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Hi.
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years, I've been on a journey to prove the existence of life after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we now know that our loved ones have survived physical debt, and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. Did I
ever tell you about my impossible promise? Way back in two thousand and two, I took a self development course called Power and Contribution, and the idea was to make your life about being in service and when you pick a really big thing that you're passionate about and where you would like to help, then somehow your life works out. People were taking on things like ending world hunger, cleaning up the water in the world, things that are impossible
but we can make a difference in. And at that time I have to tell you I had no idea what I was passionate about. And they said, look what it is you've been doing. Who have you been being, What kind of things have you been interested in? Is there any common denominator for me? I owned a small business. I owned a coffee and chocolate store. Also my mom and I catered for race car teams, and I had
been investigating the afterlife. Didn't tell anybody. Started out very small, so I thought, who I am is someone who makes a difference in a lot of different ways. We all had to fill out this form with our impossible promise, and I said, well, I'm looking at life after death. Why don't I use that. We had to pick a date twenty five years out in the future and make a promise, and I said, by the year twenty twenty seven, all people in the world will know that we don't die,
that life is an education for the soul. So I put it out there, never intending to do anything with it. Years went by. I continued my investigation into the afterlife, but of course I didn't tell anyone until twenty ten, when my dad died, and what I learned about grief made me realize that I wanted to start sharing with people everything that I learned. We are going into twenty
twenty four and now. Between my two podcasts have closed to six hundred hours of interviews talking about the afterlife and have had millions of downloads have my book We Don't Die, a skeptics a discovery of life after death, and I have no idea how many copies that has sold. I am a once a month guest on Coast to Coast AM with George Nori, talking to their three million listeners. Because of you and your kindness, how kind some of your reviews have been. This show has your own in
popularity big time. The girl who made that impossible promise back in two thousand and two couldn't have imagined the difference she's making today. Sometimes it gives me goosebumps to realize that I'm on this path. Part of me thinks whether it's God or the universe. Someone recognized how hard I work and said let's give this mission to her.
I'm certainly not the person responsible for when a tipping point happens on planet Earth, but I do know I'm someone who loves to share the stories of good people that are making a difference in this field. I don't know if this transformation will happen by twenty twenty seven, but I'm rather shocked to think that's just three years away. You never know who you are really until you get
busy do doing something you're passionate about. It doesn't have to be anything big, and I truly believe when you set your eyes on being of service to another, it makes your life a little bit easier because we're not spending all this time in the negative mind thinking about ourselves. Some good news, Mom and I saw the movie After Death. If you go back a few episodes, you'll see that I interviewed Stephen Gray, who wrote and directed the movie,
and producer Jens Jacob. They were such nice guys and it all started with a death in the family that made Stephen want to research more. The film After Death today is number four in the box offices. It is showing on about two thousand movie screens in big movie theaters, across the US and Canada to our friends not in that area. Yeah, just stay tuned because within two months or so it'll be streaming and you'll be able to
see it. You can follow the status of that if you go to angel dot com forward slash Life After I am thrilled at the quality of the movie, taking mom. I wasn't sure how it was going to be. My dear mom loves me dearly, but I think sometimes when I tell her the stories of Life after Death, one eyebrow goes up. She might think, Sander, that all sounds good, but there's no real evidence. The movie is high quality, great special effects. All the stories were from some very
professional people. Most of the people in the film were doctors. There was an airline pilot, there was a professor who all had near death experiences. Several times. I got filled with emotion and excitement, and by the end, I was just wowed.
For me.
I think this is the film that we can take our skeptical friends and family members too and have an amazing conversation about the reality of the afterlife. I know my mom was just as touched as I was. There is no possible way to watch that movie and think there's not a bigger picture, So two thumbs up for
the film After Death. As I spoke about on my interview with Steven and Jen's, this film I feel has the potential to help create that tipping point where more people openly believe and talk about the reality of the afterlife than don't. There was a day long before we were born, that the people in the world thought the earth was flat. Eventually, of course, we know it's not, but it took time. I truly believe that with this film will help mankind really accept the reality of the afterlife.
