Episode 165
8 Billion Minds. Why Meditation Doesn't Work for Everyone (And What You Can Do About It)
Why does meditation work for some people and not others? Eight billion minds. You can only write the book from the altitude you are actually standing at.
My chair broke and I could not do anything. That is a lifeline gone, and a friend had to come and push me out to the van. In the weeks after I read a hundred and twenty year old book by James Allen saying you are not your thoughts. Sometimes I need to think something through and I will go into a story deliberately. Other times there are gaps between the words.
One thing to try: Stop asking whether you are doing it right. Ask what works at your altitude.
In this episode
- (0:03) Eight billion minds, and why one method cannot fit them
- (2:35) You can only write from the altitude you are at
- (4:50) The chair breaking, and losing the lifeline
- (7:10) Reading James Allen, and you are not your thoughts
- (9:54) Going into a story deliberately, and the gaps between words
With gratitude to
Suzanne, Maria, Michael, Tiffany, Ellen, Kathleen, Edyll, Nicola, Jess, Lynette, Linda, Laura and Yavuz.
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
Transcript
So, 8 Billion Minds. Why meditation doesn't work for everyone and what you can do about it on today's
Steven Webb:podcast. Hello, I'm Steven Webb and welcome to Stillness in the Storms. The podcast that helps you to find peace
Steven Webb:even in difficult times. No fluff, no quick fixes. Just honest and down-to-earth wisdom from someone who
Steven Webb:lives it every day.
Steven Webb:so last week we went back to basics. This week, I want to say something about what sits right
Steven Webb:next to that because we are all different, I've grown up for so many years trying to
Steven Webb:change the world into who I am without even realising it that I had the answers, I had the common
Steven Webb:sense, meanwhile, I didn't, I knew I didn't have all the peace and quiet. I knew I did not have
Steven Webb:everything sorted. But meanwhile. I was trying to convince 8 billion people to think and be like me and to
Steven Webb:fit into my box because as soon as everybody fitted into my box, I would then feel comfortable and life
Steven Webb:would be a damn sight better for me I laugh about it now, and it's, do you know what? It's
Steven Webb:easier to accept yourself than it is to change 8 billion people. Trust me, I've tried. It's hard work and
Steven Webb:I don't think I managed with even one person. So there you go. If you're still trying to change the
Steven Webb:world, good luck. It's a long, hard slog. So
Steven Webb:why does meditation work beautifully for some people and it doesn't work for other people? And
Steven Webb:why does one teacher work for one person? Another teacher work for another, and someone will give you a link
Steven Webb:or give you a self-help book and they'll go, it's brilliant. It's done everything. It's changed my whole life. And
Steven Webb:then you read it and you go yeah no, didn't get much from it. And I always say the more
Steven Webb:self-help books you read, you're better off just putting a pile of them sitting on them and work out how
Steven Webb:your mind works. Because if you do that for five minutes a day, that'll be better than 10 000
Steven Webb:self-help books. And there's a reason for that because every self-help book is wrote. And every teaching memoir is wrote
Steven Webb:from the altitude that author is at that time. And they could be amazing psychologists, psychiatrists,
Steven Webb:they could be the best doctors. They could well be way higher than you, way
Steven Webb:lower at the altitude. But what is true for all of them is that you can only write a book
Steven Webb:from the altitude you're at. You might be able to communicate with those below you. But you can only hazard
Steven Webb:a guess at those above you, and that's just the reality of it. The same as this podcast, same as
Steven Webb:me talking to you, I can only give you my reflection from where I am. I'm so far up the
Steven Webb:mountain. My viewpoint is what I can see? If someone up the top of the mountain says, Steven, look over
Steven Webb:there, look in the distance. There's a nice something, there's a different mountain. No matter how much I try, I'm
Steven Webb:not going to see that mountain. I could visualize it. I might be able to have some kind of vague
Steven Webb:idea, but I'm not going to see it. And the same as if you go down lower, you're going to
Steven Webb:see even less. So I think this is really important. Going slightly off topic now from the meditation side.
