Episode 144
Feel Deeply, Suffer Less: The Unexpected Power of Emotion
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đ§ Host:
Steven Webb â Meditation Teacher & Former Mayor of Truro
đ About This Episode:
What if the key to less suffering wasnât found in avoiding painâbut in feeling it all? In this powerful episode of Stillness in the Storms, Steven Webb explores why allowing yourself to feel deeply might be the most healing, human thing you can do.
Weâre often told to âstay positiveâ and âchin up,â but what if the real strength lies in making room for grief, sadness, loneliness, and joy alike? Steven shares personal reflections, Zen wisdom, and practical insight into how embracing every emotion can make you more wholeâand more at peace.
Whether youâre feeling stuck in your sadness, disconnected from joy, or overwhelmed by the ups and downs of life, this episode is an invitation to stop running and start listening... to yourself.
đ§ What Youâll Learn:
- Why people who feel deeply often suffer less, not more
- The real meaning of emotional wholeness
- How to stop identifying with your emotions
- The ego vs. the âbig mindââand why balance matters
- A simple shift in language that changes how you relate to feelings
⨠Takeaway:
You donât need to fix every emotion. You just need to feel it, then let it pass. Thatâs where peace begins.
đ Support the Podcast:
If this episode moved you, consider buying Steven a coffee at stevenwebb.uk. No adverts, just real conversationsâthanks to listeners like you.
Transcript
Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you through the most difficult times in life.
Speaker A:I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and on this episode, I want to talk about feeling things deeply and becoming whole.
Speaker A:It's a subject that I visit quite often on my podcast because I think it's one of the main reasons why the people that feel.
Speaker A:Feel things deeply suffer a lot less.
Speaker A:And it seems counterintuitive.
Speaker A:The people that cry deeply, the people that have a lot of empathy, a lot of compassion about them and what seemed like a weakness, they often suffer a lot less.
Speaker A:And it's one of those things that if you feel everything and experience everything, but don't stay there.
Speaker A:And I think that's the whole.
Speaker A:The point of it.
Speaker A:And Richard Roh always talks about both and rather than either or.
Speaker A:And I sometimes feel sad and I sometimes feel lonely, and I sometimes feel, you know, include them rather than.
Speaker A:No, I just want to be happy all the time.
Speaker A:I just want to be joyful and happy and, you know, just want to be love.
Speaker A:I want to be all these wonderful things.
Speaker A:No, you know, although I wouldn't want anybody to grow up feeling a whole lot of pain, a whole lot of hurt, but by feeling all this whole lot of pain and a whole lot of hurt, you end up a more whole person.
Speaker A:You imagine growing up and getting to the end of your life and you've only listened to one side of the album of your favorite band and someone comes up and turns it over 10 minutes before you die and goes, hey, there's a whole new side there.
Speaker A:There's loads of other things you could have experienced.
Speaker A:It's like the artist only having four colors and someone coming along.
Speaker A:You could have mixed them.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker A:I've lived my whole life and I did not know that.
Speaker A:So you don't want to do that.
Speaker A:You want to experience all these emotions.
Speaker A:And this is where the balance.
Speaker A:I did a meditation and I released it on inner peace meditations.
Speaker A:And it was about balance between the small mind, like the ego, the fixer, the seven year old self that wants and desires, the person in me that gets angry and all those things and identifies with Stephen, who I am.
Speaker A:And then the big mind that's vast and it's open and there's no issues and there's no problem and it includes everything.
Speaker A:Nothing needs fixing.
Speaker A:Everything's fine.
Speaker A:Well, not everything's fine.
Speaker A:Everything just is what it is.
Speaker A:Because there's no fine, because there's no broken, because there's no.
Speaker A:You get my point.
Speaker A:It's Difficult to articulate it, it's easier to sit in it.
Speaker A:But you're balancing between those two things all the time.
Speaker A:And David Hawkins has an emotional scale, like starting at 20, that's like shame.
Speaker A:And they're moving through guilt and fear and anger.
Speaker A:And then you slowly move to courage, which is like a transformational point courage, the first thing where you start to be brave and you start to look outwards.
Speaker A:And then you've got other emotions where you start to feel happiness and joy and enlightenment and desires and all those things and they flow, you move between them.
Speaker A:And the problem is the one thing you don't want to do is stay at one of them too long.
Speaker A:So an enlightened being moves between them, fills them deeply, but doesn't stay there.
Speaker A:They almost not revel in it, because that's the opposite.
Speaker A:So when I released a podcast a couple of days ago, someone guarded me and said, I hear sadness in your voice.
Speaker A:And they were right.
