Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers & Humans — with Zach Beach | EP 461

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet.

I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you.

I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith.

Hey there, I'm Brian D Smith, and welcome to Grief 2 Growth. And whether you're tuning in for the first time, you've been walking this journey with me for a while, I am truly glad that you're here. This is a show where we take an honest look at life, loss, and what lies beyond. Together we explore who we are, where we came from, why we're here, and where we're going. Because I believe that our deepest pain— in our deepest pain, we often find our greatest purpose. Today's guest is someone who embodies the heart of what this podcast is all about. His name is Zach Beach. He's a therapist, an intimacy coach, a spiritual teacher, a poet, and the author of the brand new book Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans. Zach has spent his life dedicated to building a more loving and compassionate world, and in his newest work, he invites us into a deep exploration of how the most painful parts of life grief, heartbreak, and suffering can become catalysts for spiritual growth, for deeper connection, and for profound, profound transformation. We'll be diving into some big and beautiful questions today, like why do we suffer? Is suffering inevitable? What can the world's spiritual traditions teach us about facing our pain with grace? And how can we expand our hearts in the face of loss rather than to close them off? Zach brings not just wisdom, but practical guidance for anyone who's ever loved deeply and lost deeply. If you're a helper, a healer, or simply a human navigating this messy, miraculous life, you're going to want to listen all the way through. And don't forget after the episode to join me on my Substack, grieftogrowth.substack.com, to continue the conversation there. So with that, I'd like to welcome Zach Beach.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. It's lovely to be on your show.

Yeah, it's great to have you here, Zach. I wanted to— you're talking about all the things we talked about here on Grief to Growth. You know, the pain that we go through in life, the suffering. How do we transform that? Now, I want to start off— your book is titled Love and Suffering. So why did you choose to bring those two really powerful themes together?

Well, I was telling a friend about my book, Love and Suffering, and he goes, "Story of my life." And I was like, yes, love and suffering is the story of all of our life, this human life. Love and our need to be loved, to love others, is the deepest human need. And every human being does not want to suffer. And yet, as you have probably found in this life, love does often lead to suffering. And suffering often leads to love. They are inextricably intertwined. And there's a good reason for that. And it's so wonderful to be on this show because that is the main theme of the book, Grief to Growth, that where the ground is where we find the gold. And by integrating the darkness, by learning to love the darkness, by learning to love suffering, by learning to unite love and suffering with the practice of compassion, it leads to a life of service and joy.

Interesting that I heard you say learn to love suffering. That's, that's gonna— some people are gonna say, what is that?

What does that mean?

Learn to love suffering? I don't like to suffer.

Nobody does. But unfortunately, our attempts to eradicate suffering from our lives only makes it stronger. So let's just look at basic human psychology. Essentially, that which we resist persists. Our attempts to repress or deny our more challenging emotions only makes them stronger. So we have to embrace them. We have to look at all emotions as messengers. They're there for a reason. They're there to teach us about what we value. So I often think about challenging emotions as like a child having a tantrum. Our goal is to embrace the child, to caress them, and to love them. And of course, inevitably, the tantrum will cease. And that's how our emotions are. It only takes 60 to 90 seconds for an emotion to run its course through the body. Of course, the mind perpetuates it with continuous thinking. But if we learn to embrace, to hold, to give space, to be with our emotions, to be with our more challenging experiences that arise, it will eventually subside. So that is another lesson in the book, that if we learn how to suffer in the right way, with the open heart of compassion, we will suffer less. So the only way out is through. Hmm.

So learning how to suffer in the right way, where do we begin to do that?