Steven Webb:So what got me into meditation? I've told the story a couple of times, but I think it's really important
Steven Webb:because I think you'll relate to it.
Steven Webb:So I did despite everything that gone through in my life, my broken neck and.
Steven Webb:Being cheated on going bankrupt. I lost my friend in my 30s I don't tell you all them because
Steven Webb:I don't think my life is much different than most people's, but none of that made me hit rock bottom,
Steven Webb:even becoming paralysed. What
Steven Webb:made me hit rock bottom was one day in town and my chair broke, and my chair's broke more times
Steven Webb:than I can imagine It broke down today twice
Steven Webb:and. But we did sort it and I've got to get hold of call more mobility tomorrow because my chair's
Steven Webb:broke again. Anyway, off topic again. So I hit rock bottom at 40 and I
Steven Webb:was in town. The chair broken down. I had no money. My credit cards were to the top. I was
Steven Webb:bankrupt at the time and I had been bankrupt a number of years before, so I couldn't borrow. I couldn't
Steven Webb:do anything. And my chair is my lifeline to get out. I managed to get hold of a friend and
Steven Webb:they come down and they push me out to the van push me into it, and come home. Luckily, that
Steven Webb:friend was a bit of an engineer and he could help a little bit,
Steven Webb:and I remember sat in the busy doorway. I literally pulled my eyes out. Saturday afternoon,
Steven Webb:I was in boots. It's a, like a well-being store, a really big superstore in the uk.
Steven Webb:And there was a security guard stood on his little higher platform near the door and he walked over and
Steven Webb:he grabbed on my shoulder and
Steven Webb:he didn't say a word. I don't think he knew what to say. There was this 40-year-old in a wheelchair
Steven Webb:just bawled out crying. Crying like a two-year-old like as if the world had absolutely ended.
Steven Webb:And I managed to compose myself after what seemed like hours, probably only two minutes. But that security guard meant
Steven Webb:the world. He just squeezed my shoulder and it's like I know you're there I've
Steven Webb:got you. And that I even tear up now thinking about it, but that meant a lot to me. I
Steven Webb:got home I didn't think for two weeks, almost day and night. I was just stuck observing life.
Steven Webb:Didn't feel anything, want, angry want. I just did not have any emotion for like two weeks and
Steven Webb:I wasn't even working stuff out. I was just literally observing like one long awesome, deep meditation. And
Steven Webb:then when the thoughts and all started creeping back in, they were so painful, so horrible that I started reading
Steven Webb:the self-help books or I started doing all these different things. Just to get some sleep. In actual fact, just
Steven Webb:before that, I started drinking and asking the carers for a drink every night I ended up drinking three or
Steven Webb:four seven comforts every night just to go to sleep Two hours later, I was awake and in the middle
Steven Webb:of the night. I wasn't going to call a carer down to get another drink. After a while, I just
Steven Webb:started reading As a Man think of to go to sleep and been dyslexic. I'd never read anything since school
Steven Webb:and reading it word by word rereading paragraphs again and again and again. Eventually I had full
Steven Webb:sleep I'd done that for several weeks, and in that book it's about 120 year old book by James Allen.
Steven Webb:And he just basically said, you are not your thoughts. So
Steven Webb:I started looking into meditation a bit more rather than when I tried it in my 20s to try to
Steven Webb:do something popular. When
Steven Webb:every single book tells you that, the answer is in meditation, when one book tells you, you go, yeah. Maybe
Steven Webb:when two books tell you But when 20 or 30, when every single book turns the page and says, if
Steven Webb:you want inner peace, if you want a quiet life, you want to reduce your suffering, meditate, at some point,
Steven Webb:you cannot ignore it. It's like if you're sat in a room with no windows and doors and nine people
Steven Webb:walk in independently and say it's raining and one person walks in and goes, ah, it's sunny. Why you're stupid
Steven Webb:if you don't grab a coat? That's the reality. If enough people are telling you it's meditation,
Steven Webb:but I've got, well, I now know I've got adhd or add according to another book I read
Steven Webb:and with me, my mind's just utterly chaos and a mess and it's thinking everything,
Steven Webb:it's doing more and more things by the day. And it comes up with ideas day and night, and
Steven Webb:they're just random and they're ridiculous and they're, if you ever go walking with me anywhere, I literally do not
Steven Webb:stop.
