Soul Week, Episode 4: Near Death Experiences

We explore soul contracts as experiences rather than punishments, how judgment blocks learning, and why near-death experiences often shift values from fear to meaning. We share a step-by-step method for integrating NDEs with hypnosis and offer resources for further study.

• contracts as agreements for experience, not performance
• releasing judgment to access the lesson
• life-between-lives planning with guides and blueprints
• the pinball analogy for choice and destiny
• NDE hallmarks: light, love, peace, personalized guidance
• cultural patterns in NDEs and why skepticism persists
• integration challenges after NDEs and OBEs
• regression process to clarify meaning and permissions
• resources: IANDS, NDERF, Michael Newton, Robert Schwartz
• ethical, client-led hypnosis for spiritual exploration

Reach out if you’re curious and we’ll point you to resources; if it includes your own journey with hypnosis or meditation, we’re ready to help

Chapters

• 0:07 Solstice, Rest, And Setting The Scene
• 1:13 Introducing Soul Contracts
• 3:20 Judgment Versus Learning
• 8:52 Life Between Lives Planning
• 10:30 The Pinball Analogy Of Choice
• 12:06 No Wrong Path, Only Review
• 12:51 Breaking Social Programming
• 17:31 Defining Near-Death Experiences
• 21:07 Why NDEs Resonate Across Cultures
• 26:56 Integrating NDEs Through Hypnosis
• 31:16 Memory, Missing Pieces, And Return
• 33:22 Media, Credibility, And Consent
• 36:35 Resources And Next Steps In Practice

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:07

We are the line.

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

In the dark.

SPEAKER_03: 0:11

In the dark. It's like extra dark this morning.

SPEAKER_01: 0:14

There it is. That's what we're at the solstice. We're coming into the solstice time.

SPEAKER_03: 0:19

Yeah, that's right. That's only a couple days away.

SPEAKER_01: 0:21

Yeah. These are the four shortest days of the year.

SPEAKER_03: 0:25

That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 0:26

Between now and the 23rd. Short days. I wish that meant I could sleep. All the time it was dark. Wouldn't that be neat?

SPEAKER_03: 0:37

Today's three-eye atlas day.

SPEAKER_01: 0:39

Three-eye atlas day.

SPEAKER_03: 0:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

So I'm finally going to be able to see through their windows and see who they are.

SPEAKER_03: 0:48

That says you can decide to sleep.

SPEAKER_01: 0:50

That would be well, uh would be a good choice. Today the choice is not to go to the gym, believe it or not, because my shoulder is so sore and my hamstrings are so stretched. I think the body requires a little rest.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06

Yeah. So we're extending our soul week. And today we're coming out of yesterday where we talked about life between lives. And I just wanted to sort of wrap it up with something that I get asked a lot and that didn't come up yesterday. So I just want to talk about it before we jump into near-death experiences. People ask me about contracts. I don't know where contracts really came from, like in our earthly realm, like who who said that we have contracts. But people seem to ask about it and say, you know, can I can I burn that contract? Am I done with it? And so we check it out. It's never uh it's never always a yes. It's sometimes a no, you're not done with it. But that's not up to me. That's up to your higher self or guides or the counsel, whoever's there for you. Because you may want it out of your life, but maybe you're not done learning from it. So with contracts, we in the life between lives. If you if you're wondering what the heck that is or you want to know more about it, just listen to yesterday's podcast. But in the life between lives realm, you can sort of look at your blueprint, your life that you've signed up for this time around, and look at the sort of patterns or well, I guess it all is patterns, old belief systems, energy systems that you've carried with you into this lifetime. And you can ask your higher self, whoever's there, is it okay if I break this contract now? Am I done with it? And they'll all they're uh they'll either say yes or no, and then you go through your own process of breaking it if it's a yes. Sometimes that's tearing it apart or burning it. Some people see it disintegrating as if it's a scroll with contract information on it. Have you ever done any contract breaking?

