What are some of the biggest takeaways and lessons that you've learned from being around so many near-death experiences, from having a very profound one, which you just described, from witnessing so many people that have died in two natural disasters and as your work as a hospice doctor, what are some of the biggest takeaways that you have that you wish people who are living, anybody that can hear this, would know?

You are the most beautiful thing. You are the entire divine expression of your soul, and that's where the near-death experience is a gift is if you can actually feel what it feels like to be whole. It's not something to be achieved. You've always been whole. You were whole at the beginning. You will still be whole at the end of your life journey. If there's only a perception that you are incomplete right now, you are the most beautiful thing. This is what happens in your daily experiences. If you can start to feel the universe, if you start to feel yourself, you start to realize you can access information that never entered your mind. You know what?

I just freaking loved about both your story and the way that you're explaining this is that you've defined a near-death experience as a completely different thing. I'll never look at that term the same way again. It literally is a moment where you escape your mind and you drop into deep connection and wholeness. So how does somebody listening access what you How have you learned from near-death experiences and from witnessing so many people dying and caring for them as a hospice doctor? How do you bring that wisdom or that experience into your day-to-day life?

You are right now clinging to everything around you out of fear that you're incomplete. You're clinging to your little rituals. It might be your morning cup of coffee. It might be the way in which you pack the kid's school lunch. It might be the way in which you drive to school. It might be the way in which you show up at work. It might be the way in which you organize your email box. You've You have all these rituals in your day. Anything that takes you out of that construct for a moment, when a child says something, you get goosebumps, or an elder speaks to you, and you get goosebumps. That is a momentary near-death experience. That's why child speak is so deep and often gives you goosebumps. When a child drops a wisdom bomb on you, lights you up in those goosebumps. That's an experiential moment of a soul speaking. If you're getting goosebumps from anybody speaking to you, that's one of their moments where they just came into alignment with their coherence, their complete waveform of truth. And a child is always speaking from that space to a certain age, which is typically around age two.

They start to learn how to watch behaviors around them. And this is when They start to get an idea they are different than others. They're the kid, and that's their brother. And so they're being trained to believe that they're separate from everything.

And that's the split that you're talking.

And that's the terrible twos and the threes and everything else that are so difficult for a child because they're going from a state of being complete to the terrifying reality of they are incomplete. And that's why I think two and three look so difficult on the psyche of a child. And that's why they're so labial with their emotions. And everything's overwhelming because they are starting to learn a reality of disconnected truth or disconnected to have truth.

You know what I just got? Is that if you consider what you're saying, that Any human being that comes into this world, you're born, that you are completely intact and whole and basically an expression of pure love and connection and oneness with everyone around you. You can see that in a baby's eye, that if you then jump all the way to the end of someone's life, and if you've ever been with somebody as they are passing on.

Their whole.

Their hole and your ability to look at them in the eyes with love, forgiveness, all of it, is the now same experience. If I think about my own experience of my life, there are those moments, whether I just cry. I think one that comes to mind is thinking about being at the bottom of the aisle on my wedding day, and I looked straight down the aisle and Chris turned, and he flashed this huge smile. It was that same experience of wholeness. There are other periods of my life. I think a lot of times, like when I'm outside and you see, right now in Vermont, the fireflies are going crazy. When I take in a moment in nature like that and you have this blip of wholeness, that's what you're talking about, that experience right there.

That's exactly right. I love where you're laying this out is that there's basically bookends of the human experience that everybody's going to have. They're going to come in whole and they're going to leave whole. And as I watch those happen over and over again, I saw them, a lot of them in the ICU. I spent 10 years working in intense hospital settings. And in those years, I got used to seeing these moments of time where you really do see a soul showing up as it exits the frailty of the human mind and then comes back in with new information to the mind, but not to itself. Because at no point does it get surprised about its journey. It's never like, I can't believe I just did this. It simply says, I went to this place, I saw this, and I'm bringing this back to this human mind.

So what you're basically saying is that in the ICU, for example, where you would be the witness to all of these near-death experiences, and people would then wake up from a coma or they would, quote, come back to life, there would be an absolute certainty and knowingness and lack of judgment about what they had experienced during that near-death experience. They just came back like, This is the truth. This is where I was. That almost like certainty started to strike you. That's exactly right. Does it always have to be with another person? When you are out in nature and you are just struck with awe and you have no thoughts, it's just a pure experience. Is that from at least a biological standpoint, a near-death experience because you are back whole and connected in the moment to yourself and to the world around you again?

Maybe you've had the experience of a wild animal suddenly coming into an interaction with you.

Yeah, just Actually, the other day, we were walking down the back drive. We have a logging road on the mountain that we live on, and we had the dogs, and about 100 yards down the dirt path, a black bear walked across. We, of course, stopped, and thank God, the dogs didn't see her. I assume it's her because the cubs have been born recently, and you see a lot of them running around where we live in Southern Vermont. But there was a A moment where she stopped and turned and looked, and we made eye contact. It's as if sound in time disappeared. Then all of a sudden, I don't know how long I stood there with Chris, and we just saw this there. Then the thought came in, Oh, my God, the dogs. Then she turned and walked away and it was over. That's an example of what you're describing, is this ability that you have in your life now to come into these moments and drop in to connection and presence in your life. Because it's true. If you really think about People that are dying. I mean, you have more experience than I do.

But I'm married to somebody who's a death doula and a hospice volunteer who sits with people who are dying and supports people who are near the end of their life. I always wonder, are people scared? Are they afraid? Chris talks a lot about how no, people actually seem to be more at peace. I mean, is that what you found? Do you find that people are, when they're approaching death, they're not as afraid? Because I think it's normal to be afraid of dying, isn't it?

There's great terror in the end of something because to die incomplete suggests that there's a brokenness that didn't heal. And so the reason we developed fear of death, I believe, is because we can feel this state of incompleteness that we perceived. We know that there's something deep that needs to heal. We can feel it all the time.

I all of a sudden felt this tremendous sense of sadness.

Yeah.

To think that the biggest realization for most people.

Is that the deathbed?

Is that the deathbed?

Many of the death experiences that I've been around in which the individual will let go of the body fully, letting go of that egoic construct, they will journey immediately off the.