Bri's NDE: God Asked, "Are You Ready?"

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. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome, welcome everybody to Round Trip Death.

0:41 And to our special guest today, Brie Lafferty. How are you, Brie? I am fantastic. Thank you so much for asking. It is fun to have a listener of the show on. Yeah, I was actually directed to the show through one of my followers and became a huge fan. The stories were just so powerful. So I'm really excited to be here. Well does it feel weird to be on that side of it with a camera in your face now? A little bit, yeah. Okay, a few people that I've met in person that had only heard me on the show, they're like, it is so weird hearing your voice come out of a real person here.

1:22 Hopefully that's not the case for you. You know, I think I had a pretty good idea between listening to you on the podcast, our brief phone call, and seeing you today. So I'm not too shocked. Good. I would hate to be too scary. Hey, tell us a little bit about you. Who's Brie? Yeah, so after my interesting experiences, I became a death and spiritual doula, which I've been pursuing for a couple of years. And I am also now an award-winning author twice over, two out of my three books, and my third book is up for an award. Congratulations. Thank you. And where do you live?

2:02 I'm on the western slope of Colorado. I've heard this term death doula for a while. I know what a birth doula is. Tell me a little bit about what a death doula does. Sure, the simple way is I'm a midwife, the afterlife. That rhymes, very good. Thank you. Birth doulas help transition life into the world. I help with the transition out of it as a death doula, and I help people birth into their authentic spiritual selves as a spiritual doula. So it's really just a non-medical, holistic support person helping with these most difficult transitions of our lives. Hey, we're going to get into your NDE in a second, but I'm just curious about this.

2:46 So if anybody else isn't, skip ahead a couple of minutes, but to cure my curiosity, tell me how do you get into it, and how do you know how to help people? And have you had any interesting stories happen? Yeah, absolutely. So my background is actually an instruction, and after my near-death experience, I was really drawn to death and dying, and not necessarily in the romanticized way, but kind of in a jealous way, honestly. I really wanted to go back and get as close as I could to where I just come from.

3:27 And I knew that I could help people in that difficult transition by being authentically excited for them. You know, I didn't have to share my story. I didn't have to, you know, explain myself at all. I just got to hold authentic energy for people transitioning. And sometimes that's really what they need, especially, you know, tons of stuff is going on medically. Families, you know, can have all sorts of different types of emotions. There's a lot going on. So just to be a stable, authentic, excited, happy person, I felt like I could bring a lot of value. I'm also young. I'm in my 30s, so I bring a new fresh face to kind of the death and dying industry.

4:10 You know, a lot of people in hospice or other death do as, at least up until the last few years have been, you know, retired RNs, retired nurses. And to have young people really enter this field is really exciting. Really opens up the community for accepting talking about death and dying. It's a really scary subject for a lot of our, our society. So bringing this authentic, excited energy without being, you know, this morbid, gothic or older person has been really, really exciting. I started as a hospice volunteer and I did that for two years and had incredible stories, you know, tons of them.

4:55 Then when I last corporate America, I found a thing called a death dola found out I could do so much more than I could as a volunteer in hospice and help people anywhere from couples my age into people in their 80s and 90s who are actively dying. Everything in between. How do people find you? Yeah. So a lot of people reach out to me through, I'm on social media, I've got a website. And we'll stick that in the show notes, but I just, I just meant in general, is it like does hospice recommend you or because if people haven't heard of a death dola, how do they even know to look for one? Yeah. So I do a lot of just education with content.

5:37 So that is being active in the community. I give presentations on all sorts of things revolving around end of life challenges, advanced directives, all the cool, low cost, green alternative ways that you can later, your body when you're done with it. Okay, we're not getting into that human composting thing here today. Maybe some other time. So yeah, I just give a lot of presentations. It's a lot of networking. I've got a lot of experience as my role as a business, business development person and marketing professional in construction. So I utilize some of those skills to help me get the word out about what a death dola is.

6:19 And then of course, social media is awesome. I do post in lives and events and stuff there as well. Okay. I'm sorry, I will admit I haven't seen those, but I will look them up. No, I can't wait. I know nurse Hadley who you've probably heard we had on about a year ago and a hospice nurse and she was awesome, had great stories. So last my last question before we get into your story, do you have one that you want to share with us of someone that you've helped her worked with? Yeah, probably the, the one that really hit me was one of my first, not really my patient, but I was assigned to her.

