Learning to Love Yourself

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I want to talk about love. And I want to talk about, in particular,

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how we love ourselves.

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Not only as an individual, but as

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humans, I guess.

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And as I get older, I contemplate questions like that. Just the same as I think many people

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do. And

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I think we look at what love is and what it isn't and the older I get I think The

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more I'm starting to narrow down that I feel love is just acceptance.

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If you love something, you just purely accept it as it is. You don't try to change it. You don't

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want it to be anything else.

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In the last four weeks, five weeks that I've had a really hard time health-wise and since I was mayor,

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it's been quite difficult transition for me.

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Not... Moving so much from becoming mayor to a everyday

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person. Still a city councillor, but being quite busy and then being quite ill. And

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it's just given me a lot of room to think. I want to talk about it. I haven't done a

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podcast for a little bit and I just want to have a conversation about what it means to love ourselves.

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What it means for you to love yourself and Humans as a whole, there's a lot of hate in the

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world. There's a lot of anger in the world. And what would it mean if we just turn

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that love that we've got for so many others around onto ourselves first?

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And that's what I want to talk about today in today's podcast. And if you stick go around to the

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end, perhaps I can talk through my my own ignorance and share with you. Some of that ignorance

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that you might be able to love yourselves a little bit more. I don't know. Who knows? I'm working on

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it. But just before I do that, I'm Steven Webb and welcome to Stillness in the Storms podcast. It's been

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about six weeks since I did an episode and it's purely because, like I said, I've been struggling with my

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health quite a bit. And being paralysed, I'm in the position that I'm in. It's really, sometimes the

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body doesn't want to play ball with my head and other things, and I've got to realign. And I just

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want to say thank you to everybody that's just emailed me, wondered how I am, you know, Senga, Audra,

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so many of you, Sarah. You know, Mark and everybody that's donated, emailed,

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done a little review and just asked how I am and checked in with me. You guys, I just want

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to give you such a big hug. Thank you. Feel that hug. Feel that bit of love because it means

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so much. I do this podcast on a basis that I'm helping people through difficulties. But

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I'm only a chapter ahead, that's all. And sometimes I'm not even a chapter ahead. Sometimes sometimes I'm right in

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the mix with you guys. So, you know, people say maybe I relate a little bit more. Maybe because

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I'm still not sorted and I don't think there is any sorted. So I just want to say a huge

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thank you. It means the absolute world. And some amazing news. My Inner Peace Meditations podcast is

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number one in Australia under religion. Go figure. This looks like 32 000

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listens I've got a talent for putting people to sleep. Who would have guessed? Don't fall asleep in this episode

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though. Stay awake in Stillness in the Storms. Head over to Inner Peace Meditations. There'll be a link in the

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show notes to StevenWebb.uk with all the links to my podcast, ways you can help, ways you can follow me

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and different things. Trying to build up my Youtube channel to a thousand um Likes followers, subscribers, whatever you

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call it over there. Because I got about 620, but I just want to build it up a little bit.

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So this podcast is actually a video as well, so you can watch it over there as well. But anyway,

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going back, just like big thank you to you all. Let's get on with today's show. So I

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was sat in the cathedral last night. I had a meeting. I had about an hour to kill. So I

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sat in true Cathedral And it reminded me, when I was looking down the whole of the cathedral, there's a

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kink. And these are beautiful buildings that this was the first cathedral built of this style

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and this grandeur for 850 years in the Uk. The last one was Salisbury Cathedral. So go figure, we built

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this cathedral. I say we, I didn't. But people from Cornwall built this cathedral 120

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years ago. It was complete about then and so it's it's kind of crazy to think

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when you sit in the cathedral and you got like people that would have been great granddads of people that

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are alive today helped build the cathedral. Anyway, I digress slightly. But a couple of years after I joined the

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council, I became the vice chair of planning. And suddenly I was looking of buildings around Toronto in a completely

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different way. Who built that there? Why did they put that there it's something I had a whole new perspective

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of the city that I grew up in. And I was looking at the cathedral on Google Maps I was

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like, it's been halfway long it's crooked. That's never right. Perhaps the map's wrong. Perhaps the

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photograph's wrong. And I mentioned it to the chair of planning and Morris Fellow, and he said, yeah they were

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that when they were building it, you had the saint mary's church was the original 850 year old building They

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didn't take it down. They kept on that same trajectory, and they realised that they would block the road, so

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they had to change it halfway through. So you cannot... The problem is, now I know, and now I'm sharing

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it with you, you cannot not see that kink. But it's not broken. It's fine it's It's a perfect cathedral

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just the way it is. And if you look deeply on anything, even the most perfect cathedrals, they'll have flaws.

