Just when Lara was at the brink of her capacity, she experienced this amazing near-death experience!

Lara writes:
“I was severely depressed at the time before my NDE. I had gotten into a car accident a year ago and suffered short term memory loss. My neck and back were also in a lot of pain and my left eye would twitch at times.”

“Family life was unbearable, dealing with school, mom’s chronic illness, dad’s neglect and gambling addiction, and brother’s focus on himself. My sanity and patience started to dwindle.”

“Weeks before my NDE, I wasn’t able to study for a college exam and was under extreme stress. My moods were up and down. The only way I knew how to cope with all the stresses in my life was through an eating disorder. I began to eat less and less and lost a lot of weight. My stomach was always in pain and I had no energy to do anything. I was very fatigued and hanging on by a thread.”

“I began to see many doctors: a cardiologist that diagnosed me with heart arrhythmia, a gastroenterologist that only diagnosed me with IBS, a psychologist that diagnosed me with depression, but all the medicines they gave seemed to make me feel worse.”

“As the days went by, my will to live began to fade. What’s the point of living if I were to continue to suffer like this, haven’t I been through enough?”

“The night of my NDE, my heart palpitations were getting worse, but I just brushed it off as another symptom. I had no appetite and my vision became blurry. I cried for a few hours and collapsed on my bed.”

“Laying on my bed, I asked in my head, “Why am I suffering so much? How is there a creator, a benign God that would allow all this to happen to me?” I closed my eyes with tears on my face, but when I started to fall asleep, I felt like my breathing was slowing down, and I began to gasp for air after asking that question.”

“What happened next was the strangest feeling. I saw myself, my soul, lift out of my navel/belly button. I was looking down at my own body and I was perplexed. I went, “What the heck? I can still exist out of my body?” My essence traveled through an umbilical cord/tunnel that was white and grayish with wave-like patterns. I was so distraught, I didn’t know what to do.”

The tunnel. Image by Lara

“Was I dying? My spirit was traveling super fast like the speed of light. On my way through this never-ending tunnel, I yelled at God to save me. I was so scared that I yelled out to Jesus/Buddha to help me. I was desperate because I didn’t know where I was heading. I said I would miss my family and my two cats.”

“The tunnel then reached to this luminous white dome-shaped room that didn’t blind my eyes. But before I could go further, my spirit quickly traveled back down the tunnel and fell back into my body. When I woke up I felt instantly refreshed. It almost felt like Earth is not really real and that this world is more like a dream than reality. I had a sense of peace and happiness greater than I ever felt in my life.”

“I also had healing from my anorexia. I had a lot more appetite and gained weight. I had more energy and was genuinely grateful and happy. Things that used to bother me did not bother me anymore. I also now sense energy and can see auras of people. Sometimes I can feel people suffering or know the thoughts in their heads, their anguish, regret, pain and guilt.”

“I also sense how animals suffer and have been vegetarian ever since. It didn’t feel right to eat animal products knowing how much they suffer in the hands of humans, just for the sake of satisfying our taste buds.”

“I have more compassion and tolerance for everyone. I used to be judgmental and materialistic. Now I don’t buy as much and like to help others more. I feel as if we are all ONE.”

“If I’m in pain, the other person absorbs my pain. If I’m love, the other person receives my love. I began to be more spiritual, praying and meditating more. I feel more connected to NDErs when they tell their stories because its like they have transformed like me and had an evolution of spirit in mortal body. I felt connected with source energy and felt God’s protection and love for me.”

“Lately, these renewed senses have gone back down to before I experienced my NDE. I wish to go back to that place. This world is full of suffering and I don’t understand why we can’t have this spiritual peace and happiness in this physical world all the time.”

“What I do know is that we should love each other and everyone’s flaws. We are all here to learn, to make mistakes, to grow. We should serve humanity, be less selfish and self absorbed, and do more acts of kindness without asking anything in return.”

“We are not these bodies, we are not our accomplishments nor our possessions, we are all one with the Source of all being, which is God.”

Commentary- The experience told so beautifully by Lara is “spot on.” Anyone who is able to experience and recognize the near-death phenomenon for themselves is indeed, privy to a truth we don’t always see within this view of our world’s reality. And that is, although it appears to be very real, compared to our real home, this so-called reality is but a dream and illusion that we experience in order to learn and grow our souls. How else would growth be possible without it? How else would we gain any understanding, knowledge and wisdom without living in the contrast of a dualistic world; a world where anything in the spectrum is possible. To become wise, we must experience the trials and tribulations of the “lone and dreary world” that exists outside the parameters of our real home, and/or symbolically, “Garden of Eden” that we often call, Heaven. Like many Near-death experiencers, Lara got a taste of this in her amazing experience. It was something she definitely needed.

