We’re diving into the idea of our circles of acceptance today. How big is your circle of love and understanding? I’ve been thinking about how our perspectives change as we grow up, from a tiny circle in childhood to something much larger as adults. It’s fascinating to look at how our circles can expand or contract based on our experiences and feelings. I’ll be sharing some insights on this journey and how it affects our relationships with ourselves and others. Plus, I've got a guided meditation coming up that’ll help us explore these circles even more. Let’s get into it!

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🎙️ Stillness in the Storms — Episode: “How Big Is Your Circle of Love?”

A heartfelt reflection on how wide your love really reaches — and how to gently grow it.

🧭 What This Episode Covers

• How big your circle of love, care, and acceptance really is
• Why it naturally shrinks during stress and expands with growth
• The six stages of ego development and how they relate to your caring
• How to reflect without judgment on who is inside — or outside — your circle
• Zen and Buddhist perspectives on expanding compassion

🌀 Circle Stages — Simple Breakdown

• Pre-Egocentric – Me as impulse (pure survival)
• Egocentric – Me as person (all about me)
• Ethnocentric – My tribe (loyalty, shared identity)
• Worldcentric – All humans (equal value, global empathy)
• Planetcentric – All beings (animals, ecosystems, future life)
• Kosmocentric – No separation (universal awareness, nondual)

We move in and out of these stages — even in a single day. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s awareness.

🧠 Quotes That Land

“Growth is always in the direction of greater wholeness and inclusion.” – Ken Wilber

“Love is a state of being.” – Eckhart Tolle

“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” – Richard Rohr

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” – Jesus (Luke 23:34)

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we explore the different stages of our circle of acceptance and love.
• Understanding how to recognize and expand our circle can lead to greater empathy and compassion.
• The podcast emphasizes the idea that our circles of caring are not fixed and can change over time.
• We discuss how personal experiences, such as stress or busyness, can contract our circles of acceptance.
• The conversation highlights the importance of caring for not just loved ones, but also for people across the globe.
• We delve into deeper concepts of world centric and planet centric thinking for a broader perspective.

Welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you through difficult times.

And I want to talk about our, like the stages of development, but from a perspective of how big is our circle of acceptance and how big is our circle of love and understanding.

And I'm going to talk about it in like the egocentric view of growing up and expanding our view of the world and our acceptance of the world.

I find this just really fascinating is to how many people and how big is your circle of who you really genuinely care about?

And I think it's just really interesting when you look at life growing up and the different stages of when you're pre egoic, you're a small child teenager and you're an adult and practices.

So we're going to look at that today.

And it really did help me to realize where I've not been as accepting as I probably should be.

And it made me realize recently the more I'm campaigning on the political side and the less meditation I'm doing and the busier I become, I, I, I've seen a contraction in my circle.

And obviously these circles are not set in stone.

They're not like we get to a certain level and then suddenly we're there we go, that's our circle of love and our influence and this is the people we care about and it never changes.

And I've really seen mine really contract recently.

So I want to talk about it and I'm going to record a guided meditation that goes along with this podcast that will be on Inner Peace Meditations.

So first of all, let me say thank you to all of you that treat me to a coffee and donate and support this podcast, whether monthly or on one offs.

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So I just want to really touch upon this subject and I want you to think while I'm talking about it, how big is your circle?

And when I say about caring, I don't necessarily mean reaching out and looking after or anything like that.

I just mean how many are in that circle that you currently have that you genuinely accept and you genuinely would be there for if you need to be there and you accept their view and things like that.

So let's just go through the very first circle would be Pre egoic, you know me as a body, impulse, infancy, pure survival, it's all about me.

Then my circle is as small as it could ever be.

You know, I don't even care about my parents at that point.

And if anybody thinks they're pre egoic, you know, three, four month old cares about their parents beyond who's going to feed me, who's going to make me comfortable, you know, they'll wake them up in the middle of the night, they don't care whether they have enough sleep for three days and all that.

I'm hungry, I want food and I want it now.

And so that pre ego exchange is really, really small.

Your circle of caring is not even beyond yourself.

You don't even realize you care about yourself because you don't even know what's going on at all.

And then the next one is egocentric.

It's like a slightly bigger circle, me as a person, but I'm self focused early childhood and very ego driven adult now.

Then egocentric, they would be like the influencers all about me.

I'm making loads of money and I might be looking like I look out for you, but I don't really.

We could argue we got a world leader right now that is egocentric, that is based around that area and I would argue he really is there and some days he may even creep into the next level of growth, you know, ethnocentric.

But I don't think very often so from this egocentric it really is, what can other people do?

For me, everybody in my circle is there to serve me, to give me a purpose, to give me a reason.

And I would say definitely, you know, two, three year olds are like that.

