616: The Real Reason We Go Through Love + Loss in Relationships with Zach Bush

I think we are drawn to relationship so that we can have a mirror to look in so that we can see how beautiful we are. It's the only reason I can think of an infinite soul that has no pain wanting to sign up for a painful journey of being human. I think we want to feel it. I think we want to feel the pain. We want to feel the loneliness. We want to feel the connection. We want to feel the spark of life. We want to feel sensuality. We want to feel sexuality. We want to feel the warmth of sunshine on our skin in the mornings. We want these experiences Just flow surrender.

Let go Just flow Surrender let go I'm the one I've been waiting for Trust flow soon to let go Trust flows soon to let go Trust flows soon to let go I'm the one I've been waiting for welcome back to the Highest Self podcast. My name is Sahara Rose, and on this podcast I love to talk about spirituality, but make it modern, fun, grounded and relatable so it can actually serve your needs. And before we drop into this episode, be sure to hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast. That is the best way to stay up to date on the latest episodes. We've got this in video format, so if you're just hearing my voice, be sure to also watch our fabulous outfits on video as well on Spotify, YouTube or the Apple Store. This is the best way to stay in the flow with future conversations and also allows the podcast to reach more people. So hit subscribe so I can keep vibing with you on all future episodes. Now let's get into this one. So today you're about to hear someone on the podcast who I honestly feel is like the most influential voice in the spiritual space right now. He is someone that deeply inspires me and I really say that with a lot of gravitas. I got the honor of seeing him speak here in the UAE a few weeks ago, and he's someone that really reminds us that nature has its own wisdom, its own intelligence, and that these cycles that we see in the collective and of course I'm going to go into love, what else but these cycles that we see, you know, in relationships, in our ways of interacting with one another, there is, while it seems chaotic and it is chaotic, there is a greater intelligence to the why, you know, and for myself, having gone through a divorce two years ago and really been on this journey of understanding what is the true purpose of relationship today. I mean, just like all of us, we all have this deep desire for love. It's who we are. And then in these relationship dynamics, we perpetuate often so much, hurt so much of what we knew. And I feel we all collectively desire something greater. But we, with the rise of individualism in our society and this Amazon, have it our way culture, it can be sometimes hard to know how to compromise, what to compromise on, what's really worth it to hold a relationship. And so these are questions I've personally been sitting with, and I'm really excited to hear his perspective on it, because every time I hear him speak, he really offers something unique that I've never heard before. So he is a medical doctor, but really just like a guru. Without further ado, I would like to welcome Dr. Zach Bush, here on the Highest Self podcast.

Wow. I've never had an intro like that. I don't see myself as a spiritual guru. And that's a surprise. Very nerdy medical doctor for sure. So happy to bring all of that.

Well, you have a way of helping us see the greater fabric of reality. So I'm curious, Dr. Zach, why our relationship so hard these days?

Well, I think that one of those reasons is the rate of change. And so when social systems, cultural systems, economic systems are changing as rapidly as they are right now, it induces a neurologic response in humans that could be described as grief, but I don't know that we do grief terribly well. And so it actually devolves, I think, into reactivity as a general concept. And so because of the rate of change, we are reactive as a species. And the neurology took, you know, millions, if not billions of years to kind of collectively develop on this planet. And things were changing at a rate that was radically slower than anything we know today in our social and cultural shift. You think of a pot of monkeys or that herd of elephants, they will have been doing the same thing for millions of years. And so the first, you know, let's go to the water. The first whales coming online 50 million years ago. The blue whale today is doing exactly the same social constructs they have for 50 million years. So there's not much to grieve there. There's only beauty to witness. And so the luxury, I think, of nature is that it has this long view on rates of change. And it does rates of change at a pace at which biology and doesn't have to be reactive. And so as we start to look at the human condition, as we isolate ourselves from nature, it induces rapid change. If you go and lay out under a tree for a couple hours, life slows down and you start to feel your own breath and you start to feel your own heartbeat. And so you mentioned you're going to Bali next week. Leaving Dubai to go to Bali is your nervous system's call to action of like, I gotta, I gotta slow down. The pace of change is too quick here. I need a break. And I think everybody in these kind of pressure cooker economies that we have all around the world, really almost every household has become its own version of a pressure cooker economy. The stress levels are inducing change and that change is forcing this reactive state of the nervous system. This takes us out of creativity, it takes us out of curiosity. And for that, relationships suffer. Because when you fall out of curiosity for the person that you're with, you'll miss the opportunity to be curious to who you're becoming as well. And I think that's a lot of the reason why marriages and you know, forget marriage, I guess as a single category, but relationships in general, whether it be business relationships, parent, children relationships, romantic relationships, they're going under more volcanic force change now than they ever have because of these rates of change and this level of disconnect from the environment forcing this reactive state.

I've definitely even noticed it with my friends who don't change that much throughout their lives. Like I have some friends who've always lived in la, they have no intention of leaving. And those are the friends who have really stable long term relationships because they've hung out with the same people, they do the same things. Whereas some of us were moving countries all the time. And I think we have this desire to find that person who wants to travel with us and explore and go through that change with us. Do you think that that's possible? To have someone who can maybe not change exactly at the same rate or direction? Or do you feel that really the way to make long term relationships work is to kind of go back to small town, stay in one place?

