Louisa's NDE: "Die Hard Atheist...to Full On WooWoo"

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 to Roundtrip Death, everybody.

0:41 And welcome to our super very special guest, Louisa Peck. Morning, Louisa. Good morning. How's Seattle today? Dark and rainy. So it's good. Isn't that normal? That's normal. OK. We're going to jump right into your experience. And just to give people an idea of what there is to come, I'm going to read the title of your book because it's sort of a good summary of the whole thing. And the title is Die Hard Atheist from NDE Denier to Full On Woo Woo Against My Will. That's it.

1:21 That's me. I'm a full on woo woo and I never thought I would be. To you, what does woo woo mean? So I think, so I'm also, I've had times in my life when I was lesbian and embraced the word dyke. And I'm an alcoholic with 29 years sober and I embraced the word drunk. And so for me, if people are trying to detract from you by throwing a name at you, if you own that name, you're like, yeah, I am a woo woo. Yeah, there are spirits everywhere. Thanks. And that's just how it is. And you take their power away. So woo woo is just my catch all term for one who knows that the spirit realm is real.

2:08 And I think some of us look at the term as, okay, that person's kind of weird. I don't know if I should believe them or not. But yeah, admitting it upfront and not to the weird part, but I digress. Let's go back many years you were living in New York City. Give me a little idea of what your life was like and what led up to this night where you had a terrible tragedy. Okay. So I want to say first that I had been raised to be atheist and that was just how things went in my family. My dad really despised religion.

2:48 He kind of inculcated all of us with that. So I went to Vassar and I did really well. What do I want to say? I'd been raised in an alcoholic home. So I needed constant affirmation and without tests and, you know, papers and so forth. I didn't know how to feel I was worth existing. So my God was coolness as kind of assembled from popular culture, whatever I thought at age 22 was cool. James Dean modernized to some extent.

3:30 That was what I was shooting for. So I moved to New York specifically because the studio 54 was there and all the night clubs and what cooler place to be cool. So 1982, I'm 22 and my dad is a co-dealer and we do the cocaine that he has on our way to the Peppermint Lounge, which seemed to me the coolest of the night clubs in New York. And the bottom floor was New Wave, which was pretty new in 1982. So we were dancing and I was just starting to feel like I was finally starting to feel cool and good.

4:15 And we ran out of coke and started coming down and stills like for me, you know, someone puts a finger on the turntable and slows the record down. It's just no fun anymore to just be me. And you know, alcohol is not going to be enough for that. So we had some cash and we started asking around the night club, is anybody selling cocaine? And this guy said, I am and, you know, it's just, they said in the dark back part of the night club, we bought a gram and we started snorting it and it did nothing. And my date being a dealer said, you know, we got taken.

4:57 This is not cocaine. We're, you know, and I thought, well, it numbed our gums when we tested it. So maybe if I do the whole pile, it's just really crappy cocaine and I'll get a little bit higher. So I just snorted the entire pile of what I've learned since was lidocaine. So I got sober when I was 34 and made a lot of friends with former drug dealers. And those who heard my story said, oh, in the 80s, we used to cut cocaine with lidocaine because it was cheaper. And it sounds like you got sold to your lidocaine. So lidocaine poisoning shuts down your autonomic nervous system and your heart particularly begins to go slower and slower and you die.

5:45 And people have died by just eating a tube of lidocaine ointment. But I snorted this whole pile, which had already lumped my gum. So it was potent. So my first sign, I told my dad I was going to the bathroom and on my way there, I began to notice I was getting kind of tunnel vision. I was getting a peripheral blindness where I don't know if you've ever almost fainted, but this kind of speckly stuff enters your field of vision. And I thought, oh, what a cool side effect of cocaine. I'm just going to hang on for the ride. When I got into the bathroom, it got worse and it began to seem dark as well. And when I was in the stall, I couldn't read any of the graffiti.

6:28 And that's when I first realized that there was no air. So it felt to me like there was no oxygen in the nightclub because my heart was going so slowly that even if I consciously breathed deeply, no oxygen was reaching my brain. So I came out of there and I found my date and I was heaving my breath at that point. And I was angry rather than afraid. I was frustrated because how were all these other people not noticing that there was no air? And I said to him, there's no air down here. There's no air. And I had a sense of being like in this basement underground, in Greenwich Village, and just this claustrophobia and desire to escape there.

7:18 So he took me to the bar and the bartender gave me a glass of water and I didn't want water, but just to please them, I took a sip. And that's the moment when my NDE began. So on this side, what happened was at that point, I had a ground wall seizure. I floundered all over the floor and then I had a cardiac arrest and the bartender began CPR with no luck for three minutes. I'm told that over three minutes. So here's what happened to me during those three minutes.

