Brooke's NDE From Organ Failure (Part 1)

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 to RoundTripDeath everybody.

0:41 And we have a very special guest today. I'm not even going to say her name for a minute. From Southern California in the U.S. Good morning Brooke. Good morning. So nice to be with you Eric. Thank you. It's good to meet you finally and it's good to talk. Can you let our listeners know just a little bit about you? Who's Brooke? Brooke is a very enlivened soul living with two beautiful, wild, wondrously feral little boys that bring endless joy, boundless curiosity and a bundle of play to every single day.

1:23 I am a integrative healer. I am a multidisciplinary practitioner. I have training in depth in clinical psychology, license in that field, but I predominantly now work integrating that for mystical experiences with shamanic energy medicine and some ascension work. It varies person to person, but it is my passion. I'm also a writer and a poet. That was a mouthful all that. Congratulations for even remembering. Not alone knowing what it means. But the one thing I want to hear about is what does feral children mean? Is this like this free range parenting?

2:05 Somewhat. I don't follow like a specific ideology at all. However, we've been blessed to co-create a home school alternative learning environment with a bunch of persons in our immediate environment. They are nature-based 80% of their day, which for two boys is pure joy. Our scholastics are child-led, meaning it's based on their passions and where they're very advantageous and talented. Other areas are supported, but they're not enforced in the normative way. That is not fair. I would have loved that. Yes. I would have too. They have meditation and yoga every day, 90-minute recess.

2:47 It just goes on and on. They have this awesome drum circle and a community garden on Fridays. Very blessed and we love it. That sounds fantastic. Anyway, it's Brooke Grove to let everybody know your full name and we'll have some kind of contact info in the show notes in case anybody wants to get a hold of you, Brooke. But right now, this is a podcast about NDEs. Let's jump into what happened to you. This was back in 2010, I believe. Yes, it was, Eric. Give us some background. What was going on with your health because, wow, something bad happened. Yes. When I was writing my first master's thesis, I started getting very sick, so much so that I had to take a leave of absence from school.

3:35 I knew it was in conjunction to my paper. I was writing about trauma at the time, really pushed by my academic advisor to use my own story. I know now and I knew then that I wasn't ready for it. Back then, I didn't have appropriate boundaries and I wanted to please and I did it anyway. My body immediately resisted. It presented like autoimmune disease. I received a constellation of diagnoses from various practitioners. They were pinballing me around for years at pain management, rheumatologist, pulmonologist. I was having severe pulmonary issues marked by chronic pneumonia and bronchitis and I am a severe asthmatic.

4:22 That was very concerning and the medication was very troublesome and really impeded my lifestyle as a young person at that time, particularly predizone, which is the drug they typically use. I also was having severe pain in the body. My joints would lock. I wouldn't be able to walk at times. Knees would give out. My hands would stop working. I'd have to record my paper through my voice. Something was seriously off. I intuitively felt even back then a correlation between what I was working on in my academic career, the trauma I was treating as a young clinician and what was happening to my body.

5:02 However, because I wasn't licensed at this time and was still in school, whenever I would tell a medical doctor, I thought it was a psychological response in part. They laughed at me. They did not think the mind-body connection was significant and they just filled me with more and more medication. Even then, again, I knew something was off about this. I'm from Maryland and my parents still live there and Hopkins is there and was the leading autoimmune research center. I worked really hard to get an appointment there with the hope that somebody was going to tell me what this mystery diagnosis truly was so we could get me on a better protocol and I'd get well.

5:48 At the time, they were advising for chemotherapy, which was used for lupus and other things. I didn't want to go down that path as a 20-something-year-old. I fly to Maryland and I'm very excited to be seen by Hopkins and what begins to happen. The locking that I've talked about begins to happen. My family's not home and I'm staying in a basement apartment. I can't even get up and down the stairs to get food and get to the kitchen. I'm in crippling pain. I call my treatment team in Los Angeles and ask them what to do because I have two days until I can be seen. They tell me in no uncertain terms, it's entirely safe to double up all of the medication because nothing's going to cause me harm in one extra dose.

6:37 Well, unbeknownst to them, while they knew that the kidneys and the lungs and the joints were involved, what they'd missed through all of this odyssey over five or six years was that the liver was involved. When they told me to double up the medication, multiple products contained Tylenol. It was a dose that ought to not hurt a normative person. However, because I was already living in a highly compromised state, when I took the medication, I immediately blacked out and fell. The liver began rapidly failing. Healthy count is at the highest, usually around 40,000 or so I'm told.