And can you imagine living in that world where all people know that although our bodies die, we don't living life, going after their dreams, being okay with failure, knowing that they're never alone as in the invisible space around them, there is tons of love in people cheering us on that know when we close our eyes the last time here on earth, we simply open them and our loved ones and our pets are there to greet us, and we continue to live that day, My friends, is right
around the corner, and I'm so excited that you and I are part of it. Today I'd like to continue with the theme of doctors and near death experiences. I found a presentation by critical care doctor Lauren Belg who believes that training doctors, nurses, and other hospital personnel about the reality of near death experiences is key to how physicians talk to their patients. Doctor Lauren has some incredible stories of near death experiences that her patients have shared.
She starts with the story of Samuel.
He needed surgery, so whenever I approached him and said, Samuel, we're.
Going to need to do surgery on you, he said, oh, no, I'm not going to do that again.
And as he told me his story, he said, they did surgery on me, and I saw the whole thing. I didn't know how to respond to that. At that point in my journey. I was confused, and I was still thinking of it in a very finite way.
I said, tell me more.
He said, I was up above looking down at my belly, and I saw my whole surgery. So I'm thinking, oh, does something go wrong with anesthesia. I'm thinking very still, very finite. I said, did you feel any pain? He said no, I didn't feel any pain, but I saw the whole thing. I saw them open my abdomen, I saw my guts, and it.
Freaked me out. I will never do that again.
Now, understanding surgery and the anesthesiologist among us, can I speak to this is that there's a field that blocks the vision from the surgical field. To preserve that sterile space, you can't possibly when you're lying there see your surgery from that vantage point. I went to the medical records,
and that time we didn't have electronic medical records. We actually had to go down to the bowels of the building and pull out these big manilla folders and leaf through them and look through them, and it could take hours. But what I was looking for was the anesthesiology records, because I knew that the anesthesiologist records for minutes to minute heart rate, blood pressure, any movement, any suggestion that they might be coming out of anesthesia and gaining awareness.
There was none of that.
The anesthesiologist's report was quite bland, as it should be in a situation like that, and there was no suggestion that he had elevated heart rate, elevated blood pressure, any signs of distress. And the surgery that went off quite well, and they removed some shrapnel, which was a reason for his surgery in the first place. And he did fine according to our records, but Samuel did not think so,
and so he refused the surgery. We made him comfortable, his family gathered as bedside, and he crossed into the non physical and that stuck with me. That was a moment I could not wrap my head around. I had no context, I had no language, I had no experience. But something shifted and I became aware of this phenomenon. I read everything I could about what I came to understand is out of body experience, and at that time
I didn't know about it. But Samuel's experience set the stage for me to experience what I was intended to. But quickly I was back into the training mode. But every now and then I would hear people's experiences and stories, and I became of the impression that they all happened from this vantage point of above, that in moments of crisis, people would float up above their body, view their experience, float back down into their body, and awaken to tell
me about it. And I heard some really great things, and one of them was really quite fun. You had this impression when you are watching a cardiac arrest on TV that it's all chaotic and people are shouting and running and doing things, and that there has to be an element of drama about it for to be successful.
Not true.
In the ICU, it's actually can be quite calm because we have them already hooked up. You have the time to sit in that space and respond to whatever emergency is arising in front of you.
We have to take a quick break and then we'll be back for the rest of that story and more. If you're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Don't go anywhere. There's more Shades of the Afterlife coming right up.
I'm George Norie. Thank you for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Hey everyone, it's producer Tom of Coast to Coast AM and More. Sandrass starts right now.
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlaine. Is it possible that a new way of thinking about near death experiences, long reported but often discarded as hallucinations by the medical professional community, could help heal and transform patients with these strange experiences. Intensive care, critical care specialist. Doctor Lauren Bell believes yes, so let's continue with her fascinating stories.
I had this one patient.
His name is long lost from me, but after we resuscitated him and he recovered a couple of days later, he began to tell me about me and what he saw. And he told me about my Chartru's green shirt, which I still have in love and it's unmistakable, but apparently it looks the same from up above.
But he commented on how that.