8:02 So the first thing I felt was maybe the shock of the ground wall kicking in, but it seemed to me that something struck me under the chin. And for just a fraction of a second, I thought I had slipped somehow and hit my chin on the bar, but then it transformed into something like I like to describe it as a Popeye punch. So if character gets punched by Popeye, they go flying up in the air. That's what I did. And so I shot up out of there and that was exactly what I was longing for because I had felt so sort of claustrophobic down there and I had a vague sense of leaving Manhattan below me. I had a vague sense of like, almost like the, I wouldn't say the curve of the earth, but you know, the land as it looks from an airplane receding away.

8:53 And as that receded, I thought, oh, thank God I'm done with all that silliness because to me, my life is Louisa had been just a bunch of silliness and I was glad to be out of there. And so I had what's called an amnesiatic NDE where you don't remember your old life and you don't realize you're dead. So I flew up into the air and I was going up into this beautiful clear blue sky. And under me, I realized soon was the ocean, which was also beautiful, clear blue ocean. I got this idea that I was going to do a swan dive.

9:33 So I was a ballet dancer in my regular life and I thought, I'm going to arc back and do a fancy dive swan dive, even though I could not do that in real life at all. I did it there and it worked perfectly. And I was really pleased with that. And then I was diving toward the ocean. I'd reversed my direction and I had a thought, isn't the water like concrete if you hit it from a great height? And there was no fear attached to the thought. There was only, okay, well, we'll find out. I hit the water in a perfect dive and I went way, way down deep into the water and I could see the bubbles around me, but the surface was way up there.

10:15 And I thought, am I going to get there okay? And the next thing I know, I'm surfacing and I'm like, cool. And I see the shore and it's quite a ways off. And I think, okay, I'm hidden there. And I swam like maybe one stroke and then I was there. I was wading out of the water and again, I had no, like, how did that happen? I didn't have anything like that. I was just like, cool. And I looked to my left and I saw this mesa on kind of a sea stack coming out of the ocean. And on top of it, there was an old weather worn blue house. And I knew right away that house has to do with me and I want to get there.

10:56 So next thing I know, I'm not at the house, but I'm at the bottom of the mesa, which turns out to be a bunch of big rocks and they're covered with this grotesque, brown, putrid, just revolting slime. And I thought, what is this? And I thought, is it like rotten seaweed? I just thought, well, okay, I'm strong. I'm going to climb past this. It's not going to stop me getting to the house. So I began climbing with this sense of great capability. I had none of my insecurity. I had just interest and can do were the only feelings I had.

11:38 So I climbed to the house, but when I reached it, I had unfortunately lost my body. What does that mean? It means that I was a subjective camera view, maybe an inch from the door sill with nothing of me that I could see. And I thought, this is really inconvenient. What a bummer. And it's not going to stop me. It's what I thought. That's funny. It's just an inconvenience. It's not sheer terror, what's going on kind of thing. Oh, well. Right. It's like, what happened to my body?

12:19 It's not here. Oh, well. Right. As I crossed the threshold, the first thing that struck me was how intensely worn the wood was there with so many footprints going through that doorway. And I understood immediately that all my ancestors had crossed that same threshold, that this was our house, and we all went through there. So I did not know my ancestors. I still really don't, to be honest. I'm not an ancestry-oriented person, but on the other side, it meant everything to me. It was like, we, this is our house, and this is where we passed through.

13:00 And I had a great sense of honor. At the same time, I could sense my ancestors watching and kind of cheering for me and being very excited to be unified with me again and united, I mean. And I sense them. I couldn't see them, but I sensed the presence of many ancestors. I'm one stood out who was my father's father. He's the only one who died before I was born. He died at 60 some of a heart attack. I knew him only as a photograph in the back of my dad's closet on the shelf. That's the only way I knew him. He did not mean anything to me in my Louisa life, but on this side, he was so excited to meet me and I felt equally excited to meet him.

13:51 However, having no body was a problem. There was supposed to be an armchair where I knew that all my ancestors loved to sit and look out at the ocean. And I felt like this is no fair. You know, the arm, the chair is not there and I'm too small, kind of like Alice in Wonderland. I can't see out the window. I want to see. And as soon as I thought I want to see something else took control and it pulled me across the floor. I didn't have a body, but I had the feeling of my sternum. I had the feeling of it pulling from my heart.

14:32 And I started kind of just coasting over the floorboards and I was like, Whoa, what is happening? I was very thrilled. And then it went up over the windowsill and out. So next thing I knew, I was flying over the ocean and the sun was setting directly in front of me and beautiful sunset sky of all these colors and then this path of gold coming over the ocean. And that's what I was zooming straight down straight toward the sun. I'm just going to interrupt myself for a second to see. My father had taught me that the sun was the source of all life, that all energy comes from the sun, all life energy.