7:21 Yet I sprung up to 210,000 within the first few hours after taking this medication. When I fell and had the traumatic brain injury that ultimately led to coma, my kidneys and lungs went with the liver. Within a matter of moments, I suffered systemic organ failure of the liver, lungs, and kidneys with a traumatic brain injury. For me, the NDE ends in ICU. Did somebody find you? That's the miracle of the first miracles in a series of miracles. My family had been on a cruise and got home when I collapsed.

8:02 They knew immediately something was wrong because I was face down on the bed or the floor. I hear it varying ways from different people, but they were so in shock. That said, there was bile and I was already turning yellow and then the skin bruises when the liver fails that rapidly. You swell up within a matter of moments. You look like you've put on 15 or 20 pounds. They knew something was significantly wrong. They called the local hospital, the local hospital, helicopter made to Hopkins. So you got into your appointment a little early. Sorry, I should not make light of that. This is serious. You know what? Lavity. Lavity.

8:42 I still talk about this with great joy and ease because it brings lavity to what was a very difficult situation that ultimately became medicinal for the soul. Well laughter is medicinal. We all know that. Definitely. Okay. I want to come back to something in a while, but I don't want to interrupt what's going on with the chronological of your NDE here. Let's just pin, let's remember, come back and talk about what should people do if they get a diagnosis? They just, their gut's telling them this isn't right. Okay. Come back to that. Right now you're in Johns Hopkins. You are super sick.

9:22 They've taken you in, I'm sure, through the emergency ER and you're getting all the attention in the world. And you go straight up to the ICU or is there surgery or something first or? I have no recollections. My only knowing of this is based on the medical records, but it shows those helicopter and then right into ICU. They knew the river was failing at such a rapid rate. They, I believe per the, what my family was told and also what's in their records that they thought it was a less than 1% chance of natural awakening. So they're doing emergency work, but there's not a lot of hope. Well, yeah, I don't think there's a switch you can flip or a drug you can give that automatically turns your liver back on.

10:03 Is there, I'm not a doctor. I don't know. No, it needs to regenerate and when you have a count like mine, apparently very few people come back from that. Okay. So what happened next? So what begins my NDE from my knowing and my remembrance is coming out of the body. Now at the time I did not understand I was coming out of the body. I was merely looking down at ICU and I noticed that everybody's wearing hazmat suits and it's a very solid mood and it looked like an ex files episode to me. And as my consciousness begins to float out of the body, I am still very much me.

10:47 There's this curiosity, the science aspect of me as I was studying clinical psychology and my doctorate at that time. So I had all these questions and hypotheses as I'm pulling out. And then suddenly there's this awareness like, Oh my gosh, that's me. That's my body. And you know, I wasn't fully unattached from it at that point. So there still was some ego identity. There still was attachment to it. Almost like I got to get back in there and what do I do in a little bit of panic. And at the same time that those very tender human parts within me became activated, there was this pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool. And then within what felt like seconds, I was blasted into the most magnified cosmos like space.

11:37 It's truly ineffable. Yet there are pockets of blackness and there are pockets of these gorgeous gem tone colors which are so intense. I've never seen their likeness on this earth to date. I mean, the saturation and the vibrancy and it's not just the beauty and the poetry of the colors and the hues and the sensations that are coming from them. It is this intense vibration of unconditional love. You know how I find I hear that? And I love it every single time.

12:17 The unconditional love. I'm going to push you on that one. Tell me what that felt like. How can someone relate to what that was really like? For me, as I'm a complex trauma survivor, I've never felt what I felt over there here in life. My body has always felt uncomfortable, heavy. There's a lot of storage and memories in it that I've done a lot of work to get through. Yet it's never been this place of ineffable peace. It's never all felt like a sanctuary until recent years. So when I have this experience, I'm freed of the limitations of the body.

13:00 I am one with those colors that love everything. It's like a telepathic, intuitive activation of the awareness that we come from this infinite, eternal source that celebrates every aspect in every way because it is us and we are it. It is like the most intimate reconnect with your ultimate parent. There is just a union that is utterly inexplicable.

13:41 It makes every sorrow worthy. You just feel peace and a knowing that whatever is, whatever weather has passed through the storm of life, you are now at peace. And there is just infinite surrender in that freedom, ultimate freedom. And as someone who was indoctrinated by religion at a very young age and had some very significant religious trauma per parochial school and abuse, having that unconditionality, that non-judgmental open awareness, that non-duality meet you and greet you as if you are one with it.

14:34 There was such a cleansing purification and a reorientation to what the divine is. Okay. That's amazing. Speaking of what the divine is, you just said just a minute ago something about parents. What did you say? And could you explain that a little bit more? With the parenting to the connection to the one or the energy? Yeah. You know, I feel quite often, unfortunately, in this culture, parenting is more transactional in the earth realm.

