The Day That I Died: A Look Behind The Veil

I died when I was thirteen years old, and in that process I saw and felt the forces that command this reality and more importantly what drew me back.

At the time of my death, I wasn’t aware of the vast, ineffable nature of who we are, but it’s certainly something that I have been unpacking over the past forty three years. There are subtle nuances of this experience that have opened me up to living the life of a mystic and understanding that there is another world that is more real than the one we are currently living.

It was a typical steamy summer in Brisbane, Australia, although that’s not what would have been at the forefront of my mind at the age of thirteen. That seems to be something we notice as we get older I feel....

The year was 1980, the beginning of a decade of wildness and reckless abandon in my world. I was full of the spirit of life, rebellion and an unwavering focus on doing life on my terms and to hell with authority or anyone that disagreed. I was accustomed to skipping school whenever there was something better on offer and on this particular day a group of my friends and I decided to take the day off school (we call it wagging in Australia) and head on down to the Gold Coast to have a swim in the ocean and enjoy the freedom of fulfilling our teenage desires. This particular day we settled on Nobby’s Beach which had a large group of rocks spilling out of the ocean that offered a private area to sit away from the flags and the watchful eyes of the lifesavers.

As we bantered, laughed and smoked cigarettes, my friend Kat went in for a dip in the ocean to cool off. After she had been gone for a little while, I noticed that I had not seen her pop up from the water. It didn’t feel right, so I made my way over to the rocks to see what was happening.

I didn’t have a good feeling.

I gingerly climbed up the jagged rocks to get a better view. They were covered in what must have been thousands of years worth of shells. Some where broken and were like walking on shattered glass, making the climb slower and more dangerous than I would have liked.

Suddenly, I spotted her! 

She was swimming at the bottom of the ocean, stuck in a rip.

Without thinking, and certainly not calculating that Kat was a much stronger swimmer than I, I dove in to the water to save my friend. This became a recurring theme in my life over the years, and the basis for some of the biggest lessons I have learned.

As I hit the cool water and dove under the surface, it became blindingly clear to me quite quickly that I was now caught in the rip. The powerful movement of the water kept me under and despite my best efforts I found it impossible to swim out of the immense pressure. I didn’t know it at the time, but Kat had somehow swam out of her predicament and gone back to the shore.

I was the one now in the battle for my life.

I couldn’t clock how long I was underwater and I don’t remember exactly the moment it happened, but I felt this glorious feeling of calm settle over me.

There was an indescribable beauty in what I was feeling.

The realisation was coming over me that I was no longer in my body.

I was now watching my body with a quiet curiosity, reflecting on how I was able to be in this water without the need for breath. There was a welcome feeling of expansiveness and peace. The struggle was over and I wasn’t battling for my life or survival any more, and yet I was still me.

Observing my body, I thought very matter-of-factly, “Oh, I’m dead now”.

I had heard somewhere that when you die your life flashes before your eyes. I waited a few moments to see whether that would happen and nothing seemed to be happening so I started reflecting.

“I wonder what everyone at school is going say?” I thought.

Then I pondered what my friends were going to think, and there was no real attachment to any of these thoughts. It was similar to the feeling of flipping through a magazine whilst waiting for your appointment to be called in a doctors surgery. The memory of these moments are still crystal clear and especially really for me. In fact, now over forty years later, they feel more real to me than most of my other childhood memories.

As I thumbed through my thoughts almost willing a life review to happen, I thought about my Mum. We had lost my Dad the year before to a chronic illness and my Mum was already in a deep state of grief from the shock of losing her husband and what I could only imagine now would be the overwhelm of raising three children on her own.

There was something in those thoughts about my mother, like my heart burst open, and I felt a profound connection to the woman that is my mother, something that went beyond thoughts and feelings. It echoed through the whole universe. With the realisation of what was coming to pass I felt myself suddenly and surprisingly being pulled back into my body. It felt like it was instantaneous, as fast as a thought.

Then the struggle was real.

Returning to my lifeless body, after being outside of it for who knows how long, I found myself submerged in the ocean and acutely aware of my desperate need for breath. As if by a miracle, I felt arms grabbing me from above and pulling me to the surface. Two of the young men in our group had come to my rescue. We had a bit of a battle coming back to shore with the waves smashing us into the rocks. After some climbing and a lot of cuts, blood and coughing up half the ocean, I was safe.

My fantastic, out-of-body, near-death experience was over, just like that.

On our trip back from the beach, I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but really I was reflecting on the very strange experience I had just had.

Upon my return home later that afternoon, I saw my mother and I was filled with emotion. All I wanted to do was burst into tears and have her hug me and tell me that it was all ok, and yet I didn’t tell her that she nearly lost her daughter that day. I just told her that the day was uneventful, school was boring and I watched her continue to potter around the house oblivious to the gravity of what could have been.

I felt like I had gotten away with something big.

One of the greatest gifts from that experience was the realisation that it was my conscious heart intention that drew me back into the body. There was some deep resonance with the being that is my mother and this current role that I was playing as her daughter. It wasn’t so much a conscious choice to be here, it was just a deep resonance. This is the language of the soul, the language of the heart.

Many years later, I became a Kinesiologist and began running my own practice, working with many clients who recounted their own near death experiences and who I took through past life regression. Using this therapy on myself, I discovered that in one of my own past lives I had thrown myself off a cliff into the ocean. Perhaps that wound or that karma had stayed with me, lingering into this life. You would think that I would keep away from the water, but strangely it doesn’t scare me at all.

In my clinical studies, I have noticed that when people are at that gateway of death or they have left their body, there is always a moment when they decide whether to stay or go; they can always leave if they truly want to. This is never a conscious decision, and it gives us a clue to how we manifest this reality.

Manifestation of what we truly desire doesn’t come from constant wanting. 

Our true desires are found in the portal of the heart, the seat of the soul.

The deep resonance of the heart echos through the fabric of matter and when the heart is switched on that way the mind is still. The mind isn’t opposing and isn’t combating, it’s in a place of coherence with the heart.

This deep state of consciousness is how we manifest this reality, it’s how we co-create.

The process of death is simply a gateway into another experience and this process of death is often more painful for the people that get left behind than the being that is leaving. 

The other side of the veil is a calm and blissful experience without the struggle for survival. It’s a place of swimming in the ocean of consciousness and being embraced by the divine.

We all have been there and we will all go back there.

Death is just a continuation.