Episode 206: The Afterlife Investigations of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

and acceptance. As we delve into it a little more, we find that those stages don't happen in order, and often there are other things involved, like shock and guilt, and with grief, it's that feeling of not wanting to go on. These five stages have been mainstream for years, but who created them, and more importantly, did the creator believe in life after death? The good news is doctor Elizabeth Koubler Ross is our pioneer that we're going to

explore today. Let me tell you about her. She was born July eighth, nineteen twenty six and passed August twenty fourth, two thousand and four. Elizabeth Kobler Ross was a Swiss born psychiatrist who worked with terminally ill patients. In nineteen sixty nine, she authored a book called On Death and Dying, in which she first discussed these five stages and not just for dying, but for grief or any kind of

loss again, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She found that people experience most of these stages, although in no particular order, after being faced with the reality of their impending death. Elizabeth also taught over one hundred and twenty five thousand students about death and dying and was greatly involved with the formation of hospice and palliative care for

the terminally ill. She worked a lifetime with the terminal ill and she heard enough stories of near death experiences and visions from patients who saw loved ones just before they passed, and she started her own investigation into the afterlife. Although she was previously a skeptic on life after death, she researched more than twenty thousand people who had near death experiences. She herself had a near death experience. She's authored many books on life, on death, on life after death.

Convinced of our continual existence after physical death, she has written many many books books like on Death and Dying, On Grief and Grieving, on Life after Death, Questions and Answers about death and Dying, The Tunnel and the Light, on Children and Death, to Live until we Say Goodbye, The Meaning of Suffering, The Cocoon and the Butterfly, and many more. While we're together today, we're going to explore

some of the work of this amazing woman. I'll also be reading some excerpts from some of her books and telling you more about her and her life. Before we go too far, I just want to play a minute sound clip so that you can hear the voice of this beautiful Swiss born pioneer This was recorded in nineteen seventy four, when she was about forty eight years old.

twenty years or ninety years. And I seem to be a little from dying patients, not so much about the old stuffed the stages of dying that had to live is out fear and guilt. So the twin this occurs. It's okay, fear and guilt are the only enemies of man. If you live to live is out fearsome guilt. You listen every day is so foody that you feel like you live a hundred lacks.

And I I think we have learned from dying patients not so much about the old stuff, the stages of dying, but how to live without fear and guilt, so that when death occurs, it's okay. Fear and guilt are the only enemies of man. If you can learn to live without fears and guilt, you live every day so fully that you feel like you've lived one hundred lives. One of the things I find fascinating is that clip from her was in nineteen seventy four, and she refers to

the stages of dying as the old stuff. It was only five years before that, in nineteen sixty nine did she publish the book on Death and Dying. In nineteen seventy four, she was already onto What's next, having researched these out of body experiences, and around the same time that doctor Raymond Moody was also studying these extraordinary experiences and coined the term near death experience. I'd like to read to you now. A short excerpt that was published

in her book The Tunnel and the Light. It is interesting to me as a psychiatrist that thousands of people all around the globe should share the same hallucinations prior to death, namely the awareness of some friends or relatives who preceded them in death. There must be some explanation for this if it's not real, and so I proceeded to try to find out means and ways to study this, to verify this, or perhaps to verify that it is

simply a projection of wishful thinking. The best way, perhaps to study it is for us to sit with dying children after family accidents. We usually did this after the fourth of July weekend, Memorial Days Labor Days, when families go out together in family cars and all too often have head on collisions, killing several members of the family and sending many of the injured survivors to different hospitals. I have made it a task to sit with the

critically injured children, since they are my specialty. As is usually the case, they have not been told which of their family members were killed in the same accident. I was always impressed that they were invariably aware of who had preceded them in death. Anyway, I sit with them, watch them silently, perhaps hold their hand, watch their restlessness, and then often shortly prior to death, a peaceful serenity

comes over them. That is always an ominous sign, and that is the most moment when I communicate with them, and I don't give them any ideas. I simply ask if they are willing and able to share with me what they experience. They share in very similar words. One child said to me, everything is all right now, Mommy and Peter are already waiting for me. I was aware in this particular case that the mother had been killed

immediately at the scene of the accident. But I also knew that Peter had gone to a burn unit in a different hospital, and that he, as far as I knew, was still alive. I didn't give it a second thought, but as I walked out of the intensive care unit by the nursing station, I had a telephone call from the hospital where Peter was. The nurse at the other end of the line said, doctor Ross, we just wanted

