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This week, I’m diving into a really heavy topic: the moment I hit a low so deep that I actually understood why someone might consider euthanasia. It’s not something I ever thought I would feel, but life threw some serious challenges my way this week. I’m sharing my experiences, which have been tough and raw, to show that life can really swing from the highs to the lows in no time at all. We all go through these difficult times, and it’s important to recognize that they are part of being human. I want to embrace the reality of these feelings and remind you that they are temporary, and that there’s always a way back up.

In this podcast I share my experience of a really hard week. Probably one of the toughest weeks I've had in many years. Which fits perfectly with a podcast that helps you through the toughest times. stevenwebb.uk

Navigating the complexities of life can sometimes lead us to dark places we never expected. This week, I found myself in a very low state, grappling with thoughts about euthanasia—something I had never considered before. It was shocking to realize just how low I had sunk, feeling overwhelmed by my physical struggles and the emotional toll they took on me. I want to share this experience with you all because it highlights the reality of living with a disability. Life isn’t always a positive journey; it’s filled with challenges that can feel insurmountable at times.

As I recount my week, I experienced severe dysreflexia, which caused extreme discomfort and pain. It was during these moments of suffering that I truly understood why some might view euthanasia as an option. It was not that I was advocating for it, but rather that I finally grasped the depth of despair that can accompany such conditions. I want to emphasize that while I understand these thoughts, I also recognize that they come from a place of pain, and my life is still filled with moments of joy and hope. This podcast aims to bring awareness to the struggles many face and to encourage a conversation around embracing the full range of human emotions—both good and bad.

Next week, I’ll be diving into the theme of becoming whole, particularly in the context of being single. For now, let’s acknowledge that hard times are part of life and that feeling low is a human experience. It’s okay to sit with those feelings and to share them with others. By opening up about our struggles, we can build a community of support that helps us all navigate the storms of life together. Remember, tough days are temporary, and each experience helps us grow stronger.

Takeaways:

• This week, I experienced a really tough time that made me reflect deeply on life.
• I had moments where I understood why some people consider euthanasia as an option.
• It's important to embrace both the good and bad times in our lives as they are temporary.
• Life is all about experiencing a wide range of emotions, not just the happy ones.
• Even during the most painful experiences, we can find moments of joy and connection later.
• It's okay to acknowledge hard times; they are part of becoming a whole person.

Have you ever felt so low that you've literally realized that you've got to the point where you even think euthanasia is like an understandable thing to do?

I got to that point this week and I've never been there before.

I'm 49 years old and I never thought for a minute that anybody should ever even consider something like that when we have this wonderful life here.

And at 12, 15, 1 lunchtime this week, I felt like that and I said it to my carer.

And I want to talk about this week on this podcast.

It's unscheduled podcast.

I'm going to do a podcast next week that is really important about becoming completely whole, especially when you're not in a relationship.

And I think the best thing we can do as humans is become as whole as possible to integrate as much of us, our being as possible and the universe and everything.

And not in a magical way, but more in a.

In a practical, wise, wisdom way.

But that's on next week's podcast.

But this week I just want to.

I want to be a bit raw and just to share this week with you.

And there's a reason for me sharing it.

And I'll tell you the reason more later in the podcast because I've got to give some context to it.

But bear with me, and you might realize my voice is slightly more subdued than usual.

I'm knackered.

I am really tired after this week.

I even feel my breath slightly more laboured than usual.

But I want to share the story.

I want to share what I've been through this week.

So I'm Stephen Webb.

This is Stillness in the Storms.

And this is the podcast that helps you get through the most difficult times in life.

And the reason why I do this podcast is because my life truly is up and down.

I get some of the hardest possible days and some of the best possible awesome days.

On one hand, I'm the mayor of Truro and experiencing that role and living the dream life.

On the other hand, I'm paralyzed below the neck and I mess my trousers and need to be cleaned up.

And there's my two extremes and very often they're not very far apart, normally 20 minutes or so, to be quite honest.

And yeah, let's get on with the podcast.

So.

So this week I had a quite quiet week this week.

So I didn't have that many appointments, I didn't have that many meetings, which is kind of a good thing.

So it started off with finance now on Monday and become Wednesday Morning for some Reason I kept going dysreflexic.