7:02 She was in the memory ward and I saw her every week, her inner husband, her husband was always there and her husband was losing her. So with dementia, you lose them twice and it's really hard. And the amount of love he had for her was something just indescribable. And Puskas was great, you know, being a volunteer, they taught me all about death and dying, the process, you know, kind of what to, you might see, you know, with people passing some of the things they see and report and just some of the magic that happens. And of course, the hard parts, what the body looks like, what they go through.

7:44 What I was not prepared for was what the family members go through. And her husband was so destroyed, it was getting really, really close to the end. I think this happened a few weeks before she transitioned completely and he was just devastated. And that really tore me up and I had no idea how much that would turn me up. But the beautiful thing that happened at the same time was I was a pet therapy team. So I had my little, she was my service dog and I got her certified as a therapy dog. So we went in and the people would always light up.

8:26 They might not be able to communicate, but they would light up when they saw my dog. I wouldn't say it was me, it was mostly my dog. And you're not supposed to let the patients hold, you know, the dog by themselves or the leash and there's a lot of rules around it just to protect the patients and the dog. But this gal held on the leash. She really wanted to hold the leash of this, my little dog. And she fell asleep, blaspheming it so tight and just the list on her face and she just passed out in the communal room holding the leash to my dog. And it was such an interesting moment where I realized grief is not a cycle.

9:12 It is a web because you don't go through one emotion then another, then another, then another. You can have two, three, all of them, none of them, all at the same time. So that was really, a really eye opening for me was this very positive negative experience at the same time. So is your job more to help the person that is in those final stages of life or to help the family or is it kind of equal? Yeah, as a death to Julia, I found myself helping way more family members than actually the people transitioning. I thought I would be doing what I did as a hospice volunteer and sitting with the people who are actively dying, but it has gone so in a such direct, different direction than I thought.

9:59 And I would say 98% of my work is helping the family. All right, enough about that. Let's talk about you. You had a very different kind of experience. Seems like I say that all the time because no two are alike, but tell me what was going on with your health growing up. I know you were a sick little girl. Yeah, so I started experiencing really weird symptoms at the age of 10. So we had just moved, made a big move. I started middle school probably way too early. Fifth grade was in middle school or junior high and I was young for my grade.

10:43 So I was kind of thrown into this big, big girl world in a small girl body. So there was a lot going on and the first couple of years, we kind of didn't pay much attention to these symptoms because they were odd and there was a lot going on and it could be growing pains. So the first thing that started happening was my forearms and my calves and my arches of my feet and my palms would cramp really bad. And you know, my parents are just like, oh, it's probably growing pains. You know, your dad's tall, maybe you'll be tall. And within the probably a year, if not a few months after that, I started getting involuntary muscle movements of my left arm.

11:29 And I would do, it would do this like flutter thing and I'd have no control of it, but I have long hair. So I just pretended I was playing with my hair and kind of hit it. The cramping got so bad that I, I wrapped my arms and legs and east bandages and hit them under my clothes at school. But nothing of this was too much of a concern until I got to be about 14. And at the time I was 14, my muscle, I had voluntary muscle movements were now in both my arms and my legs. And I also added in where I would just shiver for like 20 minutes. And my grandma swore I was freezing and they tried to cover me up and I'm not, I'm not cold, they did not as allergic reaction, but I would just tremor so bad.

12:17 The muscle cramping also started to affect my back and I started developing nerve pain. So all of these symptoms combined were starting to become a concern. I grew up in a medical family. My grandpa was a doctor and he had no idea what was going on. And so we've finally started to see some different doctors and the first one was on the right track, you know, and we dismissed, we dismissed him because he wanted to put me on a benzo at 14 or 15 years old. And when he suggested that my mom said, well, we don't even have a diagnosis. Let's, let's hold off, you know, she luckily knew how dangerous benzos could be, you know, any other parent with no medical knowledge might have agreed to that and, you know, looking back that could have been detrimental.

