One of life's greatest questions is what happens to us after we die?
Is death the end or a new beginning?
Welcome to the Round Trip Death Podcast.
In this show, we listen to first-hand accounts of people who have gone beyond the veil and
return to talk about it.
We're pleased to have with us today Crystal Ray from her lake house.
Hi Eric, how are you?
Good to be with all of you.
Tell us something about your lake house.
Well, my lake house is kind of my little sanctuary.
I own three yoga studios in Dallas and I'm an author and also an artist.
So I have a real creative soul.
So one of the things I love about this particular lake house is it's only an hour away from
my home, which is like fantastic.
I can come down here and there's solitude and peace.
I always feel like when I walk into the lake house, like my blood pressure just goes, it's
so peaceful.
That's like me with the ocean or the mountains.
Same thing.
Just let the stress kind of wash away.
The blood pressure comes down.
The creative side of the brain opens up.
Anyway, would you tell us a little bit about you?
I guess the thing I should tell you is that I'm just recently married.
I've been married for two years now.
I have a wonderful husband.
After 28 years of being single, and by the way, that was following the 28 years was following
a near death experience, which we'll talk about soon, I'm sure.
But I spent all of that time, those 28 years kind of working on this soul mission to share
with the world that love is all that matters.
And of recent, I am just now the most poignant thing in my life is I am about to publish
the book that I was told to write, that book that I was told to write in this near death
experience.
So that's consumed a lot of my time between yoga and writing a book.
My art has kind of suffered, but I have two children who are grown with some grandchildren
that call me grandma, which I love.
They think I'm the cool grandma.
And I've got five dogs and two cats.
And again, a lovely husband.
I didn't mean to put him in that list, but those are the top.
Dog cat husband, I get it.
Yeah, cat, dog, husband, children, grandchildren, couple of yoga studios.
I'm called the yoga mama because I really my job is really as a mentorship.
We have had studios for 20 something years and we have thousands of teachers all over
the United States, Europe, Canada, in particular in Dallas.
We have three studios and it's been a lot of fun to be a mentor and a guide for many
young women and men throughout my life.
I say young as in 35, 40, I'm now 61.
Well, I would have believed when you were doing the math earlier, 28 years of being
single, two years of married, I was going to let people just believe that you were 30
years old.
Thanks.
I feel like I'm 35.
Like if I had to pick a number, that would be it.
I don't know many 61 year olds that can walk on their hands and put their foot behind their
head, but I'm one of them.
Anyway, hey, let's get into talking near death experiences.
That's what we do here.
And I'm really glad that you agreed to be on and talk about yours because what led up
to it is also interesting.
I mean, it was kind of a spectacular, I guess, accident that you had.
But why don't you give us a little background, what was going on and led up to this?
Okay.
So I had a very turbulent childhood.
I think that's probably normal for many Americans, dysfunctional functional.
So my parents were drinkers and a little bit abusive.
And so my childhood was very kind of a tormented.
And as a result, I really had a really deep and questioning soul.
When you become the parent to your parent, you're not really given the opportunity to
be a child.
And so I always had these very elevated thoughts at a very young age.
I remember one morning in particular when I was being forced to clean the ceiling or
something and having this really poignant conversation with what I understood to be
God at that time.
And I remember thinking, you know, if there's good people and bad people in the world and
if that is the parameter to get into heaven or avoid hell, it didn't matter to me.
I just chose to be a good person because I am a good person.
And it was my first real sense of worthiness in my life because I suddenly realized that
that means I am a good person.
And with that, Eric, I turned around and walked off the counter where I was cleaning the ceiling
and I fell into a void.
All I can call is a void, which was like a whirling time and space where I saw myself
from a distance curled in a fetus position.
And it wasn't it was almost like a tornado, but it wasn't really a tornado because there
was no sound.
It was just this whirling time and space.
And I was in the middle and I was very peaceful.
And it came to us to a very gradual halt.
And I was floating out in this like serene velvet night with stars.
And I looked out in the distance and I said, huh, those are stars or energy.
And that's what we are.
I am.
And boom, I was back in my body.
The most interesting thing about that experience is that I never hit the ground.
I fell face first into the ground.
I never hit it.
And the reason I know I didn't hit it because I ended up standing on my feet like a cat.
Wow.
You know, I can't always land on their feet.
And then I had this experience.
I thought, oh, well, I must have hit my head.
You know, you tried to justify and somehow saw stars and made it to my feet.
