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.
All right, welcome to round trip death, everybody.
Welcome to our special guest today, Betty Guadagnio.
How did I do?
Pretty good.
Nobody can see your thumbs up.
You have to say something.
You did really well.
OK, I appreciate that.
From here on, you'll just be Betty G or just Betty, but anyway, it's so good to have you.
You're an unusual guest and that's a good thing.
OK, I'll take it as a compliment then.
Well part of the reason is because you actually work for Ions who we've talked about on this
show before.
Tell us a little bit about you and how you found Ions and what you do for them.
Yeah, absolutely.
So if anybody's unfamiliar with what that acronym is, Ions stands for the International
Association for Near Death Studies.
Sounds fancy?
It is.
I'm really grateful to have an opportunity to work for this organization.
At Ions, we have an online community, which is how I found my way there.
And we have open sharing groups multiple times within a week.
So as I was integrating my own spiritual experience, I found a group of other experiencers who were
very open, very honest, very vulnerable and authentic, and they were sharing about their
experiences.
They were sharing about the tools that they used to integrate.
They were sharing about their collective wisdom that they had achieved in the spiritual space.
And it gave me a lot of opportunity to ground my own spiritual experience.
And then I quickly went into service.
Since my spiritual awakening, I've had this very intense draw to be of service to others.
So I began moderating and facilitating our sharing groups online.
And then I was quickly taken into the fold to work on the production side of things.
So I actually am the webinar coordinator for our online community.
So I find speakers.
I hold space.
I create panels and workshops that give space for experiencers to share.
And then I also host Ions podcast on their YouTube channel, which is Ions videos.
And our podcast is called Explore the Extraordinary.
And the podcast is really an opportunity to open up to all mystical experiences.
Obviously, the root of our organization is the research around near-death experiences.
But now we're growing and expanding into all mystical experiences and creating conscious
space for that.
And that's the purpose of the podcast.
And don't forget Buddha Betty on YouTube.
Yes, that's my own personal YouTube.
Buddha Betty, it's a play on words.
Yeah.
And you do lots of interviews there.
Now, some people may want to do these online groups you were talking about, but there are
also local in-person groups all over the place, aren't there?
Absolutely.
Yes, there's local groups.
And if there isn't a local group in your area, we have information on our website on how
to create one.
And I really think that there is a great call for conscious space.
And there is this great call for people to be supporting each other as we make the paranormal
normal and we make the extraordinary ordinary.
I feel like so many of us are having these experiences or just stepping into spiritual
awareness, even if it's been a slow and steady spiritual journey, because it is for many people.
And I think that it's so great just to create that space for people to be able to support
each other.
I talk to people all the time that had an NDE 20, 30, 40 or more years ago.
And back then they didn't care to talk about it.
And they seem to find it very therapeutic to be able to talk about it now.
And I would think even more so with a group of people who may have had a similar type
of experience.
Oh my goodness.
Yes.
It really makes you feel not as unique as you think you are when you get to get around
other people and they're sharing your story back to you.
And I think for people to come out of their spiritual closet and to be able to really
unleash their authenticity is, for me, it's been the main part of my spiritual process.
And evolving has been really tapping into my authenticity.
And I think that sharing our spiritual experiences is a big part of that.
Well, I know the group closest to me is in Salt Lake City and they get sometimes a couple
of hundred people out to a meeting.
Plus they have it online for those that just want to watch.
And just wonderful people.
I didn't make it to the National Conference in DC this year, but I was at the one, the
National Conference in Salt Lake City last fall.
And I can tell you, if you haven't been to one before, yes, there is science behind it
and there's plenty of people with PhDs and all kinds of initials after their name talking,
but there's also just real people and everybody is so, what is the word?
I don't know.
It's just so accepting and inclusive and nobody was saying, no, what you believe is wrong
and what I believe is right or any of that.
It was just a lot of people getting together and I hate to call it a love fest, but I mean,
it was just really nice.
Yeah.
I heard somebody call it this last year, a very heart-centered space.
And that's exactly what it is.
I went to the, my first conference was the one in Salt Lake City in 2022 and I was so
scared because I didn't know anybody.
I was going by myself and I hadn't really gotten as involved with IAMs as I am now.
And so I really didn't know anybody and I walked into the hotel and the second that
I walked through the door, it was like this wave of tingles just took over me and I was
like, whoa, I'm home.
I've never felt this kind of vibration before and I didn't know anybody and I still had
an amazing time.
I made soul connections.
