You have somewhere between thirty and forty thoughts a minute, and you never asked for a single one of them. So why do we lie there at three in the morning treating our own mind like it has done something wrong?

This one is for the overthinker, the one who cannot find the off switch. The shift that changes everything is small and easy to miss. You are not the thought, you are the one who hears it. There is the thought, and there is the one who notices the thought, and they are not the same.

Steven uses the image of a quiet railway station. Every thought is a train pulling in. Some are loud, some are quiet, some you have ridden a hundred times out of habit. The bit we forget is that you do not have to get on. You can stay on the bench and watch it roll out again.

He also names the trap the spiritual crowd fall into. Watching your thoughts is not going cold, and it is not pretending nothing touches you. The one who watches still feels it. You can notice the storm and still be stood out in the weather getting soaked.

At the heart of it is the gap. The tiny space between a thought arriving and you reacting to it. That gap is where your whole life actually happens, and widening it is what meditation is really for.

So tonight, when the first train pulls in, try one sentence. Ah, there is a thought. That is it. You are already back on the bench.

Companion meditation

A short meditation goes with this episode, over on Inner Peace Meditations. Sit with it once or twice this week. It will do more than any amount of talking about it.

Become the Watcher: A Meditation to Quiet an Overthinking Mind https://innerpeacemeditations.com/episode/become-the-watcher-a-meditation-to-quiet-an-overthinking-mind

Links

Reach Steven, the newsletter and everything else: stevenwebb.uk Inner Peace Meditations: innerpeacemeditations.com Leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more people find a bit of calm in a hard week. Keep the podcast advert free: buymeacoffee.com/stevenwebb

With gratitude to

Addie, Darren, Alice, Caroline and My Herb for keeping the show advert free this week, and to Sin, Annie, Laura, Adam, Dominique and Senga. A special thank you to Stuart, who hits two years as a monthly supporter this month. That is not a small thing.

So you have between 30 and 40 thoughts per minute.

You do not ask for these thoughts, they just appear.

And then usually around 3:00 in the morning, one of those thoughts gets

their hooks into you and you're gone.

Replaying that thing you said, rehearsing the thing you have to

say tomorrow, building a whole future out of the worry that, let's

be honest, probably never happens.

We lie there and we think the problem is the thinking.

We try to stop.

We try to stop thinking.

It just leads to more thinking.

It is like trying to calm water by slapping it down.

That is what today's podcast is about, the mind that will not be quiet

hello, I'm Steven Webb, and welcome to Stillness in the Storm, the podcast

that helps you find some firm ground, that inner peace when you don't have it.

No fluff, no quick fixes, just honest, down-to-earth wisdom from someone

who's lived it every single day.

So before we get into it, let me say a proper thank you to the people who keep

the podcast completely advert free.

This week it's Addie, Darren, Alice, Caroline, and a company called My Herb.

I, I don't have their names, so thank you to them.

And a few of the regulars that have come up this week and donated, Sin, Annie,

Laura, Adam, Dominique, and Senga.

You guys are awesome.

And a special one, Stuart hits two years as a monthly supporter this month.

Thank you, Stuart.

That is not a small thing.

Really appreciate you all.

You all keep this advert free and the Inner Peace Meditations

free, because we don't want to come here and listen to adverts.

So if you would like to join them or if you have, uh, got an idea

for a meditation and you just wanna reach out, just go to stevenwebb.uk.

It's in the show notes.

Let's talk about the noise in your head.

I want to talk to the overthinker.

The one who cannot find the off switch Yeah.

you lie down at the end of a long day and your body is done, and your mind

goes, "Ah, brilliant. She's finally listening. Party time." I know that

one well, and if I'm honest, that is me on the nights I have let things slide.

The mind does not care that you're tired.

It has got a list for you to go through.

So here's the thing, and it's the thing that most of us get backwards.

The mind is built to think the way the heart is built to

beat blood around your body.

You would not lie there at 3:00 in the morning furious at your

heart for beating, would you?