So I went to the restroom.
I look for you know, you can't dive into the floor without having at least a bruise or
cut something bump.
I had nothing.
And so I went and I told my brother, God saved me.
God saved me because I had this like a maybe he started laughing thinking I had completely
lost my mind.
And I started laughing.
We both ended up laughing.
I said, listen, Mark, I understand.
It sounds crazy, especially since we come from this agnostic atheist home where God
was only damned.
Really wasn't really welcome in the house.
And so he I said, but never forget.
And the funny thing is that my brother is now a minister, right.
And he's been my even though he didn't see the fall, he wasn't there.
But he's been my because I somehow knew as a little girl that I would think this was
a dream.
You know, I mean, because it's so fantastic.
I said, just never forget that this happened.
So year by year, I said, do you remember?
He's like, yeah, I remember.
But all of that, just to put into context of like post falling from there, I started
calling Sunday school buses.
I kept looking for answers, walking to church.
I was baptized five times because I didn't feel it.
How old did you say you were at that time?
I was this is between the age of 11 and 13 when I was on this great mission to find truth.
So I would walk to church.
I would call my mom thought I had literally lost my mind.
I read the Bible seven times forward and back.
And I was I could not find in any spiritual text, not even the Bible, because I read a
lot.
The love and the all encompassing sense of all pervasive forgiveness, kindness, grace,
love that I felt in that moment.
And so the last guy that I went to when I was a young girl before I kind of gave up
on religion was a guy that was one of those evangelistic healers that like puts his hand
on your head and you fall back and then you're healed and all this stuff.
Right.
And he's basically a hypnotist.
There was people lining up.
They were all falling.
I thought, well, why not?
Let's give this a try.
But the minute he touched me, I knew it was not that radiant energy.
It was a very heavy, dark energy that felt bad.
And I remember saying I did fall back and I came up and I said, that is not love.
That is not that's.
And then they escorted me out because they were like, she didn't act properly.
He did not act properly.
And I was escorted out.
So I went I just kind of put, you know, at this time, this my turbulent childhood.
I know I left home at 17 between 13 and 17.
There was a lot of upheaval, you know, teenager stuff and just trying to survive in my very
dysfunctional home.
So I put all of that on the back.
I had to just survive.
I just said, OK, I let that go.
Seventeen, I left home.
I remember my mom, her going away speech was, you know, you're going to be a prostitute,
or drop out of school, be a drug addict.
You don't have parents.
You don't have a family.
You don't even exist.
Wow.
No wonder you left.
And so I was like, OK.
I made straight A's.
I graduated cum laude.
I worked.
I have my own apartment.
I worked my way through college.
You know, I did all of this.
Sounds rough.
It was really hard.
It gave me a sort of grit that I think was necessary for my life, because now as a mentor
and as a guide, someone can look in my eyes and say, oh, but I've had this horrible thing.
You know, I've been raped.
I've been pillaged.
I've been abused.
And I can say, look in my eyes and you see I've done all of that, had all of that.
And I still choose love, because all of this other stuff doesn't really matter.
Yeah.
Can I can we pause for just a second?
I want to I want to find out just a little bit more about the experience that you had
with that healer, because people are looking all over the world for truth.
Right.
And you were you were looking at different churches, et cetera.
And I think the thing that people forget that we can learn from your experience there is
that you were you knew that you would feel the truth when it was in front of you.
It sounds like a lot of people are looking in other ways.
They're trying to, you know, scientifically or book learn their way into truth.
But when we're talking about something spiritual, we have to learn that in a spiritual way.
Right. And wasn't that what you were doing?
Well, my experience was that I could feel the truth of this.
And I was the the the thing is, I really wanted I wasn't going to lie to myself.
Like when they said, you know, they dunk you underwater and you come up and they say, you
have this new life, you're this new person.
I was I recognize because of the experience of falling into this void of time and space,
but this was not the true experience of freedom and love and all expansive kindness and goodness.
I recognize it because I had a reference point.
So I think the problem perhaps is that a lot of times we don't have that reference point,
you know, to to say, I know what it I know what it is.
I've been there, you know, and that's I know what it should feel like.
I know that it's not this, you know, not this, not that.
And I'm not saying, you know, that religion doesn't have a place because I feel like for
me, religion is a stepping stone to truth.
And I always say, if you're going to be a Christian, if you're going to be a Buddhist,
you're going to be whatever your religion is, be a good one.