13:09 But he wanted to put me on a benzo, benzo-depot diazepine. And when we went to schedule another appointment, they said he was leaving the office and his partner wasn't taking any of his patients. So he was willing to put a 14 or 15 year old on a benzo diazepine without a diagnosis and not following me. So we just ignored everything he said because how can you trust anything that came out of his mouth? Yeah. Yeah, that's scary. Yeah. So we went on, you know, another four year search for a diagnosis and answer. And it was the symptoms kept progressing.

13:50 I was an extreme insomniac. I mean, one hour a night, if I was lucky, sometimes zero hours for two or three days. So extreme anxiety, extreme depression set in, OCD. I have weird things going on with my body. I am a teenager in puberty as a girl. I'm in a new place. And so all of these things just kind of really converged. And I was a wreck. So we just tried different medications. We tried holistic practices, alternative medicine, Chinese herbs. I mean, basically whatever my mom could get her hands on, we tried. And nothing really helped.

14:32 I finally got a diagnosis at 18 and we thought with a diagnosis would come answers and it didn't. It did that being a very rare neurological movement disorder. And last I looked it up was last August in 2023 and still only one in a million people have this condition. Wow. What's it called? Bioclonus dystonia. Okay. There will not be a quiz at the end. Good. Nor a spelling beyond how to spell it. Well, it took me here to learn how to pronounce it. So. Suffice it to say very rare neurological disease going on. And something that rare they usually don't have.

15:12 Hey, here's the pill you take for it. Yeah. So, and by the time I was diagnosed, everything they would have tried me on even with the diagnosis we had already tried. You know, we tried stuff for the muscle cramps stuff for the non-epileptic myoclonic seizures, the twitches, the tremors, the pain, the anxiety, the depression, you know, we tried pharmaceuticals for all of it. My mom and I wrote a book called Wired to Be Disfunctional, our journey with myoclonus dystonia. In the last 10 pages, it goes through every single medication I tried. And that's 10 pages worth of different medications and their side effects. Wow. Well, we had also heard about a brain surgery that was possible, but it was shweringly experimental.

15:59 The neurologist that ended up diagnosing me said, no one in this clinic, a pretty well-known clinic in Denver has seen anybody has any patients with this. So we are not going to put a 18-year-old through experimental brain surgery, you know, just do your best, basically. So did they tell you this was going to be something lethal or something that you would just bother you forever or what? Yeah. So there are lethal forms of myoclonus dystonia. It's called progressive. Oh my gosh, I don't know. But there are lethal forms of it. They did not think mine was, but they also said mine wasn't progressive. And yet every year it progressed and progressed and progressed and progressed.

16:44 So, you know, at this point I had been misdiagnosed a bunch of times by the time I was 18 and been put on so many medications that I reacted to and I just lost faith in the medical industry and I didn't care what they said, whether they said it was lethal or not. I was absolutely positive. I was going to die before I returned 28. I just knew it in my heart. I told my mom that since starting at 14 or 15 as well that I was going to die. I was going to die young and I was okay with it. So I also faced my own mortality from a young age, which also led me into being a death doula later on.

17:25 So let's jump up to from 18. Is there much that happened between then and when you were 26? If not, let's jump to that. Yep. I was just about two because it kind of stagged me. For the next six years, just me trying to do my best. So kind of gave up on any treatment. But my mom did. My mom never did. And when I reached 26, I had actually moved to a whole other state because I figured I was going to die and I would die there. And it was just that knowing. But my mom, she, she found another treatment option that we tried and I ended up coming on top of my illness already, which my body's fatigued.

18:12 It's hurting. My soul hurts. My mind hurts and prayed to God, screened to God as a teenager and no answers, no help. So I was very broken at this point and I ended up getting flu, really flu like symptoms. And they got so bad that I could not hold down water. I can't hold down food. I was really tired. I was really sick. But of course I had no trust in the medical community. So I wasn't going to go see a doctor about it and tell them it's, you know, a holistic alternative treatment. They're just going to, you know, throw more labels at me. So I figured I would deal with it. This went on for two or three weeks and leading up to it, I couldn't sleep.