15:17 Okay, let me interject one question here before we get on to the next step. Did you have or even in hindsight, did you have any feeling of where you were? Would you call this a heaven place or a place in between or? It's an in between. It's an in between. And now looking back at it retrospectively, I passed through all the elements, air, water, wood, which is in Chinese, an element in Chinese folklore. And then I'm headed toward fire. That's interesting. Okay, keep going. So as I was zooming along and I was so happy, I just had a slight memory of my old life and I had a skeptical thought.

16:02 And I thought, wait a second, people can't fly. What's going on here? I maybe I'm dreaming. And I just asked myself the way you pinch yourself sometimes, is this real? And as soon as I asked that, a voice answered me in telepathy. And it was a very strong voice. And it said more real than anything back there. And I had not known anyone was with me. I had not expected an answer. Certainly I was just wondering to myself. And yet at the same time, when the voice said that I had a feeling of respect, like this is, this is somebody and they're right.

16:44 And so kind of acknowledged this is more real than anything back there in the silliness. And so the sun, meanwhile, is getting bigger and bigger as I approached it. And I began to actually see the corona on it and feel I didn't feel heat, but I thought, am I going to vaporize? If I get close to the sun, it should burn up. But again, I had no fear. And then before I thought I was getting that close, I passed through this kind of filament or veil and realized I was inside the sun. And in the sun was the light.

17:25 So you want to talk about heaven? That was heaven. So I could not see anything or hear anything, but who needed to? I did not. I had everything I could possibly want. And people struggle so much to try to describe the love that's in the light. But I remember being somewhat surprised that it was all through me, that it was not something external to me. It was all through me. The best way I can think of to describe the light when I think of it now is think of every good thing you ever feel in life. Like, oh, I'm so glad that happened. Oh, I'm so happy to see that person.

18:07 Oh, I can't believe I got me on that test. Oh, my gosh, I got the promotion. Oh, this natural spot is perfect. And we have it all to ourselves. All of those feelings and just put them all together and multiply it by a million. It's just such a powerful everything you could possibly long for. And I, for the first time in my life, felt complete. And I was very aware that I had been starving for this my whole life. Again, there's a slight memory of being Louisa because, you know, all the hoops I was jumping through, all of the trying to get validation. Finally, I just was completely fulfilled and felt loved.

18:52 And so I became aware of a being holding me like an infant cradling me in its arms, which I am far from the only in the year to have this feeling I know now. But it was as if it was a parent figure that was holding me and just pouring love into me. You are so loved. You are so loved. I didn't have a sense of gender at that point. I had a sense that they were sitting on the floor and holding me and pouring love into me. And I loved the parent so much once I had recognized its existence and felt the love coming from it. And I just wanted this to go on forever.

19:34 And then the parents said in telepathy in that same strong voice, you can't stay, you're not done yet. And then boom, the light gone, absolutely gone. And I'm in blackness and darkness. And to make matters worse for a fraction of a second, I seemed to be dropping. So I had, I threw a temper tantrum. I felt like no. And I felt had a sense of I'll show that parent that I'm more to deal with than they thought. And I'm getting back to the light no matter what. And then I got a little after echo message that just said, cased clothes sweetheart.

20:19 And then I dropped into this total darkness. And I believe that was the point when I was dropping back into my body. And I also have a theory about our body being surrounded by a kind of aura of anger and fear that keeps us distinct for the purpose of free will. But in any case, I began to just see against the blackness, these little white chalk figures that were doing antics and cartwheels, and they had like, you know, a teeter totter and a swing set and a jungle gym. And they were like climbing on all these things. And they were laughing. And I thought, okay, well, I guess, you know, the parent gave me this to entertain me until I can go back to the light.

21:00 But I'm definitely going back to the light. So I just started watching them. And they were saying these little rhymes like, you know, maybe you'd be swing slang or just whatever, and I was listening to their nonsense and just kind of feeling like, okay, this is Saturday morning cartoons, and I'm just going to hang out. And then one of them got closer and the face instead of being a chalk outline filled in more like a dinner plate, and he was getting in my face. So I couldn't see. And I was trying to like look around him and kind of feeling like, dude, you know, you're blocking my view. And then instead of his like hopscotch things to say, he was saying how many fingers, what is your name?

21:47 Then I had this horrible realization. Then I was back in the meat puppet that I was trapped. And I was back at this old game that was so primitive and so dumb. And it just felt to me like if somebody told you, Eric, you're going to go back to kindergarten garden, and you're just going to be there for, you know, another few decades and you can just play with blocks and Lego. And I just like, no, I can't go back to this. And then I realized that he thought that I was separate from him, which even after only a little telepathy I knew was so not true.

