Meridian J NDE

Experience Description

The day of the near-death experience, Casey and I each carried a five-gallon bucket full of food scraps from the old farm kitchen across the lawn, under the red oak tree, through the musty stone barn where the riding mower and garden tools were stored. Out back of the barn, I set my pail on the ground. At midday, the compost bin was bathed in sunlight, and the molecules of decomposition hit the backs of our throats before we could smell the acrid stench of rotting food.

We had both been attending the community summer solstice ceremony, and the slop buckets contained the scraps of a single meal for sixty-five people. It was our last day of the ceremony, and I was responsible for overseeing the no-trace process of cleaning and closing down camp. Though Casey could have carried both compost buckets easily by himself, he let me lead. He was one of the younger people in camp, maybe thirty, four or five years younger than me. We worked well together.

July, the hottest month in northern Wisconsin. The humid oblivion over days had turned all our bodies into a marmalade of togetherness. There was a cast of characters: my spiritual teacher, Sylvia; her apprentices (I was one of three); people trained to guide others through personal depth work; people who wanted to be guided; people who wanted to be outside in nature; people who wanted to be in spiritual community outside of contemporary religion; people who wanted to use interpersonal tools to better relate with one another; people who were there because of their parents or partners; people who were lonely; people who wanted to grow; people who didn’t fit in elsewhere. I can’t say for sure why everyone was there, but I was there because I had always been a spiritually alert person. And because this particular set of earth wisdom teachings focused on connecting with the natural world, which had always felt like my true place of worship.

The farm was a beautiful location at the high point on the Bayfield Peninsula near Lake Superior. Summer was lush with a vengeance, and when I opened the wooden lid on the compost bin, a dozen or so wasps flew out. It was a flash moment. I let the lid smack down as I backed away from the bin. I took two stings to the upper thigh, right through my pants. Just as I was receiving the venom, Casey took over, opening the lid and dumping the slop in. He inspected the small yellowjacket nest and said he would take care of it later. I stood still near the back entrance of the barn and started to feel very queasy.

“I just got stung,” I said, as though I was suggesting that something out of the ordinary had happened, as though that wasn’t a natural conclusion for something that happens when you mix summer with nature and humans. The equation was common, but it wasn’t part of my plan for closing down camp that day. We had just finished eating our community lunch, and now this happened? Leaving the farmhouse with compost buckets, I remember thinking, "This is good. Me caring for the daily things of community life." As an apprentice, I wasn’t allowed to interact with the community in the same way. There was a separation. "Being of the people, not one of the people", Sylvia would say.

“Are you okay?” Casey asked.

“Yeah,” I said, a little bewildered.

We walked back to the farmhouse through the cool climate of the main part of the barn and out the double wooden doors. On the front lawn, people were still cleaning up from the meal, as if the bread had only just been broken, as if the party was barely over. People were still lingering or just getting up from their chairs around the campfire ring, which was decorated with pine boughs and flowers; an indication that it was too hot for a campfire that day.

As we reached the farmhouse, I dropped to the ground and rolled onto my back. I could see stars as pinpricks of light in a speckled visual field. I saw colors of light I had never seen before. Colors I had no name for. Casey crouched and ran his fingers through the grass, looking for plantain, which grew plentifully at the farm and could help quell the histamine release from insect stings. He picked some, crushing it with his fingers.

“Where’d you get stung?” he said, ready to apply it to my skin.

I could not respond. I drifted into an expansive kaleidoscope of sense perception. Several people lifted me up by the arms and carried me into the farmhouse. My legs moved, and I walked on my own to arrive at that old blue terrycloth sofa in the living room, but I was expanding through the new hues of light I saw in the space surrounding me. My teacher came and sat by my head on the edge of the matching loveseat. She stroked my hair with her long fingers and said, “Just relax and let the venom in; let it move through you.” I remember looking at her and at myself on the sofa, watching my eyes roll back in my head, but “I” wasn’t there, and there was no single vantage point from which the watching was taking place. Then two other women who were nurses came and sat in some part of the room. My eyes closed over with the trench of stars that had filled my vision.

I watched my body shut down from the inside like switches on a control panel. The limbs of my body turned into darkened rooms until there were only two slits of translucent blue light present. There was one at my heart and one at my pineal gland. They were two tiny beams of life-force.

I heard my friend Zar come into the room.