I guess we could back up to just ask, what's the purpose of relationship? Like before we, let's go there, before we hope, before we hope for impossible relationships, what's the purpose of relationship? I guess, you know, why do creatures of all sorts go into relationship? And I think ultimately it is to experience life. Life is basically a finite process of moving from an infinite state of being, which is the energy field. And we could call that a soul. And so there are these fractals of the divine. We could call it God, or we could call it Universe, but nature is continuous through the entire universe. As a mathematical Phenomenon increasing dynamics of sacred geometry and complexity within the geometry of the universe, creates planets, creates life, all these things. And so you've got this fabric of the universe that's a continuum and it's infinite. There's no fewer molecules now than there were at the beginning of everything, right? Like the beginning of the Earth 4 billion years ago, has been working with the same elements here all along. And so these closed systems of a planet or a solar system, or a universe, everything is self contained by definition. And so you can either create or destroy energy, it can only change form. And so if the fabric of nature is constantly changing forms of energy, and the amount of energy and its nature, which we might boil down to an identity, is unchanging. And so that's really intriguing. I learned this, you know, or at least witnessed this most of all in my hospice work. So I was admitting 80 patients a week to die for four years. And so when you're seeing that amount of death turn through your experience, you get to see over and over again people leaving the body physically. Their heart stops, brain activity goes silent, and then suddenly they're back in the body again. That can be five minutes, can be 10 minutes, these periods of time, and then they're back again. And we saw this in the ICUs when I was shocking people's chests and putting meds into their veins to try to get them restarted. And so I saw a lot of these near death experiences and I heard extraordinary variety of stories with a common theme being self identity. They never lost track of their self identity. As they traveled the cosmos, they disconnected from the body, they went to this planet, they had this experience, they jumped over to this different timeline, they hung out with ancestors, they jumped to this time when we're in the future distance. And so they're all over the place. But at no point did they have any wavering in self identity. Bodies shock back in, they come and inhabit this body thing again and they're telling their experiences the same identity they were born in 80 years ago or whatnot. And so there's something really permanent about who you are. And so that permanence and that identity is complete. If it wasn't wholly complete and balanced and having complete coherence within itself, it would never have been infinite in its nature. So for you to have an energy field that can be a coherent identity, it is extremely stable and therefore complete. So then why relationship? So if you came in as a complete soul and you wanted to have a finite experience of a human body, what are you going to need to experience that body because you're suddenly limited to five senses that make you think you're different than everything and can't see your own beauty. And that's that that wound of the human psyche is where you cannot see our own beauty. We cannot see our own self worth. And so a lot of life is moving back to that moment of death where you're going to suddenly realize you were beautiful, you were connected, you were whole the entire time, and you were under this false impression, this, this false reality that you were journeying through. If you do that in isolation, it's very likely you will never see your own beauty. And so I think we are drawn to relationships so that we can have a mirror to look in so that we can see how beautiful we are. That's the only reason I can think of an infinite soul that has no pain wanting to sign up for a painful journey of being human. I think we want to feel it. I think we want to feel the pain, we want to feel the loneliness, we want to feel the connection, we want to feel the spark of life, we want to feel sensuality, we want to feel sexuality, we want to feel the taste of food going down our throats. We want to feel satiated by that meal. We want to feel the warmth of sunshine on our skin in the mornings. We want to feel what it feels like to have a baby touch your face. We want to feel what it feels like to hold the hand of an elder just before they die. We want these experiences. We want to touch everything. And that's what babies do. As soon as they can, they start sticking everything in their mouth and they hold on to everything and they grip it and they test it and they feel it and they rub their belly on it and they crawl across the ground. And then slowly they isolate and they get thrown in sneakers and polyester clothing and pretty soon there's no touch, there's no communication. Recent statistic was showing that men in most Western countries, 80% of them will not receive a hug in a year. That's a pretty amazing statistic. And it gives us a sense of why men perhaps behave as they do is they've become so conditioned to isolation that they don't know how beautiful they are. And so how would they know the beauty in another person if they haven't discovered their own self? And so we can be annoyed at the male version of the species. We can have all this baggage about the wounded masculine and all this stuff. Fact is, until we start hugging each other as men, and until men start Receiving hugs. It's impossible for us to really move forward. We have to be touched in non sexual ways. We need to be embraced and held and nurtured by our own mothers and by our fathers and by our communities at large and by our aunties and uncles and all that. There needs to be a nurture put back into culture that's really been increasingly devoid of it. And so relationship is ultimately there to see your own beauty and to do that, you, you gotta go into this proximity with another human being. And that's where the challenge, you know, really emerges, isn't it? Like it's the very thing that we want and when faced with another wounded ego, it's where we're going to do the most harm. And so that's, I think the dance that we're doing right now is can we learn to come into completion? Each of us can we learn to accept the completion that we already are? As we start to go into community in new ways, as we start to engage one another in relationship differently. And fortunately, I think we do have a good example of what this feels like. And it's friendship. I've got friendships that have lasted 45 years, you know, and that's amazing. And a couple months ago I decided I was going to start a new company. I was like, I got, I need some help on this. Like, I need a prototype, I need to build this thing. And so I called up my buddies from when I was 13 years old and was like, hey you guys, like, I got this thing, I got this project. It's like no time had gone by, they're like, yeah, come on out of Colorado, jump in. And we were doing all nighters together, just like we did when we were 15 years old building race cars. We were building this prototype for this new product I'm making. And it was just so fun to be back in it. And there was no concern that our paths would take us millions of miles apart. And I'd gone all over the place and they had been very stable in their environment, like you had said, and your friends there in LA or whatever. But my friends in Colorado have been just cruising that same group of friends I used to hang out with and they're all pretty much all together, still cruising along, running the same businesses they had back then. And there's no judgment towards me that I went on this crazy, wild, weird path. It's just friends. And you drop in and you're back in it together. So we know what that friendship feels like. And so I think that's where we begin again is we need relationships so that we can see our own beauty. And the beauty of a friendship is you're always accepting exactly where the person is. And your curiosity towards your friend is like what you up to. The expectation is not there that you're doing the same thing. And so our partnerships, however form they take, when they stop having an expectation of parallel paths or beliefs or thoughts or experiences and start just having constant curiosity for how life weaves together and where the touch points bring us together, then be curious what happened since the last time we touched and what are you hoping to experience and feel before we touch again? That kind of weaving of the sensuality and friendship may be a path forward. It's probably way longer of a meandering than you were looking for. But I guess I would say it's important for all of us to back up and just ask why? Why are we having a hope and an expectation for whatever type of relationship? And then get down to the bottom of that and be like, well, that's actually pretty simple. What we're actually looking for is not somebody to be on every flight that we go on for the rest of our lives. We're actually really wanting something a little different than that. And if we just want to see our own beauty, is it much more effective to have many people around us instead of the one? And that's what nature seems to be doing all the time, is putting many, many relationships into context of self rather than just one. I've never seen a human cell that just connects to one other human cell. Every time you look under a microscope, you see a cell literally making attachments to every single possible cell in its ecosystem. And for those cells that are too distant for it to connect directly with, it sends out signals and new genetic sequences and all kinds of microrna to communicate with the whole community. Every single human cell, every 70 trillion is communicating with every other cell. They are all in community. And for that you have the symphony of a human body. When we start trying to complete ourselves and one other person, we will suck them dry and, you know, annihilate ourselves in the process. No cell ever connects to one other cell. We've got to start connecting constellations. Complex constellations, diverse constellations. Multi generational, multi spatial, multi relational, multi geographic. Like we just need many, many, many more forms of human connection before we expect to really see the beauty of ourselves.

