From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome everybody to Round Trip Death and I'd like to welcome our special guest today,
Sky Lynn.
Sky, how are you?
Good morning, Buenos Dias.
Doing well, thank you and yourself.
I'm doing great.
Now, tell us why the Spanish, maybe it'll tie in with where you live.
Yes, I am 18 miles from the Mexican border in Nogales.
It's Tubaq and we north to give people an idea.
We're south of Tucson about 35 minutes.
So between Tucson and the border.
Correct.
And it's kind of an artist community, isn't it?
It is.
It's been here for many, many decades.
It's got a lot of like-minded spirit people that it's a creative valley for sure.
I would say the majority of the people that I've met here have come here with the best.
They've retired, they've left whatever else was there and they've come back here to just
enjoy the environment and all the recreation, the hiking and the lakes and so on and so
forth and the creativity, which is wonderful.
Now, it's going to sound like we're doing a pitch for the Chamber of Commerce.
We're not.
Okay.
I did look up Tubaq or Tubaq online and it's a fairly small town, but it looks like you
have good restaurants and a lot of artists and what do you and your husband do for fun
or to keep yourselves busy?
Yeah.
Well, there's two seasons.
There's high season where it's the tourists, which is next, they estimate somewhere about
1,100 people a day visit and our whole village is 1,100 people and when low seasons here,
only 30% of us live here year round.
So that's our favorite season, but a lot of the restaurants close during that time too.
And is low season summer because it's hot or winter?
Well, we should start April first, April to September and then again, January, we get
another group of people.
But we'd like to go over towards Patagonia, which is east of us.
There's beautiful vineyards, there's hiking, they have a beautiful bird sanctuary for hiking.
There's a couple of really nice lakes to go to and do some kayaking or floating and so
it's that.
And then Tucson is really rich too in their art community.
So we like to, which we'll be doing this week, we'll go up on Sunday afternoon, do some arts,
stay overnight and then we do our appointments and whatever on Monday and then come back
home.
Okay.
So, Skye, I know that you had an interesting near death experience.
Take us back.
How long ago was this?
The first near death experience that I had was at 11 years old.
Okay.
And how many total are there?
Two actual near death experiences and four brushes with death or vine intervention with
death.
All right.
Well, let's start when you're 11 years old.
And I can't remember from the pre interview if this is the one where something very interesting
and unusual happened or something else.
What happened at 11?
What started with the night before, I dreamt the whole experience very, very vivid.
I got up in the morning and my parents were in the kitchen.
I explained what happened in detail and my dad was a little town doctor.
It was a Sunday morning.
We're getting ready for church.
And my parents, dad says, you know, be aware of what's happening to you, what's going on
around you.
Cause we were out to babysit a group of kids, the parents are going snowmobiling or they
call them poker runs.
And we were in charge of five little children.
And my mom says, keep your eyes open.
So we're out for the afternoon.
It's a nice winter day and chilly as could be.
And we decided to go for one last run.
A start in the sun starting to go down.
And we're heading back to the farmhouse.
Everybody's thinking of cocoa, hot cocoa and warming up.
And as the toboggan, I was on the back of the toboggan and what we call a toboggan
squat where the kids, we all wrap our legs around each other.
And I was the first one on where the curve of the toboggan is.
And I actually had two twin boys in front of me and their little brother.
As we came up to the road and the snowmobile turned around to go back to the farm, it hit
me immediately.
This is where the dream starts.
And I can hear the roar of a snowmobile coming across the approach.
So I leaned over and I pulled the first little boy off.
The second little boy didn't want to go.
I was able to pull him off.
But the third little boy right in front of me was hanging on.
He wouldn't let go.
So I knew something was going to happen.
And the next thing I could smell the gasoline of the machine and it hit us.
A 600 pound snowmobile hit us.
And I thought for a moment that, you know, that I was just sitting there.
And as the snowmobile sped away, I saw its light and I saw the shattered toboggan.
And I heard the scream of this little boy.
Immediately, I felt pain.
I felt like the toboggan had hit us with the right ski over our left shoulder.
And this is where I was trying to protect him.
So it went over my left shoulder.
His left leg took off.
What I didn't realize is I was stuck on the ski.
So it took me down the ditch and then I rolled off at some of the coat tour or whatever.
And now it's getting dark out.
But what happened immediately after that is I had this peacefulness.