Take a breath, take a pause. So even in today's world, it's easy to feel a certain level of, say, hopelessness and despair. And I think the first step with that is to recognize that you are feeling this emotion inside of you. That it is an experience that is coming from the inside. So rather than try to immediately fix it, or what we often do, immediately distract ourselves from it or numb ourselves from it— this world does a very good job at distracting us from what we truly need to feel, from what Carl Jung called the necessary suffering of life— take a pause and see if you can hold it, see if you can just notice it. So I tend to use the work of Chris— of Dr. Kristen Neff, who mindful self-compassion, or as I like to call it, loving connected awareness. Our first step is just to become aware, like, wow, this is something that I'm feeling. Where is it in my body? Can I notice it? And can I hold it without a desire to immediately eradicate it? And then can I let my suffering be in solidarity with other people who are suffering? Like next time you're hungry, rather than immediately go to the fridge, because of course we live, we live in an immediate satisfaction society, right? Then immediately go to the fridge and satisfy that hunger. Be like, huh, like, what is hunger? Can I feel it? And then can I let this be an act of solidarity or simply an increasing of empathy for others who are also hungry and also perhaps do not have a choice around their hunger? This is where the spiritual practice of fasting can come in. Fasting can actually be an extraordinary act of solidarity with others who do not have a choice in that matter. And then we can do the final step, which is being kind. So really just checking in, like, what do I need right now? And this practice will change your life and it will change your relationships. Because often our inability to sit with our own suffering is going to manifest in relationships with others with an inability to sit with their suffering. So, so many couples jump right into what I call premature problem solving. So if you can't quite sit with somebody's suffering and just be with them, just be an ear to listen to and a shoulder to cry on, then you're going to jump immediately to, well, let's fix this. Like, oh, I lost my job today. I'm so sad. Oh, you know, you hated that job. Like, we can immediately go to a certain level of dismissiveness, dismissiveness, or invalidation because we aren't able just to sit with and be with somebody, uh, when they are going through a hard time. So we start with ourself. We increase our capacity to be with what is in our own experience, and that increases our capacity to be with others. Because in order to really understand somebody, you have to understand their suffering. And I'll tell you something, as a couples therapist, no one has ever come into my office and said, my partner understands me too much. Understanding is the bedrock of love. So in order to understand someone, guess what? You have to listen without getting triggered. You have to have a calm space within yourself. You also have to be able to be with their suffering without trying to change it or fix it. Like, I'll just ask you, Brian D Smith, do you want to be in a relationship where your partner is constantly trying to change and fix you?

Yeah, no, of course not.

No, none of us want to be fixed or to be seen as something that needs to be fixed, right? But what about someone who just offers their presence to you, to be with you, to join you on this journey of life?

Yeah, that's really great. I love that. And You know, as we're talking about with couples, but you were talking about trying to fix things. You know, I— this, this show is about people that are going through grief events, right? And I've realized that we so quickly want to try to fix someone's grief. We want to dismiss the grief. And you said, offer them up those platitudes. Oh, you've lost a child? You're still young, you can have another child. You've lost a spouse? You could find somebody else. You know, um, we, we don't feel comfortable with that other person's suffering.

Absolutely. All those platitudes, they're not helpful. Oh, don't worry, they're in a better place. I mean, maybe that's comforting a little bit, but all the common statements that people make tend to reflect an inability on their side to just be with the challenge of grief.

Yeah. So why do you think it is that we're so uncomfortable with dealing with those emotions, both within ourselves and with other people?

Well, this is a great way to kind of remove the self-blame, because we absolutely live in a society that doesn't teach us about love and compassion and suffering. I don't know about you, but I went through many years of education and college and graduate degrees, and no one told me how to sit with somebody in grief. No one told me how to sit with somebody on their deathbed as they're dying. Nobody told me how to communicate in an intimate relationship, how to forgive. We teach our kids all sorts of things— chemistry and biology and history— but we don't teach them the most essential things. We don't teach them the most essential skills of life. We don't teach them how to love. We don't teach them how to cultivate compassion. Like, when I teach compassion cultivation trainings, people come and they're like, no one has ever taught me this. No one has ever taught me how to tend the garden of the heart, how to cultivate seeds of love, kindness, and compassion, how to pull out the reeds of hatred, greed, and delusion by their roots and compost it for the growth. No one teaches us these things. And when we come to that understanding, we can let go a little of the self-blame. Okay, no one taught me how to love, so I'm gonna trip a few times. I gotta figure this out on my own. I gotta listen to the podcasts, I gotta look into things on my own. So we can also be kind of compassionate to ourselves as we figure these things out.

Yeah, it's a really good point. You know, I was— as you were talking, we were talking about the things that people don't— we don't get taught. I mean, you're right, we teach mathematics, we teach social, you know, we teach history, we teach those things, but we don't teach each other how to be human, you know, with each other. And I, uh, it was after I was about 23, 24 years old, I guess, one of my first jobs. And there was a course, it was called What You Are Is Where You Were When. And, uh, it, it really changed my like entire outlook on life. It's just, it changed me. And this guy was basically saying how to, it was a way of being empathetic with someone to look at someone and say, where did you come from? What's, what's your experience been? What's your history been? And we don't, We don't get taught that. So we don't know how to really put ourselves in the other person's shoes.

Absolutely. It's true. And this is why I love just being a teacher and helping people on this path. And this is why I do write. And this is why I wrote Love and Suffering, to be a guide. And my publisher was like, you know, your book's a little long. And I was like, I'm sorry, but it needs to be this long. I realize in today's modern world our attention spans are getting less and less, and we have just want to scroll through just 5-second TikTok videos. But we have to go deep. We have to really deepen our understanding of the nature of love, the nature of suffering, the nature of grief. And I really wanted to inform and give people wisdom just as much as I wanted to just offer general self-help step-by-step guides on how to live this life of compassion. Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief— most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning.

But here's what I didn't expect when I started it.

The community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing. Listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth.

