Episode 203: The Afterlife & Fighting Our Inner Demons.

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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 death and so will we Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife. I am convinced that our human journey is the toughest thing that our souls will have to deal with. It's bad enough that we live within our own minds, which don't always tell us positive things, do they. Many people deal with

I come from a family I had a lot of good gifts in it. My mother knows a lot about art history and classical music, and my dad was a.

Professor at the university and really successful in his field.

We were taught that God was something superstitious from the past, that science had since proven to be a bunch of silliness, and any kind of spiritual stuff was people's way of comforting themselves because they were afraid of reality. My father was a wine kinnisseur, but he also was an alcoholic, and I'm an alcoholic as well.

We learned to focus on all the good stuff, and.

Anything bad that you didn't want other people to know about just didn't exist.

You just get rid of it. So I grew up having to.

Excel, and it wasn't enough to get all a's, and it wasn't enough to be a good vallet dancer. And when I was a teenager, I developed an obsessive compulsive disorder, and I just hid that from the world.

I hit it from everyone. It haunted me because I couldn't.

Believe, when I was my normal, integratedself, that I kept doing these things that were so horrible to me. So I made a big vault in my mind where I could hide stuff the world couldn't see. And so I went to a vassar and I was five by to Kaba. Lots of awards, and when that was over, I didn't know how to keep excelling. So I moved to New York City, and this is where I had my NDE. I hadn't had a date in high school. Nobody wanted

Would finally feel like I was enough.

So we went to this nightclub and we did a whole lot of cocaine and.

Drank a lot.

I was almost where I wanted to be. We decided to buy some more, so we look around the club in New York and we scraped together. I think it was fifty bucks, and there was this ceed guy, and he said, yeah, I've got stuff, so we bought it.

I went in the bathroom.

I was waiting in line, and I realized I couldn't read the graffiti at all, and I began to get a little scared because it was getting so dark.

So I came out and I went to my friend and I said, there's no air in here.

I was breathing hard at that point, but my heart was probably down to like thirty twenty eats a minute, and nothing was getting to my brain. So he said, maybe you just need a glass of water.

Like there's no air. There's no air.

Most normal people would think something's wrong with my brain, but I thought, wow, there's a new effect of coke that I didn't even know about.

Wow, I'm getting some wicked tunnel vision here.

And so I wasn't afraid until it started to get so dark that I was having trouble seeing, and I was having so much trouble getting breath that it felt like I was suffocating. I went out and I found my friend and I said, I can't breathe.

Something's wrong. There's no air down here.

The nightclub we were in was in a basement, so I just felt like it was all breathed up. He said, we'll get you some water, which I didn't want, and I took me to the bar and the bartender said, here,

So I dive in. I'm under the water.

It doesn't hurt at all, and I look up and I see this beautiful, beautiful.

Dappling surface.

And then I look around and I see the shore and I want to be there, and I'm there, no problem, which doesn't seem weird.

It doesn't seem weird that I want to be somewhere. And then I'm there.

And then I'm on the beach and I look down and I see down maybe about five hundred feet from me, there's a messa coming up out on the beach. Like everything else has been eroded away, but this messa and this old house it's up on top of it. And I think, I know that house. That's something to do with me, So I want to get to it, and I'm there. I go in, and I remember I was traveling low over the floor, and I could see it was all this old wood that had been pounded, and I knew it was by my ancestors.

I knew all my ancestors. We all came through this.

Same house, and they had worn the wood over time to this fine powder. And I felt so honored to be there. I felt they could see me. I felt they were proud of me. I could not see them. The one presence I sensed really strongly was my father's father, and he's the only one who died before I was born. I'd only seen his picture in my dad's closet, but he.

Was really glad.

I was there, and there was this picture window that overlooked the ocean. So as I got closer to it, something caught me up and picked me up, and I was sailing over that dabbling path that the sun puts across the ocean. I went real low over it, and I was flying right over the ocean.

I wanted it to go on forever.

But the sun got bigger and bigger, and all of a sudden, I realized, holy crap, I'm gonna go into the sun. And again it wasn't fear. It was just like, I'm going to go in the sun. That's crazy. And then I'm in the sun and it's a brilliant, brilliant white light and warmth and love all at once. It's like everything I had wanted all my life to feel that I was loved, to feel that I was you know, I had it all of a sudden, and it came

But I didn't hear anything. It was just intense, brilliant light, warmth and love until I just sort of wasn't even thinking you love me, I love you.

We was just love is. There was nothing to want. It's hard to describe. It's impossible. I've heard many people try. It can't so I don't know how long I stayed there, But all of a sudden a parent said you're not done, or says by telepathy, you don't hear the words, but you get the idea. It says you can't stay You're not done. And I said no, and it went from light to black, complete black, and.