Color glowed and it was just so bright, and so he locked in on me because of that color, and he described to me the events that I knew to be true. We had the humorous moment in the midst of his code where I got tangled up in the bed my stethoscope is I was trying to pull it out of my pocket. Pens came flying out, and he commented on that. He said, there was so much stuff in that pocket, I thought a frog was going to
come out next. But again, over the years, I had some experiences like this where people would come back and tell me described perfectly in a state outside of the physical, what had happened while they were in the physical, and we knew that they were experiencing cardiac death and couldn't possibly by our definition, have described what they described. But a turning point for me came about seven years ago.
One of the ICUs that I work in the most is actually a trauma ICU, and that has become my home. It's become my space of comfort, and as you can imagine, there's a rich opportunity of stories there and experiences that people experience around trauma, which is probably why I love it so much. In Wisconsin, we have a lot of rivers, probably left over from glacier melt, but they're big, they're slow, they're wide, and they're perfect for recreation.
And I will never.
Forget Kyle, who was in his late twenties, early thirties and quite active, quite in love with being young and being able to do all these spectacular things, and one of his favorite things to do was parasailing on the
Wolf River. There are two stories here, our version and Kyle's version, And what we knew to happen in our version is that Kyle was parasailing behind a boat on the Wolf River and man brain set in when he saw two bikini clad women sitting on a boat floating in the Wolf River and so he was so enamored. Flirting began, and there was a moment of bad decision making on the nurses part, because one of them was a nurse.
They flashed him.
Man brain went into overdrive and he became tangled in some utility wires, not paying attention.
So our version, he.
Began to fall out of his parasailor into the water, and he's pretty high up. So he hits the water with such force that he loses breath, he loses heartbeat, he starts to drown, and these two women, horrified, become his rescuer. They pull him out of the water, and one of them was a nurse, as I mentioned, and they resuscitated him successfully. Kyle's version, I was watching these
two babes. I was having a good time, and all of a sudden, I started floating up and I thought my ParaSail it must be caught some wind and I'm floating up. And he said, while I was floating up in the air, I saw this guy falling and I was horrified. I thought he's going to hit the water. This is not going to be good. And so he said, he watched this man hit the water, and the next thing he knows he's laying on the deck looking up into the faces of as he described these beautiful babes.
He didn't know one was a nurse. I can only imagine that he heard celestial music of the sports illustrated type. And what was so fun about this story is that he gained so much insight and he was so excited about what had happened. Once he realized what had happened, that the whole experience was not lost on him.
In fact, he said, I am not.
Afraid to die, especially if it means diving headfirst and two bikini clad women. But I was in love. I was in love with the process from that moment on. To understand how transformative that moment was for him on whatever level he could accept it and experience it and relish in it and grow from it.
Became so beautiful to me.
I thought, I want more, and I sat trying to figure out how I could enter into conversation with people. What I finally settled up on is a question that I would pose to them, and I was polite about it. I would let them recover from whatever it was that had caused cardiac death or respiratory death or whatever trauma, whatever illness, whatever had happened. But at some point I would approach them and say, did anything unusual happen when
you experienced cardiac death? Did anything unusual happen when you were in your accident and were resuscitated. And the first person that I posed that question to was a woman. I asked the question, I said, did anything unusual happen? She said no, and I was so disappointed. She was well versed in the existence of near death experiences, She'd read all about them. She was fascinated with metaphysical phenomenon,
phenomenon of consciousness, and she was really truly disappointed. But we had this rich conversation about the fact that perhaps she didn't need it, Perhaps she didn't need that moment where her understanding of reality is ripped apart and she is invited to look at another possibility.
The second time I posed that question.
Was to a lady who ten years earlier had experienced neurotrauma.
She had had a head injury, she.
Was hospitalized for a long time, and after that something had happened, a flip had been switched where she was able to be incredibly intuitive. We've all heard these stories where after a traumatic incident, you can perhaps have mediumship abilities, intuitive abilities.
She had these things.