“What is going on here? Look at her; she’s dying,” she said.

Yes, I was indeed dying. I could hear her words like a sound through thick sludge, like an echo without direction. Her voice was familiar, but it had receded somewhere, to a cloud floating in the distance far beyond my body. I heard the sound of her voice, but the words didn’t reach me, like lightning and then a faraway clap of thunder as a storm moves on. A distance was between us. She was observing me where I lay, but I was no longer there.

My awareness became larger than the farm itself. I was out among the pine plantations, at the tops of trees, soaring in a 360-degree awareness of my surroundings. I saw my life open across the northern landscape. I took inventory of the people I had loved: my first boyfriend, aunts and uncles, my soon-to-be ex-husband, my brother, my parents, my best friends. I said thank you and goodbye to them all. I saw a swelling of space where love and joy had been expressed, like a puff of pollen from a juniper tree, each presence of my loved ones coloring the sphere of my awareness with gold. I felt so much love in the inventory. And the pages of my life’s story turned. The review of my life was effortless and without exertion. If there was any pain associated with these loved ones or with anyone else, there was no pain to be felt now. I was without hurt or agony of any kind. This was a pain-free zone. As if discomfort had always been an illusion. There was only love. And then I saw my daughters, their soft faces, their smiles, their alert and attentive eyes. I kissed them and told them how much I loved them, and I thanked them, and then I said goodbye.

Zar’s familiar voice and my teacher’s hand on my head were now gone, and a chute opened out of the goodbyes and thank-yous into a jolt of reverence and love so grandiose, so blissful. There was no longer a physical sensation. Instead, a whispering resound of so many voices, murmurs, a chant inside numerous chants. My arrival to the other side was punctuated by vast reaches of arms and hands, a feast touching me, welcoming me home, hellos in faces so abundant that I felt familiar to everyone, and everyone familiar to me, including the face and stature of my grandpa Bob, only in a younger form than I had known him. I felt like a great holy tongue had swallowed me into the numinous void, and now I was consecrated into an ecstasy so vast, becoming one singular elemental word. A sacred sound. One sublime force. I was without form but dissolved into formless everything-ness.

They say that when you die, you must let go of your entire life and everything and everyone in it. You might remember things of importance at that last moment. Or you might forget your life instantly and move into the Beyond. Or that maybe when we die, we’re judged and rerouted to heaven or hell. Or that painful death sentences us to the Bardo. But I arrived at a place of collective memory, where the beings who welcomed me were encircling me in a saturated heat of remembrance, as if I was in a honeyed elixir of collective consciousness. The most beautiful revelation of ecstasy. The most crystalline reverence, orgasmic euphoria.

My two daughters at that moment were somewhere in Minneapolis with my parents, in the midst of a simple pleasure like getting Chinese food and going to Como Zoo with their doting grandparents. Ava and Kiowa were the radiant lights of my life, even though I had felt utterly terrified of caring for them as a newly defined single mom. It had been five months since my husband and I had split up, and our divorce wasn’t finalized. The previous year, he told me that he didn’t want to live a spiritually focused life. He didn’t want to live at a retreat center and cater to my spiritual teacher’s daily requests. He wanted to drink beer and have barbecues with friends on the weekends. I didn’t blame him. But I was completely devoted to my path. I would not waver. I was there to study spiritual wisdom teachings, and I would not be persuaded otherwise. And he was part of my plan. If it wasn’t for him, who would help me raise our wild, shoeless daughters? Who would help me live my dream of serving humanity by helping people remember who they were? I needed him, but he wasn’t a part of my life anymore. He had said no to my plan and instead drifted toward a biologist woman at work who would become his second wife. My daughters now looked to me for their mothering and to him for the fathering—separate jobs, separate houses, as little back-and-forth conversation as possible. But all of that was behind me, washed clean with translucent blue shimmering sponges of pure love.

And then—the word “then”—I was falling backward, backing up, moving into directionality again, a swooping up and back into my body. Back into that Craftsman-era farmhouse living room, back to that sofa with a horizontal specimen called a body. Back and back and back. And Zar was above me with the spent EpiPen, and someone was on the phone with emergency services, and I gasped and took a huge gulp of air. Whose eyes did I see? Zar’s. Her benevolent yet no-nonsense facial expression.