I just felt like I had been dropped just gently somewhere and it got, I was freezing cold
all afternoon.
I had one of my brother's parkas on and it didn't fit.
So there was a lot of cold going on throughout the day, my fingers were, but when I landed
or where I stopped, all of a sudden the noise, everything, this light came on.
It was actually the sun was setting.
So it was just getting dark.
But where I was, it was someplace different.
It was very warm.
It was this smell of lemongrass, which is a touchstone to me to my grandmother's farm.
And I heard this voice.
And it was very soft.
I'm going to say it was a man's voice talking to me.
It was very peaceful.
And it felt like I was there forever.
I was just in this delicate cocoon and I didn't want to go anywhere.
The voice wasn't telling me to come or go.
It was just telling me I was okay.
And I thought, well, I just want to stay here.
I didn't feel any pain whatsoever.
What was going on in the meantime, the ambulance had come.
My father actually came along in the ambulance, which is unusual.
Usually the police would call him and then he would go to the hospital.
But he knew and he told him that.
He says, my daughter's out there.
And they're like, how do you know that?
You didn't want to get into it.
So he's sitting in the police car.
The ambulance people are out there.
They've gotten the kids into the ambulance.
They want to go.
And he keeps telling them, my daughter's out there to look for her.
And they're like, it's dark out.
We got to go.
So they got the flashlights out.
And sure enough, there I was several hundred feet down the ditch.
And the first adult to find me grabbed me and started shaking me.
And all of a sudden in my little cocoon,
there's sock little cotton candy blanket I was laying in disappeared.
And it felt like my arm had been ripped off my body.
The pain was unbelievable.
Rest is history.
I've lived through that.
But they were telling me the adults and the ambulance.
Attendance were like, we couldn't get a pulse.
We couldn't get you or not breathing.
We thought for sure you were dead.
We didn't know we didn't want a radio back to the police car
where your dad was to tell him that we're sorry, Scott's dad.
But it was he kept saying she's out there.
Go look for her.
And of course, the next thing I am, I'm in the hospital.
OK, let's let's fill in a little detail before we go down the road any further.
Yeah.
First of all, before we do, I have
to say on the show we've had guests that have had all kinds of accidents.
Some people have died from diseases, sickness, heart attacks, whatever.
But some we've had someone hit by a train, a bus, a van, motorcycle, cars,
trucks, all kinds of things.
You're the first one hit by a snowmobile.
So congratulations on that.
But if you can remember any more detail, and I know this was a long time ago,
but you mentioned the voice that you heard and then it felt.
Did you say soft?
What were your descriptions on the voice?
The voice is very soft and it was a man's voice.
I could hear that.
And it was as if it took me from my trauma to where I was to call me down
and telling me that I was OK.
It's OK. You're safe.
You're OK.
And you were feeling no pain at all at this point.
Absolutely not. And I couldn't feel the cold, which we had been out there since
one o'clock. So this is about four o'clock, five o'clock in the afternoon.
Now the sun's down.
This big parka that didn't fit me very well had been not keeping me warm all day.
It was one of those old Air Force jackets that had the fake fur around it,
big green things. And it was way too big for me.
And that's why the snowmobile ski was able to pick it up and drag me as far as it did.
Yeah, because of the loose clothing.
Yeah.
Did you do you remember seeing anything or was it just dark and you were hearing this?
No, it was extremely bright, like a sunny afternoon,
walking through a field of lemongrass and that smell and that comfort it gave me.
And the light was warm, glowing.
It wasn't like a spotlight.
Like everything around me was this completely warm, almost a yellow warm.
Maybe that's where the lemongrass in my mind's eye went with that.
That was just peaceful.
And it was like I was laying down.
I know I felt that.
That I just, wow, I woke up in this great cotton candy blanket.
It's the best way to explain it. Yellow cotton candy blanket.
Sounds sweet and comfortable and warm and everything else.
The lemongrass smell of lemongrass.
Where does that come from? Do you think?
Again, my grandmother up in Northern North Dakota, she had it growing around the farmstead.
So when we went, the first thing getting out of the car and running to grandma's farmhouse
was this smell of lemongrass. So it's that comfort that you're okay, you're safe.
And that's how I felt.
And feeling the peace that I was going to be okay, whether I stayed there or not,
it just felt like I was fine.
