It's been a week now, and I'd like to thank everyone who offered their thoughts or took the time to read and internalize my original post. I feel like I'm passing through a succession of gates towards healing, and the energy I've been feeling for the past several days has indicated that sharing my NDE was definitely one of those gates and that I'm gearing up for the next step, whatever that might be.
I'd like to add an addendum. When I finally went to bed after posting my NDE on Sunday morning, I had a distressing dream. I was in a hospital, strapped to a gurney and being prepared for a neurosurgery that would leave me completely deaf. I was frightened and crying and trying to get off the gurney and out of the hospital. I could even feel pain, as if my body could anticipate the violation it was about to undergo. At one point the surgeon rushed past me and absentmindedly confirmed over his shoulder all of the awful outcomes I should expect. But when they wheeled me into the surgery room, I became somewhat lucid and I forced myself to wake up. I was fine!
The dream and my choice to end it by waking up felt like an invitation from spirit to change my story from one of linear health degeneration to one of healing. When I talk about healing, though, I am also referring to collective healing. I feel strongly that we as a global civilization have the opportunity to change our collective cultural stories towards life affirmation and compassion (to continue the dream metaphor, it's within our power to wake up from the nightmare we've constructed to a more beautiful world). In fact, I believe my personal healing will be contingent on inspiring these changes in the people around me.
I’ve been off the grid for the past week, but did read your post about your NDE. Thank you so much for sharing about your health struggles, personal crises and your remarkable visions. These are just beautiful and truly touch my heart. I’m so glad you are part of our community. I’ve read your posts over and over again and feel uplifted by your experiences. Namaste.
Dear Coyote,
I just read the story of your incredible NDE! My heart is filled with awe and wonder. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. We are blessed to receive it, to have your trust. I am so glad that you chose to live, that you have found a spiritually nurturing environment and that your future is drawing you towards ever enfolding purpose.
Do you know the organization IANDS? They focus on honoring and gathering NDE stories through conferences and their newsletter.
Again, thank you so much for sharing your incredible story. Bless you.
Thank you, Penelope. I have heard of IANDS, but right now I'm in the process of submitting my experience to the organization NDERF. I'm more drawn to their website, and I chiefly relied on them for learning about NDEs after my own.
I don't feel like I need to participate in NDE conferences or receive related newsletters. I'm more focused on living my life. I still struggle with unknowns like everyone else, and I inevitably have my periods of doubt: will my future really work out the way I saw it in my NDE? But I've become better at noticing signs source/my spirit guides/the universe has been sending me (especially after I started participating in this forum). So for me, "keeping the faith" means trusting my intuition and living with the awareness that each moment holds the potential to set me on my way to my soul's desire.
Your story is so amazing, as I think I've said before I have no words, but your follow up and explanation gave me chills (good ones lol). You are such a powerful spirit! I know in every fiber of my being that you were given this "job" of this life to help human beings and the earth. Many of your generation are a special group of folks who I believe left the earth then came back at an opportune time to help the planet. You have incredible strength and light around you. You are such an old soul, so beyond your 24 yrs here. Thank you again for sharing this and for your courage. I'm humbled and grateful for your presence here.
I have a story of a friend's NDE I'd like to share. His was not what you'd expect:
My friend Steve G. He passed away a few years ago from ALS (very sad) but when I met him over 18 years ago he was "on fire" for God and Life. He had a profound NDE that shook him. He was in the DFW airport on one of the buses going from the plane to the terminal, when he had a major heart attack. He had stopped breathing for a total of 40 minutes, and when he was at the hospital (within those 40 minutes, after the heart surgeon unsuccessfully tried to massage his heart back to life), he was in the room where they were going to harvest his eyes (he was a donor). All of a sudden he woke up! The doctor freaked out and said there is no way you are awake, let alone able to speak right now since you would have no brain activity after 40 minutes of no oxygen to your brain! The doctor asked him a series of questions like, name, address, what year it is etc. He was awake! The doc said it was a miracle.
Steve G. then went on to have children with his wife (3 girls) and he changed his ways. Apparently he had been a serial cheater and womanizer and never went to church. He devoted himself to his wife and girls and the church. He told me the most incredible thing about his NDE. I asked him if he saw "the light" or God, heaven etc. He said No - just the opposite, he said he saw what looked like like a depressing, dark and worrisome place. He said he heard God tell him "I'm giving you another chance to change". It was sad when he developed ALS in his last 2 years of life, but his attitude was one of gratitude and love because of his experience. He also went on to help others and told everyone he knew to get a nuclear stress test if they had heart issues, because he had a twin brother who, due to Steve's experience, had a nuclear stress test that detected the same heart abnormality and saved his life.