You would not call yourself a failure because your lungs kept breathing,

especially without your permission.

No.

But that is exactly what we do with the thinking.

We decide the goal is blank, silent mind, and then the trains keep coming,

and we feel like we've, we have failed at the one thing we're trying

to do, just a bit of peace of mind.

But you've not failed.

You've just signed up for the wrong job

The mind thinks.

That is its job.

It is not going to stop, and the good news, the actual good news,

is that it was never supposed to So the goal is not to stop thinking.

What it is, here is the whole episode in one sentence.

You are not the thought, you are the one that hears it.

Sit with that for a second because it is easy to nod at and miss.

There is the thought and there is the one who notices the thought,

and they are not the same thing.

So the thought says you always mess up, and something in you hears it.

Well, who is that?

Who is the one listening to the thought?

Because if you can hear the thought, you cannot only be the thought.

There is you underneath it, quietly listening to the whole

thing This is the one who watches.

The moment you notice that, even for a second, something loosens.

Something just frees up.

You do not get rid of the thought, you just stop being the thought.

You have thoughts,

but are not those thoughts.

You took one small step back and now you are holding the thought instead

of the thought is holding you I hope you're keeping up with this.

Now I use a wonderful metaphor for this.

So if you've heard me on the podcast before, you would have

probably heard me say this before.

So imagine a quiet railway station, not a busy one, a calm, almost empty

platform, and there is a bench, and you're sitting on that bench.

the trains come in one after the other.

Some are loud, some are quiet.

Some you've ridden 100 times and you know exactly where they go

So imagine a thought is a train pulling into the station.

And here is the bit we forget.

You do not have to get on the train A train comes in.

Ah, there is a train.

You can just look at it and its own time, and in its own time, it pulls away again.

You do not climb aboard.

You stay on the bench and just watch it go, roll out.

So I think most of our suffering is not the trains, it's not the thoughts

itself, it's how much we get on the train.

It's how much we go with the thoughts.

And normally we're, we're going with the thoughts and we hate

the thought we're going with.

"Oh, this again, I can't believe it. Okay, I need to deal with it."

And it all goes round in our heads constantly.

And it really is, you do not have to board every train.

You do not have to get on every, um, thought that comes along.

Some you can just let pass.

And when you visualize sitting on the train station and just allowing

the thoughts to come and go, like clouds coming and going, medi-

meditation teachers talk about.

I like trains because I like the train of thought.

I think it just, um, it just works.

I just like it.

Maybe I just like trains.

I don't know.

Um, when you get really good at this, and it does take a while, you can even drive

the train and take it where you want to.

You can choose which thoughts to get on to.

You can choose the nicer, the gratitude, the more positive thoughts.

And the more you choose to get on a train, the more your subconscious mind

will give you a certain type of train.

If you always get on the blue trains, your subconscious mind

will give you more blue trains.

Just like the child giving you sweets.

You know, if you tell a child once to give you a green sweet, when you bump into that

child when you're-- when the child's 20, he'll still give you that green sweet.

But there is, and I have to be honest with you, because there is a way to

get this wrong, and the spiritual crowd get it wrong all the time.

Watching your thoughts is not going cold.

It's not standing back from your own life with your arms folded,

pretending nothing touches you.

It's not the illusion of being stoic like we think, "Oh, nothing

ever, you know, touches me."

I have met people that, "I'm just observing it," as a very calm

way of never feeling anything.

That is not peace.

That is hiding.

That, I think, is stepping into the spiritual bypassing,

which I spoke about before.

The one who watches still feels it.

You can notice the storm and still be standing out in the

weather getting absolutely soaked.

Watching is not a wall you put up.

It is a room.

That is the difference.

The feeling is still there.

The grief, the fear, the anger, all of it is still allowed.

You are just no longer drowning in it because there is now a little

bit of you on the bank watching the river instead of being swept in.

I'm mixing metaphors up completely today.

So you're not aiming to feel less.

We are aiming to be less owned what we feel, by what we feel, and

I think that's really important.

And this brings me to the most important part, the gap.