You should see people spot each other from like across the room and they are just like
magnetized to each other and they're like, I know you.
I mean, like I don't know you, but I know you on some soul level.
I watched so many situations like that unfold while I was there.
I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
It was so incredible.
It really is such a beautiful space.
And our podcast was fairly new back then, but some of the people that had been on the
show found me and just ran up and gave me a hug and was so nice.
So if you have any favorites from this show, you know, you may see them at the next conference
and you can go up and give them a big hug and tell them you appreciate them sharing.
Anyway, let's talk about you now.
Me, me, me, me, me, finally.
I was wondering when we were going to get here.
Finally.
Do you have quite the past young lady?
I do.
Yeah.
Should I paint you a picture of it?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Cause I want it to be in your words, not mine.
And this is without judgment.
That was only a joke, but yeah, go ahead.
Oh yeah.
You know, just like brief little trigger warning.
I do say some very triggering things because my life was very triggering.
So I grew up in this very chaotic dysfunctional home.
My whole family is a perpetual cycle of addiction and poverty and everything that goes along
with that, which includes sexual trauma, emotional trauma, physical trauma.
And it's been that way for generations and generations.
And it's exhausting being the one to break all the generational curses, but I guess that's
what I'm doing here.
So I grew up using drugs to cope with my feelings.
You know, I experienced sexual trauma as a young child and I learned how to use and cope
from my family.
And I would see that whenever they were going through an emotion, any emotion, it could
be joy and elation or it could be sadness and depression.
They would take a pill or they would smoke something or they would drink something and
their whole mood changed.
And as a little kid, I said, I want that.
I want to be able to do that.
So the second that I could, I did.
And so I started using drugs really early in my life.
And you know, everything that goes along with that, I thought that it made me cool.
I thought that it was my personality.
I thought that I was a rebel.
And you know, I watched my parents deteriorate with their own drug addiction.
And in 2007, my parents had reached another bottom.
I mean, they had hit so many bottoms in their life.
But this bottom was pretty exceptional.
And they were about to be evicted for, you know, like the millionth time, the lights
were turned off, the gas was turned off, the phone was turned off, there was no money.
And they made this decision that they had to end their suffering and stop using drugs.
And they did that by committing suicide with one another.
And how old were you then?
I was 23 when that happened.
And my sister was 18.
And we found them and they left notes and they were very brief.
They were actually written on like the kitchen notepad that you would make a shopping list
on.
And, you know, it didn't explain anything.
But you know, in some way, I understood because I knew how incredibly they were suffering
in their life, you know, like not having money can really make a person do crazy things.
Like just not having any sort of financial security.
And then along with the addiction and all of the mental stuff that goes along with that.
And this was really, they thought that this was their only out.
Yeah, you know, it was just so traumatizing and so traumatic.
And my sister and I coped in very different ways.
I went like headfirst into my own addiction.
And my addiction kind of became my parent.
It felt like my addiction spoke to me and said, I'll never leave you.
I'll never abandon you.
It's me and you together forever.
And so it became my best friend.
It became my parent.
It became my companion.
It became my whole personality.
I'm covered in tattoos of liquor bottles and packs of cigarettes.
Like this was my identity.
This was what I was going to do until I died.
And I thought that the only way to stop using drugs was to die because that's what I saw
modeled to me.
How did you turn things around?
Or am I jumping ahead too far?
No, no, that's good.
Yeah.
I changed things around.
Well, I died.
That helped.
Yeah, I had this really transformative spiritual experience after an overdose of drugs in 2019.
And you know, I had experienced a lot more trauma in my life.
After my parents' death, I decided that I would never be a victim to my circumstance
ever again.
That I would now be the perpetrator in people's storylines that I would be the abuser because
those were the only options that I thought there was.
There was victim and victimizer.
I didn't know that there was any other role to play.
And so, you know, I really caused a lot of harm in my life.
I mean mountains and mountains and mountains of harm.
So I had this overdose.
And when I overdosed, I was a militant atheist.
And as my experience started to unfold, I was so pissed.
I was so mad that I was wrong as I started to experience this unconditional love.
I was like, how can I be wrong?
Okay.
Back up a little bit.
Don't jump ahead too fast on me here.
Okay.
The day that this happened, what was going with something, did something lead up to you
doing more drugs than usual to an overdose?
What happened?
So, the thing that led me to using more drugs was that I was going to go do my laundry.
And I thought, oh, I might as well be wavy for some mundane human task.