I screamed no, no.

I don't have a voice, but I was like an infant, just throwing a freaking temper trantrum. And the parent left me with sort of an afterglow of like I still love you.

By's a done deal.

So then I had a split second of fear, like I'm in total darkness. And then these still stick figures showed up. They were like white figures on a blackboard, and they were doing little cartwheels and jumps and spins. There were maybe like six or twelve of them. I can't say, but I thought, okay, this is a toy that the parent left me to keep me entertained until I go back, so I'll just watch.

So they were saying these little rhymes like how.

Many hippos make the hopscotch or you know, they just didn't make any sense.

And then one of them got closer and bigger, and the face filled in solid and it was saying, what is your name? How manys? And I remembered, oh man, I'm in the world. Oh no, this is.

Terrible, and I thought, I know what he wants me to do, but it's so stupid.

I'm not gonna do that. He wants me to make that burpy air.

Stuff come out and move that loafy thing and supposed to make these sounds. And I'm in the meat puppet and I'm not having it. But then what are you going to do? So my old desire to please came back, and I said Luisa, And I was back in the world, and I realized all the stick figures with people, and I had sweat like a pool, and I thought that someone throwing water all over me. I was soaking wet. They asked me if I could stand up. I was

But everybody was staring at me. I didn't understand. I died.

We'll be right back with more of Louis's and near death experience. You're listening to Shades of the Air Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain. Let's continue with Louisa's story from flatlining in a nightclub to the after effects that have her believing.

Seemed like we all went upstairs and we all went out on the street we were on in the village, and we sat down on this bench, and this man came over and he said, you were dead. You were gone for three minutes, and I was doing CPR on you that whole time. So I asked my friend, I said, what are we waiting for? He said an ambulance.

I'm like, okay, And then I'm like, wait a second, who's it for. It's for you? You were dead, And so my brain started to work again.

I thought, okay, ambulance means hospital means parents find out that I was doing cocaine, means a whole lot of trouble. And there were a bunch of cabs right in front of us. I said, can we just go? And so he didn't want to get in trouble either, so we just kind of jumped in a cab. I remember a bunch of people chased after us, like hey, hey, and we just took.

Off and I never saw a doctor. When we got back to.

My apartment where I left in my roommate, I wanted a drink and they wouldn't let me have one.

I was really ticked off about that.

In the morning, when I woke up, I remembered the whole thing, and I remembered that feeling of being loved so much. I told my roommate the whole story. But I was a really intense atheist. I I had written my senior thesis at Vassa about the advent of modernism and how the Anglican Church had fallen.

People had finally awoken to the mythical nature of.

God, and anybody who's believed in God talked about God.

It just kissed me. Ah. We discovered I had some brain damage. I wasn't concerned. I was brain damage, main damage, whatever. Then I wrote the whole thing down in a journal.

I read it aloud over the phone to my sister, like this crazy drug trip. And then I eventually got with that boyfriend, and I also read it to him over the phone.

I would not ask them to believe that I really went anywhere.

I only told the story as just an example of an amazing hallucination I had with cocaine.

I kept it like that for a long time. I would have left it.

There was just this weird thing that happened to me that had no meaning because I'd never heard of a near death experience.

I'd never heard of white.

Light, except that paranormal after effects started to happen to me. And a lot of people don't know that there are paranormal after effects that come with an NDE.

Something has been ruptured so that you get.

New awarenesses of energy that you didn't have before. I may have missed stuff or denied stuff that happened. Was five years before my first weird thing happened. I've since written my autobiography, and so I enumerated the number of weird things that happened that gradually broke down my atheism, or fourteen weird things. So the first weird thing doesn't happen till nineteen eighty seven.

And it was a whopper. I was on the.

Beach at Gloucester in Massachusetts early in the morning, in the middle of a storm, and there was some romance thing that wasn't worth looking out for me at this party I had gone to. So I went out in the storm alone in the morning, and I'm walking along the beach and this old man comes out of these dunes where there's no houses, there's no nothing. I'm like, wonder what he was doing in there because there's no development there. And he's also wearing all this vintage fisherman gear.

We get closer and closer. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at me.

He crosses right in front of me, and right when he's there, I say, how's it going, And he didn't look at me.

He moves his eye a little bit. They're kind of.

Bloodshot, and he moves it a little, but he just keeps walking. So I guess kept walking and I got all the ways and I thought, you know what a jerk man, what a high school thing.

To like, not even say hy, not even look at me? What is up with him? So I turned around to look and he wasn't there.

And I spent some time trying to figure out if he had dove into the waves, and wouldn't his hat at least come up, wouldn't there be some sign?