22:28 But I couldn't correct him. He wanted me to make noises with my mouth and the mouth felt to me way far away. I felt very much that I was in my brain. And so I had a feeling about my, my mouth as if it were an underground garage under where I was. And I had some kind of remote control where I could manipulate it. So that's what he wanted me to do. So I did it. And I said to, for the fingers and I said, Louisa, I came to on the night on the floor of the nightclub, this guy was the bartender. He had been ceaselessly doing good Samaritan CPR on me and I had come around and I was in a pool of water that I thought they had thrown on me, but it was just sweat.

23:16 And I came back into my body. I sweated that much water. Wow. Let me clarify a couple of things. You kept talking, you were talking about this guy. Who is the guy? The bartender. Okay. That's what I thought. So, so there's some kind of interaction going on with the bartender, sort of when you're out of your body and coming back in or back in. Am I getting that right? Yes. Okay. At a time where you're sort of in both worlds just briefly. And I feel that all the people that were going on the play things on the swing sets and jungle gyms, when I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a ring of Gawkers like as the whole nightclub was gawking.

24:06 And I feel I had been picking up their energy. I myself felt as though I were five years old. That was my mentality as would be, I would compare it to being a child of that age. And I had sort of seen all of them in the same zone as children. But I mean, I think that's my theory. I don't know. All I know is that she came out, he came from among those stick figures. And when I opened my eyes, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of people around me. Sure. Okay. Let me ask you a couple of questions about what was going on. And then there's more to come after this that we're going to talk about as well.

24:48 In the sun, this parent figure, were you seeing anything or anybody or was this just all feeling? Was all feeling and knowing because I could only see the light. Okay. Please try to explain the love a little bit more. So is that once a sensation of warmth and comfort, a little bit like if you lie on the beach and you feel the sun on your skin warming you up, big stuff, that's going all through your thoughts, all through your being. It is just a love.

25:29 I don't know how else to describe it. How do you describe that intensity? Being alive in our bodies is such a struggle. And I actually think it's an unnatural state that we are, you know, people have all these theories about us being here on a mission or whatever, but whatever project the universe source God is working on has involved making us carnate. And it's not comfortable. It's when you're relieved of that.

26:09 I mean, I had been out of the body when I was in the in-between zone, but I think this is the point at which I reunited with the source that is God, that angel that I now call Ignacio is the one who pulled me across the floor and guided me into my source. So if I had believed in Jesus, maybe that's what I would have seen, but for me, I believed in the sun. And so that's where I went. All right, let's talk about Ignacio. Jump right into it. Okay. I mean, you've got a name for him in everything now. So I didn't get the name until the pandemic.

26:49 My first weird after effects were not him specifically. I was in a dark place. I had depression. I rejected my NDE. I wanted to keep drinking. I wanted to go on as I had, but I shoving away this NDE was difficult. And I was so lost that I went into a time of panic attacks and a time of depression. And so my first weird after effect was seeing a ghost who I saw so clearly as a 19th century fisherman in a Macintosh and everything in the middle of a storm. I was walking on the beach in a storm, but then it turned out he left no tracks.

27:34 So that was the first one. It just made me angry. I was just like, this cannot be, this cannot be. The next one was foreknowing that my nephew was going to die before he was born. For during birth, I didn't really know much about my nephew. I just knew that my brother was going to plunge into this horrible, dark sadness because his baby was going to die. And knowing that was awful and when it came true, it was awful. Again, I'm still drinking and I'm heading towards my bottom, right? I'm drinking more and more and it's getting less and less okay because I'm in my 30s now. I drove home super drunk. I was not living in Seattle then. I was living in a long cabin.

28:14 My partner had left me because I'd been untrue and I was just reading the Kowski and drinking and just scrolling in my journal obsessively about this boy at the espresso shop where I worked. And I got home after crossing this railroad overpass where I had seen millions of reflectors and not millions, but maybe like six. I just guessed and like headed for the middle and drove through it 80 miles an hour in the dark just completely bombed. When I got home, I got out of my car and I was holding onto the door because I couldn't stand without it. It was a starry night and my thought was, hey, and I drive so badass when I'm shit-faced.

28:59 And then Ignacio shot something through me. It seemed like it came from the stars and I was so not expecting this. It was a bolt of knowing that hit me like a bolt of lightning. And he had two things. He was yelling and he, but it's telepathic. And the first one was, this is the last time I can help you. And then the next one was, you do know right from wrong. And well, I remember that so clearly. I knew in my heart, he's the one who took me across the bridge. And then in the morning when I woke up, I had done all kinds of things in a blackout.

29:42 I'd left a huge mess in a blackout. I had no idea what happened after that bolt because that's when he pulled the plug on the spiritual sort of life support that he was giving me, right, to get me home safe. And after that, it was just my brain. I have found that spiritual memories do not fade like my NDE. Like anything spiritual that I have lived through, I can know it. So it ruined my drinking. Let's just say that I kept trying and it kept coming back to me. You know, you do know right from wrong. So when I finally hit bottom, I ended up calling Alcoholics Anonymous. I was going to either drink a gallon of vodka or call Alcoholics Anonymous.