I hope to see you there. Yeah, you know, you were talking about being, you know, people say it's too long. I get told all the time, your articles are too long, you know, your podcast is too long, you should really try to get it down to like half an hour. And that's part of the thing in our society, we want instant gratification. And I think that's one of the reasons why we struggle to deal with these uncomfortable emotions. I don't think we have bad emotions, but they're uncomfortable. So we're like, how do I just get rid of this? How do I just make it go away?

Yes, absolutely. And that's why our phones are such good at distractions. Like, I, I write this idea that we are by far the most comfortable generation, like, in history, but we definitely aren't the most loving generation. Like, our informational technology has far surpassed our emotional technology, and we're just we need some time to catch up. And like, uh, technology is coming up with something new every day, and our hearts are still lagging far, far behind. And our ability to just cultivate presence through whatever it is— meditation, mindful movement, contemplative prayer— like, throughout time, we have needed to cultivate spacious awareness in our life. In fact, I recently encountered a quote by Martin Luther. Not Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, the 16th century German priest, who said, every day I kneel down and pray for an hour, and when I feel like I don't have— I don't have any time and I have way too much to do, then I kneel down and pray for 2 hours. And I was like, this is the 16th century, okay? This is before, you know, planes, trains, and automobiles. And today everyone consumes every second of their day with so much consumption that taking 5 minutes of the day to pause and breathe seems like too much. Sometimes I'll teach maybe a yoga class in like a corporate office, and I say, just try before you open your computer in the morning, sit and breathe for 10 seconds. And that is so extraordinarily challenging for most people. Hmm. So I usually say the degree to which you can't sit down for 10 minutes and meditate is the degree to which you need to sit down for 10 minutes and meditate. So we are the most comfortable generation, but we're also the most distracted generation. We just need to fill every gap in our life with something rather than just be able to pause and just be with our experience.

Yeah, that reminds me, a few years ago I was sitting with some friends and I was just starting to get into meditation. And I was meditating, you know, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes at a time or whatever. And they're— both of them were like, oh, I could never sit quietly for even 5 minutes, not even 2 minutes. Just, you know, we just feel so uncomfortable with our own, our own thoughts.

Absolutely. Um, there's the joke of the, uh, man who's sitting with this therapist, and the therapist is like, you know what, you should go on a little yoga retreat, go on a little bit meditation retreat. I notice you're feeling a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of sadness with life, and then you'll feel better. And the man goes to the retreat and he sits down and he watches his anger and sadness and frustration, and he just gets more angry and frustrated and sad. And he goes back to the therapist, is like, hey, you said I'd feel better. And the therapist is like, yeah, you're feeling your anger better, you're feeling your frustration better, you're feeling your sadness better. So we do have to feel better. In other words, be better at feeling. And we're, we're not good at that anymore. We're so good at distracting ourselves.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Feel better. Um, because again, there's— I think there's this misunderstanding when we talk about mindfulness or meditation that I'm going to sit down and shut off my mind. And people say, well, I, I can't sit because my mind won't stop.

Yes, absolutely. I want to contextualize the book real quick and then just go into the yogic idea of what it does mean to calm the mind. Yeah, because, because love and suffering is at the heart of the human condition. You can look anywhere, you can look in any religion, any spirituality, any philosophy, and you will find the lessons of love and suffering. So there's a chapter on the Buddha, there's a chapter on Christ, there's a chapter on Western mystical traditions. The final piece of the puzzle is what it means to love this world, which of course is suffering in many ways, this natural world. But I— but also as a yoga teacher, I go into the yogic path. And there's a few yoga paths out there. There's a path of love and devotion. There's a path of selfless service. There's also, also the path of self-discipline and mastery. Where 2,000 years ago, Patanjali defined yoga very simply. Patanjali said, yogash chitta vritti nirodha, which means essentially yoga is the calming of the mind. Yoga is the stopping of the mind. And I often use this idea of if you're in a car and you're going down a hill and you have your brakes on continuously, what happens? Your brakes heat up. So in yoga, we call that heat tapas, which literally means burning or discipline. In other words, in order to like calm and stop the mind, you're going to need a lot of discipline, you're going to need a lot of motivation, you're going to need a lot of gumption, and you're going to experience some discomfort. There's that heating up of the friction of learning how to slow down the mind. We have a lot of what, what we call habit energy, right? Habitual tendencies to do things. So as soon as you do sit down and try to follow your breath for 5 minutes, all that habit energy is going to come up. Oh, you should check your email. Oh, you should call so-and-so. Oh, you have this errand to do. You have this thing to do. There's all this habit energy that's pushing you forward and then you need to apply those brakes. And this is gonna— things are gonna heat up, it's gonna be tough. Things are gonna— in order to slow down the mind, things are gonna heat up, things are gonna get warm metaphorically. But that same tapas, that same burning, is a purification process. So it's like putting a pot into a kiln. Once you heat things up, things begin to harden. So we're here to purify those habitual tendencies. We're here to even Notice the tendency to say, get angry and act it out, but sit with it and let it burn away. So the same way we often say that meditation is noticing the itch without scratching it. Well, meditation is noticing the thoughts without getting caught up in them. It's also noticing our emotions and learning how to respond with our true values of love, kindness, and compassion rather than react unconsciously.