Now then, this is a condition that most spinally injured people suffer if they broke their back or their neck.

And what it basically means is if anything goes wrong below the level of injury.

So I don't feel anything from my nipples down.

I don't feel the lower part of my arms.

I don't feel my hands.

So if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, you can see that my hands are paralyzed.

I'm always sat in a wheelchair.

I use an electric wheelchair for getting around for everything.

I use a hoist to get in and out of bed.

I have 24 hour care and I need help to literally, I need help to cut my food up, wipe my bottom, the, the bloody lot.

Okay.

And Monday I went toilet allowed.

Tuesday I went loads.

And just.

This is probably way too much information, but it's really important that you get the context of this because, you know, we're all human and I just want to share the other side of being disabled.

I do this sometimes on my podcast.

I believe in keeping it raw and keeping it real, being authentic.

So that's what you're here for.

You know, stillness in the storms is about not having, not living an unrealistic life that you're all sunshine and roses, is all happy and tree hugging and let's, let's find the gift and everything and be all happy and all that all the time.

Yes, I believe in there's a gift and everything, but I don't believe that it's always realistic that you're just going to always feel like as if you're just on top of the world.

Sometimes.

Some days are really bloody tough and sometimes we need to sit in them.

Sometimes we need to be okay with that really tough day.

And when we accept those things, they're a lot easier to deal with, trust me.

So this week I, I had a real, real problem.

And when, when something goes wrong with the autonomic disrefects your, the body, your body goes into this panic loop.

So if you feel pain on your legs or someone comes along and sticks a pin in you or something like that, or you've got something rubbing or you're sat on something, that those nerves will send a signal to your brain, your brain would go, it's okay, I know what it is, and just move your leg and you'll just deal with it.

Well, with me or many other spinally injured people and some other spinal injuries, it sends a signal to the brain, but it doesn't get there because of A broken neck.

So then it gets this feedback loop, much like sound in an audio.

It just gets worse and worse and worse and the body goes into panic.

So what the body does, it sends the blood pressure sky high and.

And we're not talking about, oh, a little bit of a headache, we're talking about.

And it can be measured.

It's like, last time I had a really bad attack.

I didn't measure it this time, but the time before that, when we were waiting for the paramedics for nearly 90 minutes.

We need to get that sorted in this country.

You know, the NHS is really crumbling under the pressure.

As much as they're amazing and they're heroes, they need, they need help and I'm in full support of the nursing strike or something like that.

But I digress.

Let's get back to my dysreflexia.

So it sends the high blood pressure like 250 over 150.

It fluctuates around there and you go blue.

It feels like if you just literally move or touch the skin anywhere, it feels like someone just sticks a hundred needles in you.

Your eyes are literally like pins sticking in them.

It feels like someone's punching you in the head from inside every time the heart beats and it's just horrible.

It's hell on earth.

And what the carers need to do is find out what's causing it, relieve that, and you can take some medication for it, but it doesn't really do that much effect.

It has, it really has very minimal effect or it might take the edge off it, but it's so incredibly uncomfortable and it could result in a stroke or death within like 20 minutes, half an hour.

So I had this on Tuesday night, again Wednesday morning, and then I had it again Wednesday lunchtime.

And every time it was the one thing it was, I needed to go toilet.

And it got to the point where I, I, I was on the bed and my carer had to clean me up several times.

It was just getting worse and worse.

So come quarter past 12, after been put on the bed, put in the chair several times, my head was pounding, I was sweating, I was freezing cold.

It just.

Oh, the worst possible feelings.

And no painkillers touch it.

Nothing does anything like that at those points.

I remember looking up to my care at the point and go, do you know what?

If this was my life, this last three hours, if that was my life, I would understand why someone would take the option of euthanasia.

I use euthanasia deliberately because it is different suicide.

I've done A podcast where I do suicide.

And when I thought about taking my life, but this is different.

I, I wasn't advocating it.

I don't agree with it.

I, you know, each to their own.

And I'm not about to do anything like that.

Okay, I'm not there.

I'm not even considering my life is pretty damn good.

But what I'm saying is I, for the first time, I really understood.

I'll turn my chair off a minute.

I really understood being severely disabled, that if that's all my life was, then I would really struggle.