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They'll diverse in some little way. And

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it just made me think when I was sitting there thinking, right, well,

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how do we love this cathedral? We just love and accept it the way it is. And

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then I thought about my dyslexia. And I thought about the book that I read by Malcolm Gladwell, David and

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Goliath, where he says about dyslexia in there was really it's a good trait to have because it helps us

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to navigate life in a different way. Let's face it, we didn't have the alphabet until, what, the Persians come

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up with the alphabet because the rich people were fed up with people nicking their stock. So they come up

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with the alphabet in a way of writing, not for poetic song or poem reasons and all that. It was

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literally so they could stock take to keep an eye on the minions that were stealing their stock. Yeah, that's

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humans for you. Progress is not always the most romantic way but then We got

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poetry and we got music because of diversity and because of differences we

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got We probably even got fire because someone had a crazy idea, hey, let's light a fire. And everyone around

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went,

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what's that? It's like, so all these differences, all these diversities and like

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just my dyslexia. And because of the way I think, so literally this is my head I'm going to share

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with you now. And I know whenever anybody sits down and meditates and all that, their mind stinks and everything

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like that. I think that's quite the average for the mind that The more you sit down, the more you

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try to quiet in your mind or do any of those things, the more the mind thinks. You know, the

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average person has what? 56 thoughts per minute or something like that. It's like 56 000 thoughts a day it's

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It's something crazy. They're just constantly bombarding us with thoughts. No, it's 46 thoughts and 40 and 46

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but anyway so so if you think of, I suppose, the average mind, we often look at it as

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a couple of colours. Well, my mind is like 20 different colours. And they're all firing at the same time.

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And like right now I'm doing this podcast and I'm focusing so hard on not going down every tangent story

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that my mind's literally throwing at me. While I'm talking to you, my mind's going, go there, go there, go

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there, do this, do that. What you're gonna fatigue And it's constant. And it's why, and I

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was looking up and reading I was speaking to my doctor and things like that. And a friend of mine

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About this mind and the way it works. And apparently it's a form of ADHD, which

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we've labeled for years as a problem. Same as dyslexia, we've labeled for years as a problem. But

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it's not. It's just the way the mind works. It's not good nor bad. It's not a problem or not

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a problem. It's just that's how that mind works. But we look at it because it's away from the average.

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That it's a problem. And you can go back to history and just before this podcast I I

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done a bit of research and you you look at the people in history that we really look back on

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now and that really change things. Now elbert Einstein believed to have dyslexia. Einstein's unique way of thinking

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revolutionized physics with the theory of relativity um leonardo dovinsky He had dyslexia as well.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He had Adhd um Sir Isaac Newton. He

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had characteristics of autism um Charles Darwin. Autism as well. Emily Dixon, the poet.

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Agoraphobia. And I could go on and on and on. And there's so many of them. The list is so

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long. It's just, we look at... We try to put people in a box and we try to put ourselves

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in a box. And I think this is where

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society tells us that there's something wrong and there's not something wrong.

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You know, if you're a brilliant reader and you can do that all the time and everything like that, you're

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no more broken or better or worse than someone that isn't a brilliant reader because they can do something else.

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And music and art and

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anything that's different out of the norm came from these things. You

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know, they're almost gifts. And I I looked at an article by Sir Richard Branson just a couple of weeks

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ago on Linkedin. And he was saying dyslexia and forms of Adhd is actually a

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trait that some companies are looking for now because they want to be able to see things differently. Then I'm

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picking on these two because these are two in particular that I've been looking into recently for me. Because I've

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been trying to understand myself a little bit more and But for years I grew up thinking that because I

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couldn't read properly and what I read, I couldn't focus on it. I could read a whole page and, you

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know, between the age of seven nine ten I never really read anything because I was diagnosed dyslexic. So I

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thought why can't read, there's no point. So I faked my later schooling. When the teacher would

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ask us about the book we read at homework at night, I would make sure I was in the queue

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with a few of the geeks and I would ask them about what they thought about the book. And I

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would use that in the lesson. So I brilliantly found ways to circumnavigate it. You know

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that there's a gift perhaps that's helped me deal with my being paralysed and all that. I I don't know.

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But going back to loving ourselves and society as a whole I I think we're

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told that these things are not that they're broken or that there's something wrong with us. But the quirkiness, we're

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not broken. No one's broken. Humans are brilliantly diverse the way we are. With

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all our experiences, all our things, we're creating an Ai now that has diversity built in

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deliberately. Otherwise it would be just pumping out the same stuff.

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So we're actually trying to build this in simply because we're now seeing it as qualities.

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So going back to the contemplation of love, how

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do you love something? You accept it.