Speaker A:My voice was feeling sad because the meditation was reminding me of the seven year old self that cannot fix and heal the world.
Speaker A:I'm still working on that.
Speaker A:I still think that it's possible.
Speaker A:But do I think, does big mind think it's possible to heal the world?
Speaker A:No, because it doesn't think.
Speaker A:It doesn't.
Speaker A:It has no concept of that.
Speaker A:But the small mind does, the ego does.
Speaker A:You know, the ego wants mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Speaker A:It wants to fix things.
Speaker A:It wants everybody to be happy.
Speaker A:It wants to be happy, it wants to be joyful because we're promised all these things.
Speaker A:So it doesn't want to be sad.
Speaker A:But you know, there's nothing wrong with being lonely or sad.
Speaker A:You know, it's much like if you're going to try to deny all those things, it's much like having a garden and always wearing shoes.
Speaker A:You'll never know what it's like to walk barefoot in the sand or barefoot in the cold grass.
Speaker A:And being human is just to experience.
Speaker A:So you don't want to not experience sadness and grief, you know, why would you not want to experience grief?
Speaker A:Grief is just that beautiful emotion that reminds you of love.
Speaker A:I don't think you can have grief without love.
Speaker A:Can you have joy without sadness?
Speaker A:Can you have happiness without content?
Speaker A:Can you have enlightenment without ignorance?
Speaker A:You first need to be ignorant to have wisdom.
Speaker A:To understand what it means to be warm, you've got to feel cold.
Speaker A:And I could go on all day with these things.
Speaker A:So the idea is to feel these things and be okay with these things, but don't stay There, experience them all.
Speaker A:That's what it means to be human.
Speaker A:When you look at animals and when you look at other things, trees and nature, they don't get to experience everything that we do.
Speaker A:You know, a tree is a whole tree.
Speaker A:Many humans are not whole humans because we deny our human side.
Speaker A:We deny that moving through emotions.
Speaker A:And I refrain from saying I am sad or I am lonely or I am happy.
Speaker A:I mess up sometimes, but I try to say I'm feeling sad.
Speaker A:I'm currently experiencing sadness.
Speaker A:You know, I'll sit here and listen to a song and I'll cry.
Speaker A:And sometimes it's sadness, sometimes it's happiness, sometimes it's just overwhelming emotions.
Speaker A:I wouldn't want to not do that.
Speaker A:I wouldn't want to live in a world that I suppose as a child my parents said to me, you know, stop crying.
Speaker A:You know, it's because they felt awkward when they were seeing a child upset and sad.
Speaker A:That made them feel sad and they didn't want to feel sad.
Speaker A:So stop crying.
Speaker A:Pick your chin up, you'll be okay.
Speaker A:And it's not nice seeing someone else feeling sadness.
Speaker A:It's not nice seeing someone else lonely.
Speaker A:It's not nice seeing someone else suffer because it makes us suffer.
Speaker A:And if you do care and you have a big heart, it's really, really difficult.
Speaker A:And I'm a firm believer and I don't always get it right, I get it far from right.
Speaker A:But I'm a firm believer and try not to cause any more suffering if you can help it.
Speaker A:And sometimes I make mistakes and sometimes there is suffering at some of my actions and decisions.
Speaker A:But then I realized that I'm only responsible for mine.
Speaker A:I'm only responsible for what I do.
Speaker A:And being human is all part of that experience and finding that balance between all, because it will come and go, but almost.
Speaker A:We grew up in a world that wanted to deny all the sad feelings and replace them with all the good feelings.
Speaker A:When I grow up, I'll be happy.
Speaker A:When I have this, I'll be happy.
Speaker A:That's almost saying that that's the only time in that state of happiness, in that state of experience is the only time this life is worth living.
Speaker A:It's not.
Speaker A:How can you know happiness if you haven't known sadness?
Speaker A:And I know this is living in the duality of things.
Speaker A:And many people say, don't live in the duality, you know, go to a non dual state and all that.
Speaker A:Well, you know, then you get hungry or you get cold, you know, to live in a non dual state you'll be in a state of limbo all the time, just sat on your meditation cushion and you'd never eat and you never do anything.
Speaker A:You never experience anything.
Speaker A:But the whole, whole idea is to hold everything loosely in a way that you can experience it, but you don't become it.
Speaker A:And very often when we have feelings, when we're not very mature with those feelings, we become so enrolled in it, we become the emotion and we try to get out of it.
Speaker A:We try to deny it like some sticky treacle that we're trying to.
Speaker A:I don't like this.
Speaker A:Well, if you don't like.
Speaker A:If you think you are sadness and you don't like to be sadness, that's to say I don't like to be human because I don't like to experience anything.