But then I sat there and watched about 10 minutes of daytime TV because I couldn't bear to move.

Homes under the Hammer was on or something.

I don't know.

But I watched it anyway.

And so, yeah, sometimes it can be really, really tough and.

But what I try to do when I'm lying on the bed and I literally cannot be touched anymore, my head is pounding that bad and I'm worried about a stroke or worse.

I remember that this isn't all my life.

And later on, in a couple of hours time, things will be different.

I'll get an email off somebody that is a really nice email, or I'll get the opportunity to meet somebody in the community that's doing great things, or I get the opportunity to help somebody.

And I think this is what partly where we're trying to go wrong.

We're trying to get a life that is so brilliant and wonderful and happy.

We're trying to be all enlightened forever and happy, or we're trying to be like, I'm happy now, and there we go, rest of my life are going to be happy.

We know it's not realistic, we know it's not possible.

But as children we go, what do you want to be when you have.

When you're older, you know, if you get over, I want to be a dinosaur, I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a doctor, or all these other things.

And you say, well, I just want to be happy.

As if it's a place to get to rather than just an experience.

And just the same as that happy experience comes and goes, or the experience of desire and joy and real enlightenment for a moment.

All of those things are just temporary.

They're just experiences that you have.

Like going to a music concert, you go to see a favorite band, and even during that band, you don't have one experience or evening, they might play a favorite song and you'll have a happier experience than the next song that you don't like.

So much, somebody else two or three rows down might be loving the next song and they're having a different experience.

So happiness and joy and all those things are just experiences, but so are the worst possible days.

So when I'm lying on the bed and having to be cleaned up and having to go through that real severe pain and fear and to be pulled around, and it really is hell on earth.

It really is.

I lie there and I close my eyes and I'm like, I don't want to open them.

I don't want to see the world.

I just can't do this.

And this week it happened again on Thursday.

So this week it's been hell.

It's.

It's been the toughest week.

But it's temporary.

It comes and goes.

And as long as we remember that when we're faced with the most difficult situations, the most painful, even when my partner cheated on me and it was terribly painful when I ended up single or broke my shoulder, or when I went bankrupt and lost the business, things like that, all of those things are temporary, albeit they feel very permanent at the time.

Like as if that's it, the rest of my life.

So when I'm lying there on that bed Thursday morning, Wednesday morning, Friday, I know it's not permanent.

I know in a couple of hours time my life will get better.

And I know in a few days time it will probably get worse again.

So I just wanted to share that with you.

Just.

Life is a fluctuation of experiences, and we have to embrace them all.

Trying to deny the bad feelings, trying to deny the unpleasant ones, push them away.

I don't want.

That means you're pushing away the joyous ones as well, because they almost go hand in hand.

I love the analogy of a stick.

If you imagine picking up a stick and on one hand is the most pleasurable joys in life, and on the other hand are the most dire, difficult, horrible situations you can imagine.

Well, what we want to do is we want to chop off the end of the horrible situations.

That leaves us just with the end of the good.

But the problem is, the more you chop that stick, you don't end up with just one end.

You still got two ends, but they're just closer together.

And the more we try to chop that stick away, the more we try to even out the bad ends, the more those bad ends get closer to the good ends, until it's so mixed up and the stick isn't long enough for you to tell a difference anymore, your life becomes a blurry mess.

Of good, bad and everything else, and you end up not being able to distinguish the differences.

So therefore you think your whole life is what it is.

You know, have a long stick, experience the biggest joys at the furthest end of the stick, and experience the deepest of lows.

And that's what it's about.

Becoming whole is about experiencing the depth of who we are, the depth of our feelings.

You know, if you ask the average person how many feelings do they have, they'll go five or six.

Happy, joy, desire, sadness, anger.

But there's hundreds of other ones.

There's hundreds of subtle ones all in between, and we never stay at any of them for more than a few seconds.

Just become aware of it, enjoy it.

Embrace the fact that you're somewhere at any point in time, somewhere along this great big long stick, and at any time you could slide down to the end you don't want to be, or you could be given a ladder up to the other end.

It's like, it's nice and ladders, isn't it?

That's what that reminds me of, you know, that's life.

It's about embracing everything.

And unless we embrace everything, unless we embrace what it means to be a whole human, to experience all of these feelings.