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You know, you don't see a teddy on the bed and go, I wish you had a longer leg or

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wish you had bigger eyes or I wish you didn't. You just love it. Your kitten, your dog, you just

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you just love it, don't you? The way it is. And because we're told by so much of

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society that... These traits within us if you If you have a thought that is just seemingly crazy,

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and literally my head's bombarded with thoughts all day long that are crazy. You know, if I was to share

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my thoughts with you and what comes into my mind on a daily basis I I feel like I would

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be locked up.

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But I don't think I'm any different. I think you're probably listening to this podcast going, yeah, me too. Because

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I think that's the reality of being human. But

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how do you love something like that when we've been told that

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it's not right? They're not kind thoughts they're not Not all my thoughts to loving and kind and compassion. Trust

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me. On the contrary, most of the minds um Does that make me a bad, terrible

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person? Or society have said for such a long time, yes. No, it makes me human. It

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makes me, I was gonna say normal then. It's not normal. It just makes me human. There is no normal.

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There's the average. And

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yeah, this is my podcast that I'm coming back with because I'm really excited by this. I sat down in

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my meditation this morning and I just, just for five minutes, I just, what does it look like to love

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myself?

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And everything that come up, every thought, every light that come on in my head, I just tried to accept

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it. And every time I accepted the thought and accepted the feeling and accepted the thought,

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more and more it was just, ah. And there was an easing with it.

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The problem is, and I said at the beginning of the podcast that I I will say some of my

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ignorance that might help you to love yourself. The reason why I think it's so difficult to love ourselves because

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we have inside knowledge. We know some of the things we've done. We know some of the things we think,

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and we know that we're not the most compassionate person. Trust me, I'm working on it, but boy, am I

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not compassionate. You

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know, I try to be I try to be kind but

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spend the week in my head you'll you'll think I messed up as the next person. But I'm starting to

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realise that's beautiful, and that's what we need.

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You know, we're sharing a world on society on social media that is fake. It's not real.

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And

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I think we're on a brink of really embracing these differences with humans and going, it's

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okay. Accept people for who they are. Accept them for their struggles because, trust me, there isn't a person I

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know that's not struggling. There isn't a person I know that hasn't been bombarded with thoughts and... All these different

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things. It's just when we take them too seriously

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and when you just ease that burden on ourselves and we just go, do you know what? I'm going to

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try to love myself just a little bit more today. So

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my advice to you is just sit for one minute every morning and just go, what does it mean to

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love myself? How

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does it feel to love myself?

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Accept myself with all my flaws, all my um Brilliantness All my craziness.

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What does it feel for you? What would it look like for you? Just to simply, just put your hand

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on your heart now and just go, do you know what?

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Take a deep breath and go, do you know, what's it like to love myself? What's that feel like? And

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just imagine loving yourself right now.

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And do you know what that feels like to me? It just feels like a burden lifted because

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loving ourselves doesn't take effort. It's

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not something we have to do. It's something we we are the natural state, the natural relaxed

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state is love, is acceptance. When

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you accept your body just sat here, when you accept this moment just sat here,

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that in itself

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is love, isn't it?

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If you've got a different take, let me know. I don't know if I'm right. You know, I'm more ignorant

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than the average person. I'm

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just trying to work out stuff myself and stay ahead of my suffering. That's all I'm doing.

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Yeah, what does it feel like to love ourselves? That's my podcast. I am so happy to be back. I

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have so much more energy. I'm eating brown flakes every morning. And that's another form of loving myself. No sugar,

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just brown flakes. Taking one for the body. But yeah, it's... I love you guys.

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I love doing this podcast and thank you for the reviews. Tell me where I'm doing it right. Tell me

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where I'm doing it wrong. Share it with your friends. If this helps you, it may help somebody else. And

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ultimately, deep bow and thank you to all the donators that

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buy me a coffee, that join as a member and that have persevered and stuck by me in

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recent weeks when my health hasn't been good.

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I'm just glad to be back. And now you have an insight into my mind and why I get overwhelmed

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and why I get every single given moment. It's just like, whoa, party time

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that's okay. The committee of 3 000 in my head. And you've probably got exactly the same.

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Let me know. Head over to StevenWebb.uk. You can support the podcast. You can

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check out my other podcast with the meditations. And you can also message me. There's a few messages I haven't

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replied to yet, which I'm going to get to over the weekend. But you guys are just awesome and I

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love you. And above all, just feel what it's like feel what it's like to love

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yourself.

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Feel what it's like to accept yourself. Take the word love out if it has too many connotations with you.

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What does it feel like to accept yourself wholly as you are? As the brilliant human you are.

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With all the flaws and the imperfections and the indifferences. And the quirkiness and the craziness and the

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Comedia 3000 in your head. Take care. Thank you.