And the drugs that I used every day at this point in my addiction, because this is the
tail end of my addiction, every day I used heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, some sort
of hallucinogen, whether it was psilocybin or LSD.
And then some sort of like, like benzo, like, you know, like a piece of a Xanax to sort
of like tie it all together.
So every day I was using an insane amount of drugs anyway.
But this one particular day, I decided to take a little more of each of the drugs and
it activated a spiritual awakening.
So I didn't technically die.
I was conscious for my awakening process.
Today I have some language for it.
What I experienced was a spontaneous Kundalini awakening.
And the drugs activated my Kundalini energy.
And if you're unfamiliar with what that term is, Kundalini roughly translates into life
force.
So I had this life force energy activation.
Every single one of my chakras became activated and online all at the exact same moment.
And as my third eye and my crown opened, it felt like my spirit shot out of my body.
I gotta ask and you don't have to answer if you don't want to.
How does one, I don't know, survive taking all those drugs?
You couldn't hold down a job, could you?
No, no.
My life was immersed in prostitution.
That's how I made money to support my drug habit or anything that I could do.
I would steal, I would lie, I would cheat, you know, anything that I could do to get
a little bit of money to be able to afford my habit.
Okay.
Explain more what happened here.
So you're at the laundromat?
It started at the laundromat, yes.
And I realized that I took too much as I was like putting the clothes into the washing
machine.
I live in New York, so we go to outside laundromats.
And I, you know, like everything started to kind of feel funny.
Like the quarters felt like they were the size of my face as I was putting them in.
The paper money felt like tree bark.
And I said, I gotta get out of here.
And so I started to run home.
And as I was running home, I was going at a very quick pace.
Every time I got to a corner, I would see the street signs.
So I would see Madison and Stuyvesant.
And then I would run to the next block and it would say Madison and Stuyvesant again.
And the next block, it would say it again.
And it felt like I was stuck inside of this loop.
And then all of a sudden the whole world became washed in the brightest white light that you
could ever imagine.
And then I witnessed all of the buildings around me crumbling to the ground.
And all that was left of them was the green lines of matrix code that made them up.
So like the fabric of reality is crashing before my eyes.
So now I really start the high tail at home.
I walk in through my front door.
I finally get there.
It felt like it took me six hours to get there.
It might have been six minutes.
And as I entered the doorway, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror.
And I thought, who is that?
I have no idea who this person is.
And then I heard my mother and my father's voice come into my consciousness.
And I heard my mother say, what are we doing inside of our daughter?
And then I started to get downloaded with just everything.
Like every, the whole fabric of creation started to unfold inside my mind.
The whole storyline of creation.
And it kind of felt like I was my parents and that I was downloaded with their suicide.
And I could feel the intense anguish.
And I kind of liken this to like a life review.
Because I was experiencing their suicide from their point of view.
And then I was experiencing it from the perspective of a grieving daughter,
the way that I had actually experienced it.
And it was all so overwhelming.
And then all of my other memories started to come into my awareness.
And I began to feel the way that I had made others feel as I victimized them and hurt them.
And it felt like every cell in my body was covered in concrete and static.
It was so heavy.
It felt like hell, like what people describe hell to be like.
That is what my life review felt like.
And I was stuck inside this super low energy.
Just so people understand, and I ends is on board with this.
Someone's heart doesn't have to stop to have what we call a near-death experience.
And that was your case.
And that's been the case of some other people that we've had on this show.
I've learned a lot as we've gone along.
The intro to the show used to start with something like, you know,
we're interviewing people who have actually died and seen the other side
and come back to talk about it.
And that's true.
But these experiences, like you're describing, fit in that category as well.
Yeah, definitely.
They're near-death-like experiences,
because it's all the same major points of a near-death experience.
The life review, the seeing loved ones that have crossed over, the white light,
you know, like all of these other things that are part of, yeah,
like just the common near-death experience.
So you were feeling a hell type of experience.
Did it progress beyond that?
Yeah. So, you know, like as I'm feeling, again, like today,
I can conceptualize it as a life review.
But then I just thought, oh man, I died and I'm in hell.
So I started to hear these masculine voices.
I started to hear my own divine masculine voice.
I recognized it as myself.
And he was guiding me into the light.
And then my father came in and I had had a boyfriend
that had recently passed away as well.
And so their voices were familiar to me.
Their energy felt familiar to me.
And they kept saying over and over again,
you are worthy of all the love in the universe.
You are worthy of all the love in the universe.
And so I started to follow those voices.
