Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes: Going from Grief to Growth

Brian D. Smith Talks About Going from Grief to Growth Our guest today is Brian D. Smith, and he is with us for the third time. Brian has long been a spiritual seeker. He started out in the Pentecostal religious tradition, and later became part of an evangelical community. After that, he became a Christian Universalist. Then later on, he studied Buddhism and various mystical traditions. As a young man, Brian says that he was pretty deeply scarred by toxic religion, which, among other things, instilled in him an intense fear of death; but further study helped him to alleviate a lot of that fear. So Brian was living a beautiful life, with his lovely wife of now more than thirty years and his two young daughters. But then in June of 2015, his younger daughter, Shayna, unexpectedly transitioned in her sleep. She was not yet 16 years old.  After Shayna’s transition, Brian tells us that his spiritual quest intensified because of some extraordinary visions and messages that he was receiving from his daughter. As a result of those experiences, he immersed himself in researching the afterlife, taking a scientific as well as a spiritual and philosophical approach to it. He says that now he felt that he really needed to know, and not just believe, what was true about death and the afterlife. And he learned so much that he ended up writing a book. It’s entitled, Grief 2 Growth; Planted. Not Buried. Brian D. Smith is also now a successful podcaster and blogger, and he shares all that he has learned as a teacher and grief counselor within the wonderful organization, Helping Parents Heal. His website is grief2growth.com Learn more about Roberta here: http://robertagrimes.comhttps://seekreality.com/