When word spread around camp that I had been stung, someone started running around looking for Benadryl or an EpiPen. Who brought that EpiPen into the room that day? A doctor who came to the ceremony during the first few days left a box of them. She apparently had said, “You should really have EpiPens here in your first aid supplies.” And that’s what Zar used, otherwise fully prepared to give me a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen.

It took the ambulance an hour to arrive, but then the gush of navy-blue-uniformed EMTs pushed into the living room where they lifted me, asking me, “Can you walk?” and I said, “Yeah,” but there was no “me” there. I remember them opening the ambulance doors and ushering me up onto the gurney. Outside of the farmhouse, a mass of people had gathered to see what was happening. I looked to be moving. I looked to be alive. But I had just died and come back and was not back just yet. The word “back” so poignant. I came “back” from the dead. I crossed over, but then Zar punctured me back into the living realm, and here I was, on my way to the hospital in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Because Ashland was in a different county, the EMTs had to stop the ambulance just a half-mile away from the farm and park on the county line. There we waited for at least twenty-five minutes for a new set of EMTs from Ashland County to arrive. I was inside the ambulance on the gurney, but in my conscious awareness, spread wide in the most open aperture, like the wind coasting over the earth, gliding along through forests, swirling around leaves and stems and along the surface of nearby Lake Superior. Everything glinted with warm and radiant light. I began talking jubilantly with the EMTs as they squeezed corticosteroids into my veins. I spoke as if using a new, unknown language for the first time, but fluently. I remember being amazed by the power of each word I spoke, the way each puff of air arrived in shapely colors at the crest of my lips and formed a unit that the EMTs nodded their heads to in confirmation. Words were like musical arrows of light. I was astonished that I could create understanding with these star-units of immense color and vibration. The EMTs all seemed to be beaming at me, as though observing an intoxicated person. But I didn’t care. I told jokes. I spoke in poetic turns of phrase. If they thought I was crazy, well, that assumption was my delicious enjoyment. When the next crew of EMTs finally arrived, I set about administering radiant word units to them as well. They treated me, and I treated them with injections from the death space, the magnificent Void, the zero from which we all are born and return to. I was in an undifferentiated state of consciousness. There was only a “we” whose language I somehow knew by heart.

Back home in New Mexico, I tried to adjust to my new understanding and perception. I kept making repetitive mistakes, like accidentally draining two thousand gallons of potable water onto the dusty Navajo sandstone all because I forgot to turn the hose off to the horses’ water trough. Ever since my near-death experience, it was as if my soul was just barely buckled back into my body. I kept embracing my children and considering how lucky we are to be together. And yet, I had tasted a level of acceptance and welcome unparalleled in the physical world—a completeness, a reverence for the dissolution of my identity. Residing back into my body caused me to feel estranged from the bliss I had tasted. I didn’t have a coach for this moment. It was the beginning of a deeper dialogue with my soul. I was already living a spiritual life, and by spiritual, I mean connected to the food I ate, the people I interacted with, the things I read, the places I traveled, the trees and minerals around me. My children. And my pain.

One thing I didn’t do in dying was thank myself or tell myself that I loved myself. I didn’t suddenly approach a mirror where I looked at myself and said, *Ah, at last, you. The one I have been all this time. Thank you. You’re so obliging to have held this experience of selfhood all this time. How generous of you. How commanding and deliberate you have been in giving me this experience of being alive.* Nor did I thank my body; the miraculous lengths of nerves, tendons, ligaments, inner tubes, sphincters, the surfaces of skin that changed over time, ripened, gave me pleasure and pain. What did it mean to be selfish? Or selfless? It was impossible, with my new understanding, to only be “self-referential.” I couldn’t find any detail that was separate from any other detail. A thread connecting every seen and unseen energy in the universe. I felt an embodied understanding that if we as a species could fathom the inextricable interconnectedness we are made of, it would signal the end of our sense of complexity. Apparently, we need mirrors to see ourselves. We need to know we are a part of this great oneness. We need one another to see it. When we forget our place in the oneness, we lose our sense of gratitude and wonder for being alive. We do not exist in isolation. Despite everything I would experience being a single mom, where I felt very marginalized and alone much of the time, I still knew this wasn’t true. I could watch my human self feeling one way but watch the larger part of me knowing it wasn’t true. Paradox. How grand the sense of belonging I felt. How desperate I felt to be back there, where there was no pain. I could feel both things simultaneously.