And I didn't want to leave that.
It was the abruptness of the first adult that got to me and started shaking me
because he couldn't get a pulse or he couldn't feel the breath,
which in, you know, it's freezing cold out. You can see mist of air.
They could get nothing out of it and started doing a little CPR.
They weren't getting anything.
And he literally grabbed the jacket and started shaking me.
This was my best friend's father who I'd stayed at his farm many, many times
and Snow will build with him.
And he kept yelling, you're not going to go, you're not going to go stay here.
And it was just as if I'm in this little blanket and pulled out immediately
and the pain and the coldness and all the commotion around me was like sensory overload.
It was exactly the opposite of where I had been.
Voice is gone, warmth gone, yellow is gone.
I am in the dark.
I'm screaming.
The pain hurts terribly.
My clothing had been ripped.
So that's more cold.
And they told me the arm was upside down and out of the side of the jacket
that they could see so they could see that it wasn't attached any longer.
So that was very painful.
So that was a root awakening.
Yeah.
And you went to the hospital.
What other did you have any other injuries besides your arm?
Not that they could tell.
The first three or four days they fixed the arm.
We lived across from the school.
I get home and dad says, OK, you missed just about a week of school.
Go to school.
So they set it up.
I walked over and I went in between classes.
This is a three story old stone building.
I'm at the top of the third floor with my where my locker is.
And I run into this kid that ran me over.
And I said, hey, no hard feelings.
And he goes, yeah, well, my plan is to kill you.
And he pushed me backwards down the marble steps.
And along the way, the cast shattered.
And I fell to the very bottom.
And you could see blood bubbling out of the shattered.
And he looked down.
He says, next time I won't miss.
So now we've got injury on injury.
Holy cow.
Should I ask what happened to him?
He ended up in an institution, mental institution.
And then when he was let go shortly after that took his own life.
What a sad story.
Very sad.
He was not stable and I feel so sorry for his family.
OK, well, we'll get past that.
Let's get back to you.
So that set your arm way back, it sounds like.
Then what happened with it?
And so, yeah, they had to take me up to the big city doctors.
And they had to fix it.
And so they put a cage around the bed.
And for 90 days, I had to lay there with a pin in it.
And back then they didn't do physical therapy.
They didn't do anything other than change the bedding.
And when I finally was out of the pins that were in the arm,
I grew back the best I could.
They took it out and they took me out of the bed.
And then they realized there had been a lot of damage in my back.
But they hadn't seen it.
This is back in the 60s.
Medicine was pretty basic.
Yeah.
You know, in a way, I can relate just a little bit.
I had an injury in the early 70s when I was of a similar age,
a broken leg, and they put it in a cast for three months,
you know, about as high as it could go and all the way to my toes.
So my knee had never bent this whole time.
When they took it off, it's like, okay, see ya.
And you're, you know, my knee wouldn't even bend.
And my knee wasn't what was hurt.
The tibia had been broken.
So I get it and your injury is much, much worse.
But yeah, it was sort of, okay, your bones are back together.
Now just go fix everything, the rest.
Oh, put me in the wheelchair.
My parents came to get me and then it's like, well, I couldn't walk.
It's like, yeah, so that was a whole new getting back into.
And this is in the middle of the school year.
This was done in January.
So I still had four months school up.
So that was, and I'm left-handed.
So I had to learn how to right-right-handed.
And this is probably where I became,
I've always enjoyed writing,
but some of my teachers, I asked them
if I could just do the test orally
if they would just ask me the questions.
Oh, good.
So it was a lot of memory rehearsing, memorizing to answer.
So you had an unusual situation that you were growing up in
in that you had had this experience.
Most people don't when they're going through adolescent years,
et cetera.
And you had told me about another experience.
It had something to do with your grandmother.
And let's briefly hear that too,
just to fill in some blanks here.
Okay.
I was 22 years old.
I was living in California
and my grandmother was 80 at the time.
And somewhere in the middle of the night,
I woke up and I could smell lemongrass.
And there she was.
It was like a hologram at the end of my bed.
I got out of bed and I sat at the end of the bed next to her.
And I just, we could almost touch hands
on the side of the bed.
And I'm looking at this and I said,
what are you doing here?
And in her Norwegian voice says,
Naaman, she says, you need to come visit me.
And I said, well, I know one of these days I'll get time off
and I'll come back home.
