What if your afterlife looks exactly like what you expect to find? That question sits at the center of this conversation with our caller who has died more than once and come back with stories that challenge the script many of us inherit about death. She begins with a fire-breathing accident that leads to severe burns, an awake surgery, and a coma where there is no tunnel of light—only darkness without walls, filled with taunting voices. She runs for days inside that void before turning to fight, and everything changes.
What follows is survival without a roadmap. The medical system saves her life but offers little help for the trauma that comes after—the nightmares, the identity whiplash, the sense of not quite being back. Years later in Costa Rica, another threshold appears: the sun opens, her mother steps through it, and tells her it’s not time. More recently, a 911 dispatcher’s voice pulls her back from the tunnel once again, and the medical truth finally catches up—severe deficiencies, fibroids, numbers hanging by a thread.
Threaded through all of this is a larger belief: that experience, even at the edge of life, is shaped by the mind we bring with us. Drawing from Buddhism, Taoism, and her own spiritual practice, she speaks about agency in death, the difference between organized religion and ways of life that protect free will, and the permission to borrow what works without forcing a label. And yes, there’s humor. Lots of it. It’s how fear loosens its grip. The conversation ends not in dread, but longing for ancient places, altered states, and a way of talking about death that makes life feel more livable.
Book Recommendation: The Child Thief by Brom
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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