Self Acceptance – The Zen Way

Steven Webb: 00:00:04

Hello, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you through the most difficult times in life and just gives you just some hints and tips on how to live life a little bit happier and a little more with some resilience. Today I want to talk about Zen and I come across this wonderful quote. Zen doesn't fix your life. It stops you needing to.

So I want to talk about that on today's podcast. What is Zen? How can we interpret? How can we introduce a bit of Zen to our lives without it just being a meme on Instagram?

And does it really need us to stop fixing our lives? Is our lives broken? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about today on Stillness in the Storms.

But just before we start, I want to thank all of you, my monthly donators, the people that join and promise to pay something every month and all use that, treat me to a coffee. Because really, this podcast would. I would have to put adverts. I really don't want to put adverts in there.

There's nothing worse than tuning into a podcast and you've got like 10 minutes of adverts and 8 minutes of podcast. Okay, I'm a bit exaggerated, but you know what it's like. So thank you so much to all of you.

You are absolutely awesome and thank you for sharing and thank you for the emails and, yeah, thank you for being part of my journey as well. I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and what you may not know about me is I'm paralyzed just below my neck.

I'm also a Cornwall Councillor now, so I'm a politician. I'm also a terrible meditator. I try to meditate twice a day and I'm terrible at it.

But that's what makes meditation so challenging and that's what makes it so important for our lives. Because if I don't meditate, I get teasy, I get argumentative, I get bothered, I get bogged down. I tend to get more poorly. So, yeah.

And what's my form of meditation? I just sit and shut up. Stuff you. Stuff you. Jumpo used to say stfu.

And I was like, for weeks and weeks, I would keep saying to him, what, am I doing it right? Am I meditating right? And he would go, just sit down and shut up. I'd be like, yes, but am I doing it right? He'd say, look, sit down, shut up.

Every time your mind wandered, bring it back to your breath. And I'd be like, yes, I do that, but am I doing it right? Just a few.

Just repeat that in your mind, and eventually your mind will slow down, your body will slow down. And in the end, I said, so what does the few stammer? He said, shut the fuck up. That's what it stands for. I was like, ah.

So then I asked him, can you do meditation wrong? And he said, yes, absolutely. And I was like, okay, so am I doing it right?

And he said, stephen, and I'm going to say to you, every listener here, if you meditate, just sit down and shut up. Just allow your mind to go quiet, allow your body to relax, and allow this moment to be exactly what it is. And there you go. And that's what Zen is.

It's allowing this moment to be what it is. By allowing this moment to be what it is, you then don't feel the need to have to fix everything. Now I'm paralyzed. Can I fix that?

To fix that, I would need to mend my broken neck. I would have to walk around again. I'd have to do all that. And guess what? I'd replace being paralyzed with other problems.

Because I'm guessing every single one of you that's listening to my podcast has your own problems. And are you all paralyzed? Probably not. And that's what it comes down to. You know, being alive means to suffer.

The Buddha would say, dukkha, just by being here, just by having an ego, just by having that desire to improve your life, to be happy, to do something, to get out of bed in the morning means there's going to be things that you want. There's going to be things that you want to change. There's going to be things that you're uncomfortable with, and that's what you want to fix.

If you fix everything out there, if you fix the whole world, what are you gonna moan about? What are you gonna do all day? Sit on the beach in the beautiful sun?

What are you gonna moan after a while when there's no rain, there's no flowers, you're probably gonna get bored of that ammonia. Too hot, too much sand in your bum, or whatever. You know, whatever. Whatever we end up doing, we're gonna moan about something. And that's what Zen is.

Zen recognizes that. You know, Zen is just a matter of, ah, there you go. It is what it is.

And the one thing that helps me more than anything else is I cannot change this present moment. There's nothing you can do about right now. Right now you're listening to the podcast.

Then you can turn it off and do something else in the next moment, but you can't do anything about this moment. You're already here. It's already happening. But that's the one thing we're more annoyed about than anything else.

And Zen is not about sitting down and with groups of monks and incense sticks and sitting in silence. Zen is about a direct experience of what is happening right now. Zen's not about becoming better. It's about realizing you never were broken.

You are what you are right now. You are the best version of yourself right now. Then can you become a better version? Yeah. Can you become a worse version? Yeah, but that's intention.

That's moving forward right now. You are everything you can be in this moment. You know, where does Zen come from then?

Okay, let's back up a little bit, because I'm just jumping straight towards zeniths, and there's thousands of books that try to explain Zen. And please don't take my definition of Zen as any kind of answer to what Zen is or anything, because I don't really know. All I know is.

All I know is that when we stop and we take a step back and just go, ah, that's it. The problem is we add everything to it. We want to paint it a color.

You know, if you're given a lovely blank canvas, go, okay, let's put something on it. Rather than just go, wow, look at that blank canvas.