you to know that Peter died ten minutes ago. The only mistake I made was to say, yes, I know, the nurse must have thought I was a little cuckoo. In thirteen years of studying children near death, I have never had one child who has made a single mistake when it came to identifying in this way family members

who have preceded them in death. I'm so grateful for all of the research that doctor Elizabeth Koopler Ross has done, but it does break my heart to hear that in the sixties and early seventies it was the norm to have so many car accidents on holiday times, and it was predictable that she would be able to sit by so many dying children's bedsides. I'm grateful for the time we are living, but always remember pay attention offensive driving

and seat belts. Here's another shortcase discussing a near death experience of a blind person. Doctor Ross says, one of our female patients was blinded in a laboratory explosion, and the moment she came out of her physical body, she was again able to see and to describe the whole accident and the people who dashed into the laboratory. When she was brought back to life, she was again totally blind.

Do you understand why many many of these people resent our attempts to artificially bring them back when they are in a far more gorgeous, more beautiful, and more perfect place. I know we've discussed that on the show before, that when people have these near death experiences, most of them

want to stay, not come back. We'll get more into the life and discoveries of doctor Elizabeth Kobler Ross as this episode continues, but I thought you'd like to know there is a website for her found found it is Ekrfoundation dot org, of course, standing for Elizabeth Koubler Ross. On the site you can find their nonprofit organization, the work that continues globally, videos on Elizabeth Pictures, and also so much grief support. Here's a quick quote by Elizabeth.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation. It's time for our first break, and we'll be back with more Elizabeth Koubler Ross. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal podcast network.

to be able to grow. I want to tell you a little more about her. Born in nineteen twenty six, Elizabeth Koubler Ross wanted to be a doctor, but her father forbade it. She left home at sixteen, was a hospital volunteer in World War Two, and finally entered medical school in nineteen fifty one. She studied terminal illness, publishing her groundbreaking book on death and dying in nineteen sixty nine.

The book outlines the five stages that dying patients experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kubler Ross had a fragile start as an infant. She was born as a triplet, weighing only two pounds. Developing an interest in medicine at a very young age, kubl Ross encountered intense resistance from her father. He told her that she could be a secretary in his business or go become a maid. Defying her family, kubl Ross left home at the age of sixteen and worked a

series of jobs. She also served as a volunteer during World War II, helping out in hospitals and caring for refugees. After the war, she volunteered to help in numerous war torn communities. She was profoundly affected by a visit to a concentration camp in Poland and the images of hundreds of butterflies carved into the walls there to kubl Ross the butterflies, These final works of art by those facing death stayed with her for years and influenced her thinking

about the end of life. Kub l Ross began pursuing her dreams to become a doctor in nineteen fifty one as a medical student at the University of Zurich. While there, she met Emmanuel Robert Ross, an American medical student. They married in nineteen fifty eight, a year after she graduated, and moved to the United States, where they both had internships at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island. Then she went on to specialize in psychiatry, becoming a resident

at Manhattan State Hospital. In nineteen sixty two, she and her husband moved to Denver, Colorado, to teach at the University of Colorado Medical School. She had been disturbed by the treatment of the dying throughout her time in the United States, and found nothing in the medical school curriculum at that time that addressed death and dying. Filling in for a colleague one time, Kubler Ross brought in a sixteen year old girl who was dying from leukemia into

the classroom. She told the students to ask the girl any questions they wanted, but after receiving numerous questions about her condition, the girl erupted in anger and started asking the questions that mattered to her as a person, such as what it was like to not be able to dream about growing up or going to the prom according to an article in The New York Times. Moving to Chicago in nineteen sixty five, Kubler Ross became an instructor

at the University of Chicago's Medical School. A small project about death with a group of theology students evolved into a series of well attended seminars featuring candid interviews with people who were dying. Building upon these interviews and research, Kubler Ross wrote on Death and Dying in nineteen sixty nine, which identified the five stages that most terminally ill patients

experienced es denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The identification of these stages was a revolutionary concept at the time, but has since become widely accepted. Life Magazine ran an article on Kubler Ross in November nineteen sixty nine, bringing public awareness to her work outside the medical community. The response was enormous and influenced Kubler Ross's decision to focus her career on working with the terminally ill and their families.