15:15 Parents have a goal, they're providing support and they want a certain attachment to outcomes. They want a certain thing in alignment to their beliefs and their being, which I totally understand as a parent myself. However, in this space, you were reoriented to who your true parent was, your true creator. And that source holds you in a way that's so healing for not just you, the soul that's there in that presence, but your entire lineage. It was almost as if in a moment, all the gripes I had towards my family due to dysfunctional patterns and abuse and things of that nature, religion, it was gone.

16:02 Because I understood how each and every one of us was part of that divine expression, living its unique story so we could remember this and liberate ourselves. And so there was just like an ancestral healing component to it, completely unspoken and yet so liberating, especially when you'd been told your whole life that God is judgmental and that there's heaven and hell and all this duality and that just wasn't the experience. It was ineffable divine union. God is love. Yes. Okay. What do you remember that happened after that? So after I've come into this extra juicy, yummy, unconditional love space, I'm being held yet I'm also in a sort of homecoming with three of these lights who I know to be angelics now, I work with them all of the time.

16:56 I don't know that I would have used that vernacular when I woke up, but now 13 years later, I could definitely say that. And these light beings greeted me and it was so overwhelmingly emotional. My heart chakra just always is like, as soon as I feel into them, whether it's in the story or in the here and now, in the sense that I had been an intuitive child and I had shared my visions of angelics and things that have been communicated to me when I was very young and my family saw it as witchcraft and shamed it and really shut it down. And so when I saw these particular colors, my consciousness was like, these are the angels from childhood.

17:42 Like it was the same three beings of light that I had seen as a kid and they had comforted me in times of such distress when I had no one else and when I didn't feel safe with the priest or family members or whomever. And here they were again, welcoming me to this place that was beyond any home I could fathom in my human mind. And so these light beings communicated to me through inner knowing, telepathy, nothing was said, everything was felt in an extra sensory way of feeling. Like there is just this resonance, this symphony, this cosmic kiss that comes through when you're in their presence.

18:29 And one was a beautiful ruby red, one was a beautiful emerald green and another was a beautiful violet color. And so I just really reconnected and reunified, if you will, I was formless in this space. So I'm feeling all of this stuff and I can feel my own light, yet I never saw it the way that I saw other beings. It was just a felt sense of expansion. When you would up the resonance of connection with anything in this space, you would just feel your own field expanding and becoming one. So there was just this constant ebb and flow of energy and understanding, intuitive understanding, emotional intelligence.

19:16 And these beings just really comforted me as I went through waves and pools of almost like instantaneous clearings of past occurrences and memories and things that had happened in this realm. They were almost purifying me of those stories as I began to feel the magnetic pool of this light that was way beyond scope in size to them. I mean, there are these beautiful orbs of light moving around connected to me and then suddenly there's this light unlike anything I've ever seen over here, which is almost like fire in a way.

20:00 The flame when you light a fire, you see that blue? You know, sometimes it was like that in spots and then intense white in the rest of it. Super, super, almost blinding. If I were to have eyes there, it was very, very intense. I didn't feel I wanted to look at it. I just wanted to be pulled to it. The pooling, the way that it pulled you in, it was like a tapestry of light just weaving in and out with you. And I felt the desire to go to it so intensely and yet at the same time that I wanted nothing more than to be with it and to continue to have these vibrations amplified, there was a halt.

20:42 There was a pause. And at that point is when my angelics, the three colors that I've described, they basically communicate. You may go to that light. You are from that light. That is the, you know, creator light basically. And you will ultimately go to that light. You can do it now or you can do it later. And of course, for me, I'm in an in-between state. I'm in a coma for three and a half days. I'm not technically dead. I had been declared likely brain dead, but they weren't certain. It's based on the scale, okay? And brain activity.

21:22 There was no guarantee. They tell me I can come back and I can complete. And this was important in my case, this collective mission. I had to come here with other persons to really serve. And something in that communication intuitively lit me up. There was either an organic remembrance or knowing of my soul's blueprint and why I had chosen a difficult incarnation. Although none of those words were used. Okay? It's just this knowing there's this beautiful reason you went there.

22:02 There's this divine reason for all of that suffering, all of the trauma, even the education. There was a purpose to it all. Now here's the caveat that spirit through me. They let it be known. If you choose to go back now, there will be more of that. There will be more suffering. But then they communicated what I only know to be the resonance of the number 10. At the time it met absolutely nothing to me. When I woke up, I was obsessed with 10s. And I thought it just had to do with 2010 and that number getting stuck in my head. But I didn't understand what the 10 was for. But I just held onto it when I wake up.