SPEAKER_01: 3:20

Yeah, I've done it for myself and I've done it with clients, but I think that there's for me some really important ideas that go along with it. The first really important idea is that let's just let's just address right now. I think the biggest part of the problem that people have is that they engage judgment as to whether or not they're doing what they quote unquote should do. We did a podcast on should, and I think that that's really important to consider that when we when we engage, as I understand it, and when we engage in agreements, when we engage in karmic situations that we are working with loved ones, and that's the important thing to understand is we're when we work these situations, the people we tend to work them with are people that we are close to on the other side. Because only somebody who truly loves you would agree to help you go through something really unpleasant. And the agreement is not that you will thrive through it, the agreement is not that you will figure it all out and you will you will do really well with it. The agreement is that they will provide you with that experience. And although we tend to judge ourselves, which is, you know, probably half the problem, although we tend to judge ourselves, the completion of the contract was the experience itself, not how you responded to it, not if you responded well or poorly. The response itself, you know, cause has effect, effects become cause, more effects follow in sequence, cause and effect. It's it's a simple kind of concept. It's the cause part that the contracts are about. The contracts are not about how well did you handle it that I attacked you in this way at this point in your life. The contract is that I will work with you to be in a situation to cause you to have that experience, the the and the commensurate emotions and confusion that goes along with that. Judgment. Yeah, judgment is a very, very human thing. And it's a very, very promoted thing for humans. We're we're judgment machines, you know, everything's good or bad, right or wrong. I like it, I don't like it, I want it, I don't want it. We react to everything and we condemn it or we promote it. And that judgment that we engage in, especially of ourselves, is a bit of wasted effort. Because in the judgment, you lose, you often lose the lesson. You lose the opportunity to grow. Well, you're saying, you know, I acted badly, I'm a bad person, I feel guilty, I feel shame. But they deserved it because they did this and they did that, and now we're judging them and we're judging us. And blame is just another form of judgment and trying to assign fault. And these are all endeavors that are very natural to us, they're very trained in us. We we learn it a lot and we turn to it a lot. And I think it's important to always remember that that that string of steps. You know, what we fear, we become to hate, and what we come to hate, we tend to attack. And when we attack, we find ourselves in a never-ending battle of cyclical behaviors that lead to cyclical judgments. So anyway, I think that it's important when when we think about contracts, is to what's more important than getting rid of the contract or even freeing yourself from the contract is freeing yourself from your judgment of the circumstances of these events. Then they just become experiences. And when they're just experiences, then we just can break them down and say, well, what kind of meaning did I put on this thing? And is that meaning accurate? Is it correct? Is it helpful? Right. And so I think while we we want to turn and run from our contracts, we're often told, yes, you can, because you know, no one's gonna tell you, you know, well, you've already done everything you were gonna do. It already happened. And the contract was just to have it happen. So it happened, so sure. Go ahead, release contract, right? Yeah, and I think that's that's a lot of it. But I also believe that when we release our contracts, what remains was our our higher self's motivation and purpose behind experiencing it. What remains is the desire, the creative desire to engage it. And so although we can say to ourselves, I free myself from the contract, and it's often freed because we've already been through the worst part of it, we're still left with learning from it. And often that's a good, it's a good thing to say, I'm free of the contract. So now all I can all I can do, all I need to do is just sort of learn from it and move on. And that's really all you were supposed to do in the first place was learn from it and move on. But it frees us up to do the learning because it takes, it helps us take away the judgment of it, right? So when we talk about contracts, I think that that's the first thing I want to talk about. The second thing I want to talk about is just, you know, this is part of what you can do in a life between lives session, is you can go to that place of planning. Um, and there are hypnotists who specialize in this, you know, Robert Schwartz has written all kinds of books on this about going, you know, going into trance, going back to the place of planning your life and looking at the plan. What was it, what was the purpose behind all of these things that we might otherwise call horrible events, hard things? What was the purpose? What was the benefit? When you look at it, when you're when you go to the to the life between lives, you know, I've had the experience, and I believe that many of my clients have had the experience, where they are more in tune with their higher self, the the part of you that chose to come here, that chose to come and live this experience, right? And when you're in tune with that, you're more aware of the motivations behind it and the purpose behind it. So life between lives, and it, you know, as I said, when I do it, I hand it over to the to the the guides whoever turn up. They're going to decide what's best for you in terms of what you get to see. But for some people, it's it's a spiritual exploration, and they get to go on a journey through the other side and visit these places and go back to those moments when they were planning the course of this life. So, and I find one last thing I'd say because I I like the analogy. The analogy I used with my clients is to think of one of those pinball games where either you've got a pinball that shoots up to the top and it's on an incline. So gravity is gonna bring that ball down. And on the bottom, there's really a small selection of places where the ball can end up. But the path of the ball is all over the place. And if you give the table a little shake, then the thing's gonna bounce around some more. And if you give it a little, you know, tilt or here or there, it's gonna move in certain directions. But no matter what, that ball is gonna be in play from the top and it's going to end up in the bottom. And the the extent of possible experiences and end results is limited by just the force of gravity. And I think just the force of life and love and who you really are means that the ball is going to bounce around and you can have some influence on where it bounces and how much it bounces, but in the end, it's coming down to the bottom. And I think that that's that's a good analogy for me to understand that I get to make choices and I get to do things and I get to have influence, but I'm gonna be born and I'm gonna pass on to the n to the other side. And through that process, I'm gonna have experiences. And all experiences are essentially helpful to lead me home. There you go. There's my there's my shink.