I've often spoken about this.

Between a thought arriving and you reacting to it, there is a tiny space.

Most of the time it is so small that we do not even know it's there.

The thought comes, the reaction fires, and it all feels like one

thing But it's not one thing.

There is a gap, and the gap is where your whole life actually happens.

Genuinely.

So for example, someone cuts you up in traffic, the thought and the heat, and

maybe the anger, it all arrives together.

And in that little gap, you either lean on the horn and carry it for the next hour,

or you take a breath and you just respond.

It's the same event, two completely different days, and the only

difference is whether you found the gap and you chose to respond.

That is what meditation really is for.

Not bliss, not a c- not emptying your head.

It, it trains that gap, it widens that little space between what

happens and how you answer it.

That is the whole game.

Everything else is just details.

Everything else is just nuances of it.

So let me give you something to actually do, because I am not interested in

the idea that it stays as ideas.

There's no point in how many books have we read, and we haven't

actually done anything with them.

That's me.

I, I should have just sat on the books originally and meditated

rather than reading them.

I've watched umpteen YouTube videos.

I've listened to so many teachers.

Very few teachers have actually made a difference in my life because…

Not because they're a teacher, but because I didn't actually

go and do anything with it.

I thought, "That's a brilliant idea," but I didn't do anything

So tonight, when you're lying there and the train first pulls in, do not fight it.

Fighting it just makes it bigger.

Instead, try one sentence.

Just, "Ah, there is a thought," and that's it.

Name it as a thought and notice you're already back on the bench.

That is it.

Name the thought, and when you notice it, you're already back on the bench.

The very act of going, "That's a thought," means a part of you

stepped back and watched it arrive.

You found the gap.

That gap will change your life.

It will give you two different outcomes.

You did not have to empty the station.

You just had a re- had to remember you're the one sitting down.

Some nights you will do it once and drift off.

So although this podcast wasn't about falling asleep, you can use this anytime.

But some nights you'll sit on the bench and see your

thoughts and drift off to sleep.

Other nights you'll lie there for an hour and a half getting on every single train.

It's just … That's the reality, and that is fine, and that is normal.

That is what being human with a human mind is like.

Because here is the last thing and I want to leave you with, and it is the

thing that takes all the pressure off.

The forgetting is not the problem.

We all get swept off.

We all get on that train.

We all aboard the wrong trains.

You know, probably tonight I will do the same thing.

Forgetting is not a failure

The remembering is the practice.

Every time you catch yourself halfway down the line and go, "Oh, I'm on

the train again," just step off, get back on the bench, and smile.

Laugh about it.

Laugh at your humanness.

Laugh at the mind that's evolved for millions of years, 'cause you've got

one of these intrinsically wi- wise minds that is incredible, that's

evolved for millions of years.

Yep, every one of us.

It's not about staying on the bench forever.

It's about leaning and training your subconscious mind with the

thoughts that you want and times where you don't need thoughts.

And eventually, there'll be more gaps between the trains

You are not the thoughts that come and go all day and all night.

You are the quiet one on the bench who has watched every single one of them

arrive, and normally you just get on them because that's what you've always done.

You always were sat on the bench.

You just didn't know you didn't have to get on the train.

So right, I've recorded a short meditation to go with this one.

It is over on Inner Peace Meditations, and it is called Dealing With

Watching The Trains.

No clever visualizations, just you, a bench, and the trains coming and going.

Sit with it once or twice this week, and it is only a few minutes, and it will do

more than any amount of me talking about it, just experiencing sat on that bench.

So that is the one who watches.

It goes much deeper than that, and there's many more things we can talk about

the watcher, but that's the brilliant start, and it'll take you further

than most of the other things anyway.

I'm Steven, and thank you everybody who keeps this going.

If you can, please leave a review, especially on Apple and Spotify.

Makes a huge difference.

Follow the show.

Leave a review on one of those two, because genuinely it helps more people

find a bit of calm in their hard week.

Thank you very much and take care.

Be kind to yourself, and I love you