30:26 And I decided, well, if I drink the gallon of vodka, I can't call. So I'll do that one first. And I got sober on January 29, 1995. My birthday is coming up 29 years. So that was the first time he spoke to me. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. You deserve it. It is. So then he's spoken to me many times after. Is this part of the woo-woo? Yeah, this is. But I was still kind of like, maybe I'm crazy, you know, but I'm not really having that. Next I, when I got sober, I sold the long house and I went to Europe and I just had so many serendipitous events happen.

31:07 Like he, I was getting ready to go and I had puted with my best friend in college and I didn't know where she was, but it started telling me, you need to call her. You need to call her. And I didn't know this was as nausea then, but it ended up that she was in Greece also for four hours when my flight was laid over. So I got to see her and I got to make amends with her and like, oh, what I had done wrong and turned out her mother was dying of alcoholism and I was able to talk to her about that. Again and again, he saved me. I wrote, there was a time I was just about to drink on the island of Paros because the thing hydrofile was delayed and I was waiting at a bar and I was sitting there at this point in my life.

31:52 I was quite a sort of stereotypical dyke and he said, talk to the people behind you. And I was like, I'm not talking to the people behind me. I've all I've had is a sprite. And I don't know these people and no one and I could hear that they were very queer. It was two guys. And so he was just not let not talk to the people behind you, talk to the people behind you. So I turned my chair around. Well, first I, yeah, I turned my chair and I said, are you guys friends of Dorothy? No idea where that came from, but it's kind of code for Wizard of Oz. Are you queer? Right. And they kind of went like Dorothy and Toto. And I was like, yeah. And so I joined them. And the one on my right was sober eight years, pretty much ran AA on the island.

32:40 He heard from me that I'd called the hotline and they hadn't picked up and he was like, Jessica, she's going to get some shit for me. And then he took me all over to this beautiful tour of the island. And at the very end, you know, he, he, I had a hundred days sober or something like that. And I said, yeah, man, it's so lucky that I, I turned around and talked to you. And he said, luck, how often do you do that? Right. And there's seven of us on the island that hold down AA. And I have, he had 11 years, I guess it was actually. And so I began to know, okay, I have this voice and I don't really know what it is. But then the voice told me when my sister was dying that she was blocked from crossing because she was full of fear and that I needed to describe the light to her.

33:30 And I was fighting it, fighting it, fighting it. Finally, I described the light to her. And 20 minutes later, she died, but I could feel her hovering and pouring the love. And it felt like I got a little freebie of the light that she poured into me. And then I began, okay, like this voice, I don't know what it is. And maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm like some kind of psychopath, but it seems to know more than I do. So many people have had this experience. I was at an intersection at night and the light turned green and he said, don't go. And I was like, that's dumb. I'm going to go. And he was like, don't go.

34:10 He can yell. I don't, I know how to describe yelling in telepathy, but he can do it. So I looked in the rear view and there was no one behind me. So I'm like, huh. And then I'm like, how long don't go? And then this car goes zoom through the intersection going a hundred miles an hour. He saved me that way a few times. Some of the more dramatic ones, I don't have time for all of them. They're all in my book. But one had to do with, I wrote my addiction memoir and my family hated it because no one was reconciled to the fact that our father was alcoholic. I also wrote about my weird things, which they thought that's what I call my paranormal events. They thought I was just making stuff up and trying to capitalize on my nephew's death.

34:55 And it's anytime you write a family history, family is going to be mad, but mine were soul mad and just came down on me so hard. And right after that was in the thick of that, I learned I had breast cancer. So really the breast cancer was bad, but the family stuff felt worse to just lose your first chakra of support. So I was going to a lot of Al-Anon meetings to try to detach from them. And I came out of one one day and it was raining really hard, this being back in Seattle. And I was on top of a very tall hill, this being Seattle Queen En Hill. And I remember taking a corner and touching my brakes and they're feeling just a little soft.

35:40 So I thought, well, I'll probably have to get the brake pads replaced again. Sometimes, you know, here comes Ignacio. And he's like, get off the road, pull over, you have no brakes. And I'm like, don't be silly, man. I know it's raining and I have a hair appointment. No, no. And he's yelling again, you have nothing. And I'm coming up on this big hill that at the bottom, there's a busy intersection. And I have one more turn to make before I get to that hill. And I see a sign in a weird place that says arterial turns. And I'm like, is this where it turns? And it's like, yes, yes, turn, turn.