So we go into relationship to have the mirror to see the beauty within ourselves. Yet often, because of this complexity of attraction, we choose the person who often makes Us not feel that. Or eventually in time, it does not feel that. What? Because we all have friends that we get along with so well, but they're often not the people we choose to be in relationship with. So what is the science of attraction that often makes us choose? People who bring out the shadows, you know, the aspects of us that are still unresolved.

Well, we signed up to be in the murk of it, in the mud of the human experience. So if we wanted to sign up for a journey as a soul that didn't have that shadow work and the murkiness, we would have been a tree.

I always about lifetime.

Can you imagine how good it would be? Like so good. The oak tree never, never, never wakes up being like, wow, I was really crappy oak tree yesterday. Like I did this thing, my branch went that way and the rest of forest was doing this and I was just out of sync and I just had a bad oak day. Never happened. Like that tree just wakes up being tree and it's just like so interconnected with everything. It's like in this orgasmic state of like the birds and the canopy and the winds and the clouds overhead and the blue sky and the soil deep down and the wetness of the soil and the microbiome and the root systems are all angled, is just like.

So this is rap.

So yummy. It's just so yummy to be a tree because the tree is always a tree. You signed up to be human to go on this journey of divorce from nature, so that you could look into nature deeper and you could experience something much more profound, perhaps, which is called unconditional love. And we need unconditional love when things are not going well, when things are muddy, when the shadows are there, and when the disconnects are painful to experience and the heartbreaks are real. We wanted this journey to feel everything because in that if we go into the wound of the human, the wound of the human psyche that believes itself to be separate from everything, if we go into the wound, we will ultimately transmute the pain into this, this process of seeing beauty. And when you see beauty in the shadow, when you see beauty in the wound, then you generate unconditional love. It's a frequency, it's not an emotion. It's a state of being where your whole body starts generating a frequency that is unperturbed or unaffected by other things, input. And this took me, you know, a couple of, you know, months to, to journey into in my. My first divorce. But I. I found myself one night talking to my Wife. As we were starting very early into the divorce process, I suddenly felt this amazing experience of like, I. I know this person so well. She's birthed our two children into existence. She's such a beautiful human being, physically, emotionally, spiritually. She's inquisitive. Inquisitive and creative beyond words. And she's just such a good artist. And she's. Her paintings are insane. Like, everything is so good about this person, and that hasn't changed at all. Just because our paths after 20 years are suddenly seemingly to diverge and she's seeing another path open up, that doesn't change any of the other fabric of this situation. So in just the amount of intense feeling I was having in the loss, I found this beautiful moment. It's like nothing's actually changed. It's all still right here. I'm still here. She's still here. She's still on this planet. She's still making art. It is so beautiful to witness another being that I know so well. I've seen her bring children in this world. I've seen her create pieces of art from nothing. I've seen her create gardens from grass, dirt, lots. She's just a creative force, and nothing's going to change any of that. And so I get to be witness that beauty. And when I witness that beauty, and it's not tied to my expectations that she is my wife and therefore she's always on my path, if I let go of all of those things, then there's only the beauty left. And that's where we start to find unconditional love. And so the unconditional love I have for that woman is so much more juicy and rich than anything I experienced in our 20 years of marriage. Because I was so busy in those 20 years trying to make our paths fit together, trying to make her happy, trying to make sure she had everything and that my path was taken care of. For even though they were obviously diverging. And so there was more and more energy being spent trying to make sure those paths didn't fall apart. When in fact I could have just seen the beauty in me, seen the beauty in her, and celebrated the paths that were going to unfold without any expectation of anything, expectation that we were going to be anything to one another. The unconditionality of seeing beauty is what we need to find our way to. And we wouldn't find our way there if we didn't have the pain and everything else. Because before the heartbreak, before any sense of discomfort, the state of coherence, there can't actually even see itself. And this is why we have that classic saying, you don't know what you got until you lose it. When you're in that calm state and you're in that peaceful flow and you think everything's going your way, you actually don't even know how good you got it. You've become distracted from the own beauty in your life. It's not until it suddenly gets ripped away where you get to go on this journey into unconditional love. And you witness to it every day. And so every day that I miss that woman, I get to touch back in of. What am I actually missing? Oh my gosh. She did this. And I felt this way when I witnessed her this. And we shared this memory and we had that experience together. And pretty soon there's a whole menagerie of beauty unfolding in my memory and I'm tied back to those feelings of, of all the, the richness of, of relationship. And so for me, that's. It's been such a gift of understanding what I loved about that woman. What, what was the beauty that actually engendered all of the unconditional love in me. And I actually didn't even know I, I needed to find unconditional love because I felt so much daily like love and like that little seven second flutter of seeing her at the end of a workday or whatever and be like, oh my gosh, love you so much. You're so beautiful. You're so amazing. Oh my gosh, let me see your new piece of art. So we get caught up in the little momentary reactive states of love which is kind of the emotional reality of love where we get the emotional love. And I thought that was enough. I thought that was what it was about when I found unconditional love. It's like it's finding the carrier wave of everything. Heartbreak and grief is so in the wave of unconditional love and that ecstasy and joy of just the unstopping nature of nature within me, within her. That's a carrier wave that goes on and on and on. And there is no seven second little flutter. It's just like it's the blue whales call in the ocean that goes five times around the circumference of the earth just when it says hi to its child. You know, it's that level of love it just like perpetuates through all things. And I, I don't get to talk to that person hardly. And that doesn't matter at all. I might talk to her once a year when we Bump into each other and that doesn't matter at all because I'm 100, constantly on that wave. And I can tap into that wave anytime and experience unconditional love for another being that I've witnessed and has witnessed me. She knows things about me that no other person can ever know, no matter how many more relationships or whatever. Because I had my first child with her. And that is something that can never be recreated or repeated. And so she just knows me and she, she knows aspects of me that I just so value having been seen by her because she's got such a discerning eye and she's, she's so good at seeing beauty in nature. And so if she was willing to look at me for 20 years, there's gotta be some beauty in me somewhere. And that's reassuring. And I can kind of look through those lenses and find some of those things that may have. May have kept us together so long. And so I meander when I don't know the answers.