22:43 That said, they communicate this beautiful download of just what is to come. And again, Eric, none of this made sense back then. But they showed me the earth. And the earth was surrounded by these beautiful beings of this citrine gold light. And all of these beings who I could feel had very human hearts and very human energies were connected. And they were surrounding the entire earth almost as if they were holding it. And they were the base. And the earth was emanating this light and this love and this intelligence and this like higher knowing that I had not experienced.

23:29 And when I felt and received that image, I knew I was part of that ring of the light. I knew the 10 was significant. I knew what they said was true. They told me repeatedly, if you choose to go back, you will be supported through the next suffering. You know it cannot kill you now. I love the fact that you got the choice. And I would think that that makes it easier to deal with everything now that you're back. Some people, as you know, don't have that choice. They're just told you're going back. Exactly. And some don't even want to. And so it's sort of a kicking and screaming thing. But the fact that you got the choice is awesome.

24:12 You made the choice. And I love how people are never lied to. They're never told, hey, if you go back, it's going to be so easy. It's just all going to be, you know, sweet. You won't have any more trials in life. No, they're honest and they let you know you can go back, but it's going to be hard. Things aren't going to get easier. And I love that honesty. And how could there not be honesty anyway with all that love and all those other emotions that you're feeling, right? Definitely. Honesty just couldn't be, I mean, dishonesty could not exist in that same place, could it?

24:53 No, no, not at the frequency. That's like the period you receive it. That's why it's so enlivening even now. And I enjoy telling the story and really speaking it because I feel it more when I speak it versus writing it, because you just feel that divine harmony and that unconditionality that is unfortunately so rare right now on in the earth realm with many persons and many connections and many institutions and on and on and on. But we're working on it. So did anything else happen before you came back into your body? Yes. So when I decide that I want to go back, I commit to it and I basically say to the angelics, and I mean, there was still that really wanting to connect to the source light, but also knowing I came here for a reason and things are about to shift.

25:45 I don't know what this all means, but I'm here for it. And so I asked how to get back to the body and they tell me to look like a light unlike any other. And I don't really know what that means even as an orb of consciousness. So I'm kind of like spinning around in this space and there's a lot of darkness to either side outside of the angelics. And I don't really know what to do. And suddenly I feel these other two lights and one was this amazing indigo blue and the other was again a soft green. This one much more like mossy and grass like than the other, which was more deep emerald. And so I look at them, but unlike the other lights, which really are holding me throughout this entire ineffable journey, these lights feel like I want to hold them.

26:36 I'm curious about them. And so again, my consciousness is still very aligned to my personality and I'm curious and I'm kind of playful with the lights and I'm not getting any information and I'm not getting a download and communication. So then it's just like, okay, they're cute. Just keep going, you know, no awareness of what that was or what it meant. And at that point I see this horrendous, very earth like light that I follow and I'm kind of pulled it back into my body, which that horrendous light happened to be the flashlight that they were checking my vitals with. So I'm back. You're back. Was it pleasant? Was it?

27:16 Oh no, all of a sudden I'm in pain. You mentioned your body feels heavy. What did that all feel like to be back? It was awful to be back. I was catapulted back in. I did not understand how I had come to be in coma. I'm intubated because of what they believed to be brain damage that was going to be irreversible according to the science. They had put pick lines into both side of my brains to try to save it. My ex-husband understood I would not want to be a vegetable. And so he did everything he could to preserve what cognition I could come back with should I awake and bless him for that.

27:56 However, because of the pick lines, I was strapped down to the bed. So not only am I intubated, I'm strapped down. They don't realize I'm in there for some time. They thought that my eye movements to the light were just involuntary. I had no other signs of being awake. It wasn't until I realized nobody knew I was awake for hours and hours, I started compulsively linking my eye till somebody came up and was like, do you understand one for yes, two for no? And we started communicating through my left eye. But yes, being back into the body, it was hellish. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was like being taken from this heaven and slammed back down into hell.

28:43 Everything hurts. I also thought they had given me some really good drugs, Eric, because I'm looking around the room and nothing looks the way that 3D stuff is supposed to look. There's some stuff moving around the top of everything, almost like you're coming off of psychedelics. And so I think they've just given me really good medication. When they finally give me a pen within my non-dominant hand, I wrote, please stop the drugs. At which point the nurse laughed and said, honey, your liver failed. We can't give you banadryl. You're on nothing.