If you watch them at playscore or anything like that, it's very much the people who they're close to is people they can take and have something from and can benefit them as much as we might see the odd glimmer of like loving and caring and all that, we got to be real about it.

And what I will say is you're not ever in one of these circles and you stay there permanently.

You can fluctuate in and out of them even during it, even during a day, you know, you give me a really bad day, bad headache and I'm not feeling great.

My circle is going to really contract.

And then you have ethnocentric and I will put these lists in a little table in the show notes just so you can look down through them yourself.

It's really warm in the UK now and all the Kids are out playing next door and I've been waiting for them to go quiet and I thought, no, kids are all part of it.

So if you can hear kids screaming and shouting and playing in the background, it's all part of the podcast, you know, let them in.

So where was I?

Ethnocentric.

So the ethnocentric, this is me, my group, my tribe, my family, it might even be my nation, my religion.

And you identify as part of that group.

You could argue the Hell's Angels or the Mafia.

It's, it's more about I will look out for you and if you look out for me, there's like a loyalty there.

So you could argue really that the world leader, right now we know we're talking about Trump, so I might as well say, you know, you could argue he's here sometimes, but that's, that means it's a two way thing.

Everybody in your circle, you're looking out for them and they're looking out for you.

I'm not quite sure they are there, but I've certainly been here.

This is my teenage years and this is when I'm feeling really rough or really struggling.

I want my people around me, I want the people that are close to me, I want the people that I can argue with and they're not going to take it personally.

And at that point I may not have the time or the energy to be able to be that wonderful loving self, which I'm not really, I'm working on it.

I'm not really people.

Oh, you're really compassionate.

I'm really not.

So I, I really fluctuate.

I would love to be at the next level, world centric, but I am at times maybe in deep meditation, maybe.

But then.

So you move on for ethnocentric to world centric, all human beings matter.

You know, this is where the human rights were, right?

This is where you got global empathy and all human beings matter.

This is where you start to move from.

Ethnocentric is, you know, don't let the immigrants in, don't let them anywhere near us.

This is our country.

World centric is, do you know what, they have a place here as well.

Let's bring them in, let's give them jobs, let's help them out.

You know, it's understanding and it's realizing that there is countries and there's a good reason to have countries.

But we also, we're all human, we're all in this together.

We, we've all got this, we all suffer and we're all trying to just better our lives.

This is where the world century comes in.

This is where you have like the Greenpeace organization come about in the 60s and 70s, and there was a huge seismic shift in the 60s.

Most of the world, you would argue, would have been ethnocentric before the 60s, but the 60s come in and with a little bit of love and a little bit of drugs and a little bit of freedoms, this is where you had genuine understanding and caring about the rest of the world.

We, we expanded our circles to include not just our pets, but the animals around us.

And this is where zoos and things like that started to move into more places of conservation as opposed to zoos.

And we're still working on that transition now.

But world centric is just understanding that if one country is building nuclear weapons in another country, that we're all in this together.

That nuclear weapon can destroy me as same as it can destroy anybody else.

It's worrying about that.

So at this point, your circle of love and acceptance accepts everybody.

All humans.

All humans deserve to have a life and including your neighbors as well.

It's sometimes easier to love the person the other side of the world that's done terrible things in a way to accept them than it is our neighbor that's just annoying us with our parking space.

Do you ever notice that, you know, the closest person to you can be really so annoying, you know, even in a family member.

It's like, I can never love my brother or sister or, you know, someone else in my life because they drive me insane so much, but I can accept the stranger, the stranger over the hill that's walking towards me.

I can accept and love them, but I can't do it to my brother or sister.

Do you notice that?

Isn't that strange?

But that's because we take things personally so much, and that comes from the egocentric kind of level.

And then you have Planet Centric, where all beings matter, animals, the ecosystems, future generations.

At this point, you're really, really caring and you're looking at things in a really complex way and you're just accepting of things you're setting up for future generations.

You're worried about what's going next from this kind of level.

You're really seeing things clearly now.

You're not seeing truths as well.

My truth.

This is what I think.

And what I think goes.

That's very egocentric kind of thinking.

Planet Centric, you'll realize there's multiple truths.

And very often, just because we feel it strongly doesn't mean it's true.

Just because it makes sense to us doesn't mean it's true.

And we understand the difference between objective truth and relative truth.

So we understand those differences and all that.

As you go up.

I'm mixing things up a little bit now because they almost go hand in hand.

You know, seeing truths is not necessarily about your circle of how much you care and how big it is, but it certainly does influence one and the other.

And then finally, as far as we can see at the moment as humans and let me know what it's like to be here because you know, apart from maybe about four seconds a day when I'm in deep sleep, I.

I'm certainly not that, you know, Cosmo centric where there's no separation at all.