No, she says, you need to come visit me now.
The morning I called and I,
Eric, I can't remember it was my mom or my dad.
One of the two answer, I think it was my dad.
And I says, grandma, okay.
And here again, this doctor and he's like, no,
she's in the hospital.
She's had appendix.
We have to take it out.
We don't know what to do.
She's 80 years old.
And so I immediately got a flu back home,
went straight to the hospital.
This is the first time I see my mom.
My mom thinks dad had called me to come there.
And I explained that, no, grandma came and told me
and they were both looking at me like I was,
we were drinking on the plane, watch.
And I said, no, I explained that she had visited me
in the middle of the night and said I had to come visit her.
And then my dad asked who had time was on.
I said, well, it would have been one o'clock your time here.
And he said, grandma had an appendicitis burst last night.
And we at like 1258.
And we thought she had flatlined, she was dead.
And we had to take her in for emergency surgery.
So right as that happened, she came to get me
to come get her, come visit.
It's pretty remarkable.
Lemon grass has a lot of meaning in your life.
Do you have candles that smell like it
or essential oils or anything?
No, but my studio shares with our electric cat box.
And when I went to grab the spray that I just bought,
it is lemon grass.
I'm like, wow.
Okay, here we are again.
And one other time was when I was 39, my mother had passed.
I'd been with her at the hospital at Gump Home.
They called and said she passed.
I came back, they had taken all the tubes off
and it was nice and quiet in there.
And I felt this all of a sudden, this warmth from her body
and the smell of lemon grass.
And it was like this white, very light entity
came from her and dissipated.
And I felt this warmth.
I was holding her hand.
It was cold.
She had passed already, but again with the lemon grass.
So it's a touchstone for sure for my heart, my mind
and my soul somewhere along the line that's meaningful.
And you shared that you have it growing around your home.
Well, it wasn't that I have it growing.
In this, to let our listeners know,
in our pre-interview, we had this very unusual
I'll call it a coincidence.
You can call it whatever you want it to,
but one of my hobbies is beekeeping.
And there are a couple of things in beekeeping
that we use lemon grass oil for.
And when I got on the phone with you the other day,
I had had a bunch of lemon grass on my hand, oil on my hands
and still smelled like it smelled wonderful.
And you started talking about lemon grass
and here my whole office was smelling like it.
And it was kind of fun.
Kind of an interesting connection.
Wonderful.
And thank you for keeping bees.
They're important to us.
They are very important to us.
And we could go on for a million podcasts about beekeeping,
but we'll let the experts do that.
So let's skip forward to the second near-death experience
and then maybe we'll fill in some of the blanks in between.
Well, it was the second surgery where I had had an accident
and shattered three of the vertebrae into 32 pieces.
So that was a big surgery.
And I don't need your exact age,
but were you an adult at this point?
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna say it was 49.
I gotta go back.
Well, let's do the math.
That was, yeah, Lucy is tomorrow is 17 years old.
By the way, our listeners didn't hear who Lucy is.
We talked about that previously.
You better explain.
Okay, Lucy, after my first accident
and I had to have a ladder built in the thoracic,
I named her Lucy.
It was my mom's favorite comedian.
And I thought if I had to live with that,
I better have a sense of humor.
So fast forward a couple of years later,
they realized there's still some more damage.
So they wanna make a box for the end of the spine,
like a fusion, to hold everything together.
So, you know, who is Lucy's downstairs neighbor, Ethel?
So I named her Ethel.
When Ethel was installed the first time,
there was issues with it
and they couldn't do anything at the weight of year.
So that next year, when they were going to take the screws
out that had broken, they accidentally had torn
or ripped or cut the spinal cord sack.
If part of the fluid comes out, it could cause paralysis.
If all of the fluid comes out, it could cause fatality.
You don't survive.
So I come out of the second surgery
of the part of the third surgery, spine surgery.
And they explained that I'm in a gory,
I have my head in a lock, my arms and legs are strapped down
and they're telling me I can't move for 10 hours.
They need that to heal.
They need it to stabilize itself.
So there's no paralysis.
So they wheel me into my room
and my husband's there and the nurse
and I'm not feeling well.
I'm very, very nauseous.
And she's trying to keep me as quiet as possible,
but I start going into convulsions.
And the pain was as if there was fire being poured
down my spinal cord.
