Ash's NDE Following Surfing Accident in Australia

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. On back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody.

0:41 And a big welcome to Ash Perot from Down Under. How are you, Ash? Very well, thank you, Eric. It's a, yeah, I know it's me. We're going to hear a very unusual death type of experience today, as well as an NDE. But before we jump right into it, which I'm in the mood to do today, but I want people to get to know you just a little bit. So tell us a little bit about Ash. Thanks, Eric. Well, I think probably something that most people will talk about is who they are as an identity. And for me, yes, I have these human identities where I'm a coach and a parent and a father though, and a person who loves adventure, but underneath that, for me, it's like, there's this consciousness that I am.

1:34 When we go into the NDE, I can describe that more, but it was an experience of I am consciousness and I am myself regardless of whatever role I'm playing, that there's this unique thing in me, which is Ash. And so you have this unique part of you that is Eric, and that Eric exists always in all places, regardless of living or dead. And so there's this essence that is Ash, when I'm connected to my heart, and I'm very aware of that, and I'm able to take that into different roles. So there's many roles that I do, but fundamentally there's this ethereal, intangible thing that is me, and it's unique, and it's actually a form of consciousness.

2:28 So for some people, we're nowhere on a NDE experience podcast, but for some people it's a bit woo and it's difficult to understand, but wherever we go, we are. And so for me, yes, I can have all these different ways of being in the world, but in that is this form of consciousness, and it's a very unique form of consciousness that is me. I like that. I think for us to get to know you a little bit better, since we can't look inside at that right now, tell us a couple of these roles that you're talking about that'll help us go, oh, okay, now I can relate to this guy.

3:09 Yes, I like that, Eric. So one of the roles is a coach, so people come to me when they want to connect with their heart and make transformations in their life when they feel like they've been stuck on things. I'm a parent, so I have two children, and that's just one of the greatest gifts in my life. A wife, I live in Sydney, Australia. I love music. I was a musician for a long time. I love adventures. I love experiencing the world, the way that the world is. And so, for example, I'm always adventuring somewhere. It's always, okay, there's part of me that feels most alive when I adventure.

3:54 How's that for a description? Oh, I like it, but now I'm curious what kind of adventures you do. Well, I love nature. I was a surfer for 25 years, surfing almost every day until I had a back injury. So I love mountains and swimming in cold streams and waterfalls and swimming out into the ocean when it's huge. Love snorkeling, but very much an ocean baby. And then because of the back injury, that led to exploring the mountains. Before that, I was always on the coast. And then with the back injury, not being able to surf, I started exploring mountains. Well, if you want to try some mountain snow sports, come on up here.

4:37 We'll give you a big dose of them on our big mountains here. Anyway, I've never been to Sydney. I can't wait to visit it sometime. But let's jump into what we're here for today because I don't want to make our listeners too impatient. So take us back to 2016, not very many years ago. What was going on in your life that led up to the surgery that you had? So if we go back even further around 2013, 2014, and I mentioned I was a surfer and life was very difficult for me. I had post-traumatic stress, which was from 2005 and having a stillborn daughter.

5:19 And there was something just in my psyche that flipped the switch then. And there was a point holding her. And I had this thought, I'm never going to let anything bad happen to my family ever again. And what happened was over time, I just became hyper alert. And I moved into this alternative reality where I was trying to prevent the possibility of anything bad happening. And the way that I was doing that was, well, if I generate high amounts of wealth by a big house with a big yard and we can see far and there's no one near us, I can protect my family.

6:09 And it wasn't a rational, conscious thing at the time. But what happened was over time, I got really run down. And I was only sleeping maybe two or three hours a night. And this was for a long period of time. So eventually I crashed as in I end up in a mental health clinic. And then coming out of that experience, I can't trust my mind. My mind was messing with me. I believed everything my mind was telling me. I think therefore I am. And so I got sold the lie that I should believe all my thoughts.

6:50 What happened was I was extremely exhausted and I was still working to provide for my family. I was on holiday and I went surfing and I went down to look at the ocean. And it was a very big day. There was no one else surfing. And my back had been getting sore throughout the holiday. And it was towards the end of the holidays. I didn't want to go back to work. And I was looking at the surf and I heard this voice in my head that said, if you go surfing today, you're going to hurt your back. And I didn't want to go back to work. And I said to the universe, which I have a better understanding of it these days, but I said, bring it on.