You know, when we look up the stars and the magic of the universe, we then want to add gods to it. When we watch a really good movie, we're like, oh, I hope version 2 comes out.

When we've had a really good season of our TV show that we absolutely love, we're like, oh, when does season two come out? We start looking up, are they making a season two of it? Because we want more all the time. The desire to want more.

And Zen just answers that by saying, you don't need it. You don't need it in this present moment.

And I think that's what helped me to become more peaceful than anything else, that I'm into politics, politics more than anything else. And Trump has taken way too much of my life away. It's not Trump's fault.

Trump's doing what he does, and I feel for anybody that is, like, gonna suffer at the hands of him being in power. But I've chose to be focused on Trump.

I choose to scroll through the phone looking for little quick endorphin fixes of somebody that's wrote an article that's calling him out on his stupidity. It's all my choice in that moment, can't blame anybody else for it. So when we stop blaming.

So then when we stop blaming everybody else for our life, and I'm blaming Trump for taking too many years and all that, you suddenly just start facing life, not the need to fix. We just sit with the pain without needing to tidy it up. And when I was going 500 miles around Cornwall in my electric wheelchair, towing a.

A replica of the Cornwall Hamiltons to raise money, I was doing it for several different things. But most of the days were just miserable and cold.

I would be in my wheelchair going along the road at like 10 miles an hour, eight and a half mile an hour, if the government are listening and any police are listening. And I was just there going along the road, and I was bored half the time. I was cold. I was fed up.

I remember going along one road and I was looking ahead of me and there was this horrible clouds and rain. And I started thinking, oh, God, I don't want to be in that. Oh, God, this is gonna be a really horrible afternoon. What happens if.

And I totally forgot the fact that where I was in that moment was beautiful sunshine. And I was looking ahead to, I don't know, three miles down the road. Well, that was half an hour off. I was doing about.

Because when you average out the speed, I was doing about six, seven miles an hour. On a good hour, I might do eight miles. And that was half an hour away. And there I was already in the rainstorm while sat in the sun.

And that's what the mind does. It takes us to the places we don't want to go because we're frightened of losing the place.

And when we're in a terrible time, we're like, oh, my God, I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to. Instead of just going, well, I know this moment's going to pass.

It's going to pass just as quick as it does, whether or not I hate it or not. And I think the Buddha, I heard a story of the Buddha was saying, or it may not be the Buddha.

Dalai Lama was saying, if you think time is relative, you spend just 10 minutes sat on a sofa talking to a person that you love, their company. Or you spend four seconds sat on a hot stove. You know, that hot stove will seem like a lifetime.

And that 10 minutes sat on the sofa with somebody that you really enjoy, their company will seem like a few seconds. And that's what everything is. Life is relative, relative to how we're feeling, what we're doing. And this is where Zen and stoicism is very similar.

It's facing life exactly how it is. And when we do face life exactly how it is without, I'm not saying don't feel emotions because Zen Stoicism isn't about not feeling emotions.

This is where it often gets a bad rap. You know, it's not about being stoic and stiff uplift like the British maybe, you know, look at me. Well, I can't joke, I can't smile.

Much like the Kingsguard, isn't it? And when they cannot smile, they can't do anything. They're just like sat there rigid. That's not stoicism.

Stoicism is feeling everything but not being controlled by those feelings. It's ah, a feeling of discomfort is arising. What is that discomfort? Where is it coming from?

Being inquisitive but not having to immediately fix it or change it because it'll go.

Have you ever noticed the way you can have a real bad headache or you can have a real big pain, or you can, you know, something's going on in the outside world and then you stub your toe. Nothing else exists in the world. The minute you stub your toe, that's it.

It's like if you want to get rid of all of your worries and all of your problems, go and buy a pair of shoes that are too small for you and go and walk two miles in them. I can guarantee within half a mile you won't be thinking about all your problems.

You'll be thinking about that sore foot with that blister on it that will be giving you agony. So everything is relative. And this is what Zen does.

Zen just brings everything back to this moment, what it is now, in this moment, without having the need to fix it. You're just holding the raw moment for what it is. And when you do that, something magic happens.

Suddenly you start seeing the world, the universe within. You start feeling the wind on your face, you start feeling the heat. You start seeing life for what it is.

And you start seeing it through, not so much through lens, like lens tinted glasses, where you're just trying to see all the best and everything. You're just seeing it for what it is. And therefore you don't feel the need to change it. And it becomes even more magic than what it was before.

You suddenly see the lines in the leaf. You see the way a car goes past and the leaves jump up in the air and then they all just settle back down.

You see the trees and the branches of the trees, the way they wander and weave. Every single one of those branches is at war with the other branch. You think nature's nice and peaceful? Oh, look again. There isn't a bare nature.

There isn't a war with the next bare nature. And we hear these stories of the way the trees talk to each other. They'll feed their own offspring. They'll do all that. No.