18:57 I was really, really sick. I just was exhausted. And on the night of April 27th, 2017 at two in the morning, I gave up. I called out to whatever God there was. I had no idea who it was, but I basically was thinking and calling out from my soul, my heart, my mind, my body, absolutely everything. I can't do this anymore. It's in your hands. If you're out there, it's up to you. I am done. And growing up, I was told, you know, surrender to God, but no one tells you what that means.

19:37 And that night I found out I surrendered. I gave up. My body gave up. My soul gave up. Everything gave up. And in that moment, everything was ripped. There were, there was silence. There was peace. There was no pain. It was calm. It was serenity. The only time in my life, I remember it being that supreme. And right after that, I heard this big booming voice. Are you ready? Something just happened. I didn't hesitate to say yes. And in that, I felt three really hard pounds on my chest and I felt my heart stop. And I was detached from my body.

20:19 And that is the beginning of what is a profound experience. Wow. I just want to make sure we're clear in case somebody wasn't listening closely enough. This is not suicide, right? But it is. I give up. I can't do it any longer. And I get it. I mean, this has been the majority of your life. Yeah. And so you say you surrendered. Okay. I guess we'll have to figure out exactly what that means. Yeah. It's still hard to put words to it other than, I think, I think I could compare it to somebody swimming in the ocean and, you know, being stuck and not seeing land anywhere near them.

20:59 They're exhausted. They've been treading water in high waves. It's cold. They're tired. They've been stranded for days, not weeks, however long someone can survive. And when they give up knowing that giving up means they die, that's the closest I can explain to that, is you just stop. I think that's a good explanation. Giving up is not suicide. That's a different thing, but giving up. All right. So go back a step. What were you feeling and what were you hearing? You said you heard something. Yeah. So at the moment I gave up, the moment I stopped treading the water I call life, I felt peace, extreme peace and serenity and stillness and no pain, no fear, no, just nothing negative.

21:52 And it was amazing. It was almost as if heaven had entered the room. And with that, the voice, a big, booming voice, and I, you know, it wasn't external. It wasn't internal. It was just ever present. And I would say it sounded masculine. Asked, are you ready? Just those words, and I didn't hesitate to think about what that meant or what I was ready for. I just knew something had happened and I was absolutely ready for whatever was next. Okay. Keep going. All right. So as soon as I think yes, I feel those pounds of my heart and I'm detached from my body and I am just energy in this black void.

22:37 I call it a void even though it was not void of anything. It was everything. It was pure energy. But it was, you know, it was dark, I didn't see any light, but it was, it felt as if you could walk into those old static TV stations and it was just warm and love and energy. And in that, in that darkness, I understood the Creator to be there. I understood God, the, the being that saved me from whatever was just going on, which I was completely unaware of at this point. I didn't, I wasn't aware of a person named Brie.

23:18 I wasn't aware of a place called earth. I wasn't aware of a body. And in this place, I had no body. And even though I was completely unaware of the human concept and where I'd just come from, some part of my conscious knew that I was dead. And so I had that thought, am I dead? And three months up here out of this darkness, just floating by, laughing at me. And I, you know, not mean, just like, oh, I feel only knew. And I just thought that was super curious. I didn't put any judgment into it and they've disappeared back into the darkness.

23:58 It would take me another six years to realize they were laughing because there is no such thing as death. So it was a funny question. It was a funny thought because there is no such thing as death or dead. And after they fade into back into the darkness, I end up in this tunnel and I am going like supersonic hyper speed, warp speed, whatever, so fast. And it's the outside is filled with ones and zeros. And I'm still just a soul body at this point. And I know I'm being downloaded with so much important and amazing information. Not aware of what that information is. Just I knew I would, it would come to me when I needed it.

24:42 And it was very cool. It was kind of horizontal and just most theory old blue with ones and zeros tons of binary code, which I could read binary code. Maybe I could go back and figure out what, what everything was saying. And after that, I end up in a white, white room. It's not really a room because there's no walls or floors or doors or walls, any of that, but if, you know, it's a space. And behind me is a cantel, it's a send in master teacher. And which one? I have no idea. I think it really depends on what your religious and cultural upbringing maybe is who you might experience.

