Flavors of Suffering, Notes of Jiva 🐳🩵

Editor's Note from Sally 💌

Jiva is that person who showed up to a Monday yoga class one day—and suddenly, there was life before Jiva, and life after. Since that day, he’s seemed to be everywhere: part of the juice club, lighting up the dancefloor as the most radiant, joyful mover in the room. Dancing with him is the kind of memory that stays in your body forever.

Our conversations always leave the deepest imprints. He walked into my life at a very transformative junction, and since our befriending, we’ve been witnessing so much unfold together.

What a soul. This interview holds so much heart. I’m thankful to know him, and even more honored to share him with you.

📸 photo of Jiva

Intro & Interview by Rich Awn

Have you ever met someone and immediately felt: I need to know them better?

That was Jiva Smith.

We first crossed paths inside Anold Wu’s juice dojo during our juice pickup. The room was dimly lit, almost cave-like, but Jiva’s presence lit it up—a calm, joyful smile gleaming through the shadows. His gaze met mine with a kind of knowing, like he’d been expecting me. Something wordless passed between us. I sat down, curious.

What struck me first was his listening. My words seemed to land squarely on Jiva’s kind eyes. My sentences suddenly formed eloquently and effortlessly knowing I was being heard and that I could feel safe in our mindful exchange. It didn’t take long before we were deeply engaged in a chat about our inner landscapes, epiphanies, and co-creative endeavors. 

After this fateful introduction, we each walked away with an unspoken trust that we’d meet again. And we did. What follows is a record of one of those crossings. The words have been left intentionally raw—to preserve the vibrancy of what unfolded.

I’m honored to welcome Jiva to our Whaleness Club 🐳.

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Richie: Let’s start from the beginning. Do you have any early memories—around seven or so, when we first started forming identity?

Jiva: I do. Here’s a fun story literally out of the womb. My name was supposed to be Sam. But when I came out, my mom had this massive heart-explosion—like a full spiritual awakening.

At that moment, she knew that her whole identity had changed. She cried for three days straight. She said it felt like my being had asked something of her. And so she changed my name to Jiva, which means “the essence of life.” 

Being a Jiva instead of a Sam planted a seed that’s been an important part of my identity.

📸 Jiva as a baby

Richie: Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Jiva: Yeah, I do. I wanted to be a scientist—a chemical scientist making potions. I found a lot of pride and safety in being good at school.. but also in being social. I liked being both.

Richie: You're a genius. 

Jiva: I'm just a guy. 

Richie: Were you one of those tested-and-placed-in-advanced-classes kids?

Jiva: I was. But the most visceral identity memory that really stuck with me happened around nine or ten.

My mom’s best friend at the time—a bit of a bully—was over for dinner. She sat next to me and kept pinching my belly fat, over and over, maybe a hundred times in half an hour. Telling me I was too fat.

In my head I thought, “That’s just rude”. At some point, I just said, “Look. This is my house. You don’t get to treat me like this. Please leave.”

Richie: How old were you? 

Jiva: Nine, I reckon. I’ve always identified as someone who leans “too nice.” I’m still learning to own my authority and trust my intuition. But at that moment, even as a kid, I knew that adult’s behavior wasn’t okay—and I stood up for myself.

My dad told me, twenty years later, it was one of his proudest memories of me.

Richie: Do you take after your mom or your dad? 

Jiva: I’d say I’m deeply bonded with my mom. I have two dads—my biological father and my stepdad, who came into my life when I was four. They both shaped me in different ways.

But my mom and I have always had this multidimensional connection. We communicate on many planes. I admire her wisdom, I love being in her company, and I can seek her counsel. I feel fortunate.

Richie: And you're one of two children. 

Jiva: In my direct parental lineage, I'm one of one. I have three half-siblings—an older half-sister, and a younger half-brother and half-sister. 

Richie: Were you old enough to feel the separation between your parents growing up? Or did it happen early enough that it didn’t mess you up too much?

Jiva: When I was four, my parents had a major dispute, and my dad essentially snatched me—he took me from my grandma’s house and went into hiding. My mom spent months driving around New Zealand, anxiously searching for me.

As a four-year-old, my memories are spotty, mostly filled in through bits of hearsay and family lore. It had its emotional imprint: a complication around the idea of love.

For most of my life, I believed my dad didn’t love me. After I was found and custody returned to my mum, he was mostly absent.