And I found myself landed on what felt a lot like a spaceship.
It was all covered in complete white light.
Everything that I'm going to describe
is the images that were coming to my mind's eye.
But on this spaceship deck, it looked
a lot like the Gravitron ride at Carnivals.
I don't know if anybody can remember that,
but it's like the spaceship that spins really fast.
And you throw yourself up against the wall
and there's no gravity.
So you can like flip upside down.
That's what it felt like.
It felt like I had come out of the side of one of those panels.
And I was standing on the deck.
And there was thousands and thousands of other souls
all around me.
And there was this commander in the center.
And whether you want to call it Christ or Krishna or Buddha,
just some sort of higher consciousness
was the commander of all of these souls.
And we were all getting hyped up for our mission to Earth.
And everybody was so excited and screaming.
And everybody was so happy to be going down to Earth
for this mission.
And the download that came through
was that we were all coming down for the Great Awakening,
that there would be a transformation of consciousness
while we were incarnate on Earth.
And we were going down to help shift the collective
from a level of third dimensional thinking
to fifth dimensional thinking.
So I'm downloaded with this whole scene.
And I'm realizing that I'm actually a spiritual warrior.
And then my perception shifts to another scene.
And everything is happening simultaneously
all at the exact same moment.
And I find myself in front of this table of beings.
And I don't know who they are, but I didn't even
need to ask because they were most certainly people
in charge of something.
And so I just had this great respect.
Like I felt like a great feeling of respect for them.
And they had what looked like this big, giant gold book
in front of them.
And they were thumbing through it.
And they were like, hey, it's good to see you.
Get prepared for your trip back.
You're not meant to stay.
And I'm like looking over my shoulders, like all around me.
I'm like, you guys aren't talking to me, are you?
Because I don't know where I am, but I'm definitely staying.
This place feels way better than the place that I just was.
And I am definitely staying here.
And they're thumbing through the book.
And they're saying, no, no, no, you're not finished yet.
You still have a lot more that you have to do.
You haven't completed your mission.
And so then they take me through the details
of my pre-birth plan.
So they showed me that I, as a soul,
had actually designed my life before I came to Earth.
And the way that it looked in my mind's eye
was a lot like a grocery store.
And there was this man who was guiding me
through the grocery store.
We had this big, empty grocery cart.
He was wearing a plaid blazer and a fedora.
And he said, OK, pick your life.
And so I start grabbing all of these.
They looked like cereal boxes off of the grocery store shelves.
And each cereal box had a life experience on it.
And so I'm this little orb of light.
And I'm like, well, if I'm going to Earth,
I'm really going to Earth.
And I start grabbing every cereal box I could get my hands on.
So I'm picking sexual trauma.
I picked my parents, the family line
that I would be born into, my gender, my ethnicity.
I picked all of my life's challenges.
And then I also picked all of my life's purpose
and the pieces of my mission.
So there's a box in the cart that says author.
There's a box in the cart that says spiritual awakening.
There's a box in the cart that says recovery.
But none of those things had happened in my life yet.
So they didn't resonate.
So I just thought, wow, that's very lovely cart filler.
So I'm taking through this whole scene.
And every time that I grab a box, there's
a little orb of light behind it waiting
to come into contract with me to complete the experience.
So the one that really sticks out very vividly for me
is the box of childhood sexual trauma.
As I picked that box, a little orb of light
came out behind it.
And it was the soul of the man who would abuse me
as a small child.
And we came orb to orb, face to face with each other,
so to speak.
And we came into contract.
And I was downloaded with the reasons why.
And one of the main reasons was that I had been his abuser
in a previous life and that we were balancing the energy.
Another reason is that we were transmuting this
for the collective, not just for this particular soul,
but for the entire collective as a whole.
So then I had this great sense of freedom come over me.
It felt like two tons of bondage had been released from my back.
I was no longer a victim to my circumstance.
I was actually a divine co-creator of my experience.
Things had no longer happened to me.
They had actually happened for me.
Because on some soul level, I had chosen it
for the involvement of myself.
Now, my human cannot understand how any of those experiences
could involve me as a spirit.
But today I have unwavering faith that my soul is in charge
and knows exactly what's going on.
That is so amazing.
And the thought that people would actually choose
really hard, sometimes horrible, difficult things
is hard to understand.
But I guess in a realm like that, and realizing that, hey,
I'm choosing this because I'm going to learn something from it.
Is that the idea of the choices?
Yeah, yes, absolutely.
