Stillness in the Storms

This is a podcast for anyone going through something hard.

No quick fixes. No everything happens for a reason. No advice from a man who has never had a bad week.

I am Steven Webb. In 1991, aged 18, I dived into a swimming pool in Truro and broke my neck. I have been paralysed from the chest down ever since. That is not the hard part of the story. It took another twenty two years, a bankruptcy, a spell homeless and a dark night at forty before I found anything that actually helped.

What helped was Zen. Not the serene kind with the robes and the incense. The kind you do at three in the morning when your head will not shut up and there is nobody to ring.

Every week I sit down and talk honestly about one thing. Anger, grief, pain, the mind that will not be quiet, the exhausting business of pretending you are fine. Sometimes there is an answer. Often there is just company, which turns out to be most of what people needed anyway.

Around sixteen minutes an episode. Nothing to sign up for.

Steven Webb is a meditation teacher, a Cornwall councillor and the former Mayor of Truro. He teaches from the mess, not from the mountaintop.