And they couldn't give me too much medication
because they had to be able to talk to me
and I had to be able to feel where the pain was
and I had to be able to use my legs to tell them
if I was feeling paralysis.
And I go into convulsions and it felt like all of a sudden
I was on a surfboard that was on a earthquake
that was on a tidal wave, taking me away.
And again, the pain of this fire going down my spine
and interrupting Lucy terribly causing her issues
and the convulsions, which I can't move my head.
And the nurse is trying to catch what's happening
because I'm being sick and I can't keep anything down.
And all of a sudden with the shaking, the pain, the fire,
I'm gone.
I'm standing at the end of the bed
and I'm looking at me in this convulsion.
The nurse is trying to keep towels around for what's happening
and my husband is bracing my arm on the one side
and the nurse is bracing my arm on the other side
trying to hold me still.
When I talk about this to friends,
I try, you know, I'm probably emotional.
So excuse me, just a minute, Eric,
it's reliving some of it.
It's watching my husband's reaction.
And he,
yelling for me to stay there and to don't go.
I need you here, please don't leave.
Convulsions, pain, and all of a sudden it's gone.
And the first thing is I feel or it's the smell,
lemongrass, I'm standing at the end of the bed watching this
and this hatch opens up behind me.
It was round, it was not square.
I don't know, whatever it was.
And I turned around and like, wow, it's just again,
this beautiful, warm, yellow light.
And I'm looking at it and the pain's gone.
I mean, in a nanosecond, I'm like, oh, finally.
And this voice is very loud and very distinct, very calm.
And I ask, I'm like, what's gone?
And I'm asking him, can I, can I,
can I stay here?
And they're like, yes, yes, you're welcome to stay here.
So you're in the hospital room, looking at your body.
There's some kind of hatch portal round behind you.
Okay. And you hear the voice again.
Yes.
Is it the same one you heard as a child?
It sounds like it, it does.
Okay. And what does it say this time?
Okay. I'm facing the door and I ask this voice,
can I come back?
And it replies, no.
And I'm standing there and I'm halfway looking
at the portal's glow as the door is closing
as if I need to make a decision.
I'm like, I can't go back?
No. I want to be in both places and it's telling me I can't.
I have to decide.
It just simply says no.
So I choose to stay.
The light, the portal closes behind me.
There's a moment where all of a sudden I'm starting to feel
sick to my stomach again and I am immediately back
into that bed and the convulsions stop.
I smell a little bit of lemongrass.
All of a sudden I'm extremely cold, but I'm there again.
They get me situated and after my 10 hour time and whatever
and they can medicate me and they take me out of the head
and they unstrap me and they get me cleaned up
and everything and my husband has to get out of there.
He just has to go take a walk and this nurse stayed
with me for the night and somewhere along the line,
she explained that she thought she was holding a corpse.
She couldn't feel the pulse.
My body went extremely cold.
Anything on my face, she said, you look,
your lips were purple.
You looked as if you were dead.
And she said, I want you to know,
I heard you negotiating with somebody.
I said, what do you mean?
Wow.
She says, I could hear you ask, can I stay?
And somebody in a man's voice said, no.
This is the next thing your body started going
through a gentle release of the convulsion.
I'm like, ooh.
She's like, she said that was kind of weird.
Yeah, it doesn't happen every day.
Did your husband hear any of that?
When I asked him about it, he says he was in the moment.
He was concerned about me, but he did talk about me
feeling that I was cold and I was no longer there.
He thought I had died.
Yeah, and you went through trauma and he did too,
having to witness it.
Yes, that's it.
Wow, okay.
I love that.
Anything more that you want to tell us about that experience?
I think it was the having the nurse when she shared
that she felt like she was holding a corpse,
cold at the touch.
And during the incident, looking at my husband,
why they held me down, she felt his strength
and determination and she wasn't going to let me go.
Yeah, I assume that helped it become all more real.
Yeah, this is it.
And I'm just going through,
they've told me they don't think I'm going to be paralyzed.
Some dealing mental gymnastics is going through
the second surgery with the same,
to fix what was wrong the year before.
And all of these three spine surgeries,
my question is always going to be,
am I going to be paralyzed?
Because I really want to be up and about.
I live a healthy life.
And when I was talking, when I was standing there
and the portal was there and I felt the strength,
I'm never going to be paralyzed.
I'm going to be okay.