7:31 And so I started paddling and the second wave I went to dive through, I popped two disks in my back. And so it was a very big day of surfing. And I was the only person out there and I could only move my right arm. And so my left arm, I was holding onto the board and I was trying to paddle back in. It was a bit scary. And then when I got back into the shore, I was standing on the edge of the water holding my board, but I couldn't walk. And so I was just stuck there. And some people came down to help me. That led to having a back operation. Okay. When you talk about this big surf, how big were these waves?

8:14 I want to really picture it. That's why I asked. Yeah, yeah. Well, if I was on a wave, it would be at least three times the height. So it's not huge. It's not, you know, what they surf these days where it's 25 times somebody's high. But a wave face of 18 feet, something like that. Yeah, it's a big wave. Did you get pounded on your way in? I got knocked around a lot, shall we say. I wasn't close to drowning or anything like that. I'd been close to drowning a few times before and it wasn't at that level. All right. So well, thank goodness there were people here or there to give you a hand, help you out of the water.

8:55 All right. Was it straight to the hospital? Initially, I just, we were camping at the time and went back and just thought, it'll get better. And then the next day I went to hospital. I tried to get some treatment, just natural treatment and that didn't work. And, you know, went to hospital and they diagnosed that I'd had two slipped discs, which was impacting the nerves. And they said they wanted to do surgery. Not initially. So I spent two years trying to heal it naturally. And so doing yoga, Pilates, acupuncture, lots of different therapies.

9:37 And it just got to the point that I couldn't operate. I was still working. I was taking medications. So I was on opioids that I'd been on opioids for about six months, which of course, you know, you just don't want to be on those. And there was one day I just couldn't do my shoelaces. And I thought, okay, I just have to surrender and go in for the operation. Now, people don't die from back operations. So and I have a preview of what's going to happen. Go ahead and go through it. Well, let's tell our listeners what happened. Yeah. So I went in for the back surgery and during the surgery, they tore a vein.

10:21 They didn't know. And they stitched me up and sent me back to the ward. And it was, it was a, it was a, from my perspective, it was a fair mistake to make because the vein actually tore in my groin, not where they were doing the surgery. And that was because the vein stretched and they're a bit like, a bit like tissue paper. They're very fragile. And so the tension down in the joint, in the groin caused the tear. That night on the ward, I was in a lot of pain and I called the nurses several times and they said, oh, you're okay. Just press the fentanyl button. And you know, the button, you know, it'll be reset in 10 minutes.

11:03 You can press it again. And then in the morning, the physio came in to get me up for rehab because with that kind of operation, they start rehab the next day because the body goes, oh, okay, there's this expectation that I can move. Let's respond to what that is. And I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked down at my leg and it was at least twice the size it normally was. And I said to the physio who was very young, I said, my legs not normally like this. And he said to me, you'll be okay. Just stand up. And then as I stood up, I felt very faint and then I collapsed back on the bed.

11:44 I was unable to move. He pressed the red emergency button and from there, the emergency team came in very, very, very quickly. Was this what we call a code blue? Yes. In other words, your heart stopped? Yes. So they started putting oxygen on my face, attaching, I'm not sure what they're called, but then started attaching the sensors on my chest. EKG things, I think that's what they're called. I'm not a doctor. No, we do that. And it was surreal. But my whole life, I've had this optimism that things will be okay. And I remember that all this, there was up to about 12 people in the room at one point and I could see that somebody was taking notes over in the back corner and then the surgeon came up at one point, the physio was standing over in the left-hand corner, just pale.

12:39 He looked so scared. And I could hear what they were saying and they're saying, oh, he's not breathing. He doesn't have a pulse. And I was thinking, I'll be okay. I'll be okay. And at one point I said, can you get my partner? Call her. Call her. And so I saw somebody run off to go do that. And then I started to black out. Actually, just before that, I heard them say his blood pressure is 52 on 36. And at that point I thought, oh, I'm in real trouble here. And then actually it went a bit further before I blacked out. And I had this sense that I thought, oh gosh, this is dying.

13:21 I'm dying right now. This is what dying is like. And then I had this immense sadness that nobody I loved was in the room with me. And it was this very deep, deep, painful sadness. And that's around the point where I blacked out. Keep going. What happened next? Then my experience was, and there was a lot of curiosity involved with this, my experience was that I had blacked out and I could see black, but I still had conscious awareness. And I knew that I was dying and I experienced myself become ripples. And these ripples were spreading out and out infinitely.