Not sure what to make of Steve's experience but it did change him profoundly.
Wow! Thank you Coyote for sharing your story. I am going to be thinking about this. I always felt that our DNA structure mirrored our universe. I once worked with a Dr. who's mother was a geneticist and he told me he has seen DNA and it looks and feels like thin white thread. That make me think of the myth-stories of the Fates, who spin, weave and cut the threads of life. From science to experience to mythos...
Anyway, I had a dream once (not an NDE) that I was in a place where souls go very soon after death. There was a large room with small beds or platforms that "people" are laying on and healers going from person to person and placing their hands on their heads/bodies and healing them energetically. It was communicated that these were souls who had some major trauma and mental illnesses (or perhaps damaged by the ravages of addiction) that affected them and they needed to be healed first. The healing helped these souls return to themselves. That their lives here on earth had altered them and we were just helping to make them whole again/kind of like a straightening out of frequencies-- similar to like how an electrophysiologist re-routes aberrent electrical conduction in the heart but using energy not an ablation probe.
I should add that prior to this dream, many years ago, I had befriended a coworker who had schizophrenia and she told me about the voice she heard in her head and how it was an individual-- who had a name, a history and a personality. To me it seemed like she was soul sick and this personality was like a virus, feeding off her energy and distress. I know that is very unscientific and probably considered superstitious but I really had this sense of it. Added that science offered her little in healing, the medications made her feel sick but enabled her to sort of cope- be functional most of the time and prevent her from hurting herself mostly but still, periodically her symptoms would break through and she would be required to be inpatient at a hospital for short periods of time. This impression remained with me in future encounters with mental illness and addiction. Science says it is a chemical imbalance. Spirit tells me there is more to this, but the solution is less complicated overall.
I've read several NDE accounts and pieces of writing from mediums who channel the afterlife that recount the place you saw in your dream. Yes, it's a place where souls who lived very traumatic lives or happened to die through violent means go so that they can coalesce and come back to themselves. I've seen some people refer to this place as the Hall of Healing.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona is trained as a psychiatrist, and he's written quite a bit about using Cherokee and Lakota shamanic approaches to treating people with mental illness. There is more to it than chemical imbalances, and Mehl-Madrona (along with many other native healers) have seen patients make remarkable recoveries from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using their "unscientific" methods.
@Coyote, thank you so much for sharing. I am trying to figure out how to put feelings and colors into words now, but you must know that I have tears in my eyes reading.
Your experience comes across as very Druidic as well. Druidism has a distinct cyclic believe to it; you can also see this in most of their holy symbols-> spiral imagery like in New Grange, Ireland.
@Jeanne mentions the mathematics of numbers to which you responded, I totally believe in that. There are numbers that will follow you throughout life like clockwork. Hold on to that; it can give clarity whenever you have moments of doubt.
I am so glad that it helped you to find peace and on the path to the life you wish for yourself!
Meeting the shaman is icing on the cake! Be blessed with the wisdom you can receive from them.
I always felt close to the wolf and although I haven't had a confirmation of my spirit animal, it feels right. So, my brother, right on! Run wild and breath in the fresh air of freedom and hope! ❤️
Everything in the universe is coordinated and works in cyclical patterns. While things will renew and return to origins in the course of those cycles, the universe is always advancing towards a new destination, "spiraling" to new experiences and discoveries for discovery's sake. And there are nested cycles within larger cycles, and cycles within those cycles, like a Mandelbrot set. Even the turbulence of my life at that point and the turbulence and ugliness of the world were purposefully building up towards a more beautiful whole with implications that went well beyond humanity or planet Earth. I understood all of this with each passing moment in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital as if I were hooked up to an IV of knowledge, and I could only keep on repeating "oh, wow!" over and over in my mind.
I'm overwhelmed by the beauty and brilliance of this young being, our Coyote. He has been a teacher and a guiding light for so many. I am so incredibly grateful to be allowed to know him, even if only for a little while.
We do not die; Coyote knows this. We go on, spiraling forward in great arcs of fractaling life.
I can already sense him in another time, standing strong and healthy in a verdant field, admiring the Earth and witnessing the fruits of his unique healing power to make "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible" real. I can feel my future grandchildren there, and yours. And I'm moved to tears of gratitude.
Thank you, Coyote.
💗