The intense scrutiny her work received also had an impact on her career path. Kubler Ross stopped teaching at the university to work privately on what she called the greatest mystery in science, which was death. During her career, Kubler Ross wrote more than twenty books. She also traveled around the world giving her life, death and transition workshops funded

by the profits from her books, workshops and talks. She established Shantynalaya, an educational retreat center in Escondido, California, in nineteen seventy seven. Around that same time, she formed the Elizabeth Kubler Ross Center, which was later moved to her Virginia farm. In the mid nineteen eighties, working with AIDS patients during the early days of the epidemic, she tried

to create a hospice for AIDS afflicted children. In the later part of her career, Kubler Ross became increasingly interested in the issues of life after death, spirit guides, spirit channeling, which was met with criticism and scorned by her peers in the medical community. For one who wrote so extensively on dying and death, Kubler Ross's transition from this life was not a smooth one. She retired to Arizona after series of strokes in nineteen ninety five left her partially

paralyzed and in a wheelchair. I am like a plane that has left the gate and not taken off. She said, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, I would rather go back to the gate or fly away. In two thousand and two, Kubler Ross moved into a hospice. She died on August twenty fourth, two thousand and four, of natural causes, surrounded by her friends and family. Not long before her death, she had finished work on her final book on grief and grieving, which she wrote with

David Kessler. Kubler Ross was survived by her two children and two grandchildren. In two thousand and seven, she was inducted into the National Woman's Hall of Fame for her work. Kubler Ross helped the public discussion on death and dying in the after life, and campaigned vigorously for better treatment and care for the terminally ill. We certainly owe doctor Ross a lot of gratitude. Here's some words from her book, The Tunnel and the Light, essential insights on living and dying.

It is said somewhere, ask and you will be given, knock and it will open, or in a different language, a teacher will appear when the student is ready. This proved to be very true within One week after raising this important question and making a commitment to finding an answer to it, we were visited by nurses who shared with us the experience of a woman, missus Schwartz, who

had been in the intensive care unit fifteen times. Each time this woman was expected to die, and yet each time she was able to walk out of the intensive care unit to live for another few weeks or months. She was, as we would call it now, our first

case of a near death experience. This occurred simultaneously with my increasing sensitivity and observation of other unexplained phenomena at the time when my own patients were very, very close to death, many of them began to hallucinate the presence of loved ones with whom they'd apparently had some form of communication with, but who I personally was neither able

to see nor hear. I was also quite aware that even the angriest and most difficult patients, very shortly before death began to deeply relax, have a sense of serenity around them, and begin to be pain free in spite of perhaps a cancer ridden body. Also, at the moment of death, their facial features expressed an incredible sense of peace and serenity, which I could not comprehend since it was often a death that occurred during a stage of anger, bargaining,

or depression. We discovered that it is possible to do research on life after death. This discovery was for me an incredibly moving experience, and I will simply summarize what we have learned in the many, many years studying this phenomena, which is called, for the time being, the near death experience. Our dream was to collect twenty cases. We now have

twenty thousand cases. We never published them, and I'm glad we never did because what we found out when we started to look for cases was that there were lots of people who were willing to share with us, but they always started sharing by saying, doctor Ross, I will share something with you if you promise not to tell

it to another human being. They were almost paranoid about it because when they came back after having this glorious experience, which for them was very sacred, very private, and shared it with people, they got a nice little pat on the back and we're told, well, you are under drugs or it is very normal that people hallucinate at moments like this. They were also given psychiatric labels, which of course made them angry or depressed. We always need to

label things we don't understand. Why is that? There are many things that we don't know yet, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Amen to that, doctor Koubler Ross. Let's have another quote by doctor Ross. There are only two emotions, love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety, and guilt.

It's true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear, but it's more accurate to say that there is only love or fear. We cannot feel these two emotions together at exactly the same time. They are opposites. If we are in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. In our next segment, together, I'll read some words from Caroline Mace, well known medical intuitive, New York Times best selling author

and friend of doctor Elizabeth Koubler Ross. We'll be right back. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.