Because although I, I don't, I try to live in a non dualistic way as possible in, in the way of everything's good and bad, or to me it's a lot fuzzier than that, healthier and unhealthy.

And I talk about it on the podcast a lot.

There's an unhealthy way of trying to deny feelings, but the problem is while you're denying some feelings, you're denying the other end of feelings the same time.

But we, it's so subtle, we don't always see it.

Don't deny either end.

Embrace them, include them as part of your life.

And then you'll suddenly find out there's way more powerful feelings.

You know, I remember my daughter, when she was about five, six, we watched a film with her and there was a really sad ending about a dog died or something like that.

I couldn't quite remember the film and the dog passed away or got lost or something and I had a tear in my eye.

I was trying to cover it up, being a man, you know, and Emma had a couple of tears in her face and Kember was just laughing at us, just like I was like, how can you be laughing?

That's really sad.

And she goes, it's not.

I said, I'm like the Dogs died.

She goes, it's a movie.

And she just wasn't bothered.

It was a movie.

It's not even real.

And then about two, three years later, we were in the kitchen and she came out and she bawling her eyes out in the most, like, you know, that kind of you cannot catch your breath kind of crying when like as if the whole world has collapsed, like the only thing existed was this kitchen.

And she just witnessed the end of the universe.

And I said, are you alright?

And she goes, no, I know.

All right.

And I said, what's wrong?

She goes, the dog died.

And I went.

She goes, the dogs died in the movie.

That movie.

You know that movie.

The.

The dog died.

And what's really interesting is the fact that this was a movie she watched loads of times and yet she never, she never felt the feelings before because she'd never experienced them herself.

So you've almost got to experience the pain in order to just go deeper, to go there, you know, we very often want to dampen our pain out.

You know, that's what antidepressants do.

It's what alcohol does and drugs and things like that.

We dampen our pain, we disconnect because we don't like to.

We like the joyous ones, we just don't like the other ones.

So we're trying to get rid of them then.

There's nothing wrong with a little bit of alcohol.

I did it for quite a while, nursing myself to sleep when I was really suffering.

And there's nothing wrong with antidepressants to get you over.

I can't remember quite when.

You know, sometimes you need that hand just to.

Just to re center yourself.

Nothing wrong with that.

But when we're getting to a point where we literally cannot face life on a.

In a prolonged way, so six months later, we still cannot face any kind of adversity.

That's where we're not helping ourselves by not experiencing it.

It's in a similar vein to loneliness.

I sit down with my loneliness quite often if I'm feeling lonely, sit on the edge of the bed.

Well, I don't sit on the edge of it, I'd fall off.

But if you can sit on the edge of the bed or you lie down, just think how lonely am I.

Go to the point of the.

The only person in the universe really experience what it's like to be alone.

Imagine everybody that ever existed is gone, including nature.

And you're not even there with any trees anymore.

And what the body will do after a few like tens of seconds with that, they would go, do, you know, I'm not lonely anymore.

Stuff that.

So it has a.

So when you include it, you feel a whole lot better.

So instead of me going, I don't want those bad days, which of course I don't want them, I don't wish them on myself.

But if I didn't have them, how would I recognize the good days?

You know, if we didn't have the crimes, how we recognize non crime?

Probably not a perfect analogy, but you know what I mean.

So that's my podcast this week.

It's just embrace becoming a whole human.

And I'm going to talk about that a lot more next week in the context of being single and things like that, because somebody emailed me and I mentioned last week that I was going to do a podcast on this, but I want to do this podcast instead in the meantime because boy, this week has been tough.

And embrace toughness, embrace the strengths that we have to endure that.

But also recognize that it's okay to have a hard time.

It's part of becoming whole.

So look, head over to stephenweb.uk it's my website.

There's a link there to my main website, my blog, you can treat me to a coffee, you can download my little book, you can see my other podcast with or the meditation app which got all my meditations on it.

But right now I'm tired so I'm gonna go.

I'm probably gonna, I don't know, just do some med tech and take a deep breath, close my eyes for a little bit.

But have an awesome one.

Thank you guys for listening.

Stevenweb.uk I love you guys and thank you for being there.

Thank you for being part of my journey and I deeply appreciate it.

Bye.