Over the months that followed, I became incredibly distressed that I did not die. I felt such blasphemous grief that I was still alive. I did not want to be alive. Even while I knew that my children were much better off with my continued presence in their lives. I had touched something so profound that I wanted to return. Had I become a drug addict? Addicted to the drug of the Void? My grief about my marriage ending and the breakup of my family was mixed with the grief of not dying. Why then did I come back? Surely a question that many NDE experiencers had asked before me. Why did I stay here? Could it be that I had yet to experience the self-love and self-appreciation of which we are all deserving? I was previously so oriented to helping other people, I scarcely noticed myself and my needs. I didn’t have any answers, but it was the beginning of the end of my life as an apprentice.

Often, I was alone at the retreat center between scheduled events while the other apprentices and my teacher were traveling abroad. Sometimes I would sob while mucking the horse pen. Sometimes I would scream or bellow, the horses eyeing me cautiously, not wanting to come near. Sometimes my daughters were just meters away in the house playing when I would release a tsunami of tears. Inside of me, I experienced the deepest grieving I had ever known. It wasn’t suicidal ideation. It wasn’t depression. I was still in the death space, the Void. I was still merged with the presence of invisible forces. I had gone home, and now I was homesick. “Divine homesickness,” my craniosacral teacher called it.

After a time, the death experience eliminated my fear of my own death. I still worried about other people—my children especially. The following spring, my ex-husband was arrested for DUI with the kids in the car. I had to make a big change to prioritize them. I formulated a plan to leave the retreat center. I turned toward the imprint that the NDE had left on me. I returned to my writing. I found an adobe cottage for rent closer to Santa Fe. The tiny house was situated along an old apple orchard by a creek where the girls could play freely. Here, my single-mothering phase began in earnest.

I spent three years in intense PTSD from the apprenticeship experience, going deeper into my grief and pain. I learned that suffering is an integral part of the human journey, but also part of the illusion. We suffer because we believe we’re alone. Because I am human, I feel the temptation toward these misperceptions some of the time. It turns out that suffering is part of the experience of being alive, just as is joy, contentment, and belonging. If we choose to go through each experience with as much presence as possible, we can better access a state of acceptance, compassion, and ultimately, wonder. We remake ourselves via the crucible that discomfort has to offer.

Just beyond the rim of this moment and the next, there is a veil. Behind that veil is everyone you have ever loved and everyone who has ever, or will ever, love you. What self-referential signpost can you place in the ground of your experience so as to remember this truth? What scintillating word can jog your remembrance toward the eternal? We can use anything as an excuse to enter the present moment, and there is only this one now-moment. The noise, the beauty, the togetherness, the loss, and the return to embracing one another.

At the time of submitting this description of my experience, after working on it for a while, I have just lost my brother to homicide. I often shared my NDE with him when he was alive. I was very aware of him as he traveled to the other side, in disbelief of where he was. I find that I am still so connected to the other side. It would be so easy to follow him there. But I've made a conscious decision to stay here, in the land of the living. So I did not follow him. And I did not let my conscious awareness merge with his changing form. But the recent experience of his passing brings this all back in technicolor.

Background Information:

Gender: Female

Date of NDE: July 2014

NDE Elements:

How do you consider the content of your experience? Both pleasant AND distressing

Did you feel separated from your body? No

How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal everyday consciousness and alertness? When I was crossing over.
Very much so. The love was so sublime.

At what time during the experience were you at your highest level of consciousness? More consciousness and alertness than normal

Were your thoughts speeded up? Incredibly fast

Did time seem to speed up or slow down? Time seemed to go faster or slower than usual
It was slower, I think. And faster. Both.

Were your senses more vivid than usual? Incredibly more vivid

Please compare your vision during the experience to your everyday vision that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience Different quality of seeing all together. Rounder. So blissful.

Please compare your hearing during the experience to your everyday hearing that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience I don't remember hearing anything. The living world dropped away. I was unaware of sound.

Did you seem to be aware of things going on elsewhere? Yes, but the facts have not been checked out

Did you pass into or through a tunnel? Yes
Not a tunnel, but stair steps that seemed to be downward away from my body.

Did you see any beings in your experience? I actually saw them

Did you encounter or become aware of any deceased beings? Yes
My grandfather for sure. He was about age 30 in the encounter. I did not know him in his thirties. I knew him in his eighties.