She had this very rich experience, But what our doctors and her family told her is that you had a head injury. It was a very serious one. You almost died. These experiences that you're having are probably just sequel from this head injury. So she start to shut down, and these beautiful experiences, these rich exps experiences that she had, were kept close to her, were unable to be shared, and that was extremely lonely for her and very sad.
So when I asked her after her cardiac death, did anything unusual happen to you?
She started to cry.
She burst into tears, and she shared with me this beautiful experience of meeting light and pure love, and this sadness of not wanting to come back because she had experienced intense peace and acceptance. And she sobbing through this whole story. And in that moment, I realized she didn't need the experience. She needed the question, and the question became very important and still remains something that's part of
my tool set as I interact with patients. But then I more often than not, I come across patients that need the experience and the question they made the question for me to set the stage for them to begin
to understand and process their experience. I had a patient who was quite ill, and in that illness, we understood that he had a faulty electrical system in his heart, and every time we would try to bring him to consciousness, he would have this storm of dysrhythmia ventricular tachycardia, and he would become quite unstable and we would have to shock him out of it, soak him in medication, let him marinate in the medications that we know can hold
people in a stable rhythm. And this happened to him four times, and so he had four resuscitations during his long hospital stay, and these resuscitations were quite prolonged. We would stand at his bedside shocking him and giving him medication thirty forty minutes at a time. But he survived. And I saw him in follow up in the outpatient clinic and he told me this incredibly rich story of how he was able to very easily get out of
his body. And it only took him one already at arrest, to realize that he could do this, and he would get bored laying in bed I can imagine and walk around.
If he saw a.
Nurse coming, he would think, oh, I've got to get back and bend, and so he would get back in bed and he would lay there, and he began to say that he could understand the nurse's thoughts. He could hear them, and with people. He was very connected with his family. He could hear their conversations over great distances and recount them to them. He could hear their conversations
in the waiting room. He recounted a funny one where they were fussing over which store they were going to go to to catch the sale racks, because one had a better sale wreck.
Than the other, and if we get there early, we'll get the better deals.
And he was able to recount that conversation to his family, who just stood there looking at him, unable to believe what they had heard. But the curious thing is that not only was he transformed by this experience, he had had incredible difficulty with vision and hearing. He had heightened sensory experience that lasted for about three weeks after he went home.
He could see, he didn't need his glasses.
He could hear, he didn't need his hearing aid, and as time went on and it started to fade, he was trying to hold on to that experience in whatever way he could, but it changed him. And when I saw him and follow up, you're.
Going to love this, I guarantee it.
He said, I've been doing some research about what I experienced and I found this place in Virginia and he said, they seem to know all about what I'm talking about. And he said, and I want to go there. I said, it wouldn't, by chance be the Monroe Institute.
Yes, it is.
It's a Monroe Institute, and we're connected, We're bosom buddies. So I've formed this ongoing relationship with them that has been quite beautiful, but again a brilliant example of how these experiences can be transformed and how we need to be prepared to hold space for them. And asked the question and invite it forward. Just like buying a red car, Once you buy a red car, you see them everywhere. Once you'd name your child Katie, suddenly the world is
filled with Katie's. This level of awareness that you didn't know of before suddenly is right there. About three years ago, I noticed that people started telling me things without the question. And I imagined that once I had entered into that space, and once they had hinted their space, that connection was probably obvious to them on some level that they didn't necessarily understand or recognize consciously that this was safe space.
They could tell me their experience without being judged and without being told that it wasn't real.
And sometimes they're quite funny.
Well, doctor Lauren, we like funny. We haven't talked too much about out of body experiences that people have, being able to walk around the hospital like this guy could. There'll be more of that when we get back from the break. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM, Aaronormal podcast network.
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We're happy to let you know that our Coast to Coast AM official YouTube channel has now reached three hundred thousand subscribers. You can listen to the first hour of recent and past shows all for free, so head on over to coastocoastdam dot com and hit the YouTube icon at the top of the page. This is free show audio, so don't wait Coast tocoastdam dot com is where you want to be the best afterlife information you can get. Well you're alone. Shades of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain.
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain, and we're listening to doctor Lauren Bell, critical care doctor, about some of the experiences and what she's witnessed.