29:26 And that's when I was introduced to my after effects. What after effects? And so the first after effect to introduce itself from my ND was the ability to see the quantum field and energy, any kind of auric activity that's occurring on anything. This can be an inanimate object. This can be a person. With a person, it gets much more complex. The doctors are walking up and they're telling me all sorts of grim and dim stuff about my prognosis and I won't have children and I'll be in a wheelchair and I need a liver transplant. It's just one thing after another. And at the same time that they're saying all of this to me, I'm only noticing what's happening on their aura.

30:07 I've stopped even listening to them and I start unconsciously responding to what I see and depending how intense the activity is, there was one doctor who was always spinning the doom and gloom and at the same time he was ruminating on a cigarette. And so I blurred out. Just go smoke already. He jumped like 10 feet back and then I realized I'm like, I can't say these things out loud. How did he respond? He jumped like 10 feet back. It was very similar to when my parents heard me say things that, you know, from things that came to me and then happened to be true within a matter of moments and they were like witchcraft, you know, like, and I had that programming in me.

30:55 So the minute he jumps back, a guest, what gets reactivated in my lower mind, my human, the trauma of being a kid that's an intuitive that names stuff that scares people. So instantaneously, I start to form a distrust of what is happening to me. It's bad. It will get me in trouble. It's shameful. And what ended up being my savior in that ICU were the Angelics again. I had been very blessed to have been working with a Taoist master before all of this happened. And he was always talking about my guides and like, and I was always like, yeah, whatever back then, right?

31:36 But I liked the Taoist practices. Well, when I'm in ICU and I can finally use my phone, I messaged him and I was like, something happened. My mind wants to say it's just a dream, but some other things are happening and they are not dreams. And you tell me what you're intuiting or what you're reading off my energy because you've described things to me. And he goes, oh, you're hanging out with your friends, red, green and violet. And I was like, I can see them. And he's like, uh-huh. They've been waiting for this. And I'm all like, what do I do with this? And he's like, you'll know. And so I just fiercely prayed ICU is a scary place to be stuck in for a very long time.

32:18 People are constantly dying. And you can see energy and there are glass walls around you and they are calling code blue one after another. I started just saying, if you were real, if you were real as a child, if you are real now, come to me, speak to me, show me what I do with all of this, because I could already start to feel there was something to using my hands to heal that I could intuitively ease the liver and pain just by holding it the right way and to change the color of my own field. And so all these things are beginning to step forward, yet I don't, my intellect is fighting it. I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Suddenly I'm seeing things. Suddenly I'm having clairaudience.

33:00 Suddenly I'm knowing doctors like thinking and feeling. Suddenly I know my parents and my entire family is somehow blaming me for this. It was a lot to digest. Yet thankfully I also knew if I was psychotic in any way, I would not be oriented times four, which is the clinical term for person, place, time, and situation. I was constantly taking my mental status exam and I was constantly oriented times four. So I knew that clinically I was grounded, aware, cognizant, yet something trans-personal, something beyond normative senses had been activated or perhaps reactivated.

33:44 And so the angels began gently guiding me with how to intuitively use my hands. When people code blue, they say, don't look for the pain. Look for the bliss. And that's when I began to see angelics coming in and surrounding each person and them being lifted up in this beautiful tunnel of light surrounded by other oars of light. And those were my first shared death experiences at that point. And they happened one after another and another. And I realized that even though the hospital was this place with so much darkness, I could call in that light. I could continue to increase my own and I wouldn't feel any of that other stuff.

34:25 Suddenly I would be reunified with the angelics in the yummy sensations of divine unconditionality. And to be able to do that in ICU when it seems like the whole world's turned against you, you still haven't received an accurate story as to what happened to you. There's no accountability. My family, because again, they weren't there when it happened. They used the trauma and abuse history against me. When they heard it was too much Tylenol, they made the assumption because I self-tarned as a kid, I took an overdose. And so I had to go through the shrinks and all of that kind of stuff, which I aced with flying colors, yet it was painful to have to go through that when I hadn't been someone that was actively using for over 10 years.

35:15 So to go through that, there were layers and layers and layers of pain. But at the same token, this new activation, this new intuition, this ability to see the energy field was my saving grace. And it really carried me through the darkest days of ICU. And eventually they told me, this was in December, that I would not be home for Christmas. I would spend New Year's in ICU and that I would be living in a rehabilitation hospital for most of the next year. This is when I first wake up. Cut to 14 days later when I'm out of ICU, I'm now into a lower threshold of care. And I'm teaching myself how to do things at night when they're not around so that I can use the bathroom so that I can do some basic human functioning.