25:25 But for me, I would recognize someone like Jesus, just because I was raised in a Christian household. And in front of me is a pile of giant black numbers. And they're all just kind of piled up and they're one through nine. And I grab them and I throw them up with childlike enthusiasm and go, no, what are you love creating these? Because I realized the universe was created with math. And for some reason I thought that was really exciting at that moment. Yeah, that's kind of different because some people wouldn't be excited at that. They'd go, oh, mass. I never liked mass.

26:06 Yeah. I mean, I enjoyed that, but I never, you know, was super gun hoe. It wasn't my career. It was nothing like, you know, I wasn't a math nerd. I didn't join, gosh, there's tons of math clubs, you know, so for math and binary code and numbers to show up a few times through my experience is still kind of funny to me, especially because in the process of this disorder, along with some other brain injuries I've had along the way, I developed a satia for numbers. So I find that really ironic and hilarious. That really is. Yeah. That's, I don't know how to explain that, but that's okay.

26:49 So after this excitement with the numbers, I end up in another place and this place is full of other beings and it's the right white area was the first time I had a human body and the only time in my experience I had a human like body. So going into the next part of my experience, there are other beings and these beings looked more like dolls than anything. And I call them beings because I have no, I still didn't know what a human was. So if they ever had a human experience, I don't know. They didn't look human, but they didn't look alien. We all just kind of had these fluid bodies and they look like dolls.

27:33 I looked like a doll for a little while as well. Then I also was a robot for a little while. I was a snowman for a little while, but the big part of this experience was my thoughts turned into reality instantly. So I saw these guys sliding down snow covered trees and I thought it looked like so much fun, but I didn't think I liked snow. And before my eyes instantly, as soon as I thought that it turned to these lush green covered trees and I was sliding down them with these other beings. And I thought, wow, if I don't like snow, but they do, what if they are experiencing sliding down the snow trees and I'm sliding down the green trees and we're having these experiences that are separate, but we're experiencing them together.

28:23 And I thought that was just really cool, but not that crazy where I say that here on earth. And it's like, that's kind of a mind blow. But there it was just another like, oh, cool, that they might be experiencing different realities that were experiencing together. Another part was when I was a snowman, these beings were working on a machine with a huge flame at the end of it. And I just had the thought happens if I get too close. Sure enough, I was instantly underneath the flame, melted and a puddle of eyeballs. Then I had the thought, where can you put me back together instantly? I was put back together.

29:03 So my thoughts were instant reality. And I am now so thankful that we have the opportunity to change our thought direction here on earth, because I thought still create reality. But thank goodness we have the chance to change it. Because if you go, oh, I see a tractor across the street, I wonder what would happen if I got run over. You would be there and run over and it would be a lot of pain where in my experience there's no pain, there's no fear. But here you could be like, I wonder, I see that tractor, I wonder what would happen if I get run over. Oh, why don't I just not go stand in front of the tractor? You have that chance to.

29:44 Yeah, you have the time to fix those thoughts. You absolutely have time to fix that. So another big part of this experience is I would say it's really hard to describe. We communicated as one, but no words were ever said. And people ask me if it was telepathy, but telepathy, you have a thought. Everyone receives that thought or hears it, thinks about it and returns it and you hear it all silently. And it was so much faster and even less communication than that. It was just we moved as one. At one point we danced like there was 20 of us and we danced as if we had choreographed for millennia without ever saying a word.

30:28 We just all moved in one and unison. And those beings who put me back together, I didn't try to send my thought to anyone to ask for help. It just, they knew. So that was really an interesting phenomenon in that area. And towards the end of that place I was at, there was a barbed wire fence and there was an opening and some of the beings were going through the opening to on a land bridge behind it. And here we could see behind barbed wire very clearly, but it was very fuzzy and blurry behind the fence in this experience. And I was never asked if I wanted to go with them. I didn't really have a choice.

31:10 I just knew that I couldn't go with them. I didn't know what lied beyond, but I just knew I couldn't go with them. And so I ended up in the last kind of place in my experience and it's a dark room. And this one actually feels like a room. Like it feels small and there are seven like very powerful beings behind me. I don't see them, but I know they're powerful, like not as great as the creator that I met in the void and more powerful than the ascended master teacher. So somewhere in between, then in front of me is the scroll and it's unrolled and things are starting to be written on it.