And again, because it does something for the collective
itself as a ripple.
So right now, because we're in the midst of the Great Awakening,
the collective needs a lot of negative energy
to be transmuted.
So I took on all of these challenges, not only
because I wanted to heal the family line that I was
choosing to be born into, but I wanted to heal these things
for the collective itself.
So in case someone doesn't get a chance
to experience the healing from these things,
I'm experiencing it and creating a ripple out in collective
so that other people can jump into that ripple
if they so choose.
OK, before we move on from the grocery store,
is that what you call it?
Yeah, I mean, it was.
It was like a little grocery store.
I have a whole bunch of questions here.
So I'll try to get through a couple of them quickly.
This whole thing about you mentioned the word contract.
So you chose these experiences, and there
was some kind of a binding contract that went with them?
Well, I wouldn't say binding because that sounds
like so condemning.
Like if you don't complete your contract, it's OK.
You'll probably have to come back again and finish it,
but it's not as definitive as that.
It's not like a jail cell.
So I'm a big believer in agency and our freedom to choose,
and I'm not a big believer in that everything is
predestined ahead of time.
I believe that we can make choices along the way.
Does that fit into what you're talking about?
In other words, you made some of these choices beforehand.
During this life, could you make some different choices
and change that path if you chose to?
And is that a bad thing based on the contract
that you entered into earlier?
I know that's a lot of big questions there.
No, no, that's great.
So number one, there's no way to mess this up.
It's not real.
So there's really no way to mess it up.
It's just kind of a game that we're playing.
So free will and pre-birth planning
are not mutually exclusive.
They go together.
So pre-birth planning, I have picked out
the major plot points in my story.
Now, I exercise my free will as a human here on Earth
by designing everything in between that.
So let's say that I have five major plot points in my life.
I can make loops and turns.
They're not linear.
So for instance, one of my major plot points
was addiction and recovery and spiritual awakening.
Those are some of my major plot points.
So I could have come off of the path of addiction,
like 15 years ago.
But I kept making my own free will decisions
to continue on with the learning of that part of the lesson.
And then at the point where I had gotten to where
it was the spiritual awakening plot point needed
to start to take place, it was like the recovery
and the spiritual awakening plot point coincided.
Like they crashed into each other,
because I had taken so many twists and turns along the way
that now my plot points were going to mesh with each other.
I could have come into spiritual awakening very slow
and steady.
And in fact, many times, I think that
would have been a lot nicer than getting
a bucket of ice water thrown on my head
and a bunch of spiritual bricks thrown at my face.
Again, free will is the decisions
that we make in between the plot points.
But I have a deep knowing that we do pick specific things
to do in our lifetime before we come here.
It's like picking a major in college.
We've picked the classes that we want to take.
Yeah.
And then we often change it if we feel like it later.
Yeah.
You mentioned the quote, storyline of creation.
What was that?
That's real hard to articulate into words.
So one way that I can is that I was downloaded
with the divine feminine and the divine masculine storyline
of creation.
So you see this reflected in every mythology.
Every pantheon has its own divine masculine and divine
feminine energy, every mythological family.
So there's Jesus and Magdalene, Shiva and Shakti,
Hera and Zeus, Adam and Eve, Isis and Osiris.
So I was shown that we as souls are here
to express the divine masculine and divine feminine energy
within ourselves.
It doesn't necessarily mean that you're
supposed to have a masculine and a feminine human being.
Inside of my soul, it's divided into two, a masculine
and a feminine energy.
And this is proven in science with left brain
and right brain thinking.
OK, so it wasn't about the creation of the Earth
or some galaxy or something.
It was more about us.
It was more about the soul's journey here.
Again, Earth is an illusion.
It's not real.
So it's really just like, where do you
decide to pick up the storyline from?
So what makes you think that Earth is an illusion and not real?
Well, I'll say I've got lots of reasons why I think that.
One of the main reasons is I'm a student and a teacher
of a course in miracles, and in that metaphysical text, which
is a channeled message from Jesus,
it tells us that this world that we live inside of
is a dream.
And it can be a nightmare or it can be a happy dream,
depending on where your thought forms go.
That was something that gave me the confirmation of what
I had experienced in my spiritual experience.
When I woke up in the space of eternity,
it felt like I had woken up from a dream.
I remember kind of like shaking my head and going like,
whoa, that was so weird.
Did my parents kill themselves?
Crazy.
The same way that you would wake up from a dream
and you'd only be able to grab three seconds of it
when you're actually sleeping.