SPEAKER_03: 12:02

There's your TED Talk.

unknown: 12:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 12:04

Yeah, I mean, you're right. Uh that there's no there is no wrong path as well. You know, I think I mentioned yesterday for a brief moment, you can't you can't mess it up, right? You can take an easier path or a little harder path, but you're not you're not going to get to the end and be judged for what you what you what path you took, right? You're going to apparently, which will lead us into ND's, apparently go through a life review and have a look and go, oh, you know, maybe I'll do something different next time, or maybe that I I should have, maybe I well, I don't even want to use the word should, you know, maybe I could have chosen a different path there.

SPEAKER_01: 12:51

Yeah, I want to I want to just step in right there and just say that that's uh again, you know, my fascination has always been with programs and the way we control each other, the way our society really sets us up to be fearful and to take sometimes take ourselves and take situations all too seriously. And so, and I think that's programming. I think we all come by it naturally, we all come by it honestly. We get most of it from people who love us, who thought that was the way it was supposed to be. That's how they were raised. It's perpetuated. I think that right now, one of the big things about the times that we're in is that we're breaking those molds. We're we're being given an opportunity to see the dishonesty and more importantly, the inappropriateness of trying to control each other, trying to control uh masses of people under the premise that some people are good and some people are bad. And we fall into these judgment traps. We just naturally we're encouraged to be judging others, we're encouraged to be afraid of others, we're encouraged to be really defined and trapped. And our behaviors are meant to fit in tiny boxes to fit within a system. And we're realizing that that system doesn't work, it doesn't care about us, that it benefits only a few. And I'm not just talking economics here. I'm talking about the whole thing, the whole way we live, even within our families. And I think that as we're breaking out of that, we're starting to experience that we can make choices and our imagination is powerful, and the way things are is not the way they have to be. And I see this going on. We're we're stepping away from this tendency towards judgment and condemnation and focus on fear. I think that's the time that we're in. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity waiting for us to be creative and to learn how to collaborate with those around us. And so, with all of that said, that's the tendency that we have. And really, on the other side, the purpose was just to come here, just to come here, get back in a body, live as a body, live as a body in a very confining reality and have that experience trying to bring forth who we really are. And that's where I see us at sort of a crossroads right now. When I look at everything going on in the world, I see the struggle between the people who just want to live and the people who want to control. That's where I see the struggle. And I see us making a shift and being aware again that our natural creativity, our natural curiosity are the forces that should be driving us, not the pursuit of stuff and the pursuit of prestige and status. And so I see us in that place. So to bring that back, remember that a lot of this is a program. Most of this is a program. Most of this has been defined for us. We've accepted it because it it made as much sense as anything else at the time. And now we're using our own critical abilities and saying, wait a second, this doesn't seem right to me. This doesn't seem to be sufficient, this is not satisfying, this is not, this is not who I am for a lot of people. So I really believe that, you know, to be more lighthearted and realize that you probably, just by being here in the family situation that you're in and in the the country situation that you're in, you probably already fulfilled most of the goals that you set for yourself right from the start, because the goal was really to come and experience it and do your best to thrive within it and and not more than that. And if all of that doesn't make sense, just or all of it just sounds like hooey, just ignore me. Like just, you know, you don't have to take anything I say any more seriously than you want to.