Like many of us, Lara was suffering in life and trying to cope with her own emotions, thoughts and situations the best she could, to continue to live another day. Lara was on the brink of more than she would be able to handle. Like I said before, there are many possibilities that can happen in this dualistic world in which we live. Suffering? Part of the world we live in, the world of opposites, or as I heard someone call it recently, “the infinite rainbow-nightmare spectrum.” Meaning that suffering… is experienced as living on the nightmare part of that range. Upon hearing it put this way, I had to laugh at how neatly the whole experience of both “good” and “bad” in this world was captured and explained so concisely and accurately. Only one thing. Though it may seem like it, thank goodness this “infinite rainbow-nightmare spectrum” is not really infinite. It is finite, as it is only the experience of this world that we will at some point exit.

Many times we think that only good should happen to us and that life should be easy for all. But it is important to remember that the spectrum of possibility includes many desirable and undesirable states of existence. Like being on a roller coaster ride once we are already on it, we don’t get much say to the ups and downs and direction that ride is going. We just know that we went on that ride and it hasn’t stopped yet, and will not until the day of our own death. On the day the ride comes to a complete stop, a new and different ride will begin. 

From another point of view… we do have a say about how those ups and down go. Our say is through how we will perceive them. We can spin them into an uplifting and empowering story where we have become the victor. Or… we can tell a sad and disempowering story where we are the powerless victim. Either way is fine. It’s YOU who is telling the story of your life. It’s just that one way is more evolved and enlightened than the other way. So despite our suffering and many hardships, in the end, we all have the power to choose what will be the final story of our experiences; how we handled them and ultimately what we learned and incorporated from them. And hopefully, we will count these experiences among those which created our greatest growth and development as souls, and call them “good” anyway.

The umbilical cord that Lara described is very much like what many people see while experiencing an out-of-body experience. This cord is what connects us to our physical bodies when we venture off into other worlds and dimensions. When we actually cross over, that particular cord is severed, allowing us to detach from our physical bodies. I imagine her physical brain was indeed, confused by what it was witnessing with this strange, but new spiritual scene.

It is true that after a near-death experience, many times there is a profound shift in the “experiencer” where healing occurs. In the literal light of the experience, attitudes are adjusted and whole viewpoints shift as a new and even more believable reality presents itself to us, to relieve us from life’s heavy significance. As we see in Lara’s case, physical healing can take place too. And many times… this new reality one experiences occurs more as a remembering- a vague but familiar memory of a past, long ago and far off in the distance from a life filled with the weight of pain and drudgery. Often with this reprieve comes a release from the illusions of a heavy and dark world, for we get the insight that this is not forever… it’s only the school of our experiences. And with the realization of this… we are made much lighter again.

As parting gifts from Heaven, Lara not only received both physical and mental healing, she received increased gifts of compassion, patience, peace, tolerance, love and connection to others, even animals, as well as God’s love. This new insight has changed her in many ways. Her empathic and telepathic gifts have blossomed. She can see auras now! Yes, Lara’s reality has shifted as her new desire is to feed her spiritual side now. Why? Because she now knows the truth of what she is. A spiritual being, first and foremost.

Lara wonders why we can’t experience love and peace all of the time. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Although the dualist world tends to prevent this kind of love and peace full-time, we can learn to be loving and peaceful within the spiritual world of ourselves, and perhaps this loveliness will bleed out in some amazing form into the world around us. You see, once one knows that there is another world, YOUR home, that is precisely that- love and peace forevermore, it makes this life a little bit more manageable.

Although this does sound like a cliché or even just something really enlightened to say and hear, it is true that at some point and on some level… we are all ONE. So remember to be kind to yourself… and others too. Because on some level… They are YOU!

I called this post of Lara’s, “At the Brink…” because Lara was not only at the brink of what she could cope with in her life, she was literally at the brink of death. Who knows? Perhaps it was only because Lara had called upon Jesus and Buddha for help, that she was rescued from the certain death of her physical body and this dualistic world. But, given all that Lara had gone through in her life up until that point, and just how far she has stretched herself in order to live another day, she was literally at the brink of her ultimate breaking point which required some serious remedy. The miracle here is that after having this very amazing spiritual experience, traveling back into her physical body, healed and refreshed by the light, this turned out to be Lara’s perfect medicine. And… it is the light of love that heals all things. 

Heavenly landscape. Image by Lara