who was a friend and interviewed doctor Ross. Caroline is a five time New York Times best selling author, an internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human consciousness, spirituality, and mysticism, health, energy, medicine, and the science of medical intuition. Here are her words. I was privileged to know Elizabeth Koubler Ross, not as well as some, but well enough

to know that she was a paradox. For example, during her last two years, as her health was failing, she phoned me three times, not to learn what she could do to help heal herself, but rather to find out what she could do to help herself die more quickly she found living in a wheelchair, slowly waiting for death to come, and unbearable suffering. She fought with God until the very end, angry that she could not determine her time of death. Even Elizabeth, it seemed, had to walk

through the famous stages of death and dying. That was Elizabeth, feisty, stubborn, wilful, intense, and determined to have things her way, even her own death. Death did not scare Elizabeth. Neither her own nor anyone else's. Death, however, did scare almost everyone else, and that fact is what made Elizabeth one of the most controversial figures of the medical community during her lifetime. All of the many things that come to mind in describing this incredible woman, one

phrase seems to sum up her whole life. Elizabeth was, as I mentioned earlier, a paradox, working within a society and culture rooted in Judeo Christian tradition which holds fast to the belief in the afterlife. Elizabeth devoted her life to proving that this belief was not in vain. An after life did exist, and not only that it was beautiful. Dying was just the beginning of another life, an eternal life that was filled with love and the promise of

meeting those who died before us. And yet it was this Western Christian culture, rooted in an afterlife theology, which challenged her death and dying work the most. Consider Elizabeth's argument that the dying person was in fact prepared by some cosmic pattern that organically emerged within the person's psyche for this journey of crossing over. People didn't just leave

this earth as if their lives didn't matter. They were prepared for the process of leaving this earth, suggesting it was important that each of us take the whole of our souls with us when we depart. She noted that indeed, the shop of being given a critical diagnosis by a physician most often results in anger. No one responds to that news with joy. Then depression sets in a natural response to feeling helpless when confronted with a crisis in which you are told there is nothing you can do,

but the patient. Elizabeth urged should not be abandoned by physicians or family during this time, nor ignored out of fear of death. Due to the age old superstition that death might be contagious. Not speaking about death does not, in fact calm the patient. The truth is, the patient knows he or she is dying through the natural knowledge

of the soul. To not speak about this process is to deny the human being the essential need to complete unfinished business by collecting the fragments of the soul that long to together before the soul is called home. It is that completion that ultimately brings the soul peace and calm, making it ready to release from its earthly life, and completion requires open dialogue with friends, family members, business associates,

and even adversaries. Identifying the stages of dying made Elizabeth famous, but paradoxically, it also made her notorious. Notorious because she tampered with the taboo of talking about death in a society that is deaf phobic. Yet, and here is one more paradox. This Christian society, with its belief in death and resurrection, found death and dying to be the failure of medicine to succeed, and thus Elizabeth's accomplishments were met with controversy instead of with the acclaim they should have

merited during her lifetime. Nevertheless, she forged on and inspired the hospice movement and near death studies, reporting numerous incidents of people who were clinically dead and then returned to life.

In one of her lectures, she speaks of near death experiences and notes with great hope and optimism that the individuals who have had these extraordinary events report encounters with their deceased family members, and then a tunnel of light embraces them with a quality of love transcendent of that which can be named here on earth. Again, the paradox of Elizabeth's research is that it was scientific and rigorous, yet also love centered, hopeful, and filled with messages of

christ consciousness. Yet her work was feared, especially by the medical community, who simply could not break through its conditioning that medicine was about life and not dying. The paradox was that Elizabeth did practice medicine, but it was medicine for the soul and not the body. She found more than a career, Elizabeth had a spiritual calling. I have no doubt in the years to come, Elizabeth's work will continue to be valued as groundbreaking material. She took on

a cultural myth and cracked it right in half. She took on death itself. I consider her one of the heroines of our age. Again. That's by author Caroline Mace. Caroline describes doctor Elizabeth Koubler Ross as a paradox several times in the words that I just read the definition of a paradox, a seemingly absurd or self contradictory statement that, when investigated or explained, may prove to be wealthy founded

and true. Next, I'd like to read some words from doctor Kubler Ross from her book on Life after Death. I am sharing with you some of the experiences and findings of the last decade gathered since we started seriously studying the whole issue of death and life after death.