Now.
Just before the break, she said, some of them are quite funny, so let's listen.
I recently admitted a man to the hospital who had had a respiratory arrest.
From his enphysima. He had been found by his son.
He was pulseless, he was non breathing, he was blue, and he didn't know how to do CPR, so there was some time before the ems got their way able to resuscitate him.
And for time, oxygen.
Or the lack thereof is brain and so you always worry about an oxic brain injury. But he was right his rain. He was perfect. And I walked into the room and he was jubilant. And I walked into the room to introduce myself, and the first thing he said to me is.
I saw my brother.
That's great. I didn't understand the context. He said you don't understand. I died and I saw my brother. So I'm all in, I'm all ears. Pull up a chair, I sit down. I said, tell me, tell me what happened. And he recounted this beautiful story of crossing over being greeted by his brother that he loved but had died tragically in an accident years earlier, and again this pivotal moment of I'm not afraid to die. It's okay, I know what's going to happen next.
So as I'm getting ready to examine him, I pull the chair aside.
I reach into my stethoscope, and he said, I know what's going to happen next. And I said, you're going to see your brother. He said, no, you want me to take a deep breath. By and large, near death experiences are quite positive, and what people experience is quite
positive and transforming. But I am so glad that I asked the question because Carol told me an experience a patient who had had a cardiac arrest that was actually quite dark and quite frightening, and all of her fears that the afterlife came barreling in on her when she crossed over. She saw demons, she saw darkness, she saw agony, and when we resuscitated her, she was terrified, terrified of dying, terrified of what it was going to be like, terrified
of what she perceived was waiting for her. And so when I asked her the question, that's what she shared
with me. And I remember reading something in a book, a book that I got here, about someone's experience of encountering this darkness when they would go out of body and have experiences of exploring out of body, and they tried to avoid it, but it kept pulling her, and when she finally engaged with it, she understood it was just a throbbing, undulating mass of her collective fears and anxieties and beliefs that did.
Not serve her.
And so I remembered that story and we sat for probably an hour dissecting that experience of.
What do you think that meant? Was anything familiar to you in that any fears that you have here that.
Resonated with you in that experience. I was so fortunate that I had the time to sit with her and to unravel that, because she gained an understanding that how we are here is how it is there. If we set up that script I've heard people say I don't believe in God, I don't believe in an afterlife, and I've found myself saying, once you cross over, you will find that that is true, because that's what you've decided
is true. And so we were able with Carol to bring her back to a space, and I was able to share some stories with her that were brighter and lighter and more encouraging that this, in all likelihood was a script and a scaffolding that she had set up for herself, and that if she took the time to explore those fears and to untangle them and to set them aside, and to refuse to keep their company, that I felt confident that when she crossed over for the
final time from this earth body, that her experience would be quite different. I'm still learning from this process. I'm still being informed by what people experience. There was a woman who was.
Dying, and we knew she was dying, and it was clearly her time. There was nothing that we could do to save her.
But she was quite conscious, and she had a son who had been quite naughty, and he had done some things that were just so unkind to his parents and alienated himself from his parents. He had spent some prison time for theft related to how he had really destroyed their financial lives, and so there's a lot of hate and animosity that existed between them.
E'sn wanted to come.
Visit her on her deathbed, and she said, no, I don't want to see you. And of course he's older, he's has more experience. This is now twenty five years after the fact, and he really wants to connect to his mom. And he's sitting in a bar, We've got lots of them in Wisconsin, and he's experiencing deep sorrow, deep regret, deep remorse, wanting to connect with his mom before she crosses over, and she's refusing to see him,
and he's wanting this so badly. He looks up and he sees his mother coming into the bar, and he's so shocked and he's so elated. He's crying, he's excited, and he can't understand it because she's so sick.
What is she doing there?
And he gets up to go greet her and assn some bars are always so crowded. There are people that obscure the view, and when they pass, she's no longer there. His mother wakes up and says, I have just dream I dreamed that I was in a bar and I saw my son sitting at a table crying, and he got up to start coming to me, and I got scared and I woke up. And we were able to
corroborate these stories and understand that her sigh herself. And this is how I see it, because unfortunately, before she passed, they were not able to make that physical connection, but I believe they made that soul connection, and.