And coming back and going through that pain again,
that just kept thinking on that other side,
I'm going to be okay.
The voice said I was going to be okay.
I just couldn't be in two places
and I chose to be where I'm going to be.
And that is here on this side for now.
Well, you look super healthy.
So did you have a good recovery here able to walk
and hike and...
That's it.
In fact, after the first spine surgery,
I'm a former fundraiser and nonprofit consultant.
I became a aqua fitness coach instructor.
And I have just come back
getting my certification in ACHI for physical therapy
and also my aquatic rehab physical therapy certification.
I think water is the belt in the youth.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Yeah, I teach hydropilates at a healing center here in Tupac.
Okay, I want to hear more about your life growing up.
Okay, because there are not a lot of 11 year olds
that have an NDE experience something like this.
How do you think it made you or did it make you different
than other soon to be teenagers
and as you were going through all those adolescent years
and early 20s and things like that.
Were you different than everybody else in a way?
I felt that and I always have that there's a purpose
and that whatever comes in front of you, just deal with it.
Don't run away from it, don't coward from it.
And I think I'd mentioned when I was 18 months old
and incident where I'd fallen off the dock
and they couldn't find me.
And when they did, I was facedown basically pronounced dead
and they brought me back.
And I've survived 10 years being a warrior of cancer
and also at age 27, I was in an airplane.
And I thought about this after you and I had talked to Eric
because there are any other time I've heard that voice.
And when the plane was going down,
it was the night of the San Francisco earthquake
during the World Series.
So there were guest pilots on our plane
and we're going from Minneapolis to Arizona
for the National Make-A-Wish Convention,
which I was their state president at the time.
And the plane was being driven by a pilot
that was new into the industry
and a pilot that had retired and came back.
The retired pilot was taking a nap and at 35,000 feet,
the new pilot, the younger pilot had accidentally turned off
the generator, he saw a generator went out,
but he turned off the generator that was working.
And at 35,000 feet, you can't restart a generator.
It has to be less than 30,000.
So the plane went from flying to nose dive immediately
and went into a spin.
Gratefully, there were visiting pilots
that took over the cockpit, basically piracy,
went over and went over
and they were able to get it to at least level out.
And in between the mountains of Pueblo, Colorado
and Montevisto, they found a little landing strip this big.
We needed this big.
So we hit the ground about 400 miles an hour,
but it was as this is happening,
immediately my background, I was a lifeguard in high school
and my background told me, go into safety.
What can you do?
Because the staff is told not to do anything.
That's something you know for sure.
If you're ever in a plane incident, follow staff.
So the lights go black, we have no air conditioning.
There's, it's completely black and the plane is circling,
but there was a full moon out.
So I could see what they were doing.
It was coming through.
So I jumped out of the seat I was at
and started to help.
There was a family there that was an elderly family.
And then there's a family that had a baby
and they couldn't get the baby to quit crying.
And anyway, when we were going down,
right before I got out of my chair,
there was a moment that I was extremely scared
like anybody else.
I think, okay, we're going down, we're going down fast.
We're going down like this.
The air in the plane is like,
it feels like it's 180 degrees and I heard this voice
and it said, you're going to be okay.
Your life guard, you're going to be okay.
I got up and started helping where I could.
And that transpired throughout the rest of the incident
because we were stuck up there for a day or two
and snow and no suitcases and trying to figure out what to do.
But you were alive.
It was.
And I feel that when our time's up, it's up.
I truly believe that.
I'm not saying I drive down the road 110 miles an hour
trying to tempt fate, but I truly believe that.
We have a purpose.
We need to be in touch with what it is,
find out what it is and don't be afraid of it.
Open it up, see what happens.
In fact, you're writing a book about all this, aren't you?
I am.
You want to talk about that at all?
I know it's not done yet, is it?
It is.
Oh, okay.
Tell us about that real quick.
Without making it a big sales pitch for everybody.
Exactly.
It is the story of, and it's called,
the title is stolen from death,
how obstacles help clear a path for a better life.
It's Nietzsche.
And talk about these different experiences.
And after each chapter, it ends with what I learned from it,
how life changed.
It even deals with bad divorce,
deals with breaking up with family members.
It talks about the bumps we have in life
and what you take with it.
You can either be happy or mad.
The choice is up to the individual.
Nobody is on this earth to make us happy.
