By Zach Beach (www.o-books.com)
OUT SEPTEMBER 1st from wherever books are sold.
If you’re reading this, you are probably meandering around the internet. Like we all do on our laptops, tablets, and smartphones, we see a link or headline that piques our interest, click on it, and begin to scroll through it until another link comes up that interests us, and we click on that one. The process goes on.
While such an activity might seem simple and common in the past decade, we will eventually run into a situation that no human being throughout history has ever encountered before. Our small and limited human mind will be pummelled and inundated with words, pictures, and videos of intense suffering from all around the world.
In just 5 minutes, the average internet user can read a story of a hospital getting blown up in Gaza, a fire in Bangladesh, an earthquake and Tsunami in Indonesia, a murder, a shooting, a mass rape, a child with cancer getting denied treatment, the government committing human rights violations, and entire coral reefs disappearing in the face of climate change. This process is sometimes referred to as the doomscroll: the sudden gravitation towards something negative, that propels the user to something else negative, that continues on and on.
News networks and social media sites know how to grab your attention, which most of the time is with something negative. The mind has what psychologists call a negativity bias, which helped our evolutionary ancestors. It was advantageous to an organism’s survival to scan their environment for threats and remember when bad things happened in order to avoid them in the future. Unfortunately, this leftover vestige of evolutionary conditioning does little to make us happy.
I’m not that old, but I still remember a time when you would wake up in the morning and go outside to get the daily newspaper. Depending on your age and interests, you would glance over the headlines, sports, finance, or comic sections, for around 20 minutes. Then you would set the newspaper down and go about your day, without exposure to what was happening on the other side of the world, until maybe you came home in the evening for 30 minutes of news.
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to moderate one’s media consumption, so the modern person is ceaselessly confronted with endless negative information. This can easily lead to hopelessness and helplessness. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and inadequate, as we commute to our job and feel we aren’t helping any of these intense issues. It then becomes natural to close down, to shut down the heart, to feel stressed and unhappy.
This is to be expected in a world that hasn’t taught us how to meet suffering or what to do with it. We live in a world that hasn’t prioritized the needs of the heart or trained us in the cultivation of compassion.
This is precisely the gap that my latest books seek to fill. Entitled Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans, this comprehensive book is a guide to help the modern person meet suffering with a wide-open heart. While the current media environment is a modern problem, the solution comes from ancient wisdom teachings. Every generation of humanity has had its own unique suffering to overcome, and the wisdom teachings from the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Kuan Yin, Rumi, and Julian of Norwich are just as applicable today as they were back then. We can also meet modern issues with the same gumption that Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King met theirs.
This book has come from the culmination of my own training and education. For almost 15 years, I have dedicated myself to bringing more love into the world, and no matter what path I took, it always led me back to suffering. And any path of suffering eventually led me back to love. When I had this realization, everything clicked. I realized why we all struggle in love: the challenges are there for a reason. I finally understood why the Buddha taught the four Noble Truths, why Christ sits upon the Cross, and why great mystics throughout history had experienced great suffering in their lives.
Rather than see suffering as an experience to be eradicated, we can see it as one of our greatest teachers. By uniting love and suffering with the practice of compassion, we are put on a path towards spiritual awakening and the joy of service.
Believe it or not, suffering can be a gateway to greater wisdom, understanding, and compassion. We can turn the pain into medicine to solve the world’s ills. Rather than see suffering as something to be eradicated from our lives, we can see it as one of our greatest teachers. The challenging emotions that come upon us, even the ones that create internal distress, are there for a reason, too. By learning how to hold those emotions with loving presence and compassion, we begin a journey of coming to wholeness.
If you’re skeptical, great. As a coach and therapist, my favorite thing to do is explore my client’s resistance to new ideas and ways of living. Hopefully by the end of the book you to come to the same realization I did: if we let love and suffering have a marriage in our heart, they will give birth to joy.
***
What do the Buddha, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, St.John of the Cross, and Victor Frankl all have in common? They all found the courage to love this world even amidst intense suffering.
Welcome to the ultimate guide to the great gurus of life: love and suffering.
In this impassioned and informative work, love activist and spiritual leader Zach Beach takes you on an enlightened journey across world religions and spiritualities to find the unifying themes behind them all. The message is simple: If you want to know love, know suffering. If you want to know suffering, know love. 
The author masterfully weaves insights from his life and teachings with mystic poets, spiritual leaders, therapists, and psychologists. Inspiring without being dogmatic, and uplifting without being cheesy, Love and Suffering will help any seeker on the path of personal and spiritual transformation.
Love and Suffering: A Spiritual Guide for Helpers, Healers, and Humans by Zach Beach is available to pre-order from www.o-books.com or from wherever books are sold.
PRE-ORDER TODAY FOR A SEPTEMBER 1ST RELEASE.
BOOK LINK: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/o-books/our-books/love-suffering-spiritual-guide