Yeah.

So in your book, the title Love and Suffering, um, as are these two, uh, I think you did say at the beginning, they're kind of inextricably entwined. So is, is suffering inevitable in life?

So the First Noble Truth from the Buddha, some people think it means love, uh, life is suffering, which is fairly fatalistic, right? So there's two other ways to put it. One is life as we normally live it is suffering. So there's a little hint of hope there that we are living in a certain way that perpetuates suffering in our life. Now, another way to put it is just that life contains suffering. And this is important psychologically, just because our mind has an incredible negativity bias. It gravitates towards negative information. News and media knows this. They know that if they put an article that says, oh, we had a rainbow in Montana today, no one's going to click on it. But somebody died, there was a tsunami somewhere on the other side of the world, the brain goes, okay, I'm going to click on this. So this is important. Like, it's important that we have to intentionally cultivate gratitude and appreciation for the good things in our life in order to overcome the mind's natural negativity bias. But the Buddha did teach suffering and the deliverance of suffering, or the freedom of suffering. So there is a way out, at least from the Buddhist perspective. And most Eastern thought, yogic thought, Jain thought, even some Hindu schools, Vedantic thought, is all about the liberation from suffering. Not just suffering from this life, but in most Indian thought, there is the cosmology of karma and reincarnation that we've been on this endless cycle. Of suffering for countless eons, for countless times. And there is freedom from it. So if you— if that path appeals to you, freedom from suffering, like, that is one route you can take. Hmm. But there's some hesitancy there because there is another path that just involves being with it. And to me, this is actually the Christian path because God essentially sent his son to the earth as an extraordinary act of solidarity, an extraordinary act of being with suffering. So you might have seen that, like, famous Brené Brown video that often goes viral a few times where she discusses the difference between sympathy and empathy. And the way that she describes it, it's like your friend is down in a hole. And they're feeling really bad. And you look from the top of that hole and you're like, wow, yeah, it's dark in there. Well, yeah, sucks to be you. And like, this probably happens a lot with grief. Someone's like, oh, I'm sorry for your loss, right? There's this sort of like sympathy, but you know that they're not there with you. And empathy is going down into the hole, going down into the darkness and joining that person and saying, wow, it's really dark in here. So it's an act of joining. And I think that's one of the many lessons that we do learn from the Christian tradition is that we can join with others in their suffering.

Yeah, that's a really, really good point. I know there's a lot of talk right now as we're recording this about empathy versus sympathy. And yeah, I really heard it put that way tied to the Christian tradition, which is to be with someone in their suffering. And I see that, you know, I was talking to someone the other day, we were talking about one of the verses in the Bible, and I said, you know, there's the shortest verse in the Bible, I think one of the most powerful, is Jesus wept.

You know?

Yes. When Lazarus was, you know, dead. And I said, I don't think Jesus wept for himself, and he didn't weep for Lazarus because he knew that he was going to raise him. But I think he wept because he felt the suffering around him.

Yes. And in fact, most people say that Jesus probably wept like at least 2 or 3 times.

Yeah.

There's kind of some hints to it.

And yes, that to me is all—

is exactly it. It's quite powerful imagery that Jesus too wept. So that's why I contrast a little bit kind of the Buddhist tradition or most Eastern thought that talks about freedom from suffering, because when you do look at beautiful statues of the Buddha, you can see this natural peace. And that is kind of the idea that there is a deliverance from suffering. Then you go to a Christian church and what do you see? You see an instrument of torture, and you see a bleeding crown. And not everyone depicts Christ in their, in their imagery, but if it's a particular denomination, then you will see a bleeding, tortured figure. Isn't it? The contrast is quite different. One talks about freedom and suffering, the other one talks about like, you're not alone in this. Like, this is, uh, something we can learn to embrace. And Jesus too, Jesus too wept. It's such a beautiful two words. Encapsulates the life.

I think that is such a powerful thing. And as I've grown more in my understanding of humanity and what we are and why we're here, I believe part of the reason we're here is to go through the suffering, to feel the contrast, to feel the highs and the lows. And to want to escape that is to not want to be, I believe, fully human.

Absolutely. I've even been exploring this quote, another one with just a few words: with pain comes poetry.

Hmm.