36:00 I got out for Christmas and I walked myself out of the hospital with full spontaneous remission, which is the medical term for, we don't know, but the same doctor that was ruminating on that cigarette came down to the floor and he said, I don't use this term lightly. You are a miracle and shook my hand. That is so cool. Thank you. And so awesome. And isn't it interesting that you felt weeks before like you needed to go to hospital Hopkins and you did, right? But not for why you thought. Yes. Anyway, I mean, it worked out there. It just didn't work out how you expected it.

36:41 And hey, most things in life go that way. And Hopkins said actually they transferred me to University of Maryland because I, one part of the story that I leave out because I was informed of it later and I don't really remember this, but they were trying to get me a liver transplant. I was only 29 years old and when your liver fails that rapidly and you are not an active addict and I was a doctoral student, they shoot you to the top of the list. So they were prepping me at University of Maryland for a liver transplant. It was the only thing that would have saved my life. And instead I ended up being able to walk out of there and my liver count is still in the optimal functioning. What's wild is Hopkins sent me a letter.

37:23 What is it? 13 years now. They sent me a letter saying we found you a liver. And when I called them, I said, you guys know you discharged me with spontaneous remission and they were like, oh, no one keeps that. I'm like, I'm still in it. So they said they'd kept me on the list. I was like, please give it to someone else. I've been blessed. So what was your healing like after that physically? Did you just heal really quickly? I did heal really quickly on the physical plane, but my psychological healing was like many end-of-years. It was much more of a labyrinth and very disheartening for someone who had spent their adult life in passion and pursuit of understanding the human mind.

38:10 It's a very difficult thing to give 13 years of your life to the study of something. And then suddenly realize it doesn't work very well when their attributes come on. And so I feel like for me, that ego death of the clinician and the researcher and the, I was, you know, I had a 4.6 in every degree. I really worked hard to be at the top of each cohort. And then suddenly I'm defending my dissertation and it's on a topic that I wrote about before all of this. Suddenly I want to go into the transpersonal and the NDE and what the hell with the consciousness. I want to understand all of these things and use my science for that.

38:52 Well, this was a very good school that had an APA, American Psychological Association accreditation, and they didn't want to be associated with anything that they saw out there. And so I attempted to defend my dissertation three times. In my story, you always hear a lot of threes, three angels, three days, three organs. They just come up over and over again. Well, I attempted to defend my dissertation three times and each time that I went to defend the subject I no longer believed in, suddenly I had autoimmune symptoms. Come on. The third time when my hands began locking after being in complete spontaneous remission, I said, this is my body communicating.

39:35 I didn't listen before. I'm not doing this. And that led to a period of very deep CPTSD and depression because I didn't know what to do with my life. I had invested so much money in the pursuit of these degrees and suddenly they were meaningless. And what do I do with that? And what am I going to be? My whole identity was invested in becoming a doctor. I already had the white coat with my name on it. I just had to defend the paper, but I couldn't. And ultimately I wouldn't. And though I didn't know it at the time, Eric, it became a great, great gift. That inability to be the person I used to be was the beginning of becoming the person I am, the person I always was here to be, but shut down due to family programming and trauma and cultural conditioning.

40:29 Everybody changes after an NDE, some more profoundly than others. If you don't mind me asking something personal, you mentioned an ex-husband. Did that become an ex shortly after your NDE? Within five years of my NDE. That's pretty typical, isn't it? Super typical. Statistically, our divorce rate, our relational difficulty rate is way higher than the national average. So yes, I had just been married a year before coma and we'd been together six years without conflict. When coma happens, and let's just say I tried, but ultimately I became lit up spiritually and I wanted to pursue that path and he was a fervent agnostic and wanted nothing to do with it.

41:18 And I knew I had come back to be part of a collective that's here for healing and part of some sort of shift in humanity. And I wanted that. That's what I was back here for. And that kept me going. And when I got depressed, it did too. Suicide is super misunderstood in the NDE community. There are many people that believe because we have these ineffable divine experiences, we would be against suicide. And yet statistically, in the first seven years following an NDE, 7% of adults will complete suicide and 21% of childhood experiencers will complete suicide. These are numbers I have not heard before.

42:01 So thank you for bringing them up. Yes, those are from, I respectfully believe they're outdated. That's from my friend, PMH Atwaters, Spinding. Yeah. Done so much research, but those were quite old statistics. So from a research perspective, there's a lot of work calling to be done there. However, I specialize in mystical experiencers and the majority of NDEers that come in that are new. The reason they're coming in is suicidality. Number one reason I get called for with them. What about the divorce? What are the numbers? Do you know? I know the divorce rate is almost two and a half times the national average. It's almost like 90%. I think it's between 80 to 90. Yeah, it's really high.