SPEAKER_03: 17:06

I think it's great. Yeah, I think I think the idea of running around judging ourselves and judging the world is very natural. It's very, very normal for us to go through, but it's it's not necessary. And if you want peace in your own mind, it's something to think about maybe releasing if you can. I think you know, we're gonna talk about near-death experiences and how they well, not how they come about, but how they can have an influence on people's lives, maybe the the all the different things that can happen for people. And like we said yesterday with life between lives, it's very different for everybody, but very similar. So a near-death experience is not we're not talking about like going surfing and almost getting bitten by a shark or something, you know, like that's that you can call it a near-death experience, but we're talking about when you find yourself in a situation where you've you've basically coded. And there's been people out there that have that have that have died for so long that they end up in a bag in the morgue and then wake up in the morgue, which is a little unnerving, honestly. But the experiences, and I will say not everyone remembers their experience, but many, many do. And if you look on YouTube, you can find lots and lots of experiences. When I got into near-death experiences, there wasn't much on YouTube. Um I think I plowed through YouTube experiences in a very short time. But there was lots of written experiences that are on websites like IANS. IANS is I-A-N-D-S, the International Association for Near Death Experiences. As well. So I I mean, Les probably can tell you this obsession wasn't even the right word. This was a good 10 years ago, probably when I started down the path. He's laughing, like just looking out of the window, laughing to himself.

SPEAKER_01: 19:32

Yeah, she was obsessed.

SPEAKER_03: 19:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:36

All good though.

SPEAKER_03: 19:37

Yeah. And I I was like, why am I obsessed with this? But it turns out I was meant to work with people that had died in a hypnosis context. I wasn't a hypnotist at the time. And so you can imagine, like, I was thinking, what the heck is all this for? But yeah, it's just fascinating how. Similar the experiences are, but again, everybody experiences it a little differently. And I'm uh I'm I'm trying to get to a point here, but I'm like, where do where do I start?

unknown: 20:12

I don't even know.

SPEAKER_03: 20:13

Like many of the experiences have things like the light, a tunnel, complete connection and love, and just feeling accepted, a feeling like everything is going to be okay, even when moments earlier it's everything wasn't okay, right? A sense of incredible peace. And then as they go through their experience, guides come to them. Sometimes archetypes come to them, angels come to them. And the the the general feeling that people come back with is that the experience is very much tailored to you and your level of comfortability. And apparently, which I've learned recently, we if we have a near-death experience, it's something that we have set up beforehand. We've set up, you know, if if A happens, then B happens, then C is gonna happen. And fun interesting, interestingly enough, people have a near-death experiences when they're at a major crossroads in life. Uh, we say that you know you're never off your path, but maybe there's different ideas of how good your path can be. And so many near-death experiencers have their experience when they're when they're going through a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 21:41