And I kind of heard the same idea from the poet Jane Hirschfield, who I love, and she says, just as thirst leads us to water, pain leads us to beauty. Oh, wow. And You know, you look into music, you look into great art, and it's not sunshine and rainbows, although I can— that can play an important role. Um, but it talks about the transformation of the human experience, that we have this capacity to transmute our pain and suffering into beauty, into beautiful songs, beautiful art, beautiful poetry.

Yeah, well, as you said that, I was thinking, I just had a client I talked to like 2 days ago and this person, he lost his son just about a year ago, tragic passing due to drugs. And he said, you know, I don't want anybody to take my grief away from me. I want some of the feelings of guilt, et cetera, I'd like for those to go away, but my grief is kind of like my companion now and my grief is my teacher. So that idea, as you said, of taking that suffering and transmuting it into something else and using it to compel us to move forward in a different way. And I've seen that over and over again with people.

Ah, there's so many different ways I can take it. One, I'm sure you've talked about this on the show, that grief takes many forms. And I say this because when I do talk about suffering, people tend to go to the emotional immediate extreme, like, you want me to love suffering? You want me to love violence and genocide and war? And it's like, hold on, hold on.

Yeah, yeah, let's—

you want to lift the 5-pound weight before you lift the 50-pound weight, right? So I feel like it can often help to recognize that loss is a fundamental part of life because everything in life changes. So you get a new car, it's going to get a scratch. Your favorite restaurant's going to close down. The company that you work for is going to go under. Um, grief is about loss, and we experience loss in lots of different ways. So when somebody— so again, we're not here to be like, oh, you lost a loved one, you're in a ripe time for growth over here. We want to become— we're here to offer our presence and love and compassion to that person. But this is where our practice comes in, because we do want to prepare ourselves for those intense moments of grief and loss by learning the nature of loss. And the nature of suffering.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and just how death does accentuate life just as much as the darkness around the stars accentuates their beauty. And so, be— start slow, be kind to yourself. The next time you are licking your ice cream cone and it falls off and goes into the ground, be like, this too is grief. You just lost something that you are enjoying. So use it as an opportunity to get in touch with the nature of grief and the nature of loss and what arises within you. And then you can start to lift the heavier and heavier weights so that you are a bit prepared. Um, there's a story of the, uh, Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah where he holds up a glass, and I actually have a glass here for, for the video listeners, and he says, do you see this glass? It has a wonderful color, and when I flick it, it has a wonderful ring to it, and it holds my water so marvelously. But to me, the glass is already broken. So it— if or when I do drop it, I realize it is already returning to what it already was. So we, in this duality, we tend to divide up life and death rather than see the death in life and the life in death, and that these are two interdependent concepts. So, you know, our death process begins as soon as we are born. And just as you died as an infant and became a toddler, you died as a toddler and became a teen, and you died as a teen and became an adult. So it's just this process forward of life is about grief. So if you're an athlete and you have a career-ending injury, you will also go through intense grief. Of who you thought you were going to be, the death of who you thought you were going to be, and even the death of who you were as an athlete. So in other words, every moment of life offers an opportunity to learn the lessons of love and suffering and grief. And in every moment we experience loss because loss also means transformation. So in every moment we can transform the grief into growth. We can transform the loss into a deepening of understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be living in this life.

Yeah, I think it's beautiful, you know. And I, uh, I have two children. My daughter Shayna passed away 10 years ago, um, and people say, you know, I'm really sorry for your loss, which I greatly appreciate. But I realize as a parent, when you have a child, you're going through grief process all the time. There's gonna be a last time you pick that child up. You know, when they're toddlers. You don't know when that time is going to be. There's going to be the time when they go away to college, like my daughter went, you know, when she moved out of the house, um, when they get— when they get married. So there are all these losses that go along even before the physical transformation of what we call death. So to your point, you know, we're always losing something. Something's always changing. We're losing our youth. As we get older, I have a friend that just retired pretty recently and just was miserable. It was like, you know, it felt like he had no purpose in life anymore because of that transition from the working world to not working anymore. So, you know, as you said, we've got all these losses. It's just part of life, these transitions.

I like how you said transitions, because I was thinking of another, another little monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, who would often hold a piece of paper in front of his lectures and said— and he would say, do you see the cloud in this piece of paper? And there's nothing on the paper. And so people are like, no. And he goes, well, the cloud nourished the earth, and the earth went into the tree, and the tree got cut down and got transformed into this piece of paper. So you cannot have, uh, paper without clouds, and within the clouds there is a piece of paper. So everything is, of course, always changing. Um, does the cloud die to become the rain? Does the rain die to become the mud? Does the mud die to become the tree? And as hard as it may be in the moment, because again, we want to give ourselves time I do also think a potentially comforting idea, idea is that nothing ever truly dies, but lives on in us and lives on in this moment. That inside all of us is the DNA of all of our ancestors, and we are a continuation of them, just as the rain is a continuation of the cloud. And it— what an important question is to ask is not say like, why am I suffering, but what will I do with it? How will I transform it? How will I work with it? How will I see this as a catalyst? So for many people, those times of intense suffering are catalysts for transformation, and a catalyst that we never would have gotten. It's easy to get complacent and comfortable in this world, and often those times of intense pain and suffering shake us out of our security, to enter into a path of transformation that will— may include a dark night of the soul on the way, might include a long dark tunnel, but to a new light that we never would have experienced before.