42:42 It's incredibly high. And I just know that circumstantially from people that I'm talking to on the show and stuff is that it's very high, but I've never seen any numbers, specific numbers on it. And then another one, if you happen to know any numbers about this, and that would be job or career change. I think it's over half is a drastic change. And for others, it's more like steady progression. You know? So I mean, people, my friends always laugh because they're like, there's Brooke before a comma and Brooke after a comma. Like which one are you talking about? Because we're so vastly different. Brooke point two. I was able to take my training and co-create with spirit, something that's still utilized that academia and also use it in a healing capacity with my counseling skills, however, in a different format.

43:37 So I was very blessed in that way. However, if you had told me I'd be practicing as an intuitive with energy medicine and I'd be going to different countries to study indigenous shamanism, I would have been like, no. You know? What? Exactly. But now that's the vibe. I'm going to digress a little bit, looking at some of my notes here and some questions that I had along the way. You mentioned something about a mission. What mission did you come back with? I wasn't given a mission in the terms that most people are usually hungry for when they talk about mission and purpose. It wasn't like, you're a poet or you're a mother or something specific.

44:18 Love was what all of those of us that are here to assist seem to be here for. It's almost like the divine wants us to remember or to help humanity remember that we are loved exactly as we are here and now. There is nothing to effort, change, or fix. And because of the times we're living in and the climate of politics and social injustice and the economies and whatnot, disease as well, it's so important to remind people that you are connected to God within and without you and you are unconditionally loved.

44:59 Reminding people they are loved as they are is super, super important. And that seems to be what the Creator wants to awaken in each of us in different ways. And so we're blessed with certain gifts that support that. Great. Did you figure out what the number 10 meant? Yes. It was 2010 when my coma happened, I spent 10 years going through CPTSD, depression, suicidality, before Spirit ultimately carried me out of that, quite frankly, and we land in the pandemic. And that's when after leaving my ex, which unfortunately it got very abusive towards the end and there was just a lot of bringing up the trauma and domestic violence and things like that that I endured another level of the suffering they told me I would return to.

45:51 However, this time I got to hold the perpetrator accountable. This time I didn't hide my truth. This time I used my gifts to heal. This time I got spiritually oriented psychotherapy, which did tremendous things for my entire nervous system. This time I healed and as I did that, I decided I'm ready to tell my NDES story. Lo and behold, as I start telling my story on the anniversary, the 10th anniversary, I spoke at IM's for the first time in 2019 in December. And then the pandemic happened in 2020 and I'm happened to be invited to many podcasts and conferences based on that one speech in 2019 that opened me up to connecting to people.

46:40 And what's interesting, Eric, is in 2019, I knew what the 10 meant. I said to spirit, I know now I'm ready. I'm going out into the world, no more hiding. I'm making my current website and I'm sitting in my parents house before I go to IM's to speak for the first time. It was a big year for me in 2019. This is now the international conference, not the local ones. And so I'm working on this website and my mom's like, you have three master's degrees, you almost had a PhD, you're really going to put that on the internet, you really want people to come to you for this. She's like, and where are you going to find them? And I'm like, well, my teams are very playful and they have pretty much field of dreams it.

47:23 If I build it, they will come. And my mom's like, okay, good luck with that. And then I went to the IM's and spoke that particular year and within six months I had seen people across the world. I've now seen people in 30 countries. There is a demand for a transpersonal, multidisciplinary approach to integrative healing of mystical experiences. And I have been very blessed to work with incredible people from around the world with great credit. And they figure out how to find you. They find me through YouTube. I am not a social media person myself. I don't have a channel that I'm on all the time doing work. I've tried it. It just energetically doesn't appeal to me.

48:05 I like the intimacy of deep diving with my clients. I enjoy interviews because it connects me to people across the world, but they always find me through interviews. And as I work intimately with people, they tend to work with me for at least a year or two. I do do one-off sessions, but I'm really adept at going really deep and helping people integrate the transpersonal and the mystical. So it's embodied so that the awakening is just the beginning. The radical embodiment is the journey. All right. Next. This is going to sound like kind of a dumb question, but you may not know the answer to, but you can just give me your opinion. Where did you go? Where did I go?

48:46 I don't have language for it. It might have been the cosmos themselves has certainly looked like them. Okay. If you were going from the set, the sense and seeing, it might have been in between dimensions or realms. I don't know that I would use the term heaven, which is also so associated to it just because it felt nothing like the heaven I've been told of, but for the soul, it very much was heaven. It was just a place to me. It is, it is the source. It's the eternal eye. It is where we come from. I don't have the language for it, but it is almost like the womb of the creator being held in that space.