Did you see or feel surrounded by a brilliant light? A light clearly of mystical or other-worldly origin

Did you see an unearthly light? Yes
Hard to describe. A soft merging of everything. All light beings on the other side.

Did you seem to enter another world? A clearly mystical or unearthly realm

What emotions did you feel during the experience? Bliss! Complete bliss!

Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness? Incredible peace or pleasantness

Did you have a feeling of joy? Incredible joy

Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe? I felt united or one with the world

Did you suddenly understand everything? Everything about myself or others
Yes, I understood the truth about LOVE

Did scenes from your past come back? No
Yes, past relationships came into my awareness so strongly.

Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure? Yes
I watched my system shut down, and then I let go. I'm not sure if I stopped breathing. Maybe for a moment. Did my heart stop beating? Maybe for a moment.

Did you come to a border or point of no return? No

God, Spiritual and Religion:

What was your religion prior to your experience? Other faiths- New age
Studying Earth-Wisdom teachings. But also had been practicing meditation and other somatic based modalities.

Have your religious practices changed? Yes
I think so, but the change has been so gradual. I just don't see as many separations in my heart of heart about reality. Everything is actually interrelated.

What is your religion now? Do not know
The death experience changed me. All religions are fundamentally the same to me now. Different dressing, different cultural overtones. At the core, everything is love and unity. Otherwise it's not real.

Did your experience include features consistent with your earthly beliefs? Content that was both consistent and not consistent with the beliefs you had at the time of your experience
It just took away all the boundaries that we use culturally to stay separate from one another. To hold ourselves back from experiencing one another.

Did you have a change in your values and beliefs because of your experience? Yes
Yes, I prioritized relationships more.

Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice? No

Did you encounter or become aware of any beings who previously lived on earth who are described by name in religions (for example: Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.)? No

During your experience, did you gain information about premortal existence? Yes
Just the truth about LOVE

During your experience, did you gain information about universal connection or oneness? Yes
OH yes. Awareness that a LOVE FIELD exists, and it's always here, surrounding and supporting us.

During your experience, did you gain information about the existence of God? No

Concerning our Earthly lives other than Religion:

During your experience, did you gain special knowledge or information about your purpose? No

During your experience, did you gain information about the meaning of life? Yes
Same as above. That living is all about LOVING.

During your experience, did you gain information about an afterlife? Uncertain
I was on my way to somewhere else, but then got tugged back into the land of the living. I did not want to return to the land of the living at that point.

Did you gain information about how to live our lives? No

During your experience, did you gain information about life's difficulties, challenges and hardships? No

During your experience, did you gain information about love? Yes
Yes, as I talked about in my longer description of the event. Also, I already changed the names in my description.

What life changes occurred in your life after your experience? Moderate changes in my life
I am still figuring that out, all these years later. I am less attached to definitions of spirituality.

Have your relationships changed specifically because of your experience? Yes
I am more present, forgiving, and loving. More open hearted.

After the NDE:

Was the experience difficult to express in words? Yes
It just feels like the other side cannot be captured in words.

How accurately do you remember the experience in comparison to other life events that occurred around the time of the experience? I remember the experience more accurately than other life events that occurred around the time of the experience

Do you have any psychic, non-ordinary or other special gifts after your experience that you did not have before the experience? Yes
Yes, I have a stronger sense of guidance. Actually, this is the thing. Now I have GUIDES. Streams of wisdom that guide me daily.

Are there one or several parts of your experience that are especially meaningful or significant to you? Coming back and appreciating my life more.

Have you ever shared this experience with others? Yes
Mayne six months or so? I started to talk about it. People are always very impacted when I share about it.

Did you have any knowledge of near death experience (NDE) prior to your experience? No

What did you believe about the reality of your experience shortly (days to weeks) after it happened? Experience was definitely real
I was not fully back in my body. For years I walked around with one foot on the other side of the line.

What do you believe about the reality of your experience now? Experience was definitely real
No doubt in my mind. I don't care if other people think I'm crazy. Find out for yourselves one day!

At any time in your life, has anything ever reproduced any part of the experience? Yes
Yes, I have had moments where the experience seemed so close. Where I was communicating with beings on the other side. I have since then tried to stop these interactions. They felt like they drew me too close to wanting to be on the other side.

Did the questions asked and information that you provided accurately and comprehensively describe your experience? Yes
I think so.