He was blown away. The family was blown.
Away because they understood that something quite unusual had happened, and they were able to share the same data to confirm that this was true.
This is a fun one.
I liked what William Buelman said about throwing out an anchor and keeping yourself firmly entrenched in a reality.
And we come across that.
I had a lady one time who was incredibly ill and bound into her hospital bed by every cord that mankind can invent that.
Has utility in the ICU.
She had a folly in her bladder, she had a tube in her throat connecting her to the ventilator. She had IVS, she had lines, and she was quite ill, but we knew that she would probably not die from this illness.
So when she.
Recovered, she was furious. She said, your staff is horrible. I tried talking to that nurse and telling her I had to go to the bathroom, and she would not listen to me. And she was right there and she kept her back to me the whole time. I know she could hear me, and she was just ignoring me. So I got frustrated with all you people. I had to go to the bathroom. So I got up out of bed and started looking for a bathroom. You don't have a bathroom here in the ICU.
Did you know that?
And I went over to Miss Sallie and she described Sally, and Sally is our administrative assistant in the ICU. She described her perfectly, who was not on duty the day that she woke up and was telling me this story.
And I asked Sally where the bathroom and wasn't She ignored me? And so I went out the door to the ICU, and I wanted to say, did you open I'm gonna go through them. And I looked around and this is a sorry institution. You don't have a bathroom anywhere for use of the patients and I'm going to file a complaint. She did.
She filed a farmer complaint, and the nurse manager that I know very well of the ICU, she came up to me and she said, I knew this could only be your patient, Lauren. I engaged this patient in conversation in language that I felt that she could accept and understand. Suggested to her that maybe she had had a non physical experience, that maybe she had had an out of body experience, but she did not have the context to
even register that she did not have the experience. Her anchor was firmly out in this physical reality, and that is how she interpreted her experience, to the point of putting ink to paper to tell us how bad we were for not having bathrooms in the ICU. Another one that is really quite charming, and this is just an example of many and the night shift things can quiet down and be quite controlled and peaceful even in the ICU,
and nurses were sitting out talking, chit chatting. And we received another complaint of a guy who did not feel that his needs were being met and couldn't get the call like to work. Must be the batteries needed to be changed. So he came out to the nurses station and he started talking to the nurses. They didn't listen to him. He tapped him on the shoulder, they didn't listen to him, and he's thinking, these nurses are just so inattentive. I've never seen anything like this in my
whole life. So he sits on the counter and said, I'm going to sit on the counter till they noticed me.
And they never noticed him.
So he went back to bed for lack of anything better to do, understanding from our perspective that he's so hooked up he can't even possibly turn over, let alone get out of bed. But again explaining to him that reality his anchors firmly down.
He can't conceive that this is even possible.
What I've encountered recently is I continue to grow in this journey and to evolve how I interact with patients is understanding that there is a truth that exists for patients around these experiences that has nothing to do with our belief in them or lack thereof. They exist independently, and they don't need our belief in them to be true.
They don't even need the patients believe in them. To be true.
Before we continue with doctor Lauren's next stories, I think it's important to point out a couple of things. One is this question about negative near death experiences. Even in the movie After Death, they brought up these negative experiences in the movie, and with people that I have interviewed, there's usually a pinprick of light or they start praying and it shifts that experience. Also, we are not yet detached from our physical body, so our consciousness is still involved.
So some of the fears that we might have may show up if we don't have them resolved before we die. However, at some point there's the light, there's our loved ones, and there's the love. Also, I know personally some people that attempted to take their own life, they saw negative and they feel that that made them want to live. The other thing is these are out of body experiences. I love hearing about people cruising around the hospital, can't
find the bathroom, can't get the nurses attention. Our consciousness is very powerful, so we may look at more of these out of body experiences in another episode. Fascinating, Let's go to the break. You're listening to shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
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Born Book. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain and we are listening to the stories of critical care doctor. I see you, doctor Lauren Belg. If you want to find out more about her, you can go to Laurenbelg dot com. Let me spell it for you l A U R I N b E l l G dot com Laurenbelg dot com, and you may be interested in picking up her book, Near Death in the ICU Stories from patients near death and why we should listen to them. Let's continue with doctor Lauren.