Well, a near-death experience is a kind of a reminder, right, of who you really are. And the value of it is well beyond the individual experiencing it, right? You know, when you go onto YouTube and you look at near-death experience videos, like these things are watched by millions and millions of people. And they've gone just in the last two or three years from being, you know, just a person there being questioned and trying to recount their experience to being these elaborate AI recreated scripts that that people are put putting out there because there's such an interest in this. There's such an incredible, natural, normal desire to understand who we really are and you know why we're really here. So I I believe that this is a growing interest that this is happening, it's happening thousands of times a year. There are hundreds of thousands of these experiences cataloged outside of every culture that you can think of. And there are similarities and there are differences depending on the culture, but the the differences tend to be aligned with the culture, whatever culture that they come out of. And and the differences then are really just cultural. The the long and the short of it, I suppose, is that it's a glimpse into what happens when we die. And I think that as a society, we have become over the top afraid of death. And that there are cultures on this planet, especially European and North American cultures, that really they have become really good at challenging anything that would suggest that you are more than a body with a limited lifespan. And, you know, we often use materialist science to challenge any kind of insight we can gain from these kinds of individualized experiences. I mean, it it science as a method is wonderfully powerful, but it is it is reliant on the senses, it's reliant on the ability to confirm data, and an individualized internal experience is really, really hard to verify to start with, and and then to measure in terms, and then to extrapolate from, and from there repeat the studies and try to gain insights. So it's a it's an internalized individual experience that's being reported, and science is not built to put a lot of weight on those kinds of evidences, and so there's this real tendency to dismiss it, but it can be studied like anything else, and its commonalities can be noted and counted and averaged and predicted, and these are all scientific methodologies, right? I think it's an opportunity for humans who have maybe really trained themselves into being limited in their view of who and what they are and really trapped in a particular kind of lifestyle. Then I'm not trying to sound like some political person here. I think it's really obvious that humans are very much focused on the when you're when you can go beyond survival, you're focused on amassing wealth, you're focused on having things. You know, I was in my first job as a lawyer, and my boss patted me on the shoulder and said, Well, you know, he with the most toys when they dies wins.

SPEAKER_02: 25:44

What?

SPEAKER_01: 25:45

And that's what he said. And that's I was in that environment of people that were really, really focused on that. And so I think that we are raised is the I think the best word. We are raised to be focused on things that maybe aren't the most revealing, aren't the most insightful, aren't the most enlightening. And these experiences that people are having are causing many, many people to reconsider their values and reconsider how they've constructed their lives and reconsider what interests them and reconsider, you know, what what they want to explore and experience. So I think that, you know, near-death experiences uh we we need to say thank you to those that have had them.

SPEAKER_03: 26:34

And shared them. And felt confident to share them because many people keep them to the keep them to themselves for years. I mean, I I know people coming out now that had their experience in the 70s or 80s, and they were they they spoke about it in bits and pieces at the time and were so shut down or made to feel crazy that they just stuffed it all inside. And the amazing thing is that the experiencer, the experiencers speaking about their experiences, even if it happened when they were five and they are, let's say, 60 now, it is just as it's not like a memory, right? It is just as right there as anything could be, right? Like as as that as they're explaining it, they're right, they're right there. It's it's like it's logged somewhere different in the mind.

SPEAKER_01: 27:40

So as a hypnotist, how have you helped people with that? How have you because you've hypnotized a lot of people who have had near death experiences, you've helped them process things. What kinds of things what's well, yeah. What's your experience? What's the process?