After working with dying patients for so many years, it became very evident that, in spite of our existence for so many millions of years, as human beings, we have not yet come to a clear understanding of perhaps the most important question, namely the meaning and purpose of life and death. I wanted to share with you some of

this research on death and life after death. I think the time has come when we are all going to put these findings together in a language that can help people to understand and also perhaps help them in dealing with the death of a loved one, especially the tragic occurrence of a sudden death, when we don't quite understand why these tragedies have to happen to us. It is also very important when you try to counsel and help dying people and their families, and the question occurs over

and over again, what is life? What is death? And why do young children, especially young children, have to die? A long time ago, people were much more in touch with the issue of death and believed in heaven or life after death. It is only in the last one hundred years, perhaps that fewer and fewer people truly know

that life exists after the physical body dies. We are now in a new age, and hopefully we have made a transition from an age of science and technology and materialism to a new age of genuine and o thorthentic spirituality. Spirituality is an awareness that there is something far greater than we are, something that created this universe, created life, and that we are an authentic, important, significant part of

it and can contribute to its evolution. All of us, when we were born, came from the source, and we're endowed with a facet of divinity. That means, in a very literal sense, that we have a part of that source within us. That is what gives us the knowledge of our immortality. Many people are beginning to be aware that the physical body is only the house or the temple, or as we call it, the cocoon, which we inhabit for a certain number of months or years until we

make the transition called death. Then, at the time of death, we shed this cocoon and are once again as free as a butterfly. To use the symbolic language that we use when talking to dying children and their siblings, I have worked with dying patients for the last twenty years. When I started this work, I must say I was neither very interested in life after death, nor did I have any real clear picture about the definition of death.

When you study the scientific definition of death, you see that it only includes the death of a physical body, as if man would only exist as the cocoon. I was one of the physicians and scientists who did not

ever question that. It only became a really relevant and important issue in the nineteen sixties when the transplant of organs, especially kidneys and hearts, raised an important question as to when we are ethically, morally and legally allowed to remove an organ out of a patient in order to save

another person's life. Being a skeptical semi believer, to put it mildly, and not interested in issues of life after death, I could not help but be impressed by several observations which occurred so frequently that I began to wonder why nobody ever studied the real issues of death. Not for any special scientific reasons, not to cover lawsuits, needless to say, but simply out of natural curiosity. Don't you just love this woman? Don't you wish you could have a conversation

with her right now? Thankfully, she's got over twenty books we can read. It's time for our next break, and when we get back, I'll read some more from Elizabeth Kobler Ross's book on life after death. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal podcast network.

all to understand. She's a wonderful pioneer, and I'm sure she's continuing to make a difference from the other side. Now I'll continue reading from her book on Life after Death. Man has existed for forty seven million years and has been in its present existence, which includes the facet of divinity, for seven million years. Every day people die all over the world. Yet in a society that is able to send a man to the moon and bring him back well and safe, we have never put any effort into

the definition of human death. Isn't that peculiar? So, in the midst of caring for dying patients and the teaching of medical and seminars students, we decided one day, on the spur of the moment, that we would try to come up with a new, updated, all inclusive definition of death. Doctor Ross goes on to share the story I told to you earlier about Missus Schwartz, who had fifteen near

death experiences. Then she says, my third and perhaps most subjective observation was the fact that I have always been very close to my patients and allowed myself to get deeply and lovingly involved with them. They touched my life. I touched their lives in a very intimate and meaningful way. Yet within minutes of their death, I had no feelings for these patients and often wondered if there was something

wrong with me. When I looked at them, they appeared similar to a winter coat to be shed with the occurrence of spring, knowing it wasn't needed anymore. I had this incredibly clear image of a shell, and my beloved patient was no longer in that shell. Naturally, as a scientist, I could not explain this, so I would have to put these observations aside. If it had not been for

Missus Schwartz. Her husband was a known schizophrenic, and each time he had a psychotic episode, he would try to hurt his youngest son, the youngest of many children and the only one still at home. Missus Schwartz was convinced that if she should die prematurely, her husband would lose control and the life of her youngest son would be in danger. Through the help of the Legal Aid Society, we were able to make arrangements for her to transfer

the custody of this child to some relatives. She left the hospital with a great sense of relief and a new freedom, knowing that should she not be able to live, at least her youngest child was now safe. It was this same patient who returned to our hospital again almost a year later and shared her near death experience. Experiences like this have been published in many books and magazines in the last few years and have become familiar to

the general public. But our first experience with missus Schwartz, who told of having been hospitalized in an emergency basis in a local hospital in Indiana at the time, being too sick to be transferred as far as Chicago. She remembers being admitted in critical condition. She was put into a private room in a hospital, and just as she was contemplating whether she should struggle once more for the sake of her youngest child or simply let go lean