31:51 Beautiful, sparkly golden script. And for some reason that's when my soul decided, oh, you're going to remember you're a human and your human ego is going to come back and it did and said, huh, you're showing this to a human and the letters disappeared, the scroll rolled up and that was the moment I snapped back into my body. Okay. Well, that's a lot to unpack, isn't it? I can tell some important things that you learned and we'll get into that here in a little while. My first question is, let's talk about the word void. Yeah. It comes up all the time and I've never been that comfortable with it and you said something about it today that made sense that it wasn't devoid of everything.

32:37 Explain that again. What was it like there? Yeah. So, so it absolutely was not devoid of anything. It was absolutely everything. It was everything in energy. So if you take the highest form of energy and you are just in that presence, the center of creation, all the energy possible in all the universes, all the dimensions and put it in a space and you're in that space. It is pure energy and it's like as if you walked into an old TV that had that static on the channel that was just really fuzzy. That's how it felt.

33:18 That's interesting. You know, most people that talk about it, they don't, they don't talk about the energy of it, but they also don't talk about it being completely empty. The fact that it might be black, I don't know, why do we, just because it's dark, for some reason we call it a void or something more, you know, it has this mysterious kind of aura to it and I don't think it needs to. If it has all this energy like you're talking about, it's not scary. It's not devoid of everything except maybe light at that particular time, which also means when you go to the next thing like you did in a lot of other people do, well, imagine this at nighttime, when you turn on a really bright light, it seems a lot brighter than it would have if you turned it on during the day, right?

34:14 Maybe that's what this void is for in some circumstances. So we really get it when the light comes. It is a big impact. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I also heard, I wish I could remember his name, he presented at the IONS conference last year about some different aspects of seeing the light in the near-death experiences and he, I don't know if it was his idea or he found it somewhere, but when light is so bright, it can collapse on itself. And so I often wonder, you know, looking back in my experience, if there was just so much light and it was so bright, it collapsed in on itself.

34:56 Okay, that's blown my mind too. I'll think about that later. Awesome. Okay, when we spoke before, you'd mentioned a bunch of different dimensions. Is that something that you explained going from one place to another to another, or is that something else that you left out today? Yeah, so I didn't, that is the different places I went to. Okay. So, you them as different dimensions, just it makes the most sense in my mind, instead of being one place that are so drastically different, I believe they were five different dimensions. And did this seem like it was, it took place over a long period of time to you?

35:41 How long would you say? So, in the experience itself, I didn't feel any sense of time at all in any of the dimensions. It just really wasn't a concept, to get from here to there, there was no time, there wasn't that concept. However, when I was back into my body, I was terrified to open my eyes. I was absolutely certain. Once again, I didn't know what happened, but somehow my conscious knew that I had died. And so, when I was back in my body and back in the physical, I was positive that if I opened my eyes, I'd be buried in a casket, coffin, whatever, six feet underground.

36:24 And that my parents had ignored my wishes to be cremated because they were so distraught that I had died young and they don't want to cremate me. And it was this full crazy thing going on in my head, but I was terrified to open my eyes because I thought it'd been at least a month, if not two. And how long was it, do you know? When I finally got brave and opened my eyes, it had only been eight minutes. So then, thinking that there was no way it was only eight minutes, I was trying to figure out if I had the day wrong, what day it was, was it the same rough time, like was it eight minutes and 24 hours, eight minutes and 48 hours?

37:04 I was trying really hard to place because I had been gone from my body for so long, it felt. I get it. Like that eight minutes was maybe a day and eight minutes or? Yeah. Yeah. When I opened, I didn't believe the clock, basically, and it believed what I was seeing. You mentioned that you had felt extreme peace and serenity, I think were your words. Yes. Explain that more. So I think that comes from, you know, the 16 years leading up to that, my body was tormented. You know, I constantly had different pains through muscle cramping, nerve pain, twitching, hitting myself, hitting others involuntarily, then the mental anguish of it, you know, and the emotional toll it took, the anxiety, the OCD, my mind was never silent.