SPEAKER_03: 27:56

Yeah, so people come back, and this doesn't happen to everybody, but a lot of them come back and they they have a really hard time integrating back into life, integrating back into the body. They uh they sort of tell it like you are, you know, for those moments of outside the body, you're this expansive, huge energy. And then getting back into the body is like getting back into mud, right? And it's hard to walk through and it's confining. Some people experience themselves half in the body and half out the body. So experiencers talk about how once that sort of veil is lifted, they have a harder time staying in the body. So they pop out in what we call OBEs, out-of-body experiences. So they pop in and out of the body randomly. So they want to not do that as much anymore. Integrating their experience, understanding their experience. And it's not up to me to try to figure out their experience and understand it. What a what it usually looks like for me when I take somebody through regression is we go to the moment their experience started and we go through it, we plod through it again. And so they'll recount their experience and then they'll recount their experience, and then towards the end, when their experience is finished for lack of a better word, we'll bring a guide in and the guide will explain their experience a little more to them, or they'll get a sense of what did that mean? Or am I meant to remember that part? Because sometimes also parts are missing. And I have had clients go through the experience and then recount that part and it comes to them, but not always. And so they can go through their experience and get a sense of whether or not, yeah, they're allowed, they're allowed to recount that part. Some people, right before they come back, are told, you know, you're not gonna remember this at this part of the experience, but we're gonna let you remember this part of the experience. I don't know many experiencers that go through the experience and aren't told you have to go back and you have things to do. You can't stay here, you'll be back, don't worry, kind of thing. And many experiencers fight that because it's so wonderful over there, whatever that is. And in the end, they they get a sense, of course, because they come back, but in the end, they get a sense of, okay, yeah, I I should I should come back because there are things that I I need to do or want to do. But sometimes they're sent back unwillingly as well, right? Where they're just like they've got this sort of pushing sensation, like they're like their guide is sort of pushing them, and then they go back and back and back and sort of into the body again. Many people experience, especially in surgeries, if you die during surgery, this looking down at the body, seeing everybody around the body, seeing what's going on. There's an amazing account of a woman who is completely blind, been blind from birth. And when she came out of the body, when she died during surgery, she could see everything. And then she she told everyone when she got back. So, how do you explain that, right? Yeah, I mean, there's just so so many types of experiences, but it just amazes me every time I listen to somebody that every time I listen to somebody, there's something new but the same, right? And I also want to clear up something earlier. The the when we mentioned AI coming out, the AI isn't making up the experiences. What they're doing is they're taking experiences off of IANS and NDERF, and they're just like copy-pasting it into an AI movie maker or whatever they're doing, and then releasing the experience that way. I hope they're doing it with the people's uh, you know, okay, you know, with the people's consent, but that's not for me to judge, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01: 32:38

Well, the world of YouTube is like any other medium, it's about advertising and it's about generating hits. And those who produce, you know, yeah. For me, it's when we spend time on YouTube, it's checking out who the cre creator is and what they're about. And then you have a better sense of is this something that I find trustworthy? Is this something that I should put some credence into?

SPEAKER_03: 33:06

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, near-death experiences, they're they're out there, they're they're being talked about a lot. There's channels out there that speak to experiencers. There must be interviews coming out almost every single day now. There's something coming out. And and sometimes they're, you know, you you notice that an experiencer, when they're interviewed on one channel, it's like suddenly every channel has them because they just get reached out to, right? And then they go through the interview process again and again. So there are people that you see, you know, oh yeah, I recognize that person from something I watched the other day. But excuse me, it's becoming more and more prevalent. And I think it's bringing a sense of peace to a lot of people, right?

SPEAKER_01: 33:59

Well, if you happen to be on one of those spiritual journeys where you're exploring and you haven't yet spent time learning about NDEs, it's a worthwhile thing. If you're on a spiritual journey and you haven't, you know, examined things like Michael Newton's books, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, Robert Schwartz's book, Your Soul's Plan. These are really great resources for you to turn to. And of course, our our little role in this whole thing is that we help people through hypnosis. Sometimes we help people who have had these experiences, sometimes we help people have their own deeper spiritual experience. I find it really important to see the connection between mind and what we call spirit or your true nature, and that your own mind can be used as a tool to access more and more information about your true nature. For some people, they don't want to know. I've literally had people who say, you know, I just want to lose weight, I'm not interested in my true nature. And that's totally cool because we're all here to just have the experience. And the experience we get to part of it, you know, we've planned, and part of it we get to choose as we go along. And it's not for me to ever mess with somebody's choices. It's something I believe very strongly about ethically, and as a hypnotist and as a human being. Yeah. But if this stuff causes curiosity in you, there's lots of information out there. And don't be shy to reach out and ask questions, and we'll be happy to direct you to all kinds of resources. And if it includes your own personal journey using hypnosis as a tool or meditation as a tool, we're we're ready and equipped to help you out. And today it's just about helping you expand your mind to these ideas that you might already be familiar with, and hopefully there was some new information. But if nothing else, maybe triggered your curiosity some more to make you do a little bit more looking.

SPEAKER_03: 36:15

Yeah, interesting conversation. Well, everyone, have a good day, have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you later.