Do it well.
But don't be so dogmatic that that's the only path.
That's my my thing.
If it serves you to call upon Jesus or Buddha or whatever to keep you grounded, what's the
problem with that?
I don't see a problem with it.
For me, it's universal love.
It's light.
It does.
It's non differentiated because of my experience.
It is definitely not embodied enough to say that these people didn't exist and are not
avatars.
But I know that above and beyond that, at least from my experience, what we are is the
pure essence of beingness.
It's a light.
It's an energy.
It's all pervasive, non differentiated.
And yes, it can be personalized for certain levels of consciousness for as need be, you
know, but it doesn't necessarily make it.
It's just a stepping stone.
I think eventually my truth is eventually everyone will leave those avatars and embodiments
behind and recognize the truth of all existence is a all pervasive love that is expressed
in particles of light and energy.
And if one were to ever get an email from you, I'd love to this down at the bottom.
It just said love is why.
Love is why everything.
So the why of our existence, you know, I remember in college reading several books, but one
most poignantly by Victor Frankel, Man's Search for Meaning.
Yes, I've read it.
A Holocaust story.
But what he found is that people have to have meaning and purpose in their life.
And of course, a little bit of luck to avoid being shot by the Nazis.
But to continue to survive.
How can you survive when, like, for example, in a childhood where, you know, you're being
abused and you're being you have little to eat and you have you're forced to work and,
you know, how do you survive these kind of holocaustic experiences of life?
And you have to have purpose and meaning.
And my purpose and my meaning was that little girl saying to simply I want to be good for
goodness sake.
I don't want to be good to get to heaven.
That seems corrupt to me, even at 13.
And I don't want to be good to avoid hell.
And I really didn't even want to sign up for a God that could create a flawed being and
then punish it for being flawed.
It just seems so ridiculous to me.
Like, OK, if you're going to do this, it just seems it seemed really.
And beyond that, like this is a finite point of time, 89 years, 100 years of life, and
you will suffer for all eternity for this speck of nothing in context of all of eternity.
The math is wrong.
It should be the reverse of that.
So I had a really hard time coming to terms with all of that.
Your logic makes sense.
All right.
Let's fast forward a little bit towards your near death experience.
OK.
So fast forward post divorce, feeling much like a failure, like Cinderella and the shoe
didn't fit.
Somewhat like my mom was right about me.
You know what I mean?
Because she had said all these negative things and I couldn't even sustain a marriage.
I did have two beautiful children and I didn't really date for about a year and a half because
I had been married for 13 years and I just I had never to me divorce was not a possibility
because it wasn't going to be my mother who had divorced.
And of course I did.
But so after about a year and a half, I decided, well, this is unhealthy.
We need human contact.
All I did was stay home and work with the kids and do my thing.
But it was a very solitary time in my life.
And so I decided that I would date just friendly dating.
And I decided to go on a trip with a friend of mine who was very interested in dating
me.
But I said, listen, I'm not ready to date date, but I'll go with you as long as I can
bring my cousin.
Chaperone.
A little chaperone for this 35 year old woman.
And he said yes.
And we went on this trip.
And what I found is that it really wasn't my life, I was very kind of clean living.
I didn't I never have drank.
I never smoked.
I never did drugs.
It was not because as a judgment again to sit.
It's probably just because it's an eight and who I am.
But this particular gentleman that I went with his family drank, they cussed, they smoked.
You know, it was just an environment that was very toxic for me and for my cousin who
was this beautiful clarinetist in the Dallas Opera.
And so we decided like, you know, this is really not as much fun as it looked like it
was going to be.
So I was leaving a day early.
So I told my friend, I said, listen, I think we're going to head out a little early back
to Dallas.
And he said, OK, let me take you to the airport.
Well, on the way to the airport, we were going up a mountain and there was a car coming down.
It was icy conditions, kind of a blizzardy is in veil.
And this car hit.
We started spinning, first of all.
And then he put the brakes on.
We started spinning this car that was skidding towards us, hit my side of the car, crushing
the side of my door in, continuing to spin us around and threw us off a cliff, which
was twenty five feet before you hit the ground and then we rolled ten times.
So to your earlier point, it was a very kind of spectacular wreck.
I'm sure it's kind of one of those things you see in the movies and go that never happens,
but actually it did.
It sounds just like a movie.
I think we can all picture that from some movie from some movie.
Yeah.
But it actually happened.
