 minutes, sit on the cushion, do that.

All I will say is whatever you do, keep pushing the boundaries.

Don't settle for one minute.

If you can manage to do one minute work up to two, work up to three, five

'cause you will have bigger rewards, you will widen your road and eventually

that road will move into other roads.

So you can widen your road.

You really can.

You can become a good meditator, a dyslexic person, in my respect.

If you are similar to my dyslexia, the remembering what you read, I read a

page and I can't remember the character.

I get better at doing it partly by reading something that I'm actually interested in.

Not, council work.

Don't tell councilors that.

Don't tell any.

My friends on the council that agendas are bloody boring, I'll tell you that.

But they're important.

They're needed to be, and I'm glad, like on the audit committee, we have

people that are accountants and things like that because my god, if they're

relying on me to scrutinize it, no.

But I'm there to get a bench where it's needed.

I'm there to fix a fence.

I'm there to make a difference in people's lives.

Right?

I want to get back to something really important and I want to thank

those that brought this podcast free.

These are the people.

And I don't make any apologies for spending time on this

'cause it's really important.

So thank you, Suzanne.

Maria, Michael, Tiffany, Ellen, Kathleen, Adele, Nicola, Jess, Lynette, Linda, Laura

Yavuz and a few kind anonymous souls.

Thank you so much, and a special call out to Jane one year as a monthly

supporter as of 15th of April.

You guys are awesome and I've got people that have been subscribing

for two or three years, but when your anniversary comes up, I will call you out.

You guys keep these.

Inner peace meditations and this stillness in the storm

is completely free of adverts.

It's the only way I can do it.

It's the only way I can earn some money.

So thank you so much.

You are awesome.

And if you can donate or you can help leave a review, hit a star follow.

StevenWebb.uk.

The link is in the show notes and I've got a couple of courses and you can, with the

courses, you can pay what you like from zero to, well, whatever you wanna pay.

I think the highest is a hundred dollars, but you can pay what you

like because that's what I believe.

I believe none of my teaching is mine, and I'm lucky.

So thank you guys.

Deeply grateful to you.

I'm gonna sign off now, and I just want you to leave you with one thing.

We're all different.

We're all on our roads.

The more you practice, the more you do, the more you can widen your road.

The world was not designed for you.

It wasn't designed for me, or 8 billion others.

It's that simple.

Don't feel that you need to fit in, do the meditation the way it does for you.

Just keep pushing, pushing yourself, and ultimately accept yourself.

Take care and I love you.