It wasn’t until he was on his deathbed that I spent, like 9 hours, finally asking him questions I’d carried, the first one being: “Why don’t you love me?”

And he said, “I was in such a deep depression that every time I tried to reach out, I felt like I would only make your life worse. I couldn’t do it.”

Out of the 500,000 reasons I had invented in my head, not once did I consider that he was suffering too much to show up.

Richie: How could you have known? You probably didn't even have enough of that kind of awareness about yourself. Were your parents young when they had you? 

Jiva: My mom was 24 and my dad was 36. You know, I think everyone’s suffering journey is their own.

I’m grateful for the closure I received, but the impact of that early wound echoed into other relationships. For example, in my marriage, my wife probably said “I love you” forty times before I felt safe enough to say it back.

Learning to trust—learning to blossom into my own heart—meant eating all that pain. And strangely, I now see it as part of my rite of passage. It was the biggest challenge and also the most meaningful victory.

These days, I consider myself a big lover—and I’m happy about it.

📸 Jiva and Lou 💗

Richie: I felt that from you right away. At Arnold’s, it was so clear—I just knew I needed to get to know you better. It's good to know you better. 

How do you hold compassion for people who are… horrible? When someone is truly awful, how do you show compassion and open your heart?

Jiva: That’s a great question. I could talk about this for four hours.

Firstly, the short version— You fake it till you make it.

No matter what tradition or path you follow—spiritual, philosophical, religious—most of them include some kind of training in love, compassion, or open-heartedness. That’s why I’m such a big believer in meditation. It helps us plant the mental states we want to experience more of in daily life.

Take universal love—it sounds great in theory. Intellectually, I was always, “Hell yeah, why wouldn’t I want that?” But in practice, it felt impossible—until one day, it wasn’t.

I’d been meditating on loving-kindness consistently, and at some point, it clicked. I was walking down Fifth Avenue when suddenly, without effort, my mind erupted and I was just madly in love with absolutely every single person I could see.

Everyone I saw—unhoused folks, supermodels, businessmen, tourists, all of them—I loved them all. It showed me that beautiful states of mind like that are possible—for anyone.

Richie: And this kind of universal love, this compassion-as-practice—is one of the methods you teach, right?

Jiva: Yes—Whether it’s love, compassion, or any state of mind, it’s something you practice. Over time, with repetition, it becomes your default way of being.

That Fifth Avenue moment I mentioned lasted maybe 40 seconds. But it’s happened again since—longer and deeper each time.

It felt like a state of mind that was unshakeable. Nothing anyone said or did could touch it. Whatever shit they had to say, no matter their particular flavor of suffering was—doesn't matter. 

📸 Jiva teaching meditation

Richie: Flavors of suffering. I love that. 

Jiva: There’s a poem I always recommend by Thich Nhat Hanh called Please Call Me By My True Names.

It follows a chain of life—starts with a frog, who gets eaten by a snake, and the snake gets into trouble somewhere else. Then it shifts. (Trigger warning here.)

The poem crescendos into something devastating:

“I’m the arms dealer in Uganda. I’m the starving child. I’m the sea pirate stealing slaves. I’m the girl who was raped by the sea pirate and threw herself into the ocean in grief.”

And then it lands here:

“I am all of it. The deepest sorrow. The greatest joy. And I love it all—because everyone is doing the best they can at the level of consciousness they’re at.”

It’s easy, from a place of comfort or privilege, to say how things should be. But we have no real idea what someone else has endured.

When you zoom out—on the scale of lifetimes, of thousands of years—you start to see we’re all just trying. Working through our shit, becoming something.

And none of us are separate. Everyone’s on the dance floor. Even the ones who seem like they shouldn’t be.

Richie: I’m letting that sink in. You’re basically saying: Compassion doesn’t depend on circumstances.

Jiva: Exactly. I’ve been studying at the Kadampa Meditation Center, a Tibetan Buddhist lineage, and they really emphasize that compassion often gets confused with empathy. People think, “If I feel bad with you, then I’m being compassionate.”

But real compassion can actually be joyful. It’s: I see your true nature—which is the same as mine—and I hold all of you in love.

I don’t need to feel bad with you to support you. Sometimes the best gift is to feel radiant, and let you bask in that.

The best way to “help” is to offer someone loving awareness instead of asking them why they’re feeling like shit.