And when this happened, I had a very spiritual experience that even today, some what, thirty
years later, I'm still in reverence to.
And this experience started with time slowing down.
And me viewing my own existence from a panoramic view, three dimensional view of everything
that had happened and most importantly, the poignant things that had happened in my life
and the ripple effect of my actions, both good and bad, out to Infinium, like how a
kind act would go out and out and out and also an uncounted act the same way.
And I saw everything from three dimensional views and three hundred sixty five degree
view like front and back.
It was all encompassing view of every single thing, which sounds impossible in a span of
a few seconds, which I'm sure it took us to hit the ground.
But I was shown in that in that moment, this view.
And I remember thinking, oh, I didn't know I was going to die today.
Like it was a surprise to me.
But I didn't have the typical fear response that most people have based on my childhood
experience where I had already fallen into this vortex.
So I was like super calm, like I was calmer than a cat, like I was a Zen moment.
I remember looking in the car, the guy who was driving was frantic.
The cousin in the back seat was screaming.
And I remember looking back and having so much compassion for her, like, I'm so sorry
for your fear.
And then I just kind of slumped in my seat and said, OK, you know, it's too late.
I'm going into the light was the last thing I said, I'm going into the light.
And then I was shown in those moments, like multiple realities of which I could choose,
one of which I could come back and be crippled or have brain damage or I could die.
These are all possible lines of energy or possible destinies.
And of course, the one where I come back and I meet Eric.
Yay, you picked the right one.
And so this is the one I chose and write a book about love.
And so I was shown all these possible destinies and opportunities.
I was shown my children also would have different life timelines based on what I chose, but
that each soul is here for the bliss of their own existence and that my children's life
was not dependent on me, which was quite a shock because I was quite the mother bear
that they would be fine without me, which I was really shocked about that.
And I had always, I think, based on, you know, my childhood, seen life as like a big heavy
burden like life is like you've got to be good, a good mother, a good wife, a good ex
wife, a good daughter, a good this, a good that.
And there was not at that point in my life a lot of joy.
Probably the opposite of that, it was just like life seemed like a heavy burden.
And in that moment, I was shown three poignant things that I spoke with you about the other
day that changed my my view of life forever.
And they don't they're simple things, but they absolutely changed my life.
And the first one was that I was shown that I had never seen or experienced the sunrise,
which of course I have, but I hadn't really seen it with the full expression and then
the symbolic meaning of the sun rising and setting and how that is symbolic of our lives
and the opportunity that we're offered each day as the sun rises and the opportunity as
the sun sets to let everything go and rest.
And then second thing I was shown is that I never really smelled freshly cut grass.
I had this overwhelming like when someone's mowing their lawn and you have that freshly
cut grass smell that we all recognize.
And I was just shown like I hadn't seen the beauty in the things that I had just disregarded
because I was too busy.
In other words, I hadn't stopped to smell the roses much less to smell freshly cut grass
and all of the beautiful things that were around me that I had just completely disregarded
like the scent of freshly cut grass.
And thirdly, I was shown that I had never ever reached out and touched someone.
Of course I have three children, two children.
I had a couple of miscarriages, so that's why I said three.
I have two live children that made it.
I actually had six pregnancies and only two children, which is probably one of the worst
things for a marriage, but that's another story.
I had these two children, so obviously I had had intimate contact with someone, but I was
shown that I had never really fully embraced the gift of physical touch, of being able
to reach out.
You know, when you lose someone like a loved one, I think one of the things that we all
know that we miss most is that we can no longer reach out and touch them, like give them a
hug, like hold their hand, like brush your fingers through their hair, like those things
that we miss when they're gone.
And I was shown like I had all these gifts and I had not really even seen the beauty
of my own life because I was too busy with the burden.
So one of the big shifts when I came back out of this experience was that my verbiage,
nothing outside necessarily changed, but that my verbiage about my life changed because
instead of seeing I have to be good, I realized I get to be a good mother.
I get to smell the roses.
I get to smell freshly cut grass.
I get to reach out and touch you.
I get to.
That's a gift.
It's called life.
And I really had a different experience.
And post-accident, there was a lot of chaotic stuff going on, too much to really talk about
in a short broadcast.
But...
Were you badly injured?
Surprisingly not.
And here's the really crazy thing about that.
I did have a severe neck injury, but my cousin who was in the backseat of this small little
red Jeep we were in was banged around from side to side.
She broke every bone in her face, her eye sockets, her jaw, everything.