So that's what it felt like.
Sometimes I can look around and just sort of see the energy
vibrating in the walls around me and say,
I can't believe I think this is real.
I know that real reality is without form.
And this reality where we're in form
is just kind of like a little pit stop.
It's just a ride that we're on.
Well, unto us here, if you can see it, feel it, touch it,
smell it, et cetera, it must be real, right?
Right, yeah.
OK, let's jump back to the grocery store.
I want to see what happened next.
OK, OK.
So after they had taken me through all of that,
and like I said, I had this kind of weight lifted off of me,
I found myself back in front of the table of beings.
And I was so grateful.
I just kept saying, wow, I'm so grateful
to have this information.
I'm so grateful to have this information.
I will still not be returning to Earth,
but I am so grateful to know that I actually
picked that crazy life.
And they said, listen, you're not going back as a punishment.
You are going back to complete the mission
that you signed up for.
So you have to balance your lifetime.
You have to complete the grocery cart.
And I was very dismissive.
And I said, I don't need to go back.
I said, listen, you guys don't tell us
what Earth is actually like.
And I don't think that I can handle it.
I don't think that I can go back and finish.
I said, I definitely cannot go back into her pointing
to my own body.
I said, well, I could see my body in the bathroom
outside myself.
That's where I was.
That's where my awakening took place inside my bathroom.
Glamorous.
Yes, I know.
I said, she's glitched.
She needs way too much healing.
Like her body is wrecked.
There's no way to fix what she's done.
And they kind of chuckled.
Of course, it can be healed.
But I don't understand that.
They said, well, listen, you don't have to go back into her
if you really don't want to.
But you do have to go back.
And so we'll show you the baby that you'll be born into.
And so then they took me into this scene
where I could see, everything looked a lot like a video game.
And that could be because of the generation that I'm born in
or because we live in a simulation.
You can take your pick.
But so they showed me this little baby and everything
about her, like all of her stats came up next to her.
She was beautiful.
And they showed me her gender, her ethnicity, her family line,
her challenges, her purpose, her mission.
And she was going to have to complete my grocery cart
on top of a couple of other things
that were going to be added because of the family line
that she was going to be born into.
And so I thought, OK, if these are my only options starting
from zero or going back into the body I just came from,
then I'm going to go back into her.
And they said, listen, we promise you
that your life will not be nearly as challenging
as it has been.
You're going to be living in awareness now.
You're going to have these beautiful spiritual goggles
on that when we come into awareness, we get to wear.
They said, the first part of your life was boot camp.
And the second part of your life will be carrying out
your mission.
And this time around, you're going to have helpers.
You're going to have kindred spirits, soulmates,
mentors, teachers.
You're going to find the knowledge
that you need to help you on your way.
And your life will be vastly different.
Trust us.
And I said, I do not trust you guys.
And then I found myself back in my awareness on my bathroom
floor.
And that was the end of my spiritual experience.
You told them that you don't trust them?
I do.
Yeah, I do not trust them.
That was how I felt then.
Now I have a different perception.
It's true, though.
I feel like I wasn't prepared for what Earth actually was.
I had somebody ask me once, do you
think this was an informed decision?
And in a way, I don't.
Because when I'm in that spiritual space,
as I'm picking the cereal boxes, I'm
feeling the life experience.
But I'm feeling it for a millisecond,
because time doesn't exist there.
So I don't realize that I'm going
to be dealing with the grief from my parents' suicide
for decades of time.
I just think, oh, yeah, I can handle this.
Or the pain from addiction.
Oh, yeah, this seems like it would be interesting to experience.
I don't realize that it's going to be decades of linear time
here.
So for a long time, I felt kind of tricked
into this whole experience.
Today, I have a different awareness,
and I don't feel that way.
But I can understand how other people do.
I can't imagine how hard it was to heal at that point,
physically from addictions, as well as having to finally deal
with all these emotional things.
What was that process like?
How long did it take?
Because you seem very healthy and happy today.
Thank you.
Yes, I am.
I drink a gallon of water a day, so that really helps.
But my healing process, I mean, I'm still healing.
I'm not cured of addiction.
I have a daily practice.
I'm part of a 12-step fellowship.
That's something that really helps me.
I actually experienced a spontaneous healing
after my spiritual experience.
Like I said, this body was very glitched.
After my experience, I wrote the Holding Office Drug
and Do Psychosis.
I didn't know anything about spirituality.
I didn't know anything about spiritual awakening.
And I definitely refused to believe in anything like that.