I was recently laid off, and 90% of people said, “Oh no, I’m so sorry.” But 10% said, “Congratulations. You get to redesign now!.”

Richie: Yes! Especially for people like you—overachievers, bright minds—it’s a huge gift to be forced into alignment with your true path.

Jiva: I hope so. 

Richie: I’m feeling it right now—there’s a blooming happening. No more tolerating what we know isn’t right. Either we move out of its way, or we move through it.

Jiva: That’s the magnetism of what you and Sally are cultivating.

It’s not just a once-a-week yoga class—it’s the idea of becoming the most nutrient-dense cell in a giant organism, radiating all the fucking nutrients possible for everyone to thrive. 

Providing the nutrients is what all the cells are going to want to party with.

What you’re building… it’s like the opposite of COVID. It’s the juicy good times virus.

Richie: The juicy good times virus is real. What’s your relationship with death?

Jiva: Great question. Funny enough—I meditated on that this morning.

I wouldn’t say I’m completely free of fear yet. But I am softening it.

In the Tibetan Buddhist lineage I study, there’s a strong belief in past and future lives. I wrestled with that for a long time—resistance, skepticism, the whole deal—but eventually, I came out the other side with conviction.

I now believe: the mind is formless, ethereal, and it continues on—separate from the body. That helps ease the fear.

I’ve also had these visceral moments—sitting with friends in the hospital who thought they were dying.

But when I looked in their eyes, what I saw was life. Full vitality. They were still so here.

It gave me a deep conviction that what we call death isn’t what we think.

Ram Dass said it best: “Death is completely safe.”

Richie: He also said, “Sadness is inherent in form.” 

Jiva: For a while, I definitely over-glorified the spirit world.

But lately, I’ve been finding more balance—wanting to create beauty in the material world, not just float above it.

The most profound teaching I’ve received from tantric Buddhism is this: the nature of your external reality is the same as your mind. They’re not separate.

They merge—like water mixing with water. And when you live from that awareness, you can experience spirit consciousness while fully awake. It’s just blissful.

Richie: What cracked you open? How were you cracked open? 

Jiva: I think there are a few classic ways it happens. One is: your life completely falls apart. Everything you thought was stable gets rocked, and you’re forced open.

The other: you get everything you ever thought you wanted—and realize you hate your life. That might even be worse.

My personal version followed these series of unfortunate events...

We had a miscarriage. My wife got into a serious accident. My mum broke both her legs falling down the stairs.

A major crypto investment I’d made collapsed. My wife got laid off.

All in the span of three weeks.

Richie: That's intense, man. It's a crisis. 

Jiva: Yeah. I was frozen—like, physically unable to move. So I started doing sound healing just to cope. And eventually, I turned to what I now call crisis meditation. It became a daily practice.

Richie: Is this when you discovered meditation? 

Jiva: I had dabbled before—but like a lot of people, I felt like I wasn’t “good” at it.

I just assumed I wasn't good at it and left many times. 

Richie: Funny, with a name like Jiva, I would’ve assumed you were raised chanting mantras in an ashram or something.

Jiva: I went to chants until I was about twelve. My mom quietly wove Dharma into our home life. We were vegetarian, and we were super clear about not killing bugs or insects. She’d also drop gems like,

“Every second you keep acting like an asshole, you’re becoming more of an asshole.”

Richie: Where was your mom when I was in my twenties?!

Jiva: Love her.

So, about a year into daily meditation, I had this lightning bolt realization. It pulled together all these disparate threads of my life. The bolt was: “You need to teach meditation. You need to share wisdom.”

At the time, I was working with a teacher who really touched my heart. A couple of weeks later, he announced a teacher training.

For ten straight days I resisted. I kept telling myself:

“This is a dumb idea. I’m not spending five grand on something that’ll never pay me back. I’ll never make a living doing this. Stupid idea.”

But the call wouldn’t go away. Eventually, I gave in.

The training lasted four months, covering a wide range of esoteric and ancient wisdom. It ended with a retreat in California.

By that point, I was completely cracked open—the suffering, the yearning, the hunger to live a life that didn’t hurt anymore. Every fiber of my being was listening to every word the teacher said. We spent two full days peeling back every dream, every wound.

During a sound healing session, I felt this intense spinning through my body—each chakra like a vortex.

And at some point, it felt like a glass plate over my heart shattered into a million pieces.