Well, as you speak, I and I paint a picture for the audience. We're all feeling the emotion of that and we're all feeling, I don't know, this sadness of loss of relationship that I think we all connect with. Like it's so beautiful that you're speaking about her in that way. And like the sadness of like, like why is it that we can know that this person's not meant to be in our lives anymore, Be completely at peace with the relationship ending. But sometimes when you think about those beautiful moments, it brings out this sadness of what no longer is. Is that something that we can overcome or is that just part of the wave?

Oh, I think we better not want to overcome that. I think we want to stay in that, that longing or that missing, like it's such a juicy good part of love. Like it's somewhere along the line Hollywood or somebody came along and told us we were just supposed to have good feelings. No, no, no, we got to go into the shadow feelings because that's where we start to understand finite life. And that's the only thing that an infinite being could be curious towards. To adopt a finite reality is, is to feel those things. And I think if I really feel heartbreak good in this life as I have learned to feel it and not push it away. I think I did push it away initially. And then I started to allow myself to feel it. It was long journey, 10 year journey of feeling everything. Then I metabolize through those feelings and they don't stay emotions that are unprocessed. Emotions are perhaps unable to process. Ultimately, Chinese medicine for thousands of years has identified that all human disease is rooted to the emotion that is dominant in that organ. And so there's a location in which we store these different frequencies that we call emotions. I'd like to think of an emotion as the high fructose corn syrup of feelings. And so feeling is a complex carrier wave that will take you through all kinds of experiential feelings in the body. It can take you through grief into joy and ecstasy. An emotion that we might call love is this very thin bandwidth frequency of neurochemistry that lasts for about seven seconds. That little flutter when somebody says I love you, oh my goodness, I feel loved for seven seconds at the most. And so that little flutter thing is an emotion that's a thin bandwidth that's been pulled out of the carrier wave of unconditional love because we like that little frequency. So we say, well, if I'm not getting that little frequency, I must not be loved. Well, no, that's actually ridiculous because nothing needs that kind of constant affirmation other than a human mind that thinks it's separate from everything. So only the human would come up with a construct that I need to be loved all the time. I think the rest of nature wants to be able to express itself all the time. And in its expression, it creates beauty. And in creating the beauty, it induces the state of love and everything that's witnessing it. And so what we really want to do is express ourselves, not be loved. And so if we reorient to I want to express myself until I see my own beauty, then I'm going to be loved by everybody around me because they just can't help but see the beauty. And as they get out of there, as they metabolize through their emotional traumas, emotions stored in tissue causes disease. So as we all start to release emotional trauma and start to feel themselves, they are also going to love and see the beauty in my shadow. Moments when I'm not coherent or beating the crap out of myself or whatever's happening. And so we're going to get better and better as we start letting go of the expectations of our current relationship models at allowing other people to go on their journey and honoring their shadow periods perhaps more than we honor their little momentary highs that they might be getting out of the journey. We're gonna really love the journey. And for me, I'm actually starting to be kind of really curious to where I'm going. I'm. I think I've had Every single human experience a human can have, but an infinite soul decides to keep signing up for another morning on this pillow. And so I woke up again this morning and I'm kind of confused by that on one level, like, why? Like, what am I here for? And then the day started to unfold today and I had crazy freaking good day and all kinds of things that I've never thought about happened today. And my higher self knew that and wanted to stick around to see what this day was going to hold. I've never had a conversation with you before, and here I'm having a beautiful conversation with you. I'm intrigued by that.