back into a pillow and shed her cocoon. She became aware of her nurse, who walked into the room, took one look at her, and dashed out. At that very moment, she saw herself slowly and peacefully floating out of her physic body, hovering just a few feet above her bed. She even had a great sense of humor, relating that she looked at her body, which looked pale and icky. She said she had a sense of awe and surprise,

but no fear or anxiety. She then told of watching the resuscitation team walk into the room, enumerting in great detail who walked in first and who walked in last. She was totally aware of every word of their conversations, of their thought patterns, and she had only one great need to convey to them to relax, to take it easy, and to tell them that she was all right. But the more desperately she tried to convey this to them,

the more frantically they seemed to work on her body. Finally, it dawned on her that she was able to perceive them, but they were not able to perceive her. Missus Schwartz then decided to give up her attempts, and in her own language, she said I lost consciousness. She was declared dead after forty five minutes of unsuccessful resuscitation attempts, but later on showed signs of life again, much to the surprise of the hospital staff. She lived another year and

a half. Missus Schwartz shared this with my class and myself in one of my seminars. Needless to say, this was a brand new experience for me. I had never heard of near death experiences in spite of the fact I had been a physician for many years. My students were shocked that I did not call this hallucination an illusion or a feeling of depersonalization. They had a desperate need to give it a label, something that they could not identify, and then put it aside and not have

to deal with it. Missus Schwartz's experience, we were sure could not be a single unique occurrence. Our hope was to be able to find more cases like hers, and perhaps move in the direction of collecting data to see if this was a common, rare or a very unique experience. It has become known recently that many many researchers, physicians, psychologists, and people who study this phenomena have tried to collect

cases like this. In the last ten years, over twenty five thousand cases have been collected from all over the world. I'm going to stop reading right now, and what occurs to me, even though this was first published back in nineteen ninety one, is that over twenty thousand people were documented having these experiences, and doctor Ross promised that she wouldn't share them for people's fear of being thought crazy

or hallucinating. I know now that near death experiences is the hottest topic, and even from you, dear listeners, you want more and more stories, so I always try to bring them to you. But getting these stories out in the open is what's going to have us go from

believing to knowing. I don't want any of us to have a near death experience, because chances are there's going to be some pain and suffering involved, but to learn from others and possibly have our own induced after death communication, whether through meditation or some other spiritually transformative experience, it is possible. Later on in the book on Life after Death, doctor Koobler Ross shares some interesting experiences from her journey

into meditation. She calls them out of body experiences and witnesses so much in detail and clarity convinced that we are are more than our bodies. Later on in her life, closer to passing, she even had her own near death experience, so it was no wonder. Like Caroline Mace said in the beginning, she was looking for her way to get over there. It's not easy, as you know, to be living in a human body with any infirmities that we have, or the older we get, things start shutting down and

breaking down and aches and pains. But it's all an experience for the soul. And I do think when we can turn in to our inner selves, it can provide relief but also access to that invisible world around each one of us. I'd like to remind you now of those words that doctor Elizabeth Koobler Ross spoke in the beginning of this episode. She said, I think a lot of people in the audience have either a terminal illness, or have lost a child, or are in the process

of death. Being four to face the issue. When you're healthy and everything goes well, nobody wants to think about it, which is ridiculous because if you live life fully and learn to live without fear and guilt, it doesn't matter whether you live twenty years or ninety years, and I think we have learned from dying patience, not so much about the old stuff, the stages of dying, but how to live without fear and guilt, so that when death occurs,

it's okay. Remember, fear and guilt are the only enemies of man. If you can learn to live without fear and guilt, you live every day so fully that you feel like you've lived one hundred lives. As we leave each other today, could it be as simply as having a note with you that says, am I living from fear and guilt? Or am I living in love? As she says love and fear cannot exist at the same time,

we can definitely inject love into every situation we are in. Well, my friend, it's been wonderful spending this time with you. A reminder come visit me, would you? At we doodie dot com. That's my home base. I have a free Sunday gathering every Sunday two pm New York time on Zoom inspirational, motivational, and a free medium demonstration within each and everyone. So much more to explore there at weedodie dot com. I'd like to leave you with one final

quote by doctor Elizabeth Koobler Ross. The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sense activity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep, loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. I know who I'm speaking to right now. You are

a beautiful person. For all the struggles you've endured. You are compassionate, You're kind, and you make a difference everywhere you go. And in that invisible space around you, you have the biggest team of cheerleaders from the other side. There will be a reunion and happiness for eternity, but we have a job to do first here on Earth. I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you so much for listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.