In that instant, I knew: Everything I thought I was —was not real. My identity was merely a collection of stories.

Richie: How'd you deal with that? 

Jiva: I cried for three days straight.

Just like my mom did when I was born, which is…kooky.

Richie: Well, You were reborn.

Jiva: And in the most kooky timing—my wife called me the next morning to say we were pregnant.

After five miscarriages, our son had waited for my heart to open. Too perfect to make up.

📸 Jiva, Lou & baby Ogi 💗

Richie: I love stories like that—how souls wait until there’s enough love to enter. That’s a great story.

Jiva: A gentle caveat to anyone listening or reading—That experience was three years ago, and the unfolding and blossoming is still happening.

That lightning bolt gave me something unshakable about the universe—but there have still been doubts, dips, growing pains.

I think becoming who you’re meant to be is a slow blooming. You keep playing with it.

Ram Dass said, “Just let it be role play. Don’t take it so seriously.”

That line stays with me.

I still don’t know exactly what this will all become. But I do know: my ability to love, to be with people, to hold space—that’s growing. And it keeps growing.

📸 Jiva and baby Ogi

Richie: What’s your relationship to psychedelics? Have they been a gateway? A tool? A crutch?

Jiva: They’ve definitely been a meaningful part of my journey—especially in teaching me how fluid the universe really is.

More recently, I’ve used mushrooms in very intentional ways—especially in dance spaces. On the dance floor, you see it: how energy affects energy. It’s a living organism. It’s not just about compassion—it’s about responsibility. Your energy influences the whole. If you’re bringing warmth, vitality, non-attachment—that matters. It ripples into the collective.

And lastly I’ll share… I recently took vows to stay clean—not from morality, but because stillness is important to me. To access blissful, totally still states of mind, it helps to keep things clean. I’m making a bet: the stiller my mind gets, the more it’s going to feel like psychedelics anyway.

Richie: Oh, totally. I’ve cut back a lot too.

Jiva: Yeah, and I want to say: my path is just one path. There are thousands. Many practitioners I deeply respect blend both worlds beautifully. I’ve just chosen—for now—to focus fully on one trail.

Richie: What’s next for Soulsmith?

Jiva: If you figure it out, let me know. 

Richie: I ask because I want you to keep going. Creating a true object for meditation is no small thing. It takes everything—blood from a stone, in the best way.

Jiva: I’m a meditation teacher, life coach, and business consultant. I work across all those lanes. But lately, I’ve been drawn to helping people navigate transitions—especially in this chaotic world.

Richie: Even if the world were certain, people would still struggle with change.

Jiva: Exactly. So how do we create offerings that are both spiritually grounded and practical?

How do you teach someone to have a hard conversation?

To manage money with care?

To move through grief with presence?

I’m sitting with those questions—and thinking about how to scale that work.

And—honestly—I’m feeling called to ceremony. I’m feeling the call to be a hot daddy sauna master this summer.

Richie: You're going to do that.

Jiva: And I want to host retreats. Something in the spirit of your Whaleness Club—which, by the way, the essence of that feels really yummy to me.

Maybe not now, maybe soon—but that seed is planted.

Richie:  What advice do you give someone who wants something so badly… but knows it’ll take time and resources and a bit of finagling?

Jiva: If it’s meant for you, there’s karmic certainty. Trust the ripening.

You’ve got all the yummy ingredients—things the universe could really use. The right conditions will come. And honestly—if we just said, “Yes. Let’s go do it”… we would.

Richie: Let's go do it. 

Jiva: My friend Rick says, “You don’t just move on to your next. You expand and integrate your past.”  You fold everything you’ve lived into what’s next. The seed is planted. The karmic imprints are there. Now it’s just… fire time.

Richie: So basically: don’t worry. Just go. Fire under the butt. Let it spread.

Thank you, Jiva.

JIva: Thank you. That was so fun!

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Having had the privilege to befriend Jiva, practice yoga with him, and soak in the wisdom of his guided meditations, one thing is clear: there’s never enough time to bask in this man’s radiance.

Whatever flavors of suffering he’s transmuted, whatever thresholds he’s crossed, whatever miracles he’s made space for—Jiva Smith is a luminous, grounded, and generous soul worth knowing.

To practice with him, or simply soak up his medicine, visit Soulsmith.org.

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Rich Awn

Edits by Sally Choi