I just thought, man, I was so high
that I thought I was talking to God.
That's crazy.
And then all of these really beautiful signs and synchronicities
started to take place to let me know that my experience was
a true one and that I really had to get onto a different path.
And there was this great sense of urgency
about getting onto the path now.
So my world became very teeny tiny.
And I know my guides and my soul made my life
impossible to keep using drugs.
But I had a physical dependency to heroin.
So along with mental addictions to countless other substances.
And so it was really challenging for me
because I didn't want to deal with the pain of withdrawal.
I found myself on day three of withdrawal
because I had no way to get drugs all of a sudden
after decades of using them.
Now all of a sudden I had no dealers.
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me.
And so I found myself on day three of withdrawal,
which is the worst.
And if you don't have any experience with that,
I'm so happy for you.
It's what they depict in films when they show people
like really going through it.
It feels like your skin is made of broken glass
and your bones are campfire logs.
You're sweating.
You're sick all over yourself from both ends, aches and pains.
And none of it is even real.
Like there's nothing actually physically wrong with you.
And so I was writhing in pain.
And I heard a voice and it said that I could request
what I wanted fixed.
And I was in the throes of desperation.
So I was like, okay, strange voice.
I want to no longer be physically dependent
to this substance.
Please take this away from me.
They told me to lay back, count backwards from 10.
And I saw these two little men appear in my mind's eye.
And every time I tell the story, I see them again.
And they just like waved to me.
So these two men, they were wearing white lab coats
and they had these bulbous noses.
And they had these little lawn mowers in front of them.
And I watched these men take off
and go in separate directions
to start working through every crevice of my mind.
And as they were going, they were mowing out
the old neural pathways
and they were creating space for the new ones.
So my pain receptors were being restored.
Again, I'm not actually physically,
there's nothing physically happening to me
that I should be feeling this pain.
It's because everything inside my mind is so jumbled
because of the substance.
So they were clearing it all out.
And when they finished mapping out my mind,
I felt somebody draw X's onto my forehead with their thumb
and then a plunger on the crown of my head.
And as it plunged down and came back up,
there was this bright white flash.
And I was instantaneously healed
out of day three of heroin withdrawal.
I mean, like moments before I was sick
all over myself, welcoming death.
And then in an instant,
I was completely well and healed and fine.
And I couldn't believe it.
I threw myself on the ground.
I was on my knees crying out,
how could this be happening to me?
I don't believe in this.
You could not have picked a more unworthy subject
to bestow this kind of grace on.
And for the contrast, I was an atheist.
I was an orphan to suicide.
I was a drug addict.
I was a prostitute.
I was a liar, a manipulator, a thief.
I was a rapist.
I was a racist.
I was all of the things that you would think
would not bestow you with any kind of grace.
In fact, those are all things that were taught,
condemn you to something really terrible.
And there I was completely enveloped,
totally healed, completely fine
because of the unconditional love
and grace of source energy.
What did that feel like?
I mean, it just, you know,
this flood of unworthiness tried to take over me.
It really did.
And it was quickly combated
by what felt like a shield of light.
You know, like the feeling of knowing
that I'm worth something
when I had felt so worthless my whole life,
I had abused myself to no end,
you know, like victimized
and just completely abused by myself.
I did that.
And so, yeah, knowing that I was worthy of something more
was just, I mean, obviously it was very life changing.
That's amazing.
I mean, really amazing.
Okay, what's the moral of the story?
Well, so I think the moral of the story is
there's no such thing as condemnation.
And I think that that's a really big thing that I took away.
There is no judgment.
There's no way to mess this up.
And really, you know, the idea that if you do wrong,
you don't get to go to heaven.
It's just not true.
Like, so for me, I could have come back
and continued living my life the way that I was.
In fact, I did for many months after my experience,
I kept using and manipulating, stealing.
Today, I choose to live righteously
because it feels better.
It feels better to be of service to other people.
I didn't think that I would ever be able to feel good
without a chemical getting me there
or experience or a person
or whatever I was using to make me feel things.
And today, just by being of service to other people,
this is the highest that I've ever been in my life.
And it feels much more aligned
with that fit dimensional level of thinking,
which is a service spirit centered level of thinking.
Thinking outside of yourself for others.
Yes.
What do you say to someone who may say,
hey, all that was was a drug induced psychosis.
Oh yeah, I mean, I thought the same thing.
I'm totally with you.
But if you see before and after pictures of me,
you can tell that there is something much bigger going on.