Yeah, you know, I just said it reminds me of a story I tell all the time when I'm working with people. It's— and, um, when my daughter was 9 months old, I was working this job. It was a great job. My wife had just started staying home with my daughter. She was first— her first child. And I got fired from my job and I thought it was a terrible, terrible thing. I was angry. I was like, am I going to sue this company, you know, etc. Felt so unjust. But long story short, I ended up taking a job, took a big risk that would never take it if I'd been on— if I'd been employed. But because I didn't have a job at all, I took 100% commission job and turned out great. And thinking about that years later, I'm like, That was a real blessing because I would've never taken that risk as long as I had something to fall back on. But when I didn't have something to fall back on, it kind of pushed me out of the nest.

That's a good metaphor, getting pushed out of the nest. I love it.

So let's talk about your book. It's called Love and Suffering, but the subtitle is A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans. So how is this helpful for helpers, healers, and the rest of us?

Helpers, healers, humans. Let's talk about humans. There's an interesting idea that you find across, again, different spiritual traditions that us humans have a very unique capacity. So even in the world of, say, karma and rebirth, a human life is always seen as both a very, very rare and fortuitous life because we have the capacity to choose our own attitude in any given situation. You might call this the spirit. You might call it free will. This is what Viktor Frankl discovered in his book Man's Search for Meaning about his life in a concentration camp. Is that even in the depths of the most darkest places, the human spirit still prevails. So part of our path is just to discover that aspect of our being. And in terms of the helpers, those are those who go into places of suffering. Doctors go to help their patients, therapists go to help their clients. And it's helpful for them to really contextualize it and reduce what is often called compassion fatigue. Yeah, but I tend to reframe as empathic distress because I feel like most people don't truly understand what compassion is and where it arises. So we already talked about empathy, which to me is an important component of compassion, but it's only a part. Um, first off, compassion comes from a spacious place of mindful awareness. But there's also four aspects to it. There's the cognitive aspect, the awareness that somebody is suffering. Yes, the empathic aspect, the feeling in yourself. There's also the intentional aspect of desiring for this person to be alleviated from their suffering. And then there is the final motivational aspect to it, a desire or a motivation to help, an impetus to help. So this inevitably propels up an act of service and being of service to others. So it helps healers in particular because it's so easy to think that I am the healer and this is a person being healed. I am the fixer and this is a person to be fixed. But we really have to change our perception of this. And there's a number of really fundamental ways to do this, one of which comes from, say, Mother Teresa, who says that whenever she helps somebody, she saw Jesus in a distressing disguise. So one way to transform this idea is that everyone we meet is an incarnation of the divine, and we are here to help them. We are— this is— we are— we are all Buddhas at the great costume ball. We're all the divine in drag. So if you're helping the divine, boy, that just brings you happiness, right? It does. It's It's not a drain of your energy. Now, another way of putting it, and it kind of goes a little bit earlier into how we talked about empathy is an act of joining. So even when we say, I'm sorry for your loss, I think that can potentially be useful to say sorry for your loss, but it also again creates this separation. Like you can also say, wow, this, this loss right here is really tough. So we can have it, and we can see it as union. So one way of putting it is like, when your right hand gets hurt, your left hand bandages it. And the left hand doesn't go, okay, right hand, you really owe me for that one. It just does it. It just does it naturally. And this is— this has been my latest attitude when I go out into the world to be of service for others. Okay, okay, it's time for my left hand to bandage my right. Yeah, this is just, uh, humanity helping itself. So if you feel like you are sort of giving or offering your energy to another person, it will be a drain. You will experience that fatigue. But if you feel like this is your right hand bandaging your left, if you feel like this is actually an act of self-love because the person across from you is a reflection of you, if you think this is, uh, helping the divine in another human being and therefore bringing more light to the world, then it will transform your experience.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. You know, it's interesting because people ask me, with the work that I do, do you ever get burnt out? Do you get, you know, sad because you're talking to sad people all the time? I'm like, no, not at all. Um, it really— it actually energizes me. So I think that's— I like the way you put that. This is a different way of looking at that other person is just being an extension of you, and you're helping all humanity when you do that.

Absolutely. And compassion is enlivening. That's what I've absolutely found on my own path. Compassion is a wonderful emotion to feel. It's a blossoming and an opening of the heart. So indeed, somebody who shares with you their pain is giving you a gift. They're giving you a gift of compassion. And I often just say, you don't have to be perfect, you just have to show up. Yeah, like, just your presence is enough. Our human presence is the most precious and valuable gift we have to offer another human being.

