There's No Way I Would Choose This- Or Is There?

This mindful Monday moment was inspired by a comment on Penny Wittbrodt's NDE. A viewer wrote that she was tracking right along with Penny until Penny said we choose to have tragedies in our lives. This makes no sense. Why would anyone choose to be less than 100% happy all the time, if given the choice? Natalie Sudman's NDE has also prompted a lot of discussion about Natalie choosing to come back to Earth with serious injuries.

There are reasons. Listen to find out why I believe we do choose to endure suffering.

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Transcript

Brian Smith: 0:56

Now that you're here at Grief 2 Growth, I'd like to ask you to do three things. The first thing is to make sure that you like click Notifications, and subscribe to make sure you get updates for my YouTube channel. Also, if you'd like to support me financially, you can support me through my tip jar at grief to growth, calm, it's grief, the number two growth.com/tip jar, or look for tip jar at the very top of the page, or buy me a coffee at the very bottom of the page, and you can make a small financial contribution. The third thing I'd like to ask is to make sure you share this with a friend through all your social media, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Thanks for being here. Close your eyes and imagine what if the things in life to cause us the greatest pain, the things that bring us grief, or 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, who 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 Smith. So today, I want to respond to a comment I got from someone who viewed the video that I did with Penny what brought it was pennies near death experience. And one of the things Penny said your 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 that we adore in this life. And I can understand why people have this 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 this teaching, it was actually frankly, after my daughter Shayna had passed away. And again, I was taken back like everybody else's 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 now I think agree that this is a place of pain, this is a place of duality. This is 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 this place, I believe we're 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 could understand some of these really deep concepts of just existential existential concepts. So if you think about if we're in a situation where everything is perfect, everything is just the way that we want to just the way we want it to be that nothing is ever quote unquote wrong. Nothing quote, bad ever happens. What would that experience be like? Would you actually even experienced anything at all, there was nothing it'd be like everything is you would be like you were living in, in a dream world where everything just happens, what you want it to and you weren't really experienced 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 are wishes are to even experience anything. So if we take that and said, 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 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, so they skinned their knee. And as an adult, we look at them, we see them, they scream, and they moan. And they Well, like, it's the end of the world, like they broken their leg, like they're never gonna walk again. And we kind of smile at them. We say, 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 I girls a little, and you'd say, we're going to go somewhere, we're gonna go to the movies, but we're not going to go today, we can't go today, we're gonna go tomorrow. For them tomorrow is just never gonna come. It's the end of the world again. So it's a matter of degrees and the way that we take things, I believe, when 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 a 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 didn't happen to you is going to make you a better person. Now, when I was younger, I used to like to workout, I would go to the gym, and I 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 know, I always feel like even going to the gym to workout, but you do it because you know, it's gonna 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 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 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 strengthen them has been revealed, by the tragedies have 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 will 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 asked 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, as the name didn't actually say that. But it's like it's not any of these things. And the thing is, we can spiritually bypass what I call spiritual bypass and say, by dismissing people's pain and say, Well, don't worry about the tragic experience, 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's so 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 I can choose to let there be a lesson in it. And I can choose to make use it to make me a better person. So want to thank the person who made that comment on his video for for spotting this. If you have any questions or anything you'd like to discuss, let me know I'm able to discuss it on my next video. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.