49:30 It's a good way to put it. All right. Next question is harder in a different kind of way. And that is not that it's going to be hard for you to answer, but it's a tough thing to talk about. And that is you mentioned priests earlier on and we're not here to slam on anyone person, anyone religion at all. Okay. So it comes up from time to time where people tell me, and usually it's after their NDE, they tell me, Hey, I went to my clergy, whoever that may have been, and was told, No, either that didn't happen or it was of the devil or it was something that's not quite right versus the wonderful experience that they felt like they had.

50:18 And of course you had experiences even before your NDE. So please, if you could talk to clergy in general around the world, some that are completely against this whole notion, some that have accepted it, okay, because plenty have to talk to them right now. What do they need? What do they need to know? Because their job is to help people and not hurt people. And I don't think in general, they're, you know, they're good people. They want to help. Okay. So what should they know? How should they treat people? Divine respect and compassion are absolutely the foundation upon which any healing dynamic are to grow upon.

51:06 So coming in to connection with a person who's had an experience beyond perhaps what you believe and what you can fathom, you do not need to agree with them. You do not need to have any sort of personal resonance with the experience to meet them from a place of Christ consciousness, from eternal love. And when we meet person to person beyond dogma, beyond belief, beyond even experience of the divine, just soul to soul, there is an organic, intuitive, healing, visceral and very palpable healing exchange that happens for both parties.

51:54 I have met priests at conferences for NDE's that have taught me so much about how to work and to resonate and to operate and the vernacular and ways that we can amplify the other person's comfort just by their being. And what each and every one of those individuals possess was an ability to trust. Trust what the person's putting in front of you, whether or not you believe it doesn't matter, it is true to them. Be open to that truth without judgment. Read it as the Creator meets us with unconditionality and then presence.

52:40 Be with the person. Active listening heals. Seeing someone without judgment, without shame, and this is a big one with a lot of religion and persons of the faith, there is a tendency to amplify shame quite often because shame is this human condition we all carry and are very uncomfortable with. That person telling you that story likely has a great deal of shame. They are telling you something that defies what most ordinary minds know to be real.

53:23 And they seek resonance and validation in your ability to just be present, to just receive, to hold space. And yes, some people will seek counsel, they will want religion as a soft landing place, whereas others will push it away and others will oscillate like I have done. Be open to knowing that whatever is unfolding in the moment is the invitation for that person's growth. There is no right or wrong in the heart of God. And that is how we all, clergy or non-clergy, ought to meet each other.

54:07 You did it. Good answer. Thank you. All right, we really need to wrap up time-wise. But a couple other things. You mentioned when you were in the ICU was your first shared death experience. Have you had a bunch of others? Yes. The most significant was when my grandmother passed away over 11 years ago because it was right before my eldest, excuse me, was born. She had had Alzheimer's for 12 years. I'm going to do something super rude. And that is that I'm going to interrupt this story because if you're okay with it, what I would love to do with you is have a whole separate conversation about shared death experiences.

54:50 Yes, let's do that. You have enough to talk about that we can do that? Oh yeah, I have enough. And we'll stick it out on a bonus episode sometime. Okay, cool. Okay. So there's the teaser for everybody listening. You want to hear more about that and about Brooke's grandma, which I can't wait to hear about. Come back for that bonus episode. But for now, how much fear of death do you have? Zero. I am ready whenever the creator calls me home. But you have things to do here still. I have things to do here. And I know that the times were inner potent and full of medicine for the heart of humanity, which I'm very much here for.

55:34 So I have no desire to exit at the same token when it's time, it's time and I'm all good with it. All right, last thing. Somebody listening today is having a really rough day. This world's pretty tough right now, right? And somebody could really use a brief message of hope. What do you have to say to that one individual? We are in the midst of profoundly difficult times. And to feel that or to express that or to struggle with that is the gift of our humanity.

56:15 You are not alone in that struggle. We are taught by our culture, our parents, our ego, quite often to run when struggle, pain, discomfort, hopelessness, despair, depression, heartache, loss, greet us at the door. Yet that running only compounds them. There is an eternal love from forth you spring and that love can meet you and greet you and hold you and heal you and worship the light within you that you may not feel, but I guarantee you you have for you are a light of the Creator.

57:06 And it does not go out as long as you are breathing that divine spark exists within your heart. I will not bypass or dismiss any of the very real suffering in this world, but know that all suffering is a call to return to love. And it is not something outside of you. It is something within you. Your pain is an invitation to your liberation. Love it and it will guide you. Ruck, you're a joy. Thanks a lot for being with me today. Thank you, Eric. It was fun.

57:48 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 roundtripdeath.com. If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.