36:21 So I turned and I had no brakes. I could hardly hold the turn in because I was it was there was nothing. My foot went to the floor. And then I realized, no, this isn't the right turn. This is just a tiny little side street. And then I rolled slowly to a stop. And I said, I'm sorry. Thank you. And I was like, okay, I'll never doubt you again. If you tell me something, it's true. So just to carry over from this, I had a party that fell very close to my 18th AA birthday. And a whole bunch of my friends from AA had I had done good things for many of them.

37:03 And they came to this. I made it. I get to keep my boo party slash 18 years sober. And my house was full of people and they started singing happy birthdays. Someone had brought a cake and oh my gosh, it's hard to tell. So as I saw the cake and all the smiling faces, I thought your siblings are right. You're a freaking narcissist. And that's why you set up situations like this where you're the center of attention. You suck. And then Ignacio came and he was kind of laughing. And he said, this is the best part of life.

37:46 Just let them love you. And it was kind of best part and whole point of life. He was saying, just let them love you. So I had promised him that I was going to obey him. So I was like, you know, to go from I hate myself to let them love you and look in their eyes and receive their love as I'm worthy person. So while I was going through this struggle, people were also taking pictures because it was a birthday moment. And the next day in one of my camera's pictures, I saw this big orb right by my left, which is always where I seem to hear him at the moment that I was going through this struggle. But then I was looking at Facebook and there was another picture from my friend's camera a moment later.

38:31 And there's the orb again, but it's moved a few inches away. And I saw her picture. I was just like, oh my God, that's him. That's him. A question about him. So some people feel like they get direction in their life from the Holy Ghost or from, oh, what's the term I'm looking for? Oh, or from guardian angels. And a lot of things that he did for you are like guardian angels. Do you have a, do you want to put him under some kind of classification like that? Definitely, he's guardian angel. And he's sort of like, you know, the sun has shafts of light, you know, that are raised and he is like a sunbeam of God.

39:19 He is part of God, but he is Ignacio. And the reason I call him Ignacio is during the pandemic, I had just too much time to talk to him. And I had started talking back and forth and I was like, I don't like calling you angel. Like angel is just, I don't like that name. Like don't you, how can you tell me a name? Not personal enough. Yeah. And he was just like, no, no, no, no, no. And I just kept nagging. I said, just tell me something. Then he comes back and again, it's just kind of impatience. And he's just like, little one, I have had so many lifetimes and so many names and none of them are in alphabets, you know.

40:03 And then I was like, oh, I hadn't thought of that. And so I still wouldn't give up though. So I was like, just give me something, something, something. So then he starts playing charades and I'm sitting down and I'm meditating and I keep seeing an IG, IG and I'm like, I don't know any IG names. All I can think of is Iggy Pop. And he's like, what is Iggy's name? You know? And I'm like, is it Ignacio? And then he right away puts an E under the I. And so I'm like, egg, no, no. And it's like charades. And he's like, yes, yes, that's it. I can feel that. So then I googled it and it's an Etruscan name.

40:46 When it's Italian with the I, but it's Etruscan with the E. It means born of fire. And that's where he held me was in the sun. And so I'm like, that's what I'm calling you, dude. He is okay. If you have to tell me something, I'll take that. You know, this, this just gets me thinking of all these interviews I've done, people who have met beings in the spirit world, their introductions don't happen. Okay. Somebody doesn't come up and say, I'm so and so, you know, and you're so and so from earth or something like that. It doesn't happen. So that's kind of an interesting take on it, how far you took that down the road.

41:31 So I asked him also, like, you know, were you my dad? Were you my husband? Were you my, you know, how are we, why do you love me so much? Why are we connected? And a lot of times I ask things like that. And he says, little one, be human. Not going to answer everything you want. When we spoke before, you said something about how this NDE removed. I think you said it like a filter that was blocking spiritual energies or something like that. Explain that. I can read minds when I don't want to. And you, this never happened before prior to heaven's law.

42:12 Heaven's law. And so, you know, some are, or I know when something's about to happen. So I wrote down someone's name on a clickboard before they said it. And boy, were they pissed. They just were like, how did you know that? Have you been spying on me? And I'm like, sorry, sorry. You know, like crossing it out and stuff. I couldn't explain to her. And then I often know I'm going to see people just before I see them. And I one time got very excited to see this guy that I hadn't seen in years. And I thought he was coming down the right hand side of the street. And then the last second I saw, I'm driving, that it wasn't him.

42:53 And so my inner skeptic said, ah, see, this is all of your weird things are equally explainable in mundane terms. You would have gone on and said, oh, I knew I was going to see Tim. And then I saw him. And I'm like, and then here comes the real Tim down the left hand side of the street. And there's just no denying it. I see him so clearly. I honk later. I connected him over Facebook and yeah, he heard the honk. He was coming down. And I hadn't seen him in years and years. Another one was more embarrassing. I pulled into Home Depot parking lot and all of a sudden thought of this couple that I was friends with and thought, man, I bet they still have a really good sex life. I bet sometimes they send the little girls to grandma's and they just go for it.