Do you see yourself one day starting a podcast, writing books, speaking on stages? She sharing your message with the world. But the thing is, you are afraid that you're not a good enough speaker yet. Maybe you're inspired by people like me and Gabby Bernstein and you know you have it within yourself too, but you just don't know where to start. Well, I have gotten this question so many times and this is why I've created my speak with soul 21 day method. This guides you from awkward to confident speaker in just three minutes week's time. I guide you through daily prompts, practices, and share all of the wisdom that I have learned as a professional speaker, podcaster, author, and someone who literally makes a living sharing my voice as well as through music, and how you can too, in your own unique way. So the testimonials from Speak with Soul are insane. I have seen people literally be hired to host their own radio shows. Hundreds of people start their own podcasts, create YouTube channels, IG Live series, get book deals, the list goes on. So whether you want to professionally share your voice or just get better in conversation and connection and just feel more confident in what you say and not feel like you're so in your head and release any fears or hesitations you have around the way that your voice sounds and its pitch. Well, this course covers all of it. So it's just 10 minute daily videos for. For 21 days that I promise you if you follow this process, you will be a completely other person on the other side. Because the truth is, when is the last time you spent any time on your speaking? For most of us, it was like maybe a awkward speech in high school and we never touched it again. So speaking is the way that we communicate with the world. It's the most important thing we can do. It's the way that we get our message, message across. And I know if you're listening to this podcast, you have a really important message to share because regular people don't listen to this podcast. So if you're feeling the call, come join me in Speak with Soul. I have a special 25% off discount for you listed below. So head over to the Show Notes or over to speak with soul course.com that speakwithsoulcourse.com to receive the 20 25% off right now. And you can also find that link in the Show Notes. I'm so excited to hopefully be on your podcast. Do you feel our souls sign up for as many days for however much karma we have to fulfill?

Yeah, I mean, I think certainly what I've seen in the hospice environment is the time of death seems to be really well choreographed. And so if you study much of your own astrology, that's basically the study of the position of the cosmos, the moment you emerged from your mother, you know, and took your first breath as a human being, that when you start to look at its effect on your behavioral environment, it makes sense that a soul would pick that moment quite carefully, you know, and this is why I'm saddened by the C section rates in the world right now is who are we to believe that we know when that soul should be born? You know, and at this point, the souls are probably planning for the C section too. But it's. The reality is it's so much hubris that we think that these sentient beings coming in don't have a plan, don't have a path that they've chosen, and we tend to micromanage that person's path. The moment they're born was just picked by C section. The moment they go to kindergarten is exactly at this, this September 2nd of their fifth year. And then they will, you know, go to second grade and then they will go to college and they will get their driver's license on this day. It's so freaking arbitrary the way that we, we treat life. And so the moment of birth and the moment of death, I think are just acutely planned events and exquisitely known by that infinite soul stepping in. On some level, I don't know if they have a human knowledge of it, but they have a soul knowledge of what's going to unfold because right before they step, you stepped into this finite body, you were infinite. And that's what we see on the other side of death is you suddenly go infinite again. And you are talking to ancestors that have not been alive for 100 years. You're talking to future non human entities that aren't even on the planet yet. Like you're just non local, non time oriented as soon as you let go of a human body. So if that's the reality, it's time for us to really, I think, trust the path more and allow the wave to take us into that next day, regardless what it holds. And just trust that that day was designed for our highest good. Because nature seems to only be doing highest good doesn't mean that death doesn't occur. Massive extinctions have happened five times on this planet already. We're in the midst of our sixth. When mass extinction happens, 90% of life on Earth disappears. That's pretty catastrophic. And nature plans for that. And she rebirths like crazy after those moments. And it gets so much more beautiful, so much more intelligent, so much more diverse through the death. And so nature only knows a progressive expression of beauty. That's what she's doing. And so when I have a really tough day and when I feel very isolated and destroyed by my own mind and insecurities, I can look back on that day and be like, wow, that was a superhuman journey. That was exactly. Only humans can have that day because nothing else in nature is doubting itself like that. So I had a feeling in me today, I had the feeling experience of being a self doubting, disconnected, you know, broken expectation, heartbroken human being. That's pretty unique. And if I allow myself to just acknowledge where I felt all of those things in my body, in my belly, in my throat, in my chest, in my low back, in the backs of my eyes, my headache, if I think through all those and just like really embody that, okay, I felt it there and I felt it there. Pretty soon that's all passing through and the slate is clear for another wave to happen tomorrow.

So the time of our birth, the time of our death, this is all pre choreographed, pre planned. How much of life do you think is also predestined and pre written?

Rabbi of the Cabala, which is, you know, a science and philosophy that emerged long before Judaism and Israel and all that. But this rabbi who I've been studying with the last couple years was asked that question is, is there free will basically? And the response was so eloquent and simple. The complexity of the universe makes it absolutely impossible that a human and a human mind has any free will. There's so many things that are happening to allow nature to occur inside of a human being at any given moment that there's no way that an idea in your head suddenly going to change the direction of that whole Universe. So from the perspective of, of the super entangled quantum nature of reality, the human being is experiencing life, not choosing life. You know, it's, it's experiencing life, it's not directing life. But humans have an infinite free will and freedom to decide how they're going to experience or feel what happens today. And that was really freeing to me. And I think that also kind of resonates back to the divorce story, which is I can choose to feel like I got abandoned and I was, I'm unlovable and like I'm free to do all that stuff. And I did for long periods of time. And it kind of went. And sometimes I needed to go revisit those feelings again, free to do that. And I was free to suddenly be, have curiosity towards this unconditional love moment and want to go there and experience that and feel what that felt like. And so you have infinite freedom of choice as to how you're going to experience today, even though you probably have absolutely no free will as to what's going to happen today. And so when we start to feel positive or accepting and fed by our day, we tend to see more beauty tomorrow. And so we start resonating these higher and higher frequencies. And so I think inevitably nature is marching towards these high levels of coherence and beauty. And we are doing that as humans. And unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe it's just part of the dance is we may not do that until we're on our hospice bed to really accept how beautiful the whole journey was. But I did get to hear that a lot. I did get to hear a lot of people be like, oh my gosh, my life was actually kind of perfect. Like, I can I see it now, especially after that near death experience. You come back from across the valley and you're like, I shouldn't have doubted anything. Like, it was perfect. I'm perfect, I'm whole. Of course I'm complete. I was always complete. And so you're going to get there, you're going to feel that. And all of the feelings you had as a human, broken or disappointed or whatever it was, enriched the experience of that soul and gave that soul something that it will take forward in some shape or form on its continued journey, I imagine. But I'm encouraged that there's not any pressure to do it right, to make all the right decisions.