Speaker A:And that would have to equally go with happiness, joy, desires, and how do we detach from these.
Speaker A:Okay, great question, great question.
Speaker A:What?
Speaker A:That's where meditation and mindfulness comes in.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's sitting back and just recognizing a thought when it comes in the head and going, ah, there's a thought.
Speaker A:It's recognizing the emotion when it comes up.
Speaker A:Ah, there's an emotion.
Speaker A:What's under the emotion?
Speaker A:Why am I feeling sad?
Speaker A:Why am I feeling joy?
Speaker A:Why am I feeling desires?
Speaker A:Why am I feeling grief?
Speaker A:And be okay with it?
Speaker A:Play in the story.
Speaker A:Because that's what it wants.
Speaker A:Sadness wants you to recognize that emotion that comes up and the ego recognizes it.
Speaker A:It wants to be seen and heard.
Speaker A:It wants to be seen and heard.
Speaker A:The soul wants to have some kind of rigidity or some kind of system that it can express itself to.
Speaker A:The world wants to leave a legacy.
Speaker A:It wants to be something.
Speaker A:It wants to be seen.
Speaker A:But that's small mind.
Speaker A:And you know, there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker A:It's just if you just identify with that and that is your whole, and you look at it as something to solve, you know, I need to solve my sadness, I need to solve my loneliness.
Speaker A:And very often, like, loneliness is a big one for me in my life and loneliness is relative because someone could come back and say, well, I'm more lonely or less lonely.
Speaker A:It doesn't matter.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's relative to the person.
Speaker A:It's relative to you.
Speaker A:And I have family around me, I have friends, but I can still feel incredibly lonely.
Speaker A:And I have done at times.
Speaker A:And I feel lonely because I'm desiring something I haven't got.
Speaker A:And when I used to try to solve that, it just made it worse.
Speaker A:So I Do a meditation.
Speaker A:Now that I sit in, the loneliness.
Speaker A:Ah, lonely.
Speaker A:What's that look like?
Speaker A:Well, it looks like no one's here.
Speaker A:What does that look like?
Speaker A:If I go totally alone and I go away from the planet and somewhere else in the solar system and there's no one here right now.
Speaker A:What if I take away the planets and it's just me?
Speaker A:What if I take away everything?
Speaker A:It's just me.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Speaker A:It's just nothing.
Speaker A:Not even dried up old trees.
Speaker A:And then after a while, the ego goes, okay, I'm done with this now get back and let's go.
Speaker A:It'll say, I'm hungry or I'm cold or it'll move on.
Speaker A:But it's okay to feel it's becoming whole.
Speaker A:And that's what Big mind is, that's what enlightenment is and all those things.
Speaker A:It's when you're ultimately whole with everything else and you're not attached to any of it.
Speaker A:And there's a paradox with it, because when you're whole with it, you are it, but you're not is what it is, because you cannot be it.
Speaker A:It's, you know, the English language is really difficult with this level of understanding.
Speaker A:Either that or I don't understand it.
Speaker A:And that's okay, that's okay.
Speaker A:But what I do know is that the more I don't identify and the less I get attached to my feelings and emotions and what's happening out there and within, the less suffering I have, the less time I stay there.
Speaker A:Because I can guarantee you, whether it's sadness or happiness, it will go, it will disappear.
Speaker A:Something will come along and knock yourself out of it.
Speaker A:I think Thich Dan hat said a brilliant quote.
Speaker A:He said, to be totally awake, unconscious is to always be thrown out of the nest constantly.
Speaker A:Wow, that cuts through, doesn't it?
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Speaker A:Well, I don't do adverts on my podcast or the Inner Peace Meditations podcast.
Speaker A:I do it because I struggle with adverts on podcast.
Speaker A:15 minute podcast.
Speaker A:You got six minutes of adverts.
Speaker A:No, thank you.
Speaker A:But I've got you guys, you listeners to thank for that.
Speaker A:You're buying me a coffee on stephenweb.uk and you're supporting me and the members.
Speaker A:You guys are the ones that keep the podcast free.
Speaker A:So I want to say thank you to you.
Speaker A:You are awesome and really appreciate it.
Speaker A:Stillness in the storms course is now a pay what you want from free right up to a higher price if you can afford it.
Speaker A:You can go over to stephenweb.uk to see that.
Speaker A:Apart from that, experience everything.
Speaker A:Use all the colors.
Speaker A:You know, it's a great meme.
Speaker A:You know, use all the crayons in the box.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:And that goes with emotions as well.
Speaker A:Take care.
Speaker A:And I love.
