Is it possible to Love Everyone?

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Hey, welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host. And I want to talk about how I

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can look up and say I love you. How can I look up and say I love you to someone

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that is listening to this podcast and I don't know you.

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And that's what I'm going to talk about in today's podcast, because I even answer on my emails with much

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love.

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and that's something that has been alien to me all my life. But I do it now. Why do I

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do it? And how can I say I love you to a complete stranger? That's the topic of today's podcast.

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So I come from a family that didn't really say I love you. You know, we didn't hug much, and

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I don't think I've ever said I love you to my mum, even to this day. And I've been talking

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about this to some of my friends online and some people that have been following me, and I follow them

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for a long time and we've become good friends and I've said to them many times that I'm going to

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go and tell my mum I love her, and I haven't because there's some resistance there yet. On a

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podcast, I can say to you that I love you. I can reply to an email to someone I barely

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know, much love, and someone that comes on my life. I can sign off my life saying, I love you.

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Am I being genuine? Am I. Am I really loving that person? Well, we'll all have our own

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shadows and projections about love and what love is and things like that. Let me explain one thing that I've

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learned, and it's something that's given me a lot more freedom, and that is I do

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love you.

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And we've got many things in common. Let me guess. You want to be happy. You want to reduce your

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suffering. You want to have more freedom in your life. You want to be able to do more of what

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you want to do when you want to do it. You want to be healthier and you want the suffering

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of others to reduce. You want less enemies. Have I done some kind of Jedi mind trick on you? No,

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of course I haven't. The

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reason why I know these things is because you're me and I'm you.

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Your suffering is the same as my suffering. Your hopes and dreams are the same as mine. Yes, through experiences,

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we've got a little differences on what happiness means and what it means to reduce suffering and the kind of

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things we want to do.

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My happiness is not lying On a beach in another country for two weeks on a holiday once a year,

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I like to just walk along a river and just enjoy the birds and the singing. That makes me happy.

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So we have differences. We have different films we watch, we have different preferences of books and what we do

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for hobbies.

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But the fact that we want to reduce our suffering, the fact that we want to open our hearts and

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we want to feel this freedom, means we're no different. So when I say I love you, what I'm

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saying is I recognise myself in you. I recognise that your struggles, albeit they may come from a different

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place, your desires may go towards a different thing, but the suffering is the same. If

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we both. If you split up in a relationship where you lose someone, you grieve and you suffer the same

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as I do. We bleed in the same way. It doesn't matter how old we are, it doesn't matter

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what. The thing that caused us to suffer, our aspirations and all are pretty much the same.

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So yeah I I do love you. So when I say that, I mean it, because I'm looking at the

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core of the essence of the foundations of who we are. That

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individual that hasn't got all the protections of all of the thoughts and opinions and beliefs and the groups

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and the tribes and the friends it's that person that's alone, that just has the desire

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to be content and happy and have less suffering. That's

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who I love. Because I'm learning to love that person in me,

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that raw person underneath everything in me. And what's that look like? You know what that person looks

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like in me?

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It looks exactly like you. It really does.

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So if you want to understand my suffering, have a look at your own. If you want to

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understand my desires and what it means to be happy for me and how it feels. How does it feel

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for you? And that's when we start looking at each other and recognise that we're all the same.

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You know, whether you're fighting in a war for something that you believe in, or whether or not you're

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fighting uh ecological war to improve the earth, and whether you're trying to get rid of plastic or whatever

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you're doing on a daily basis,

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you're still fighting a very similar battle. When you take away what the actual beliefs and the

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desires and the outcomes, when you take away all those things, we're pretty much fighting the same thing. We want

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to achieve something. We want to have hope. We want to improve the world in some way. And

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I say this in a warped way because it doesn't fit My thinking. But

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even the person that does some of the most dreadful things believes they're improving the world. Think about that for

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a moment. I'm not saying I agree with the actions, of course I don't.

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But they are still believing they're trying to improve the world. And that's what we're all doing. So that's why

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I can look up and say, I love you. Thank you.

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Get to the core of who you are and learn to love the core of who you are. Because when

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you learn to love that,

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you'll be able to see that in everybody else. You meet everybody, even the people you don't ever meet, you

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will recognise that same core value and belief. Even on the opposite sides of the political spectrum,

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the opposite sides of the religious spectrum. You'll recognise that we aren't that much different after all.

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We all bleed. We all have the same organs inside, things like that. We all recognise that on a very

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physical sense. But we actually have the same fundamental desires and beliefs

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and griefs and pain and suffering. I guess what I'm trying to say is, in my own.