14:03 And there was no separation between me and the ripples. I wasn't seeing ripples. I was the ripples. And they were going out all directions. And once again, there was this awareness, oh, I'm dying. And this was very, wasn't like in linear time where, you know, I thought might follow another thought it was almost like these insights were downloading instantly. And one of the insights I have was, oh, I still feel like myself. I thought when I die, I would become this enlightened Buddha. But there's still this sense of myself.

14:45 And also I was conscious I had no physical pain. Did you at some point feel like there was a separation of you outside of your body? It's a good question. I actually felt like I just didn't have a body. It was very much I was the ripples and I was this consciousness. And were you still seeing black or did you see anything else? I was, it was still black, but there was this sensation of the ripples. And so I didn't physically see ripples. I just felt them. And you were them. What do you think they represented? For me, I'm not sure if it was part of the, should we call it the returning home process.

15:31 Where for me, that was my way of moving from one state to the next. And I've listened to many NDE stories since. And I hear the commonality of people feeling like themselves. But yeah, I don't have an explanation for the ripples as such. What else were you feeling? So I felt very little at motion wise. So that deep sadness that that was gone. And it was just this awareness. So I didn't, I wasn't feeling massive amounts of joy or anything like that. It was almost like a neutrality.

16:13 But as these ripples were going out, I started to bargain. I started to say, I want to stay. Who were you bargaining with? That's an ultimate question. I don't know if I can answer that with full knowing, but my sense is I was asking something greater than me. And I'm not sure if that was my soul that I was asking to stay for, or if it was this consciousness that was a greater awareness than me. But I just started communicating, I want to stay. I want to stay. And the ripples were still going out. And I was still very aware I'm still dying.

16:54 I'm still dying. And then I started to say, well, I want to stay for my partner. I want to stay for the kids. And the ripples were still going out and out and out. And then I felt these wants. And I said, I want to stay for the work that I do and walk the planet from my heart. And the instant I expressed that, I came straight back into my body, I opened my eyes. I heard the staff say, we've got a pulse. His breathing, his eyes are open. And interestingly, I came back to immense physical pain, level 11 physical pain. And I was later told, because I'd lost so much blood, it was pressing on my organs. And that was what was causing the pain.

17:37 That is one of the hardest things about coming back. If not the, is that, and I've been assuming something I'm going to ask instead of assume, when you were these ripples and this communication was going on, and you mentioned warmth, were you feeling any pain or were you completely out of pain? No pain whatsoever. I assume that the drugs that you were being given there for the pain were also affecting you mentally in some way. Did you feel like that was gone too? And your conscience consciousness was clear instead? Yeah, I feel very, very, very clear in that moment.

18:20 And that the, yeah, I know the haze from having those kind of drugs. And it wasn't that at all. It was a very clear sense of consciousness and that I was the consciousness. This is so interesting because this is so different as you know, than most near death experiences out there. That doesn't make it any less real or anything like that. I think it's fascinating. And I think that you were given this experience to learn something. What do you think you learned from it? And I have a feeling there's a lot, but start somewhere. Yeah, I just learned so much because one was the impact of knowing that I am mortal in this physical body.

19:10 So the reminder of being mortal and that time is limited. And so for me, events can happen in life. I can attach meaning to them and use them to create a better life. Or I can go, well, that just happened. I don't need to understand anything. I didn't need to know anything. But for me, it was okay, I had this experience. I'm not interested in what the doctors say happened. I know that I had this experience. And for a long time, I doubted the experience for months. I thought maybe I just fainted and then I eventually got to the point where, hang on a second. If I fainted, how was I able to think?

19:53 How was I able to have this conscious awareness? And so it was coming back to I had this experience. Okay, I exist after I leave my body. And it's been this contemplation that's still with me all the time. Oh, okay. How can I make the most of my life? I wasn't living from the heart, even though I was kind and I was generous. I was what I can see now. I was the martyr. I was doing things out of obligation. I was giving away 100% of my energy for everybody else. And I wasn't listening to my heart. So in regards to the relationship I was in at that time, it wasn't working.

20:38 It hadn't been working for years. And it was very volatile. And it was causing me a lot of distress. And even though my intuition would be saying, you got to leave, you know, it's time to just quit on this. I wouldn't. And so that was part of my suffering, was that I was in a relationship that wasn't working. After the near-death experience, it was like this momentum started that I couldn't stop. So my human mind wanted the relationship to continue. And I was in hospital for three weeks. And then three weeks after I got out of our hospital, the relationship just fell apart. It was over. And I was very, very, very ill.