43:36 And then I saw her naked on a bed with her hair coming down. She was kind of propped up on one elbow and it was like a four poster and she looked gorgeous. And I thought, what's wrong with me? You know, I never think of her that way. I never even seen her with her hair down. I go into Home Depot. First I get turned around. I thought it was in Lowe's and went the wrong way and that killed some time. And then I came back and I was going down the main way in front of all the cash registers and coming the other way is that woman's husband Joel. And so he's like, how's he going? And I'm like, good, how's he going with you? And he goes, oh man, we just sent the girls to grandma's for a weekend and we got a bed and breakfast and he gets this big old grin and he goes, it was much needed.

44:25 And I wanted to say, yeah, who knew your wife was so hot? And that was the one that happened in 2011. And I finally Googled IONs because I was like, this is too weird. And then in IONs, I learned that this is an after effect of an NDE. Now some people have this after effect directly after like they come back and they not only remember everything that happened to them, but these, I'm going to call them spiritual gifts they're given immediately. Years took quite a while. Yes. Didn't it? Yes. And some people, by the way, don't feel bad.

45:06 Some people don't have any of this. We're glad. So, you know, I don't want those people to feel like, oh darn, I got, you know, I died and all I came back with was this T-shirt kind of thing. I think so again, I believe there is this kind of sphere encapsulating us to make us distinct from God. I like to call it a God phobic membrane in the same way that each cell in your body needs a hydrophobic membrane in order to function. If we were constantly hearing all of the signals around us, we would get eaten by a line like that. You know, we have to be focused on the physical world. So we've got this kind of shield.

45:47 For some of us, it gets damaged when we leave it and come back. Bruce Greason, who does a lot of research, he thinks it's something in the brain that shifts. I think it's something in our aura that gets literally like torn when we leave it and things can leak in. My, more often than not, my stuff seems to come from the left. I know it sounds so weird, but I didn't go to Ions. I went to Ions 30 years after my NDE. What there was with me was both a loyalty to my father for atheism and alcoholism. I just did not. I knew I had this moment of truth the next morning after my NDE where either this was real and I changed my whole identity or I come up with an explanation of hypoxia to explain it away.

46:39 Though I knew it couldn't account for the, you know, the voice that I had heard or the sense that it was more real or especially that, you know, you're not done yet. But if I, if I acknowledged it was real, I couldn't keep drinking and the pull of my alcoholic life was strong. I was only 22. Also, it was not near my bottom yet. You know, I was still quote having fun, although it really was over then the panic attacks began. But when I made that choice to turn my back on the spirit world, as I said, my first two paranormal events were dark.

47:19 That fisherman was as upset as I was and the sadness around my brother to be tuned into that. The turning point was when I stopped drinking and he did other things to get me into AA. Like he got me into a relationship with someone in AA that I, I know I was steered by him. It's another story, but in AA, I kind of had the scaffolding to learn what he wanted me to learn also, which was that life is about giving love and receiving love and being useful and of service to other people and loving them as you do it, you know, not doing it out of an eye and that's, you know, for real.

48:03 It's about giving from a place of plenty and leaving one, one, 90 ERI interviewed said she was told it's about the wake you leave behind you. Does each person feel better after interacting with you or do they feel saddened? I love that. And people that talk to me about their life reviews, that's something that comes up is they get put in the position of the one that they affected and they feel that how they affected that person. Speaking of, I have kind of a cool story, but get into that. You and I talked about how you met Kathy McDaniel. She's been on this show.

48:45 Drop that one real quick. All right. All right. Well, you have to read Kathy, Kathy's book in Kathy's book. She talks about how she kept hearing this voice that she wanted to prove was not real and the voice told her she had to go to this Ion's meeting quite a drive for her because she was going to meet a special friend there and she was just so huffy and she drove there despite it. And then just to prove it wrong, she got there super early and she sat on the end seat by an aisle in an empty auditorium and she was like, okay, so show me. So I walked in and I don't know. I never get places early, but I got there early also.

49:25 And I dropped off my cornbread at the table for the potluck. And then I looked at this empty thing and I thought, okay, I want to hear this guy. It's going to be evidence of the afterlife. Jeff Long, I want to hear him. So I'm going to the front row, man. So I start down and then I see the back of Kathy's head and Ignacio says, sit next to her. She needs a friend. And so I said to him like, next to her? He says, empty. She's going to think I'm a freaking weirdo. And he answers. He says, there will be some anger, but love can cut right through it. He didn't say anger. He said, there will be some, I don't know what he is.