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In my own gibbering way, is that below all the opinions and beliefs,

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below the desires for objects and successes and everything like that,

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look at the fundamental core of what drives those things, and you'll recognise everybody

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else on the planet is you, and you are everybody else on the planet.

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And this is what it means by learn to love yourself. Because when you love yourself and you start to

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recognise that your suffering is part of who you are, and the. The desire to reduce that suffering is also

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part of who you are and the desire to love and be loved. When you recognise those things in everybody

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else, you see everybody else as you.

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Because everybody else is. You

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know, we just may wear different clothes, we may have different thoughts. We may have got to different places in

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different ways through different experiences in life

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But the things that hold us together. The roots of trees are the same. They

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do the same thing. They may look different, they may have different structures to them, but they're doing the same

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thing. So what Your foundational core values of who you are.

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The deeper you look, you'll realise that everybody has the same ones, but we often forget about them. We often

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judge people on their actions, we judge people on their mistakes, and we judge people on what they want to

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do to be happy. And just because it's not what you want to do to be happy, they must be

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wrong or they must be different to you. They're not different. They're just learning to be they're learning to improve

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their life in this moment. And as Carl Jung says, even the rotten potato in the basement shoots towards the

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light. You know, someone that is trying to avoid life through substances, alcohol or drugs or something like that,

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they're just trying to improve their lives. So no matter what where we are, no matter what our starting point

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is, if you take a snapshot of anybody's life right now, we all just want to be a little happier,

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or we want to have a little less suffering, or we want to have someone to understand us and listen

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to us.

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And even if you're not where that person is right now, you've probably been there. And it

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may be in different circumstances, but if you really dig deep beyond the actual what is actually going on,

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like, somebody may be using drugs to avoid life, you may use Netflix to

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avoid life. You know, on. On a judgmental thing, you could say one's worse than the other, but really they're

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the same thing. You're just trying to improve your life in that moment. What am I going to do right

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now? Well, I'm gonna have

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this drink, or I'm gonna watch Netflix. We're just trying to improve our lives right this moment. So when I

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say I love you, I love you, because you're doing the same as what I'm doing, I'm doing the same

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as what you're doing. And we are all in this together. And when we realise that we'll stop fighting, we'll

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stop making enemies out of each other, we'll stop judging each other based on the actions,

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and we'll open our hearts to each other based on who we are behind the actions of

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who we are. Fundamentally, at the core of who we are, if you sit in meditation and you go deeper

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and deeper and

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you take away the opinions and beliefs inside your mind and the thoughts and the emotions and all that, you're

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left with a deep caring. You

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know, the first thing that arises out of emptiness is a deep caring and a desire, a

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desire to improve our lives, a desire to be happier, to love more, to be loved more. If that's a

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crime, to want to be loved more, love more, or open our hearts, then everybody on earth is guilty. I'm

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really sure of that, even if it's hard to recognise it in others. Some people have built up so many

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walls and barriers, and they've done that out of fear. Well, show me a person that doesn't fear something.

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Show

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me a person that doesn't fear being hurt or fear suffering more or fear being ill or something. Like that.

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So we're all the same. We're all the same fundamentally below our

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opinions and beliefs and our stories and our egos. So that's why when I say at the end of my

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life, or when I say I love you, I

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can say that because I recognise myself in you.

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We're not separate people.

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We're just maybe slightly separate in where we are what we're desiring and the stories that we're making up in

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our minds. That's all. So that's my podcast for this week and I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope

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if it resonated with you in any way, let me know in the review or the comments. If it makes

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sense, if it makes you think that you can love a little more, you can open up. Do you recognise

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yourself in others? Just spend the next week or so just whoever you come across, see if you can

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recognise yourself in them.

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Because when you truly do, it will change your life and you will end up a lot happier.

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Because you'll end up with no enemies. You'll end up with a lot more understanding, compassion.

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It's not empathy. It's beyond empathy. It's deeper than empathy. You'll end up with understanding and compassion. And that's the

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way we improve the world. That's the way we lift the world. When

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we take away the stories and all the thoughts of desires and aversions and all those things, life just gets

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a little better. A lot better. Amazingly better. Take care guys. Head over to my website and you can download

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the five Simple Practices for Inner Peace. It's a small little book I wrote, StevenWebb.com

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and if you want to book in for a coffee with me, just a 15 minute coffee, it's completely free,

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I don't charge or anything and I've got nothing to sell. You

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just head over to my website, click on the Book of coffee and

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StevenWebb.com also I have another podcast, Inner Peace Meditations Podcast. I will

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put a link in the show notes underneath this podcast which I just upload my meditations. It's

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quite simple. It's just Inner Peace meditations. Take care guys. I love you and namaste.