21:20 I could hardly walk because I'd lost so much blood. And then I developed a very, very severe blood clot in my leg. And I literally had to start life all over again. That was my daughter. She came with me and I had her bedrooms worth of furniture. And I almost had nothing else other than my music equipment. And so we moved into a new house and it was bare. It was just her bedroom and her desk and my music equipment. And my health was very poor and life just started all over again. And it was like the universe just stripped me, stripped me bare. The inquiry around, okay, I wasn't living from my heart.

22:04 What did that mean? What was stopping me from living from my heart? How can I live from my heart? What does it even mean to live from the heart? Gosh, what a massive question. And I treated my experience that I want to stay for the work that I do and walk the planet from my heart as a contract that I wasn't going to come back to life. I was not going to come back to this physical form. However, I had the realization that I had to live life from my heart and that was the linchpin. And so coming back to this life, my contract has been, okay, the not negotiable is you have to live from your heart.

22:51 Not what the mind says, what the heart says. And so that was a huge learning and it's still a huge learning every day. Yeah, in what ways is that difficult because we still have to exist here. We have to have food. We have to earn a living. We have to do those kind of things. And I have a feeling if I was 100% living from my heart, I would be just like you going surfing. I would just be up on the beach or skiing every day or something like that. And there's a practical side too. So explain the balance and how does that work? So for me, the practical side is that my mind is a tool.

23:35 It's not in charge. It used to be in charge. I was always doing what the rational mind was telling me, which was based on the past. So it was based on what protected me in the past. It was based on successes from the past. Because the heart is this infinite guide that has this deep awareness and wisdom that's saying go forward towards this. And the mind is the tool for taking me there. So there's the physical necessities of life, earning an income. But when it's aligned with my heart, what I'm doing is I'm living what people would say, taking aligned action.

24:21 It's aligned to my heart. So there can be resistance to doing things. The mind will kick in and like, oh, I don't feel like doing this today. But the heart's guidance is that this is the way forward. The mind is the tool for taking me there. So there's been a big shift in that, that my mind isn't the decision center. My mind is the tool. The heart is the decision center. And of course, the gut as well, that gut instinct, oh, no, this is right. This is right. But the mind is the tool. That's a great explanation. Thank you. That was perfect. Just a brief interruption. This month, we're asking you, our favorite listener, to support the show.

25:05 It's definitely a labor of love for Will and me, but it takes a ton of time and money, and we need donations to keep things going. It's easy. Go on over to roundtripdeath.com, click on the little donation button in the upper right hand corner. You can show your support for the podcast and help us move forward. We appreciate it. Merry Christmas and thank you, thank you. Now back to the guest. Okay, before we got started, before we were recording, you said specifically, Eric, you can ask me anything. Right? Yeah, I got it. I said you may be sorry. I love it. Okay.

25:45 Now, this won't be too bad. I do want to ask you a couple of hard things. If you've listened, I know you've listened to this show some, and you've probably heard about a lot of people whose, their relationships changed drastically after their NDE. That's a very common thing. Marriages, many end in divorce, certainly not all, but many do. Tell me why yours did, and you don't have to get into detail, but was it just because of how different you were, or what was it? There's a few reasons. If we go sort of with a, with a birds eye view, it was just our time had finished, our time with each other and learning from each other and being of benefit to each other had finished.

26:32 And that had been finished for a few years, but we were still hanging on. That makes sense. But you had kept hanging on until this happened. Yes. And then it sounds like your heart said, you can let go now, it's okay. Well, see, my, my thing was, this can't go on like it is. That this is what the realization was after the NDE experience. This can't be like it is. And there was this point, I was in hospital and the doctors were considering doing a very dangerous operation to clear the blood clot. They got to this point and they said, we've decided not to do the operation. It's too dangerous.

27:12 And my then partner came in and I told her we're not doing the operation. And she said to me, well, I don't want to spend my life with somebody with a disability and then walked out and slammed the door. And that was the moment where I thought, do you know what? I have given everything, everything. There's been, she, she had been through cancer and there was times we thought the cancer was back and I thought, I've given everything. And I just felt so, it was a realization. It was like, ah, okay, okay. That experience would have made it easier to go, okay, we're done.