Steven Webb:I will be talking about the butterfly on the leaf to a big challenge to Trump, to
Steven Webb:everything, to how my, why my toe works the way it does to my eyes, and how they see.
Steven Webb:To the universe and how Pluto is the planet right back to the butterfly sitting on the leaf and the
Steven Webb:birds hearing. And I've learned to just allow it to be what it is and my mind.
Steven Webb:But when I sat down to meditate it's like silence it and I just couldn't.
Steven Webb:It's like telling kids in the back seat of a car to stop laughing. Not gonna work.
Steven Webb:It's like the group of kids in school to sit down and stop fidgeting. Worst thing you do you
Steven Webb:know, tell them to fidget for five minutes and then they get bored. And so
Steven Webb:meditation, I thought was off the cards, but I sat down and I, I found my ways of meditating and
Steven Webb:sometimes I need guided meditation Sometimes I need to just stare at a leaf. Sometimes I need to really
Steven Webb:think of something I even go on a story deliberately to visualize something. Other
Steven Webb:times I can have a lot those moments between my words and you'll recognise those moments
Steven Webb:of just peace,
Steven Webb:like if you listen to every single word I say now.
Steven Webb:From this one
Steven Webb:to this one. In between waiting for that word, you had a moment of just waiting awareness.
Steven Webb:And the problem is with all of this is we do see the world through the image of who we
Steven Webb:are.
Steven Webb:So we think we'll look at productive people and go, how are you productive? We look at people that meditate
Steven Webb:and go, how could you meditate? We don't know what's going through their mind while they're sitting there meditating. Most
Steven Webb:of them are faking it. I bet most of them are just sitting there thinking,
Steven Webb:I wonder if they've got their eyes open. I wonder what they're thinking about. I wonder if they're thinking about
Steven Webb:to you as Same as me. I wonder if they got a bad back. I wonder if they, I'm sure
Steven Webb:I seen them move a minute ago. And even when you go on retreat and you see 10 people, if
Steven Webb:you look around long enough when you're supposed to be meditating, you'll see people just open their eyes slightly and
Steven Webb:things like that I even think the teacher is sitting there thinking. All different things, but the point is, is
Steven Webb:to bring it back, bringing it back, bringing it back, like I spoke about last week, so I'm not going
Steven Webb:to go repeating. If you didn't listen to last week's and you struggle with meditation anyway, I really suggest you
Steven Webb:listen to last week's podcast, but
Steven Webb:it's eight billion people eight billion minds. They're all on a spectrum from one side to the other, whether it's
Steven Webb:autism focus or anything. On one end of the spectrum, you've got somebody that was born with a mental illnesses
Steven Webb:and all that where the chemicals just don't fire, right?
Steven Webb:And they would find it very difficult to live in the world, and they may not get beyond the age
Steven Webb:of one or two years old mentally. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got someone that we deem
Steven Webb:as incredibly amazing with an IQ of 200 that can focus, that can read a book in like hours that
Steven Webb:can remember the most amazing things. They may not be emotionally
Steven Webb:as intelligent, but we deem them as brilliantly productive, amazing people we put them on a pedestal.
Steven Webb:And everywhere between those two things is everybody else. There's the people that can focus at times. There's people that
Steven Webb:could never focus. There's people that can get in the flow and get things achieved. But only in the right
Steven Webb:circumstances. And the thing is, with the eight billion people, there's eight billion roads and
Steven Webb:each one of us is on our own road. Then you can go from one side of the road to
Steven Webb:the other. You can go towards, you can be pulled towards other people's roads, but you ultimately cannot change the
Steven Webb:road you're on.