Yeah. I'm curious what you feel is going to be the role of marriage in this new paradigm that we're in. Do you see this with the next generation, even continue to be like an institution that people are choosing? Or do you feel we're shifting towards more of a open polyamorous relating or series of relationships throughout our lives? Like what direction do you kind of see nature pushing us into?

I think, I mean, obviously we're seeing all of those variations right now in social cultures across the world, we're seeing all those variants. I was surprised to see both my kids get married. I wasn't expecting their generation to do it because I had my own experience with it and my own beliefs and baggage about it. And so I was surprised when that generation shows this tendency towards that still is interesting. And I think they're expressing that institution or that construct differently than my generation did. And so while some sort of definition or experience of marriage may continue, I think that our generations that are upcoming are going to define that much differently, have different expectations on that construct, and probably hold a little bit looser hand on the belief of permanence that had come with that, that construct. When I got married, I never even questioned 20 years. Marriage could have been 80 years. I never would have questioned it. No matter how lonely or disconnected the marriage got, it never dawned on me that there was another option. I think this next generation is going in with a lot different perspective on the plasticity of that. That relationship and the potential transient nature of that relationship no longer being judged in the same way. So that would be nice. And so we can hold on to the words, I guess, but the containers that we put those words into are probably the thing that needed to shift. And the course of miracles was very, very much ended my whole construct of marriage. I went into another marriage after my first, and it was the course of miracles that happened to me in the middle of all that, where I was like, oh my gosh, I can't do this to myself or another human again. Because the Course in miracles says that all humans do special relationship because of the egoic split brain that we have with this original abandonment disorder from nature. We develop the ego to protect ourselves from a world that seemed against us. And so because of our misperception of everything's against us, we develop the ego. A mind that's disrupted by the ego can't ever see its wholeness. And so an egoic mind is constantly running around with two a half of something. And that's why plant medicine and, you know, breath work and, you know, all of these extreme cold plunges, everything that everybody's doing right now and a bit of a fad. They're trying to get their physiology into a state where there's a momentary ego death so they can feel whole for a moment. And that's a really beautiful thing. It's basically like a near death experience. So near death experience is basically where the biology slows down enough that you can no longer maintain the consciousness construct of the ego. Ego suddenly dissolves. You see your wholeness for a moment, like, oh my God, I'm so beautiful. Everything's so beautiful. I am God, I'm this, and everything's God. And so because we don't have that experience on a daily basis and we walk around with these egoic minds, we live into this definition of special relationship. In a special relationship, you will see in another person a trait that you do not think you can get from source. And so you will bond to that trait until you have drained it out of them completely. And when it's gone, you will leave. That's super brutal. But I did know as soon as I read that sentence, I knew what I had drained out of both my wives.

What do you mean when you say drain it out?

You literally drain it out of them. When it was like my first wife's, you know, capacity for artwork, I drained that out of her over time because I was, I so valued that. I so treasured it. And I was so holding on to that. It's like the beauty I could see every day. And her creativity levels just went down over time. She stopped producing as much art. She's now she's back doing all of our heart again. She's doing her thing. In my second marriage, I was so enamored with the amount of friends she had. I was, I. I loved that part of her. And so I know I bonded to her with this amazing experience. Like, I'm going to marry into 1200 friends. I'm a nerdy doctor that had been head down in books for 17 years of academia and 30 years of my adult life. I don't have any friends, but I could have all those. And so, and as soon as the marriage construct got put on, immediately all those 1200 friends became, you know, kind of let go of. And everything was supposed to be experienced in that relationship. So suddenly I was trying to support the social bandwidth of 1200 friends in this person's life. And I was getting drained so fast from that experience, but I had drained her of her experience of this rich community that she'd known globally. I had cut all of that off by the construct of marriage again. And so we literally will see that best thing or one of the best things in that person and by just holding onto that tighter and tighter as the kind of the lovey dovey emotionality of the. The relationship starts to die off, you're going to cling harder and harder onto the things that you can see in the other person that are beautiful. And you're so annoyed by the way they brush their teeth or the way they snore at night, but at least they have this one thing. And so the tighter you cling to that one thing that's keeping you, the less they can express it because it's suddenly becoming anchored in your egoic need for this other thing that you can't get from God. And we do that to gurus. It gets really scary. And so when we don't think we can get to God, but we find somebody and we're like, oh, my go. That person's connected to God. I'm going to connect to God through them. We destroy them. We destroy all gurus. We destroy them.

Sorry for calling you a guru.

I already forgot about that.

I won't drain you, my spirit. He is not God, guys.