27:53 Yeah. And she was a good person, right? A really good person doing many good things in the world. Not in that particular moment, I'd say. Not what I needed. However, it was what I needed, right? Because it helped set me free. Yeah. In kind of a cruel way. Okay, you, you described yourself as a martyr. It sounds like that this martyr syndrome started back from the PTSD, from what happened with your daughter. Would you say that's the case? I would say it was there beforehand. And in that, my mom, I love her dearly. She was a nurse for over 60 years. She was a long-serving nurse in Australia and seeing how she gave and gave and gave that that got hardwired into my, my personality structure around, this is how you live life.

28:49 And, and that worked for her, but it didn't work for me, right? That was her heart, not my heart. And so after the near-death experience, I said, ah, okay. And one of the lessons that I had was actually it's not about giving, it's about sharing. So there's part that's for me, there's part for you, right? And it was the same thing with money. I was giving all my money to help others and leaving myself with nothing. So now the context is, okay, I will share. I will share my energy. I will share my time. I'm still keeping pieces for me. And that has been a much, much more sustainable way of living for me.

29:31 And I just bring that up because sometimes that can be part of the grieving process. Is this self-inflicted pain, martyrdom, whatever we want to call it can come out in a lot of different ways. So, yeah, thank you. That's a good inquiry for me to explore. Yeah. Yeah, your heart will help you figure that one out. You mentioned the physical healing was tough. You were in the hospital for three weeks. But tell me about right after this incident because, well, first of all, do you have any idea how long your heart was stopped? I don't. And I did speak to the doctor about it on one occasion and he said, oh, you gave us a fright but we weren't really worried.

30:14 And of course, please don't sue us. Easy for him to say. Yeah, yeah. And I know it was very real. And coming back to, I was just trusting my experience. I had this experience and it was, okay, I don't need to know all the logistical details. I just know I had this experience and I can either use that to make my life better or I can get caught up in, you know, for example, the litigation was a big thing. Do I sue because there was many things that went wrong before I had that experience but also afterwards.

30:57 But for me, it was okay, I actually had to go through this experience. I feel like there was another hand guiding what happened. Who did you first tell about the experience? It was probably my partner, I think, at that time. I remember the first time that I started talking about it publicly, which I didn't want to talk about it publicly. But my guidance, these days are much, much better at listening to my intuition or my guidance and guidance was you need to tell this story. That's part of the entry fee to coming back is you have to tell this story. And so the first time I did that publicly was I put a video on YouTube.

31:40 It was only because I had a coach who said, you should put a video of you telling the story on your website. And at that stage, I was just a beginning coach. And so I thought, well, okay, and I resisted for about three months creating the video. And eventually it just got to the point of surrender. So I created the video and then within about a month, I had 70 or 80,000 views. I started getting clients through the telling the story. And so, okay, surrendering and trusting even more. But I remember this moment in the hospital and I was in the ICU and it was maybe the second day.

32:20 And I was really suffering. And I remember saying to the nurse, I'm so grateful to know this level of suffering. There's so many people in the world that are experiencing this level of suffering. And I'm so grateful to know what this level of suffering is like in this lifetime. And that just stood out to me. Oh, where did that come from? I bet that nurse had never heard that before. No, nobody likes to suffer. But having gratitude for absolutely everything, that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it was a very different experience. And that was when I realized that something in me had changed from the near-death experience.

33:01 Yeah, absolutely. By the way, you mentioned your website, ashpro.com. We'll put it in the show notes for people that want to reach out to you. What else is there to share with everybody out there? I mean, you were basically told you need to share this. Why and what's the main message? Well, for me, the main message is listen to your heart, trust yourself. And it's not just me that has that barrier in life that they're not listening to their heart and they're not trusting themselves. And so my experience was for me to access joy and the life that was truly possible was I had to learn how the mind works.

33:50 And so in that, what were my past things? And of course, that's an ongoing process all the time in life is going, oh, why did I react that way? And listening to the heart. And so for me, there's this process where we go through, which is we learn about ourselves so we can know ourselves. And then when we know ourselves, we can be ourselves. And the more that we be ourselves in the world, the more we back ourselves. And when we back ourselves, we learn about ourselves. And so it's like this cycle. And for me, that's the cycle that I had to engage in so that I could create what I want in my life.

