Why The Hell Would I Choose THIS?

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.

Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth Podcast. Your host is Brian D Smith, spiritual seeker, bestselling author, grief survivor, and life coach. Brian believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you've been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

So today I want to respond to a comment I got from someone who viewed the video that I did with Penny Whitbrot. It was Penny's near-death experience. And one of the things Penny said in her near-death experience is that we choose some of the traumas that we endure so our spirits can grow. And I'm going to read the comment from this person directly. She said, I liked the video up until the part where she said we choose the trauma to endure, so our spirits can grow. Sorry, but I would never lose— I would never ask to lose my twin to suicide. And this is a common and a natural response to this teaching at first, that we actually choose the traumas that we endure in this life. And I can understand why people have this response, because when we're going through life, these traumas seem insurmountable. They seem permanent. They seem like we're not going to be able to endure them. So we would say, why would I in my right mind choose this type of trauma, this type of tragedy? And I heard this teaching, it was actually, frankly, after my daughter Shayna had passed away. And again, I was taken aback like everybody else. When they first hear it. Why in the world would I ever choose something like this? But the thing is, we can't deny that this is a very, very common lesson from the near-death experience. It's actually one of the most common lessons that people come back with, that for some reason, the earth plane that we live on is designed to have this, these pains, these traumas built into it, and we choose to come here. So whether we choose, whether we intentionally choose each particular trauma that we go through, we can debate.. But we can all, I think, agree that this is a place of pain. This is a place of duality. This is a place of good and bad, of hot and cold, of love and hate, of good and evil. And so we, we do choose to come to this place, I believe, where I don't believe that we're forced here. So the question then becomes, why? Why would I choose to endure this type of trauma? Why do I choose to endure this type of pain? And I go back to using thought exercises, I think it's really like the only way we can understand some of these really deep concepts of just existential concepts. So if you think about if we're in a situation where everything is perfect, where everything is just the way that we want it, just the way we want it to be, that nothing is ever quote unquote wrong, that nothing quote bad ever happens, what would that experience be like? Would you actually even experience anything at all? There was nothing. It'd be like everything is you. It'd be like you were living in, in a dream world where everything just happens the way you want it to, and you wouldn't really experience anything other than you. We kind of have to have something outside of ourselves that doesn't line up exactly with what our desires or our feelings or wishes are to even experience anything. So if we take that and say there's got to be some level of say discomfort, some level of need. Like you would never eat unless you were hungry, right? So you first got to feel hungry in order to want to, to want to eat, satiate that hunger. So if we take that and say, yeah, there has to be some level of discomfort, some level of dissatisfaction, something to do, something to create, something to make better, then we go, okay, well, what would an acceptable level be? So we might say, well, I would choose to live in a world where maybe I get hungry, or I would choose to live in a world where maybe sometimes it's a little bit hotter than I would like, or a little bit colder than I would like. But I would never choose this level of discomfort. I would never choose things like cancer. I would never choose things like death of a loved one. Those types of things I would never choose. But then that's just a matter of degree. And I think about people, I really think of us ourselves as kind of like toddlers in some very real ways. We as even as adults, as we think we're all grown up. And if you look at a toddler, and a toddler falls to the ground and say they skinned their knee. And as an adult, we look at them, we see them, they scream and they moan and they wail like it's the end of the world, like they've broken their leg, like they're never going to walk again. And we kind of smile at them. We say, oh, we know, I mean, we empathize with their pain, but we know it's going to be okay. Because it's relative. We realize that that scrape on the leg is not that bad.. But for a toddler, if that's all they've ever known, they think this is, this is terrible. Similarly, if we tell our young ones— I remember when my girls were little, and you'd say, we're going to go somewhere, we're going to go to the movies. But we're not going to go today, we can't go today, we're going to go tomorrow. For them, tomorrow is just never going to come. It's the end of the world again. So it's this matter of degrees and the way that we take things. I believe we're in these bodies, We look at the tragedies in the world, and we look at things like the death of a loved one. And we say, no, this is too much. A good and loving God would never allow this to happen. I, as an intelligent human being, would never choose for this to happen. But what if you had a higher perspective? What if you knew that this thing that happened to you is only temporary, is only going to hurt for a little while? And what if you knew this thing that happened to you is going to make you a better person? Now, when I was younger, I used to like to work out. I would go to the gym and I would lift weights. And when you're in the gym, you're lifting the weights, the weights can be heavy, you're sweating, you're tired, you just want to get out of there. You don't always feel like even going to the gym to work out, but you do it because you know it's going to make your body stronger. And sometimes you go to the gym and you really have a hard workout, you're sore the next day. And you know that soreness, though, is your muscles reacting to the workout that you had. And you know it's going to make your muscles stronger and you know your muscles are going to grow. We have a lot of correspondences, a lot of analogies built into in this world to help us understand spiritual things. And I think this is one of those analogies. So we, I do believe, come here to experience things and to push against things to make ourselves stronger. And I can tell you, doing Grief to Growth for the last couple years, and before that, working with parents and helping parents heal and talking to so many people who have been through the worst, worst tragedies of life, and to see how they've grown, to see how strong they are, to see how they've come out on the other side, how that strength in them has been revealed by the tragedies they've gone through and how they now have a level of compassion, a level of wisdom, a level of strength that they would not otherwise have had if they hadn't gone through these tragedies. I've seen people even before they have a near-death experience, even before they get back to the other side, who can have gratitude even for the things that they've endured. So I know that this is a difficult teaching. And I would say about any of these teachings, if they don't resonate with you, if they don't make you feel better, if they don't make you feel comfortable, feel free to reject them. But I ask you to consider what I'm saying. And the thing is, I believe it can bring purpose. I saw someone say the other day that, you know, my pain is not a lesson. It's not something to make me grow stronger. It's not something to have purpose. You know, it's just kind of random. It's that the meme didn't actually say that, but it's like, it's not any of these things. The thing is, we can spiritually bypass— what I call spiritual bypass— and say, by dismissing people's pain and saying, well, don't worry about the tragedy you've experienced, because just think of all the growth you're going to get out of it. That's not the way we should approach this, right? The thing is, it's still very hurt. It still hurts very much. It's still very painful. But we can bring purpose to that pain. We can look at that pain. And again, whether I chose this particular thing or not, I can choose how I react to it. And I can choose to say that there's a lesson in it. I can choose to let there be a lesson in it. And I can choose to make it— use it to make me a better person. So I want to thank the person that made that comment on Penny's video for spawning this. If you have any questions or anything you'd like to discuss, let me know. And maybe I'll discuss it on my next video. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 lessons that you can learn from the near-death experience without going through all the trouble of dying to learn them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons. And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe the NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grief-the-number-2-growth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.