I had a patient who I was seeing again and follow up because this tends to be where I am able to hold space and receive these stories. But this woman had been in a very bad accident and had broken both of her ankles, and they had to extract her from the car with the jaws of life and all the drama that goes into trying to get someone untangled from mangled metal. Her children brought her to see me. They came to the follow up and they said, basically,
we want you to set her straight. She's telling us a story that we knew was impossible to happen. And my immediate thought, though I didn't say it, is you picked.
The wrong doctor.
If you want me to set her straight about an experience that she says happened that you don't believe did.
But what she told is that she is the eternal mother, she's the driver. She's stuck in this car.
But that doesn't even register as a possibility for her, speaking of the impossible, it doesn't even enter our mind that she can't get out of this car and assess that the people.
And see if they need anything.
So she gets out of the car and she's walking around checking on people to make sure they're okay, and then she hears the sirens and thinks, oh, I better get back in the car, so I think can take care of all of this.
So she gets back in.
The car, and she's excited about this phenomena because at some point she realizes, wait a minute, if they had to get me out of the car, how did I get out of the car.
And walk around.
So she's processing this at home, and all of a sudden, she's in love with this story of something fantastic happened to me, and I'm telling everybody, and her kids aren't buying it, and they become annoyed. They become irritated by this phenomena that becomes her deep.
Truth of what happened.
And so we end up having a discussion, in quite a nice discussion where they still don't believe it. We come to an agreement that she experienced something that she cannot prove to you that happened. You're hearing something that
you cannot prove to her did not happen. In this middle space, let's agree to honor her truth and to hear her And when she wants to talk about it, do you think that you could hold space to hear her story without passing judgment, Because obviously this is something very important, very transformative that happened to her, and they were okay with that.
And I haven't seen her in four.
Years now, so I don't know if they have been transformed by osmosis of hearing her story over and over.
I would hope.
So.
Another one that happened that I think is just quite fantastic is a lady who remained conscious throughout her entire accident, and that's recorded in the MS documentation. Because frequently you have this traumatic event, you're thrown from your car, you lose consciousness. They wake up in the ICU, you talk to them, they have no idea what happened. The last thing I remember is something was coming at me, or the last thing I remember is I was slamming on
the brakes. There tends to be this protective veil that descends over trauma and you don't remember it. But this lady had been thrown from her car, and then she starts to explain with tears streaming down her face.
I saw my.
Mom, I saw my dad and they hugged me.
She's choking sobs.
So these are these simple sentences that she can get out in this high, squeaky, tear filled voice, and she's crying. I'm crying, the nurse is crying. This is just so beautiful. And her son comes very irritated. He said, that didn't happen.
And he's angry.
And the more she tells this story, the more angry he becomes, to the point that one time I asked him if I could have a moment with him out in the hallway, and so we have this discussion about truth, and this is her truth. I asked him, what is the most important thing in this situation? That she stopped talking nonsense, That's what he said, and I repeated the question. I said, no, what is the most important thing here? And he was finally able to come to the point
that my mom get better. That's the most most important thing to me, that my mom get better. And I said, what if this experience that she had that has her so emotional is part of her getting better? What if her being supported in her truth, even though it's not your truth, is actually part of her healing and part of her.
Road to recovery.
And he was able to enter again and to what was him an uncomfortable agreement that we.
Would support her truth.
Because as I've gone through this process of being informed about near death experiences, out of body experiences, other phenomena of consciousness around people who have experienced trauma and illness is that they're there to teach us something they happen more than they realize, and hopefully, as we learn to ask the question, we will be invited into these experiences and hopefully as care providers gained some skill and helping
them interpret that experience their interpretation, not ours, and help them to get as much from that experience as they deserve to get. And so that's my new passion is how can we train physicians, train nurses, trained healthcare providers, mental health providers to enter into a conversation around their truth Because what I hear now and I actually heard it from a doctor on NPR not too long ago.