You said something there where I really want to kind of go back to, because just experienced this myself personally. I have a friend who just lost her husband suddenly a few months ago. And we were together and she was like, you know, "Thanks for listening to me. Thanks for, you know, suffering through my tears," or whatever it was, something like that. And I'm like, when someone is willing to be vulnerable with you and to share their pain with you, that's a gift you're giving to the other person. And so sometimes people in grief will feel like, I'm a burden, you know. People don't want to see me cry. People don't want to see me sad. And this— I don't think it's true at all.

Um, potential— well, when you say there's— okay, let's think about this. There is a tendency to not want to accept help from others.

Absolutely.

I think we all have this because there's a bit of vulnerability in that. Um, and absolutely, for someone who's not able to say, be with another person's suffering, that's not necessarily a person that you want to share that with, right? Um, vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnerare, which means to be wounded. In other words, it means an ability to be wounded. So yes, when you open up to somebody, when you say I love you to somebody for the first time and are waiting for that moment where they say I love you too, you're opening yourself up to heartbreak. So it's that vulnerability that we need. And even Brené Brown, the vulnerability queen over here, um, does not say be vulnerable with everyone in your life at all times, right? Like, we can be vulnerable with the special people in our, in our life. Um, and even when you said, oh, this person near to me also lost someone, and it's both an opportunity for compassion and it's also an opportunity for service. So you probably talk about this on the show. Another platitude, uh, people often express is, let me know if you need anything.

Yes.

Or I'm here if you need anything, right? And guess what? That person's in the dark night. They're in the darkness. They have no idea what they need. And there's also an incredible vulnerability in asking for it, or just, I'm not going to pick up the phone and just call you. So what I often encourage is, what can you do? Just think about what you can do and just like do it. Like, I had a story of some— of a, of a neighbor who's whose neighbor went through a loss, and they, they, they came over and they're like, can I just take your car for an hour? And they're like, yeah, I guess so. They, they washed it, they filled it up with gas, and they put fresh groceries in it. And it's like, that's helpful. Like, so suffering is a call to action. This is what I often say: suffering in ourselves is a call for us to awaken and be free from suffering and find peace from it. Suffering in another person is a call for compassion and a call for action. So think about what you can do for that person. Make them food, leave it on their doorstep, order them food. Like, we all need to eat, and often when we're going through intense stages of grief, that's the first thing that goes out the window, you know. Food just, just seems sickening. Um, so maybe they don't need it, but they can put, put them some frozen meals in the, in the freezer, you know, making something. Just do something for them that alleviates the general burden of life because they're already burdened by so much already.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, um, I guess, you know, we're talking about like this idea of the left hand helping the right, and it's, it's a way— we— you're right, you can't be vulnerable with everybody. There are people that when you're going through grief, um, you have to, you have to be selective, right? You have to be selective of who you reach out to and It's interesting, sometimes people will come into your life you didn't expect to be there, people leave your life you did expect to be there.

It's true, it's very true. And unfortunately, because humans have yet to learn the lesson of love, um, some people out there do not have your best interests. We were talking about— we were talking about books earlier before we started recording, and yeah, we get caught We both get calls from scammers all the time. Um, so yes, we do have to protect ourselves from other human beings who are using their free will for not good, good things, because they have yet to learn that the ultimate path in life is the alleviation of other people's suffering and bringing an open heart, heart, uh, bringing the open heart of compassion to them. Um, and yeah, sometimes even in the darkest of moments, people will still try to take advantage of you.

Yeah. So, Zach, as we're coming to the end of our time, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to talk about?

I'm very curious about you, to be honest, Brian. You know, I love that I came across your show. I love this idea of grief to growth. I often teach the Buddhist phrase, no mud, no lotus. You cannot have the awakening experience, the light and clarity that comes with the beautiful lotus flower without the mud and the muck. So some amazing metaphors that I love also include growth, that there is mud, there is shit in our life, and we're here to integrate it. And it helps to get to the root of things. If you want to pull up a weed You got to go at the root. Of course, if you're going to water a plant, you're going to water the roots too, not the leaves. So in cultivating love and alleviating suffering, it helps to get to the root of things, to water the seeds of love and to compost the seeds of— or compost the weeds of hatred, violence, ill will. Um, and How did you come to this realization that the mud in our life can be transformed and the darkness in our life is fertile growth, is fertile earth for growth?