Well, yes, but they're at war with the other trees in the forest. And we often talk about the way 10% of the world ends up with most of the stuff in the way of humans, people. But that's what nature does, too.

Not saying it's right, it's just what it is. You look at any single forest or wood, 90% of it is one particular species of tree. It's just a reality. That's what it is.

But we could go into a forest and go, I want different types of tree, and I want different types of flowers. And I want the river to be more weaving, and I want a few more waterfalls. Just enjoy the forest.

How would you know the days when you get out of bed in the morning and you go, oh, wow, my body's not feeling pain today.

I remember when I was going to college for about four months doing an introduction to counseling course, and they used to check in each morning and they go around the room and you do a check in. And I remember sat there one morning and my check in was, do you know what? I'm really feeling good today because I got no pains in my hands.

My hands are not feeling like they're in burning hot tar, which is what I get a lot of time with my root pain. And the room was like, oh, wow. Yeah. And they were surprised by the check in. What? That, you know, because I didn't have pain, it was like.

But so many people, and even myself, I focus on what I'm not liking about this moment. It's good that humans have got a negative bias because otherwise we would have probably not survived this long.

If you've got two bears running towards you, one with a machete and one with donuts, you're gonna want the one with donuts. But you better focus on the one with the machete, otherwise you're never gonna get the donuts.

You're not gonna get rid of that image out your head now, are you? You know, so just a reminder, two bears running, Georgia, one with donuts, gravy grin on his face, and one with machete.

Probably still got a grin on his face because why wouldn't he have? So we've got to focus on the negative, but you don't have to. I'm just thinking, does the Zen work with a bear running towards you with a machete?

Just sit and be, ah, don't worry, it's fine. Just be all Zen about it. Okay? There's situations where not.

But in general, if you haven't got a bear running towards you with a machete, be Zen, be chilled. Very similar to what the Stoicism says, control what you can and accept what you can't.

Well, accept the present moment, because you cannot control the present moment. Zen says there is no separate you doing the controlling. Really think about there's no separate you doing the controlling.

Ah, you are part of the process. And Epictetus, which is one of my favorite teachers, he says, it's not events that disturb us, but our opinion about them.

It's not events that disturb us, it's our opinion about them.

So when you take the present moment, and if you're choosing to not like it, or choosing to want to avoid it, move on from it, hate it, because something's happened in our past, and I don't like this moment.

It's your interpretation of it, and I know it's your interpretation of it, or mine or any other person, because another person can be sat in exactly the same moment and they can enjoy it. So bringing all this back to daily life, if you're doing dishes, just do the dishes. Just have those silent mornings.

Just walk quietly, get in the car and don't turn the radio on and just listen to the road. It's worth remembering that. Just take a breath. And Zen is just taking that breath. In the middle of chaos, you don't become calm. You remember calm.

You're already calm in this moment. It's just. You're not remembering that you're calm. You're in the middle of everything that's going on.

And if you just go, ah, you can go there below it, and you can see it and you can be aware of it. Be that person at the end of the bar that everything else is going on.

You know, you've all seen that Western, Western, where I probably grew up on Westerns. But that person at the end of the bar was a big fight going on. And that guy sitting there with his whiskey, everything's going on.

He's just there, calm. And right at the end of the fight, right at the end of the whatever, he downs his whiskey, leaves the money on the side and just walks out.

Wouldn't you like to be that? That's what being Zen is, it's not about disconnecting. It's not about being not part of it. It's not about running away.

It's about facing the moment as what it is. And then at that point, who is the one holding that opinion? Who is the one facing that moment? Who is the one sitting here listening to the podcast?

Because it's not who you think it is. It's just awareness.

And when you bring this moment back to a witnessing awareness, you suddenly realize that life doesn't need fixing, the moment does need fixing. It's perfectly okay the way it is. And suddenly that's when you can start to dive in and out of life and play with it a little bit.

Play with the fact that you're sad or lonely or fed up or really happy and realize that all of those are just experiences just slightly away from this Zen quiet moment. Happiness is not something you can attain. Happiness is an experience. Happiness really is in the mundane.

I do a whole podcast about that, the happiness line. Happiness is not something you achieve because the minute you achieve happiness, you won't be happy anymore. It really is. It really is a paradox.

You know, you cannot want to be happy and happy. And if you are happy, you're not going to be happy for long because that happiness will become the normal. Yeah.

So right now, without fixing anything, you can just be here as it is. And I go back to that quote. Zen doesn't fix your life, it just stops you needing to. And how do you practice Zen?

I just recorded a guided meditation for you to just sit with a Zen moment and just be here observing, being aware and just take away that needing to fix things. I'll upload that to the Inner Peace Meditations podcast. There'll be a link just below. If you go to stevenwebb.uk you'll find all my links there.

Thank you. And thank you for listening to Stillness in the Storms. And thank you for donating and keeping it free. You are awesome.

Take care and have a lovely, peaceful Zen week. Sam.