I was listening to this guy who is a well known author, well known physician, and it was really into what he was saying because he was talking about the cutting edge of medicine. If you listen to public radio, after they have a presentation, you know, they have a
call in session afterwards. And so this person called in and he's explaining his near death experience over the phone, and I'm really excited and this esteemed physician across the airwaves said you have to understand that you were really sick, and he essentially shut him down on public radio telling him it didn't happen, telling them that it didn't exist and that it was probably a hallucination.
And I was mortified. I turned the radio off. I was shaking. I couldn't even think.
But what came out of that for me is that there is a sense of urgency to educating physicians that it does not matter if you believe in it or not. Your agenda around near death experiences and phenomena of consciousness is so unimportant. What is important, what is central, is what the patient in front of you experienced. So I'm asked to switch over to a video as I tell you a story of how this video came to be.
And I really feel strongly that this work found me.
It started with a curiosity, but I'm amazed once I opened that door what is coming my way and the invitation to be part of this conversation around educating providers about what our role truly is and that it really is a medical tool. Able to sit there and hold space without judgment and without interpretation. When I did Heartline in twenty ten, I met a lady there who was a filmmaker and she's also a member, very involved.
Member of IONS, the International.
Association for Near Deak Studies and Synchronicity being what it is. She and I came together and she started telling me about our project, and I started telling her about my experiences, and she said, would you be willing to be interviewed for this project that we're putting together on how to educate physicians about how to talk with people about their near death experiences?
And I said sure, and didn't.
Think anything about it, and time went by and I didn't hear from her, and she didn't hear from me. We had a local Chapter Network retreat that summer and she and her husband came.
ROBERTA.
Eller is her name, and she has a production company called Blue Marble Films. And we started talking again and it was this moment of she had forgotten, I'd forgotten.
We saw each other and we said.
Oh, yeah, we were going to do that thing, and she said, you know, I have my equipment here, I can set it up and we can do the interview right now. We were at the Nancy Penn Center. We realized this was probably not the best environment. One thing I know about Penny is that she is always up for anything that might be a little mischievous or out of the ordinary, and so she agreed to drive us up to Robert's mountain retreat. And while we did filming and set it up, Penny set about doing Penny stuff.
But in retrospect, I consider the being that Penny is that she, without even knowing it, probably held incredible space for us while we did this interview, and it became part of a film, and the film is out now and is being distributed to physicians and nurses and mental
health providers who are willing to listen. Our hope for this film is that it will gain some momentum to introduce a new way for providers to interact around patients who have had experiences of sciousness phenomena and become comfortable in asking the question and to understand that there's no pressure for them to believe in it, because their belief in it is irrelevant. Their ability to show up and ask the question is central. This film is about thirty minutes, so I hope you enjoy it.
We're not going to play the thirty minute video, but I do want to tell you about it. Doctor Lauren got it produced. If you know somebody who could use it, or want to watch it yourself, go to IDs dot org forward slash video. So I as in ice Cream, d as in David s as in Sandra, IDs dot
org forward slash video. It features doctor Diane corkran Nde researcher, doctor Bruce Grayson, researcher, Jamis Holden, near death experiencer and neurosurgeon, Doctor Eben Alexander, psychiatrist and near death experience recent searcher, Doctor Mitch Lester, an orthopedic surgeon and near death experiencer,
Doctor Anthony Chikoria. The impact the film After Death had on me, my mom, and I'm sure millions of other people definitely had something to do with the credibility of the people telling the stories, surgeons, physicians, a skeptical doctor telling the story who now has to believe the afterlife is real. We've got to have that hope, faith and trust, and your life is important. You are one of a kind, you are special, you are loved, and you are powerful.
Don't forget to come visit me at one of our free Sunday gatherings with medium demonstration included, or you can watch your replay. They are extremely in inspiring and if you'd like a free copy of my book, just fill out your name an email address at the bottom of the page at we Don't Die dot com. In closing, I'm Sanders Champlain. Thank you so very much for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife, wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.