34:35 So now for me, life is very loving. It's a beautiful life. I have very good physical health. I love where I live. We had a beautiful home. Those values that I wanted, but was seeking in the wrong person before through me honoring myself and trusting myself and trusting my own heart and intuition has led me to the life that I wanted all along. Beautifully said, what's your level of fear of death? I'm going to put it at a one. And I give it a one because I love my life so much. But I don't have fear about going over the other side.

35:17 Okay. There's, it's just part of the process of life is that there's this experience of leaving life and coming into the other side. And I don't know what the known is. I used to be so attached to trying to work out the result of everything. It's like this conversation. I don't know what the result of our conversation is, what the outcome is. I never know either, you know, and then I get an email from somebody telling me and it's usually positive. So, and I'm sure you're affecting people in a positive way today. For me, the main part of the message of this today, and it may be different for other people, and I hope it is.

35:59 I hope everybody's getting out of this, whatever they need. But for me, it's this whole heart, mind balance kind of thing. I loved your explanation of the mind being a tool and following your heart. What do you do when those things are really in conflict? The first thing that comes to mind is the never in conflict. It's just the perception that they're in conflict, which creates the struggle. But so just, you know, it's very normal to go into the struggle and say, okay, there's some story, there's something from the past that is preventing me from moving forward on the guidance. Okay, well, what is it? And then it's having resources and tools.

36:40 And by that, you know, I now I have this amazing network of people that I can access to help me process emotions, to help me process thoughts, but as well as that, there's eight years worth of tools. Okay, so for example, somebody I truly love is Phil Stutz, and he works with somebody called Barry Michaels, and they have this body of work called the tools. And they're these short visualizations you can do to work through challenging things in your life. I love those tools. And so for me, it's like, okay, there's just this kind of little speed bump. I spend time with the speed bump.

37:21 I spend time contemplating the other part of it, which the duality of it is, well, I don't spend time with it. I just observe the emotion come through and move on like clouds. If the cloud gets stuck, there's a story. Oh, what's the story? Otherwise, you know, it's just anger. It can come and go. It's just grief. It can come and go. It's just joy. It can come and go. But if it sticks and I start to go into struggle, there's some sort of story from the past that's holding it there. Prior to your experience, did you have any kind of belief or thoughts on an afterlife? About 12 months before my near-death experience, I'm guessing around that timeframe.

38:04 It might have even just been four months. I went to a Wayne Dyer workshop. I didn't know this was going to happen, but he brought Anita Mujani on the stage. She's awesome. I've met her. Yeah, she's great. Ah, and there was this whole different energy in the room. Now, the room was already quite expanded working with Wayne Dyer, one of the true masters. And then Anita Mujani spoke, and there was this totally different feel in the room. And I had curiosity and I read a book. And so I had this, well, maybe, you know, that was her experience. I don't know. You know, it's possible we live after we die. I'd already been trained in Reiki, which was a real key moment for me in life going, ah, actually, there is energy.

38:51 Before that, everything was black and white. It was physical and nothing else. And when I trained in Reiki, I realized, wow, there's this energetic thing. I don't understand it. So there was curiosity, but there definitely wasn't the understanding that I have now. And can you give some advice for somebody that is struggling with that? You know, maybe they just don't, ah, I don't know. This whole thing about an afterlife sounds kind of like baloney because my brain, not my heart. My brain's telling me that that's not logical and that can't be. I'm going to give you the final word here. Speak to that person. There's so many moments in your life that you have had evidence that you are much more than just a brain and a body.

39:39 And that might be just moments of intuition where you've thought of somebody and they've called you or that you've woken up in the middle of the night with a dream and it's giving you an insight into what's happening in your life or next steps. Trust it. You just got to trust it. And if you just follow your path, it's going to open up. Like if you go into a forest and initially the forest, there's all these branches and it looks dark and then you go into the forest and it's easier to move around. Once you're already in the forest, you discover waterfalls. It's all there. It's just taking step after step after step and trusting yourself as you go. Beautiful. And Dash, thank you so much for being with me today.

40:21 Thank you, Eric. It's just such an honor to spend time with you and love your questions. Love your podcast. Thank you. Thanks again for listening. If you haven't already, hit that follow or subscribe button. Now is a great time to do it. And if you want to help us continue to put out this kind of quality content, head on over to roundtripdeath.com. Look for that itty-bitty donate button in the upper right hand corner. You know what to do from there. And while you're there, go ahead and sign up for our email newsletter and you'll be the first to know when new episodes go live. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.