I mean, I don't even look like the same person.
It's incredible, incredible.
And there was still many divine signs and synchronicities
that took place after my experience
to let me know that it was a true one
and that something big must be happening.
If I was awoken, I know something's happening
on a grand scale.
This was not part of my picture.
We're in the midst of transformation.
Yeah, and you mentioned the great awakening.
What do you mean by that?
So I am under the impression from my spiritual downloads
that we are in the midst of transformation of consciousness
that life as we know it right now will soon be transforming.
And some of us are already on the path to that.
Some of us are living spirit led lives.
And that's the difference between 3D and 5D.
3D is a very materialistic way of looking at things,
very ego-centered, and 5D is spirit and service-centered.
So it's about that sort of shift in consciousness
where we'll become much more kind to each other.
But it's like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Everything has to burn to the ground first
before we can kind of ascend into that level of thought.
And this does feel like something going on worldwide, doesn't it?
Oh, definitely.
You're amazing.
Did this take a lot of psychotherapy too,
or was your healing just overall like,
Wham, you were there already?
Oh, yeah.
I think my healing process was more like,
well, I had to figure out how to be a person
without using drugs because I had never done that.
So I went into a long-term rehab where they basically
broke me down into a pile of mush and then built me back up.
And I was there for a year and a half.
So I had space just to sit and learn
and use my mind for the first time in my life.
I devoured every sacred text, cover to cover.
And I started to figure out what it was that I liked about them
and what I could take and design my own spirituality around.
So I think more than psychotherapy,
it was really just about finding my spiritual connection
and relying on my guides to help me.
Well, something worked because it's not easy for somebody
to be able to say all the things that you did.
I was an addict, an abuser, a prostitute, all these things
without just wallowing in guilt.
And oh, my gosh, I'm a horrible person.
And you've somehow gotten past that.
It's fake, Eric.
This isn't even real.
Like, why wouldn't I be honest?
It's not real.
And I also, I work the 12 steps in a 12-step fellowship.
So that's also really helpful with letting go of guilt
and shame.
My past doesn't have any bondage over my present anymore
because, you know, first of all, it's gone.
There's nothing that I can do about it.
So the only thing that I can do about it
is make living amends.
So now, you know, like I caused harm to my partners
in the past.
Now I'm a better partner today, where
I caused a lot of harm to other women in my past.
So now I'm a better friend today,
and I assist women on their healing journeys
instead of harming them.
And so just by letting go of that guilt and shame,
I'm able to continue on the path and do righteous things.
Yeah, that's great.
OK, before I let you go, I want to come back to one thing
and have you explain this just a little bit more
because this sounded pretty neat.
As you were at that table with the beings, right,
and you said something like, you didn't want to go back
because this felt so much better.
Describe that and how that has helped you today.
That's a great question.
Thank you for that.
The way that it felt in heaven was peace and joy and love
and connection.
And it felt like home.
I mean, I thought that I knew what home was.
I don't know if I ever experienced a very happy home.
But you know, I did have little glimpses of it
throughout my life.
And this was not even comparable to it.
It was beyond anything that I could ever conceive.
So a long time after my experience,
I thought that my goal was just to get back to heaven.
And I thought that I had to do recovery to do that.
So I stopped using drugs.
And I had 14 days off drugs.
And I said, OK, God, I'm doing what you want.
Can you send me back home yet?
And then no response.
And then a month goes by.
Same thing.
Still no response.
A year goes by, hey, is somebody coming to get me?
Like, can somebody come pick me up?
And I realized after integrating and finding
the spiritual texts that really helped me along my way,
that it's not about going back to heaven.
I don't need to go back to heaven to feel that feeling.
I can bring heaven here.
And I do that, again, by being of service to others,
by staying grounded in my spiritual practices,
by finding and connecting with my spiritual communities,
finding the members of my soul tribe in form,
finding the other humans that I felt on that spaceship,
the people that were so excited to come to Earth
for this mission.
I found them here on Earth because I set intention.
And I prayed for them.
And they came to me.
And so now I'm surrounded by the people
that I know that I came to Earth to accomplish things with.
And that feels just like heaven to me.
And even the conversation like this feels just like home.
Because it's about connection and expansion.
Well, thanks a lot, Betty.
This has uplifted my whole day.
Thank you.
Me too.
I feel great.
Thanks so much.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
If you've had a roundtrip death experience,
we would love to hear from you.
Send an email to eric at roundtripdeath.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good
that you're looking for in this life and the next.