It's how you approach it.
And I hope that it's inspirational to people.
And things happen.
You get dealt something, deal with it.
So you mentioned a minute ago about finding one's purpose.
Have you found your purpose?
Yeah, it is on twofold,
having this aquatic background now.
I've been a certified international aqua instructor, coach.
And the people's lives that I see, I teach hydropilates.
And during the people down here are retired.
Some have had some injuries as yourself.
I'm dealing with a woman right now
who had knee surgery and for two years didn't do anything.
She doesn't know why her knee doesn't bend.
So we're working on getting that knee to bend.
We say in the industry, motion is lotion to the body,
oilier is daily.
So being in the water, doing something,
keeping yourself healthy.
I like when I introduce myself and somebody asks how old I am.
And I don't want to make them guess.
I just tell them and then I get this, really?
You don't look that old.
It's like, well, good.
I believe it's our spirit.
I believe it's what we carry with us.
And I also very much have looked for inspiration
in various healers and inspirational people.
And I followed Tich Nac Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist,
and was in 2017, went to Stonehill College in Boston
and was ordained as a peace maker, a Buddhist peace maker.
So I like to shine that light is that we care about your environment.
You carry about people.
You carry about yourself and our world.
It's a nice line to be in, I believe.
And these experiences have all brought me there.
Beautifully said.
And that was a pretty good summary.
But I'm going to ask you one more thing.
And that is, OK, you've got a lot of people out there listening
to you right now.
You've got a forum, you've got the floor.
One last thing that can help everybody.
What have you learned from all this?
And I said it to myself when I was 21 years old.
I don't know if you want to hear the situation.
I can make it short, but I don't have to.
Go ahead.
OK.
General Motors is just transforming Southern California.
I was in my new apartment looking over the ocean.
And I was going to go to Catalina Island for the day
to celebrate my 21st birthday.
I'm listening to NPR and La Cappuccino.
And I hear Natalie Wood has drowned in Catalina Island.
I'm like, well, there goes my day.
So I went and got a bottle of wine.
And I sat overlooking the ocean.
I was on the cliff of the ocean.
And I thought, what can I live with that I know now
that I can live with for the rest of my life?
And it's still true.
What doesn't work, quit doing it.
Whether it's a relationship, a job, a place,
a creative something, if it's not working.
And that includes family.
I've had to break up with family and friends.
If it's not working, quit doing it.
That seems so obvious and such common sense.
But it's not always that easy.
We sometimes feel stuck in these ruts.
And in relationships, I was the youngest of seven.
It was a blended family.
And I remember coming home somewhere around 10 o'clock,
or 10 years old or so, or somewhere in that area.
And my mom, we were doing our homework,
had to do it in the kitchen so she knew we were doing it.
And asked what my essay was going to be.
She said, well, what do you want to be when you grow up?
And I named a couple of family members.
It's just, what are you talking about?
And I shared what I saw, what they were doing wrong
with their lives.
And I said, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to go that path.
I don't want to be that.
And I think it was having that responsibility.
And then as my parents got older,
I became the caretaker.
And this just came to me listening to a podcast yesterday.
When we grow up, we sometimes get into these relationships
and we think we have to be that person.
So I became the caretaker for the family.
And as I'm getting older, and I've had all these situations,
I should be taking care of myself.
Everybody was asking me to take care of them.
And when I got to the point of understanding to live that,
this isn't working for me.
I can't do this anymore.
My life has become easier.
I've made space for better people in my life.
I have better quality of life.
I don't have trauma.
I don't have drama.
It is, I mean, things happen.
But again, if it's not working, regardless of what it is,
quit doing it.
Do you have any fear of death at this point?
I don't.
I have a surgery coming up in two weeks
and the doctor's going, oh my god, what else can happen?
It'll be surgery number 29.
It's like, yeah, the oddest things.
And here I go.
It's like, OK.
That is really a lot of surgeries.
I wish you well.
I hope it goes great.
I'm sure it will.
You're a healthy person.
You're going to continue to be so I can tell.
Thank you.
I want to be about 100 so I can keep giving advice.
All right.
Skylin, thanks a lot for being with us.
Thank you for your time and the voice
to being able to share this.
And I appreciate what your interest is
and your depth experiences.
Thanks again for listening.
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Until then, I wish you everything good
that you're looking for in this life and the next.