50:07 She'll react, but love can cut right through it. So I'm like, okay, I don't disobey you anymore. So I had to go past all the seats to get to her. And I got closer and closer and closer and I sat down right next to her. And if she writes in her book, she says it's a good thing I was sitting down because I was. And so she didn't say anything to me and I just said, hi, I'm Louisa. And then at the break, she said, this, you're going to think I'm crazy, but a voice told me you would be here. And I said, Mike Lewis told me too. And she was again, dumb counted.

50:50 So she, because she had come from gone to hell, she was very ashamed of her NDE, but she agreed to listen when I told mine the following month. She sat front and center and was my look at this person because you're nervous person. And I had a lot of dark stuff from my childhood that I decided to share. And she heard that and she was like, man, if she can share that, I can share mine. And we are good friends now. I've been very supportive of her writing her book. By the way, Kathy's experience for those that haven't heard her episode yet. And maybe we'll stick that in the show notes. It was about going to hell.

51:31 And then how she got out of there and super interesting. And I think without the support of a friend, there were no dark NDE ears in Ions at that time that she knew of. She had to find them, right? Because people were secretive and the voice guiding her to me and my voice guiding her to her. We became a kind of duo that gave us both the strength to share. Okay. Couple quick questions and we need to wrap up. How often do you get direction from Ignacio? Man, he goes sometimes for months or I mean, the weird things that were so weird that I could not deny they were his would come a couple years apart, right?

52:15 And a lot of times I'm not sure whether it's my thought or his thought. So I'd say the ones where he takes what I'm saying and says, no, you're doing the opposite, you know, those come maybe once a year or every two years. There are much more of them in my book. I think anytime I want to pray and meditate, I can. I'm moving to Oregon because when I came out of anesthesia from getting my hip replaced, she put this image on the wall in front of me and he pointed out that almost all my interactions, I was at the center of a hub and coming out for me were all my interactions with people. He said, these are all virtual.

52:57 You did not have people in your home. You're just, and he showed me, me and my home from above as this pencil scribble that was just following where I went and becoming this dark black scribble. And he said, and it's not good. You need to go. And so I'm moving. Cool. It sounded like when you were told that you needed to come back, when you were in the sun, that you were not given a choice at all. You were just told, here's what it is. Is that correct? Yeah. And we're overriding a whole poison dose of lidocaine to make it happen, but you're going back. Yeah, and I've never heard of lidocaine poisoning before. I can't imagine what it's like. I don't know much about how the symptoms work or anything.

53:41 What do you make of the fact that some people get a choice of whether to stay or come back and some people are just told you have to go back? You thought about that? You know, I write a blog that I fund on recovery from alcoholism and it has half a million views. And I believe it has helped people. And I've sponsored a lot of women and helped them get sober. And I know that I have helped them. I lived my life trying to spread kindness. And I had a son, have a son, who is a gift.

54:25 I had a 2% chance of having him in vitro, not in vitro. What do you call that? Artificial insemination at the age of 40. It's not supposed to work. But I have him and he's a wonderful person too. And I feel that at 22, I was so screwed up by my childhood that I had not given anything from the gifts that I was given except greed-wise. I had done well. But it was just so much squandered potential. And Ignacio was just like, you're going to use these gifts.

55:07 You know? He was like, this is just too much to scrap it at 22. So are you thinking that at that age and where you were and what your upbringing was, you would have made the wrong choice and you would have stayed? Oh, I was determined to stay. And I hate to call that the wrong choice. You would have made a different choice. But you were sent back here because you had a lot of good to do. And he knew he was going 100% against my will, but that's the case closed, honey. Like I have made a ruling and you are going back. I have one other thing in my notes from our pre-interview in quotes, kindness matters. Where did that come from?

55:48 It's just if the whole idea of life is to leave this wake of goodness behind you, every interaction matters. Every interaction is a choice to either make some more God by making a connection with somebody even just for a second, just even a smile, just any exchange of yes, we are connected in some way by our humanity, by being alive on the planet at this instant of the planet. You know, I've had a lot of people die recently. If you look behind me, you can see ashes from my mother and next to it, a little thing of ashes from my ex-boyfriend who died in July from drinking, drank himself to death.

56:39 And I need to take his ashes to the top of a mountain to drop them off. Anyway, it's a hard mountain to climb, three fingers. What you remember of someone is the moments of kindness. I'm throwing away everything from my mom, all these papers, all this stuff saved and I'm keeping whatever, but no one remembers anything but your kindness. What did Maya Angelou say? People won't remember what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. That's the gift you have to give. Louisa Peck, thank you so much for being with us. And tell us again about your book. Sure.

57:20 Thank you. My book is called Die Hard Atheist from NDE Denier to Full on Woo Woo Against My Will and it's on Amazon in both paperback and e-book. And you won't find another book with Woo Woo in the title. Thanks again. 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 ericatroundtriptest.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.