But it's the reality that we all obviously have direct connection. And the guru is almost saying that the guru always says, you all have direct connection to God. Let's do that through me. Instead, people will say, well, let me get there through you. And so there will be all these things, horizontal, codependent barbs and spears thrown into that person. And then they often will go down some. There's sexual deviance, or there's embezzlement of money, or they have to go then on a shadow path just to break their relationship to everybody so that they're not drained to death. And so they will go do something bad to break up the community so that people will stop clinging to them as the line to God. You know, so relationships, whether to the guru or to your spouse or to your own children and their development and their need to get into their AP classes and their university and their career, the ways in which we push each other and we hold, cling on to. Well, my daughter's got this trait and my son's got this trait. And every time everybody asks you about that, that's the special relationship unfolding in you to your children. And as I got better and better at witnessing the special relationships in my life, I realized I had a special relationship with my matcha tea in the morning. I had a special relationship to my car. I had a special relationship to my job, certainly had it to my medical clinic. And so over the years, it just was a Relentless effort to like, find out what am I not receiving from source today and what relationship am I creating to palliate that belief that I can't get that from source. I'll create it in a coffee, I'll create it in a new car, a new throw pillow, whatever it is like. We will keep consuming trying to fill those gaps if we don't just come to the terms of the fact that obviously everything that my soul could want to experience is going to be fed to me by the universe itself. Everything is abundant if you become still enough. So that's a bit of the journey that I've been on is special relationships. We will drain of each other. There is an alternative. It's called holy relationship. So the course of Miracle says when the individuals on this planet learn to witness the masculine and feminine within itself and complete itself, then when two human beings having done that, see each other, they will see so much beauty in that instant, that there will be so much unconditional love generated, that it will change the fabric of the universe. And so if there is a human game that is planned out and is destined for an ascension process, I think it is possible that two humans, before we go extinct, will complete themselves and we'll see each other. And in that seeing, we'll make it an easy path for every other human that might be left to follow into that space of completion and witness of one another. And we will see the absolute, gnarliest shadow in one of each other when we see everything. And we will celebrate that too. And so this is not like all of us reaching nirvana, it's all of us reaching authenticity. And authenticity is the highest frequency thing that's ever been witnessed from a human body. We generate these frequencies. Unconditional love is extremely high, Joy extremely high. 40 times higher in frequency is this, this trait that we call authenticity. So we're moving towards authentic reality. And it's not going to be just all pretty, it's not going to all feel good. It's going to feel a lot. And it's in feeling a lot and seeing a lot in one another and appreciating that we get to experience the whole gamut from the shadow to the light. As human beings, that's super unique in this multiverse. I think we're in a very unique planet at a very unique time that we get to have in a single day. In my experience, I can go from abject depressive thoughts and experiences and feelings in my body to absolute ecstasy in a single day. Not very many instances can go through that gamut of feeling as a human is capable of doing. So we're on a special journey to feeling everything. And we lose judgment on what we're feeling and simply feeling. We will find our absolute freedom because we are free to feel however we want to about the experience that we're going to receive today.

That's so beautifully expressed. And as you were saying that with your previous relationships, it made me think. In my previous relationship, I was always so drawn to how connected to music he was when he would listen to music and close his eyes, and how deeply he heard sounds because he owned a music management company. And after we divorced, I started producing music. I started hearing music in ways I've never heard before. And it made me realize that I wanted to be, that I wanted to have that deeper connection to music. And it unlocked my path of becoming an artist, which would not have happened without both the creation and the demise of the relationship. So, and I, and I've witnessed, even in my attraction has always been like, now I'm curious of, like, what is the thing within myself that I get to imagine embody more of? What do you feel is the fine line between creating more wholeness within ourselves, more self love, more time for ourselves? Today's Valentine's Day, you know, and so many people are on their self love journey versus when it's time to come into relationship. Because I feel a lot of people, especially in the spiritual space, feel not ready. They feel like they're not at enough self love. And I'm curious how much of that is protection coming from place of wisdom or protection coming from a place place of like, oh, God, last time I followed that wave, it took me to some gnarly corners. And I feel also many of us want to experience peace in this lifetime. And sometimes loves juxtaposes with peace. You know, that's why I'm like, maybe I just never get married, don't have kids, like, you know, just live in Bali and chill. I'm like, that sounds like a good life. But then, you know, especially when I sat with plant medicine, it's like, you are meant to be a mother. You are meant to birth things. And I'm like, and I'm also curious too, like, how much of, of what we hear in medicine do you feel is actual truth versus like just different embodiments for us to step into for more wholeness?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that's ultimately the, the desire for that, you know, withdraw to Bali and just experience the, the good stuff. It's probably Not a spiritual path, you know, in the sense that it'll be a path. But it's no less or more spiritual than working for an oil company in Dubai or whatever the opposite thing you can think of to a Bali yoga lifestyle, being a prison guard. You know, spirituality is never separate from biology. Biology is a spiritual expression of nature. It's the most energetic thing nature does. It's 10,000 times brighter than the sun is life. And so to have a single multicellular organism, be it an earthworm or a human, that takes 10,000 times more light concentration than sun is capable of producing. And so it's just so much energy that nature is doing to express life. It is so beautiful at its fabric. It is so complex and intricate at its pattern. And so I'm really eager for me to lose judgment on the way in which life is expressing itself through me. And to try to lose the labels is critical. I think as soon as we label something a spiritual community, we've already signed it up for its demise. It will not survive. We call ourselves spiritual beings or whatever it is. As soon as we use a label like spiritual, we have probably undermined its connectivity to the fabric of reality, because now we've judged everything else as being unspiritual in that moment. And so there's a interesting quote. I'll misquote it probably, but it was a piece of quote or saying from Wendell Berry, who's one of the great poets of the 20th century. And he was an incredible activist for nature and farming and food systems and testified in front of the US Senate many times. But he said something along the lines of, until we recognize that every place is sacred, we will only know desecrated spaces. And that is so profound. I mean, I think about it constantly because I have this tendency, like all humans, to be like, oh, I. I want to go to this pyramid, or I want to go to this sacred space out in the desert, or I want to go to Bali to experience, you know, yoga there, whatever it is, we have in that moment lost our presence for the beauty that we're standing in in that moment. And for that, we've become an unspiritual being, you know, and so it's in this. This is a version, maybe the most severe and common version of spiritual bypassing, which is to claim things as spiritual. And it's a real experience of spirituality is being so presence that you can see God in absolutely everything. And you're so overwhelmed by beauty with looking at the color of the paint on the wall that I'M not like daydreaming about the next adventure I go on or whatnot. I'm just so overwhelmed by the fact that I have eyeballs that can capture the dark hue of blue off the wall. That's actually not the color of the wall. It's actually the only thing the wall is not. So the wall is actually giving me the dark blue because it can't embody that. So I'm actually embodying the blue of the wall that it can't absorb. And so I'm the blue thing, absorbing that through my eyeballs onto my brain and experiencing that frequency because nature wanted that to be seen and the wall couldn't do it. So I'm doing it for the wall. Like, that's freaking trippy. That's really cool stuff. And that will help us when we start to become that present and that overwhelmed by the wonderment of being alive that we stop pursuing the spiritual thing.