You're non dual universal compassion, it really doesn't matter then you're not stopping to judge anybody.

Even the person that is out to hurt you.

You can accept them.

For this is where Jesus, I suppose was when he was nailed to the cross in that wonderful story that we keep telling.

For whatever reason when he was nailed to the cross and he says forgive them for they don't know what they're doing.

This is where the higher level of just openness and understanding and just realizing when, when you might be very good and you know, well, they, they need, they may need it more than me.

It's that kind of understanding and complete open acceptance.

You'd have to do a lot of meditating, have to do a lot of understanding and a lot of work to be able to stay a place like that for anything more than just a few moments.

And that's like in a deep non dual meditation.

Non dual might be a word that you're not quite familiar with.

Non dual basic.

Everything that we tend to do, inside and out, hot, cold, up, down.

I feel good or I feel bad.

All the negative feelings have positive feelings.

You know, if you have a good record, you have a bad record thing.

Like everything's non dual, you know, hot and cold and things like that.

I think I mentioned that it's worth going back to.

Whereas non dual is.

There's no hot and cold, it's just temperature.

There's no inside now, it's just existing.

There's no good or bad feelings, there's just ah, feelings.

But non dual goes slightly deeper than that.

It goes beyond the experiencing of those to just awareness.

And in that real deep awareness there is no feelings.

There's no, there's not even a here.

There's like a vastness that's so big, but it's not even big.

It's just, ah.

There's nothing to feel, there's nothing to do, there's no desires, there's no wants.

If you're in a real deep meditation and you feel good, you're not there because there's no feeling good in non dual.

I can't remember the Buddhist words for it now, but that's almost irrelevant.

And so just to recap on these things, so as you go up through your life, these circles get bigger and bigger.

And I want you to think now, if you were to sit in the middle of a field and you were to put everybody in, draw a circle around that field, and you would have put everybody that you deeply, deeply care about, the people that you feel so comfortable around that you could literally have them cook you a meal, you could have them stay in your house, you could spend nights, go on holiday with them and everything.

Who would they be?

How many people would be in that circle?

And then just think how big can you make that circle?

And think of it when you're not feeling too well and recognize that circle is smaller and bigger.

And so just recognizing who do we really genuinely care about?

Do you care about the person that's not present?

Do you care about the children that are suffering the other side of the world?

I don't mean care that you've got a leave the house, you got to go and help them, but do you genuinely consider it and accept them for their.

Do you care about the people that are fighting the battles?

And not just one side.

We've got the Ukraine and Russian war and the other Palestinians and the Israelis.

So which ones do we care about?

Do we choose a side?

And the biggie exactly is you don't choose a side.

You realize both of them are fighting for what they believe in.

And both of them, whether or not we agree with what they believe in, are fighting what they call a just war, which seems crazy, but can you expand and include both sides?

Can you expand and include the leaders, the dictators?

Can you sit and realize that, do you know what?

Even someone like Putin is not much difference to us.

And I say that.

And when I was mayor, even coming up to the end of the two years, I had a feeling of who am I going to be when I'm not mayor?

How am I going to feel?

And I must have, in some small way felt like what it feels like to be a dictator when suddenly they're the cream of the crop, they're in charge, they can do Everything.

And then who are they when they step down, who's identity?

What are they going to do?

They can't pick up the phone and go, hey, I'm Merit Troy.

Not that we had that kind of influence, but I felt at that point, in moments that I was going to miss out on or it felt, I don't know, it felt naked in some way and I didn't like that.

And I recognized, oh, wow, this is what dictators must feel like, but 10 times more.

I'm not saying it's okay to be a dictator.

It's absolutely not, in my opinion.

But if we can recognize that we are who we human, we can still disagree with what they do, we can still be angry.

We can still be really.

We can be an activist and angry about it, but still have them in the circle of acceptance and try to influence that way.

The problem is if you don't have them in the circle, if you don't have a very big circle, then you're not seeing things for the way they really are and you're not accepting things.

So that's what I wanted to talk about today.

And I've recorded a guided meditation that helps you to expand this circle, to move through the eccentric levels.

Most of you have moved through pre ego to ego to Ethano and world centric, but there is a couple of more and there's probably more on from that, but we have no way of seeing that yet.

I'm probably misrepresenting that, but that's my thoughts for today.

Um, this is my podcast for today and hopefully it helps you in some way.

I've been crazy busy with campaigning the elections tomorrow.

I'll be glad to get the campaign there and then with whether I get elected or not, who knows?

I still want to do this podcast.

I still love you guys and I feel like I'm letting you down at the moment.

So thank you to all the donators.

Thank you to the monthly subscribers.

You know, you are.

You guys are all awesome and I love you the Bits.

Take care and check out Inner Peace Meditations and check out the levels below in the show notes.

Bye for now.

Love.