Steven Webb:Your mind is wired the way it's wired. You can rewire parts of it. You can. Train it to become
Steven Webb:more focused. You can train it to become more spontaneous and more bewildered and curious.
Steven Webb:You can train a closed mindset to be more open, but you'll never be able to move
Steven Webb:from one end to the other. You just cannot do it. It just doesn't work that way and.
Steven Webb:I've spoke about when I think in about the 1950s or 60s they had every 10 years they have a
Steven Webb:group of people they put together and they follow them every 10 years of their life and they ask them
Steven Webb:questions. They do things well. In the 50s or 60s they had a group of people they scan the minds
Steven Webb:of the first time, scan the sides of their brains, and when they got to the 90s they
Steven Webb:scan them again. This other group. And the ones that played the piano and played music when they were really
Steven Webb:young, they noticed they had an extra part of the brain somewhere near the bottom, and this brain was linking
Steven Webb:the ears and the hands and the coordination.
Steven Webb:And the people that didn't play music didn't have these despite the brain, so they thought, oh, it's a born
Steven Webb:talent. But then they scanned them again, this same group of people. And because it is comparing and this group
Steven Webb:of people that are all kinds all over the world from different things, there's hundreds of them and then they
Steven Webb:scanned them again at 20 and 30 years old. Now the ones that did not have that a part of
Steven Webb:the brain, but they had it at 30 because they started playing music at 20. So they learned for
Steven Webb:the first time a thing called neuroplasticity. Your brain will change. If you meditate more, you'll have more
Steven Webb:focus. If you read more, you'll become better at reading. When you left school, you could add 37 and 39
Steven Webb:up quite easily. You asked me to do that. Now it takes me about 20 minutes
Steven Webb:I haven't got enough fingers to do it,
Steven Webb:but if you ask me to do maths on a daily basis, after a few months, I'll be able to
Steven Webb:do that quite easily. So we can vary. We can move from side of the road to the other, but
Steven Webb:you cannot get off your road and get someone someone that really finds life difficult because life was
Steven Webb:set up for the, the middle of the focus side, if
Steven Webb:you say on the right all the focus people on the left all the scattered people.
Steven Webb:Society liked the people on the right because they could be controlled, they could be put into factories, they could
Steven Webb:build things, they could be okay with working for 50 minutes, not working for 10 minutes. The bells worked with
Steven Webb:them and they were deemed as the brilliant ones. Everybody else they're the problems and they're the ones that cause
Steven Webb:trouble. The irony is now if you're the one that causes trouble and changes the world, you're a hero.
Steven Webb:If your crazy idea hits a home run. Then you're a genius. If your crazy idea goes nowhere, you're a
Steven Webb:lunatic.
Steven Webb:The world's mental. The world is just so messed up. But it's not. It's brilliantly human. And that's the point.
Steven Webb:And this is where you fit in. You don't fit into the world. The world is terrible adapting to who
Steven Webb:you are and where you are.
Steven Webb:Do you stay where you are? No. You change your mold It's not like star signs. You're born a Sagittarius.
Steven Webb:And then from then on, luck is going to be behind a red door. I
Steven Webb:do believe in the Enneagrams, the nine types, because you move in and out of them and they depend on
Steven Webb:how you think in life, not where the planets were when you were born. I don't believe in Mercury retrograde,
Steven Webb:I don't believe in all these things that planets are having an effect on you, that the moon has an
Steven Webb:effect on you because it's pulling the water in your brain, one side or the other. Turn around. It pulls
Steven Webb:it the other way. But on the other hand, why does crime go up on a full moon? I'm just
Steven Webb:ranting now, but I'm gonna have my rant. Why does crime go up on a full moon? Because burglars like
Steven Webb:to see what they're doing. Simple as that. If you turn the lights out in villages, they don't get burgled.