Yeah. And recognizing that wherever we are, it's an invitation to drop in deeper into finding the beauty there. And, you know, sometimes being stuck in Dubai traffic and, you know, being on airplanes and all of these things, which you live that type of life as well. It can be more challenging and just trusting that this is the chapter that our soul signed up for at this time. And I'm curious, when, with medicine, do you feel what we see visions in medicine as? Like, that is a literal timeline. There is a highest timeline for us. Or it's just something within our own consciousness that we are projecting.

When you have a hallucinogenic experience on a plant, medicine or something. Yeah. I mean, I. I think if. If your mind can. Can create the experience of it, it's real somewhere. I think that's something that's generally understood among indigenous wisdoms dating back thousands of years. Just because I can dream about the table, but it's not physically touched right in front of me, doesn't make this table that I'm so specifically seeing in my mind's eye any less real than this one here. And so I'm intrigued by that possibility that whatever you're seeing when the ego drops, and so you can remember that what you experience in any sort of extreme state of a near death experience, plant medicine or otherwise, that near death experience is taking you into a biologic state where you no longer can maintain the construct of the ego. So as soon as the ego drops, you start seeing the whole world differently. Same world. And it will be back here in your same previous interpretation in a moment. But you will know something at Your cellular level that you didn't know before. And so I think that's the beauty of a near death experience is actually nothing changed between now and then in the physical world around you, but everything changed in the metaphysical world around you. You suddenly realize you are a metaphysical being that's outside of time. And you develop unconditional love for life in that moment. And you live life differently after that near death experience. And so what we see in those moments is going to be a different interpretation of all the frequencies of resonance that our body is experiencing. And it's a relief to know just how different that reality is. And so when the plant medicine or the near death experience happens, that veil drops, that veil of the ego drops. The same frequencies that are all around you right now are suddenly going to express a completely different reality. And its beauty is oftentimes pretty dumbfounding, but it's also going to be very finite. It can be like, oh well, I saw this jaguar, I saw the moon, or these are the things I hear all the time with like ayahuasca journeys and stuff. They saw some element of nature and it was overwhelmingly beautiful. And in the witnessing that beauty so acutely with every cell in their body, without an ego in the way, they got overwhelmed with love for themselves and they felt like they just saw the face of God in this thing. So the death of the ego is a beautiful journey into, to being able to witness beauty on a whole other level of grandeur. And for that we get changed, we get changed by the frequencies of these states of beauty. Because the frequency we resonate then is in this unconditional love state. Easy to feel unconditional love towards nature, more challenging to find it in a human and so much sweeter when you find it in the human. And so look into each other's wounds and look into each other's things and free each other up to grow. Don't have expectations that you're on the same journey. Don't have expectations that your paths are going to be together any more than this moment that you're in. And for that you will probably feel each other more acutely and see something of yourself more acutely than you ever did in the 20 year journey when you thought you were on parallel paths. It's okay to see the shadows and see the separation and feel that because it's, it's the more beautiful thing.

Well, so beautifully expressed. I feel we all took away for us to all witness beauty in everything and everyone especially. And that really is the key to eventually, hopefully seeing that beauty within ourselves. So thank you so much for sharing. And where can listeners connect with you and learn from you further?

Probably go lay down under a tree and look up through the tree at the blue sky. You'll probably connect with me pretty good there.

An oak tree.

That's right, an oak. If you want a website, you can go to ZachBushMD.com that's kind of a portal into all the projects and things that I love doing and all the beauty I'm seeing and all the projects of people that have been drawn to those. So yeah, take a look at that website and find me on social media with the same Zach Bush MD and I'll be telling you what I'm seeing.

Beautiful. Well, thank you again so much for sharing with us today.

Thanks for letting me on.

So guys, this was such a profound episode. Please be sure to share it on your stories. Share it with friends. This is a really good one to put into the group chat and be like, what did you guys think? Let's tune into this minute right here. What is your perspective? The way that we can have deeper conversations, different, deeper relationships and friendships is to bring these things to the altar and really sit around and understand one another's perspectives. And be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening to this on YouTube, Spotify video, as well as the podcast store. And I can't wait to see you in the next episode. Trust your intuition, trust your inner wisdom, trust your inner guidance. So trust your intuition, trust your inner wisdom, trust your inner guidance.