37:55 It was always chatter and this and that and what ifs and ruminations. I mean, the list really goes on and on and on and I don't remember the time where it was quiet and pain free. Even before I was 10, I was always so tired. I can keep up with my friends. I didn't do well in sports, even though I look like I would do awesome in sports. And I just, I didn't understand how my friends could play all day and jump on the trampoline and ride their bikes and rollerblane and keep going and run up and down the hill and slide and it was so exhausting. So I never knew what pain free or quiet mind was like.

38:41 And I tried mindfulness meditation, but mindfulness, you really, you know, it's full mind, it's full senses. And when I felt that peace and serenity, it was absolutely something extremely foreign to me. My body felt peace. It felt calm, painless and my mind was silent for the first time in my whole life. That must have been wonderful. When you came back, did everything come back at once or were you still feeling much of that peace? Before I opened my eyes, I was, I was still in a lot of that peace. I was still in a lot of that serenity, but then it started coming back very, very quickly.

39:21 And I started freaking out. I started trying to slow my breath, meditating, begging to go back. I did not want to be in my body again. So at first, the first instance, like second I got back, it was still peace and serenity, but very, very quickly the human took over. It must have been frustrating. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was, I was trying to everything I possibly could to go back. It's been what seven years now since that happened. Yeah. My seventh year anniversary just passed. Well, you seem totally healthy now. What has happened? The after effects of this were also very, very crazy.

40:04 I was in kind of a whole new state of survival. I was so overwhelmed. I had come back with medical intuition blown wide open. I could feel people's pain. I could hear people's thoughts. I mean, if I drove past a car accident, I could tell you exactly where they were injured because I felt it and I could hear what people were thinking. And it was so overwhelming. I also felt like I'd been stuffed into a sausage casing. Like I just felt so constricted and uncomfortable and walls freaked me out. I didn't, I didn't understand the solidity of things and the density and the hatred of the world. I mean, I had gone from, you know, fear and anger and hate to blitz and love and curiosity and joy back to fear and anger and hate.

40:56 And so I was in a whole new state of survival and that in the next year, I actually, I was so such a wreck. I did actually try to take my life. So you know, my near death experience had nothing to do with suicide, but I'm, you know, being transparent and I tried to go back to that place when it didn't work that night, just breathing and wishing. I took drastic measures and ended up in a four day coma because of it. I was not expected to live and I did not get a taste. I did not have another NDE and I was so mad when I woke up from that coma. I was absolutely livid.

41:36 But I realized, okay, well, this has to be for a reason. I must, I guess I've got to be here. I don't know why. And so I did physical therapy. I had some pretty severe brain damage. So I worked really hard. And once I was good and I was functional functioning again as a human being, I jumped into hospice and that really started to help me heal from the experience and kind of everything leading up to the experience and the aftermath of that. So hospice was really healing for me. And then this time I didn't realize I didn't have any symptoms of myoconus dystonia. Exactly because I was just in such a state of survival, I wasn't aware.

42:21 And by the time I had realized that I didn't have symptoms, I finally was starting to talk about it and get excited. But at this point, I had gone back to my career in construction. I was working 40 to 60 hours a week, was volunteering, just going hard. My old thoughts were coming. I have reintegrated into life like I thought I was supposed to do. I had no idea what else I was supposed to do with it. So the illness came back. So I was like, okay, I went into remission for whatever reason. Let's deal with it. And so the illness came back with a vengeance and I ended up having to leave corporate America.

43:06 I did get that brain surgery finally because I had lost all of my dependence. I was no longer able to walk very well, type, text, button up my clothes, put on eyeliner, put on earrings. I mean, my tremors were so bad, I couldn't hold a glass, I couldn't text or type anything, I couldn't work. So I was fast tracked to brain surgery. And it was pretty successful. However, I had the warning that what they had learned in those years from me being 18 to 30 is that myoclonal stestonia is a cunning illness and it loves to learn around the brain surgery. And so I had relief or pretty good relief for about a year.

43:50 And it started rewiring around it and coming back. And kind of hopeless, not hopeless yet. There are still some programming we could do. I had a deep brain stimulator in. But I finally had a good healthcare team that took me seriously, knew what they're doing, had seen and worked with this condition. And I figured, okay, you know, I finally have somebody I can trust with my body. It's time to work on my subconscious. You know, I had a lot of subconscious programs written out of survival that I didn't need or want anymore. And I did that.