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's the, it's just the universal human story almost. It's like you're going along through life and then something happens that just shakes you to your core. In my case, with my daughter passing And, you know, then I realized it took years. Okay, this doesn't happen overnight. But I started looking at different things in my life. We said start with the small things, right? So I started thinking about like, when I got fired from my job, I thought that was a terrible thing, but it turned out to be a good thing. And there's that old story, the Taoist story about the farmer who finds a wild stallion. And, you know, so the person Everybody comes around and says, "It's great you found this wild stallion." He goes, "Well, we'll see." And then the next day it starts breaking the stallion. He breaks his leg and he goes, "It's a terrible thing. We'll see." So I've learned just through many years of going through different things that to be slow, I guess, to judgment and on what's good and what's bad. And then going back to, we talked about Jesus a few times here. And one of the things that Jesus said was, you know, "Unless a seed falls to the ground, it dies." it remains alone and it doesn't produce any fruit until it dies. So I just, I've realized that suffering is, it's a part of life. It's not a, it's how I tell people, it's not a bug, it's a feature. I think that we choose to come to this place, this crazy mixed up place to have adventures, to have these experiences. So that's, you know, it's again, it's a course over a long period of time. But the transformative point was my daughter passed away and realizing I can either let this destroy me or I can use this to do something better, right? And there's a reason why her picture is behind me because that moment transformed me, that event transformed me. And so I'm grateful to to her for making that transition to allow me to have this growth until I see her again.

I so very appreciate that share. Um, I feel like your daughter is here and your daughter lives on in you. Do you feel that?

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, we're partners. So I do absolutely believe that. As I said, it's both things at the same time. You know, it's the human aspect of being here in the mud and acknowledging the fact that things here do suck. You know, we do. We're going through turmoil in the world right now, politically, etc. But also, on the other hand, knowing that at some level everything is as it's supposed to be. And holding those two things in tension, that's part of being human, that balance.

Mm-hmm. And I imagine you've also connected with other parents who have lost children too.

Oh, yeah. I'm part of an organization called Helping Parents Heal, and there's about 25,000 of us who have lost— who have had children make their transition, as we say. And having talked to all these people, and again, just a guy I talked to a couple days ago, you know, it's like, Yeah, my son passed away and yes, it was tragic and that all sucks, but I'm taking this and I'm transforming it. So I'm amazed by the human spirit that we can take things that on the surface seem horrible and we can actually transmute them. So yeah, that's how I got to be where I am. And I love what you're talking about, 'cause we're talking about the same things. It's interesting. We talk about the same things with different language, but I think it's, you know, there's universal truth out there. It's interesting that different religions will say, "Well, this is the truth, and this is the truth." And I've studied them to a certain extent, and they very much overlap. Like 90% of it overlaps.

Yes, there is incredible overlap because the lesson is the same, that love is the reason that we are here. Yeah, that suffering is here also for our own growth, for our own benefit. And I've again very much appreciate you sharing. I feel connected to you after that, and I feel like this path that you're on is a very wonderful one, as painful as it might, might be, and that you are doing great things for people in this world. Um, I often return to the mustard seed. So when we say there's incredible overlap with different religions in the world, we have this metaphor, the mustard seed, kind of again and again. And so interesting. Um, there's a story where a very distraught mother goes to the Buddha because the mother has lost a child and And the Buddha says, well, I want you to go into the town and collect a mustard seed from everyone who has not lost anything. So the woman goes door to door and of course, cannot find somebody who has not lost somebody that is dear to them, and comes back to the Buddha empty-handed. And in the Book of Matthew, again, we have this idea that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. And the mustard mustard seed is so small, but when you plant it in the field, it grows and it becomes one of the largest, largest of garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds come and perch in its branches. And I'm hearing that aspect. I'm hearing both those aspects of your path, that it took many years for you to be where you are now, and that started as a little mustard seed and it slowly grew and grew. And now 25,000 parents are coming together as in solidarity with each other and support for each other. And your podcast has grown and your message has grown like the mustard seed. And birds and people are coming to rest, rest in the branches because there is comfort in, in your words and comfort in the work, in the work that it is that you are doing.

Yeah. Well, the things we're talking about, they are, they're universal, right? Love and suffering. It's a universal human experience. If you live on this planet for any amount of time, you're going to go through some sort of suffering. You're going to suffer some loss, some grief. So it's really interesting because we started at the beginning, we're so terrible at it in our society, even though it's the one thing that's universal, right? I tell people when you open your eyes on this planet, The only thing that's guaranteed is one day you're going to close your eyes on this planet. And meanwhile, you're going to suffer losses. That's a universal story. So you might as well learn how to face it, how to deal with it. And so I love what you're doing. And I want to thank you for being here today.

Thank you, Brian D Smith.

So Zach, remind people of the title of your book and where they can find out more about you.

Yes, the title of the book is Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans. And my name is Zach Beach. You can find me at zachbeach.com and Zach Beach Love on social media.

Yeah, again, great to be here with you today. Uh, enjoy the rest of your day, Zach.

You too, Brian. Thank you.

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