Eventually I said, okay, I'm going to figure this out.

I went back and I looked for tracks, and there were only my tracks.

I freaked out and I looked.

For as long as I could look until it was really clear there's only my tracks, only my tread, only me. And then I went back to the house and people were starting to wake up from the debauchery of the night before, and my friend, who owned.

The house, she said, oh man, this ghosts all over Gloucester. You just saw a Gloucester ghost. There's like a thousand names.

Down at the wharf of fishermen who died at sea, and he had been staring out at the horizon like he was looking for a ship. But I just wasn't having it. It could not have been a ghost. There has to be an explanation. So I made my boyfriend come and look for me, he was actually I guess my husband then no tracks, and so there's two things. You know, everybody's thinking you're crazy. You know you saw what you saw, and you know you cannot explain it, so it goes in the vault. John didn't happen. The

I knew that my.

Brother would have intense grief. It would be because his son had died. So I was waiting for a miscarriage. Miscarriage didn't happen. We met for lunch a few days before the baby was born, and the feeling was so strong, and I thought, this is more than pessimism, This is more than mari. This is like, I know his pain is going to be intense. Do I say something?

What do you say? Do you say your baby's going to die? I don't know when, I don't know how, but bohere are you going to be bummed?

I mean, what do you say? So I said nothing. When he called me. You didn't even have to say what had happened, And the feeling I had was this tremendous guilt. Not that I hadn't seen anything, but my mind was blown.

Away by the fact that I had known.

Rather than just grieving for my brother, all I wanted to feel was grief for the baby.

But you feel this, Oh my god, I knew it and it happened.

So all this time, I'm an alcoholic and I'm trying to be like my father. I'm a successful teacher and so forth, but I'm also drinking. But eventually I did hit bottom and there were more weird things around that drove extremely drunk one night, and when I got home and I was kind of like reveling the fact that I was such a great drunk driver and I'd gotten home, something hit me like a thought taser, and it said,

Like, shut up, I hate that stuff.

Even though I knew in my vaulted part of me that there was a God in at some part of it spoken to me. The weird things kept coming, and they were so undeniable. The greatest one was around my sister's death. I actually helped my sister cross over. She was dying of breast cancer. They had told us she had two weeks to live. I was waiting in the hospital room and a voice said to me, tell her about the light.

She's afraid. I was like no, And when I'd.

Closed my eyes, I could feel the light starting to fill the room. I could feel the light starting to pool around her body. And I'd opened my eyes and look and these eyes didn't see anything, and I'd be there's nothing there, and she's going.

To live two weeks.

And it just kept building until finally I was like, Okay, I'll do it, and so I went to her and I knelt down by her, and I described the light as I remembered it.

I said, it'll be all around you. She believed in Jesus, so I said, Jesus will be with you. You'll go with him, You'll be unfolded in his love, and you'll know so much happiness. She wasn't conscious, but she had told me in a previous phone call that she could hear, even under the morphine, every word people said.

So I just went with it.

And when I was done, I went and I sat down, and then twenty minutes later, she hemorrhaged and she died. At first, when she hemorrhaged, my brother and I were freaking out. We were running all over the place trying to get help. When the doctor said she's died. Her heart is still beating, but it'll stop. I wanted to kill the doctor. And then something came from outside and it was my sister, and she was saying, I'm fine, I'm great, and then I began to feel her hovering

Heard of people hovering.

All this stuff is in popular culture, and I don't believe in popular culture. Yet my sister is hovering, and I can feel her telling me that she's fine, loving us all with that same kind of love, and she filled me with it.

She filled me with the light again.

And so how inappropriate is that to be in the hospital room where your sister just died and you're filled with joy because she's filled with joy. I couldn't tell anyone. When we got home to her house where the family was. My sister met me at the door, and I wanted to tell her so much, and I was still just filled up with this jubilation that she was with God and that I was sort of with God right now too.

Here, I know you're here. I began to just pray.

I don't believe that God is anything that religion has represented it to be. I don't call it a he. I don't call it a she. The closest I think we have asn't they, because I believe we all have guardian angels, and that God is this network of energy outside of bodies, a network of energy that's all interconnected. Life is an energy that can either be invested in matter or it can be out in the world. And that's when my life began to change.

We'll take a quick break and we'll be back and hear a few more words from Louisa, and here from the spirit world about addiction. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain. I want to play a few more minutes of Louisa, she's now in recovery eighteen years, and then we'll hear from the spirit world on addiction.

I'd been in a twelve step program and you were supposed to help others, but I didn't really feel comfortable helping others.

It had been some barrier and that broke.

On a specific day, there was a guy I was obsessed with but he was also in the program, and he was trying to teach me a different way to live.