44:30 And in that, I ended up in a meditation, a transcendental meditation where I got back into that void, that darkness that. The good void. Yeah, the good. I had a client call it a friendly darkness. And I love it so much. You know, it's the realm of endless possibilities. And as I'm in this place, I see my heart and my brain appear out of the darkness, much like the monks did, and a piece of code from my tunnel come circulate within my heart and my brain. I knew it was rewiring my brain. And the next day I turned off my deep brain stimulator and I have had no symptoms since.

45:12 Wow. I have gone from a miraculous healing to a devastating relapse back to another miraculous healing, but there's been so many amazing, incredible lessons along the way. And looking back as hindsight is crystal clear, I can see exactly why everything happened, how it happened, when it happened. Amazing. All right. What else do you want to talk about? I feel like that was a, that was a good look. Oh, for you. You did awesome. When you had this experience, who did you tell about it? My mom immediately, she's always been way more into the metaphysical and the spiritual while my dad was a fundamentalist Christian.

45:59 And I saw a ghost and Auras as a kid and telling her she, she had pooped me. She didn't not believe me. And she, she kind of helped me with what those things might be and, you know, that they're good and they're gifts. So I'd always told her about any of my metaphysical or paranormal experiences. So of course I told her about this and I had no idea what a near death experience was, or any of the things related out of bodies, spiritually transformative experience, Kundalini awakenings, you know, now, now I know there's a list of things. I had no idea what any of this was and I'm telling her about it and she's, she's actually heard of near death experiences, my great grandmother had three, but didn't talk about him other than watch your words and we're not meant to know everything.

46:49 Those were the only insights I ever knew. Not what she experienced, nothing, just what her life ended up being like around those, not the actual experiences. So I knew very little, but I told my mom, I trusted her. She's been my advocate, my best friend, my whole life, my wing woman, I would not have made it as far as I did without her for sure, medically and spiritually. That's a huge blessing. So I told her, and she had an idea of that. I had the near death experience and I thought she was crazy. It's like, whatever, you get, you have crazy ideas about things. You know, that's not what it was. But through the next year, she persuaded me to go to IAINs and just, you know, feel it out.

47:34 I heard all these amazing stories of near death experiences. Dr. Maria O'Neill, who drowned in a kayaking accident. And I really wanted to see Evan Alexander, you know, the atheistic brain surgeon. And I heard all these fantastic stories of going to heaven and seeing past loved ones and the marble gates of healing and life reviews. And I had none of that. So I was like, cool. That was a beautiful conference. That's not what happened. I did not get to hear Evan Alexander's story though. I didn't do the whole conference. I did a couple of days because I didn't know what to expect. And I heard him on YouTube in 2020 and realized his experience had similarities to mine.

48:20 His was the closest to mine that I had ever heard. And it hit me like a force that I have never experienced. Maybe like a huge G force shoved into my stomach and I realized, oh, that was real. And that's what happened. But it still took me some time to come to terms with that and talk about it. Until I left corporate America after brain surgery was having the kind of crisis like, why did I do that? I worked my full life through all of this to make it to the top. And I just said no to my dream job and why? So I ended up in a meditative state and asking a bunch of questions.

49:04 And I was shown a river with books thrown as stepping stones, meaning I had to write some books. And I didn't want to, but I said, fine, I'll listen. And I wrote my first book about my experience and I've come out ever since. All right. Well, this has been fun. Love your story. Love your attitude. It's been fantastic. Let's leave one last great message for everybody out there today. What's the most important thing that you learned from this that you can share? Our thoughts absolutely create our reality. If you have negative ones, you have a chance to change it.

49:45 And if you have positive ones, have those positive emotions draw it into reality. And that is absolutely the most powerful point I think I've learned in my experience. And how afraid of death are you? Not at all. Scale of one to zero, you're zero. If there is a negative answer in this, it's negative. There it is. That's the answer. All right. I even help people who are facing death. So there's your answer. Thanks so much. Bray appreciate you. Thank you, Eric. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast. Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com. If you want to share your near death experience or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to Eric at roundtriptest.com.

50:33 Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.