Steven Webb:When the street lights are on late at night, they get purple It's that simple. Do you know what else
Steven Webb:reduces crime in the winter or the summer? Rain. Yeah. There's a direct
Steven Webb:correlation to how much crime there is and how much rain there is and how cold it is. Yeah. And
Steven Webb:that has nothing to do with the planets.
Steven Webb:So I'm going to wrap this up. We've done 20 minutes now, and I think you get my point. We
Steven Webb:sometimes put labels on things just to help us fit in and I was really pleased when I was, I
Steven Webb:was labeled dyslexic at school. Adhd or anything like that didn't come into play, but it has done now and
Steven Webb:it's made me see my life so much clearer because I
Steven Webb:tried to be that focused person that fits in because that's what society told me a good person is.
Steven Webb:And now I realise there is no good or bad people in that respect. It's just that's the way we
Steven Webb:work within our road. Then you can go back to that metaphor, you can widen your road. You can have
Steven Webb:influence, you can
Steven Webb:temporarily use other people's roads, but you cannot change fundamentally who you are.
Steven Webb:So when it comes down to meditation, if guided meditation helps you let it be.
Steven Webb:If meditation just one minute at a time, let it be. Do that. If meditation on 40 minutes, sit on
Steven Webb:the cushion, do that. All I will say is whatever you do, keep pushing the boundaries. Don't settle for one
Steven Webb:minute. If you can manage to do one minute work up to two, work up to three, five because you
Steven Webb:will have bigger rewards, you will widen your road and eventually that road will move into
Steven Webb:other roads. So you can widen your road. You really can. You can become a good meditator, a dyslexic person,
Steven Webb:in my respect. If you're similar to my dyslexia they're remembering what you read, I read a page and
Steven Webb:I can't remember the character. I get better at doing it partly by reading something I'm actually interested in.
Steven Webb:Not, council work. Don't tell councillors that Don't tell any of My friends on the council that agendas are bloody
Steven Webb:boring, I'll tell you that. But they're important. They're needed to be, and I'm glad, like on the audit committee,
Steven Webb:we have people that are accountants and things like that because my god, if they're relying on me to scrutinize
Steven Webb:it, no. But I'm there to get a bench where it's needed. I'm there to fix a fence. I'm there
Steven Webb:to make a difference in people's lives. Right? I want to get back to something really important and I want
Steven Webb:to thank those that bought this podcast free. These are the people. And I don't make any apologies for spending
Steven Webb:time on this because it's really important. So thank you, Suzanne. Maria, Michael, Tiffany helen Kathleen
Steven Webb:Adele, Nicola, Jess, Lynette, Linda, Laura your views and a few kind anonymous
Steven Webb:souls. Thank you so much, and a special call out to Jane one year as a monthly supporter as of
Steven Webb:15th of April. You guys are awesome and I've got people that have been subscribing for two or three years,
Steven Webb:but when your anniversary comes up, I will call you out. You guys keep these. Inner peace meditations and
Steven Webb:this stillness in the storms completely free of adverts. It's the only way I can do it. It's the only
Steven Webb:way I can earn some money. So thank you so much. You are awesome. And if you can donate or
Steven Webb:you can help leave a review, hit a star follow. StevenWebb.uk. The link is in the
Steven Webb:show notes and I've got a couple of courses and you can, with the courses, you can pay what you
Steven Webb:like from zero to, well wherever you want to pay I think the highest is a hundred dollars,
Steven Webb:but you can pay what you like because that's what I believe. I believe none of my teaching is mine,
Steven Webb:and I'm lucky. So thank you guys. Deeply grateful to you. I'm going to sign off now, and I just
Steven Webb:want you to leave you with one thing. We're all different. We're all on our roads. The more you practice,
Steven Webb:the more you do, the more you can widen your road but The world was not designed for you. It
Steven Webb:wasn't designed for me, or eight billion others. It's that simple.
Steven Webb:Don't feel that you need to fit in, do the meditations the way it does for you. Just keep pushing,
Steven Webb:pushing yourself, and ultimately accept yourself. Take care and I love you.