After a meeting one day.

I tried to stalk him to a place to eat. He kept inviting people to come sit at our table, and he left at some point.

I didn't even notice. I was having so much fun.

And when I left the restaurant alone, I said, God, I'm having trouble with this obsession thing. I really don't want it. Can you teach me a different way to live? And I said, I'll make a deal with you. Got every time somebody annoys me at a meeting, I will go up to them right after the meeting and I will stick out my hand and I'll say I'm Luisa, and I'll find out three things about them. And if I do this, you take away mer obsession. And that's

Another person.

You know, it talks, that's all people who do stuff I do do stuff I do. It annoys me. Then when I meet them, we're just the same until we get along or there's some aspect of us is the same. So I went from being in this twelve step program for so many years with only a small group of friends to knowing everyone and having hundreds of friends and

So I began to actually cultivate kindness. It's not that hard, it's not that baky.

It's not like can I say, you know, It's like every person I crossed paths with, I can use that for an opportunity to generate a little bit of God.

If I leave them.

A little happier than I encountered them, I'm doing what I'm here for. Three and a half weeks ago, I got a diagnosis of breast cancer. And I had had a party plan for my eighteen years sober, and all my friends came. When I discovered I was holdly I have to have a lumpectomy instead of a mass sectomy. I made it an eighteen years sober and keep my

You couldn't be more safe. Just love and be loved, and so I let go of my self consciousness.

Lots of good advice in there, including cultivate kindness, love and be loved, and that includes being loving to oneself. Louisa put her autobiography together, which is now a book called Diehard Atheist. If you're a longtime listener, you know many fridays I host something called in the Arms of Eternity, which is a healing and trance medium demonstration with Scott Milligan. The voice you're about to hear is through trance speaking.

This is a.

Gentleman I've known for eight years named mister Eric, who passed at the end of the eighteen hundreds. This is a question that was asked about addiction and if it accompanies us to the afterlife. The question is, Eric, do we take problems of addiction with us to the afterlife If we don't deal with those issues here on this side of the veil, there seems to be a strong spiritual component to issues such as substance abuse.

You well, I must say to you bit the addiction is with the physical body because what it jests then releases chemicals that brings pleasure to it or causes it to destroy itself. You will bring the memory with you. It is a memory if you wish to carry, or you may disregard. Because, my friend, if someone is crippled with addiction, and when we look at this word addiction, many of us think straight away of what can be ingested.

If you're dealing with addiction yourself or have a loved one who is dealing with addiction, there is help out there. One of the most important things to do is to realize what's in your control and what's out of your control. Do as much research as you can on how the brain operates, give yourself some compassion for what you're dealing with, and please reach out to others to help. We human beings need others, don't we And it's much easier going

One must understand that any patron will know there are times of trapal and time times of celebration. You are poured into the child all that they can, all the knowledge you wish to share, but sometimes they must find their own way. I have inspired the one we love to see a grievance like walk in a circle. You start next to each other and as you walk the path of a circle, one goes left, other right. You can see them, but again they feel so different to you.

World that carried within their heart will always be a memory when they knew of love. One has just reminded me in the times of your distress, close your eyes, don't speak of our world.

Talk to the soul of the child.

In your mind, and say, I may not know where you are, I may not have heard your voice.

Things may have been said in reaction, but I still love you, and the door of my heart will remain open. Fill me, hear me, And if you wish come back to me. For everyone who hears these words, I ask a question, have you heard of absent healing? If you have, are you convinced it can work? Are you convinced it has a benev it? If the answer is yes, then why do we question how a soul can talk to another soul called to them. It may take a moment,

Relationships are so very difficult, but this is the best advice I've heard in a long time, is to talk to the person's soul, maybe even just write a letter, to get your thoughts and your emotions out, and keep that conversation going, even if it feels one sided, and trust that their soul is receiving the information. Next, I'd like to play for you, mister Eric, talking about what it's like when our bodies die and we cross that bridge to the afterlife.

The stream in which all of you will cross is merely a stream, the stream that carries you from one state to a new For when your eyes dim and close for its final list, you see all those who you have loved, all those who you may have forgotten, you'll instantly recognize and remember. For any family members that have loved animals, the animals will be there to meet. Familiar faces of family will be there, smothering you with love and the celebration that you have lived your life

Having these conversations with mister Eric really is one of the highlights of my life. And if you'd like to join me, please do. We call them in the arms of eternity. You can find them at the store page at we doodie dot com or click on the Scott Milligan page. We also have a library with all the recordings that we've ever done, and that you can search

Thanks for listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Ghost Day and Paranormal podcast Network. Make sure and check out all our shows on the iHeartRadio app or by going to iHeartRadio dot com.