She had 90% brain damage.
They said she would never talk again, walk again.
The guy driving the car had a broken arm and some back injuries.
I had a severe neck injury.
But the crazy thing about it is that my cousin completely healed.
Her IQ is back to where it was.
She had 18 operations.
She's this beautiful musician.
She became the lead clarinetist and enhanced her musical skills at the Dallas Opera when
she healed.
She meant the love of her life.
She forgot 10 years where she was married to two alcoholic husbands.
She's the only member that she had.
Not a bad deal.
It was a blessing.
I came back with this severe neck injury.
It's a crazy story.
I'll share it if you'd like.
But they took x-rays of my neck.
And the first x-ray came back that I had a broken neck.
And the second x-ray came back that I did not have a broken neck because I put my hand
on my neck and I said, no, that's not my death.
That's not my destiny.
I'm not supposed to have a broken neck.
And I felt heat moving through my hand into my neck.
Third, fourth x-rays, no broken neck.
So they did tell me I had to sign a release saying, we're not responsible if you leave
the hospital.
But they got off the hook.
But I did have severe whiplash, which was the entrance into my yoga journey, which has
been such a healing journey.
So I'm really grateful for the neck injury because I would not have found yoga.
One of my chiropractors that I was seeing three times a week because I could not turn
my neck, I literally was moving like a 100-year-old person where I couldn't turn my neck.
He said, you know, Crystal, if you just do yoga, you could heal your neck.
And I said, excuse me?
Isn't yoga what you do when you don't want to do exercise?
Because I was like this driven girl.
And he said, no, you should try yoga.
And he was right.
So yoga absolutely healed my neck.
But it not only healed my neck, it healed my body, it healed my soul, it healed all
the stress in my tissues, like they call it issues in your tissues.
Like I unwound myself on the yoga mat.
And I learned to stay in uncomfortable places, foot behind the head, for example, and breathe
through discomfort.
And it taught me things I could never learn anywhere else and how to stay with things
in my life.
So the neck injury was a great entrance to the next decades of my life, which I'm still
in right now.
So it was a really beautiful thing.
Post-accident, I saw auras around people, which I had no verbiage for because I was,
again, not a spiritual being.
I was just a girl who wanted to do good.
I knew people's thoughts.
I didn't want to touch anyone because I could feel the deepest fear and their greatest joy.
And it was just overwhelming.
I did not want all this information.
I was like, listen, this is not for me.
This is not what I signed up for.
And I eventually learned how to close that energy down so that it wasn't such an open
door to all these experiences that I wasn't ready to.
I had to do a lot of self-healing before I could take on other people's, which is the
last 20 years, basic 30 years of my life was when I was given this mission to write a book
and tell the world that love is all that matters, coming from my dysfunctional childhood where
I fell in love.
My father left very young.
My mother remarried, alcoholic husband.
Her inspirational thing was, of the day, was I can't wait for you, GD kids, to grow up
and get the hell out of here.
And so I didn't feel loved as a child.
Although I have to say, even though my mom was very dysfunctional, somehow I always knew
she loved me, which was a great comfort, even though she couldn't express it in the terms
that a normal mother would.
And my marriage, I married somebody who just liked women a lot.
Really good guy.
I mean, lovely man and a great person and ended up being a decent father and a good
friend, but not a good husband.
So I was like, why would I be the one chosen to talk about love?
It seemed like such an unlikely match.
And so I spent the rest.
I knew that it was a mission that I had to heal myself.
And I realized that this, all the context and the challenging complexity of my marriage
and childhood gave me a foundation where I could speak directly to people with trauma
and drama and say, yes, it is a possibility.
And yes, we do magnetize things into our life for our soul to evolve, but it's all for love.
All of our challenges and all of our gifts are to the benefit of our own personal evolution
and soul expansion and for the benefit of the whole.
Like it all works in a bigger picture and a wider view for the benefit of having the
experience of the experience so that we could know it more profoundly.
And I think I'm one of those souls who said, bring it on.
Let me feel it.
Let me dive deep into the darkness so that I can face anyone who's having these issues
and say, listen, look at me, look in my eyes.
I have beat the odds.
I've done the work.
I've seen the science.
People that have this childhood, they don't end up where I'm at normally, but it is a
possibility.
Yeah.
It is a possibility.
And love, and back to your question, in love is, you know, I've always felt like there's
been angels and guides by my side, even when I not necessarily was like in a spiritual
life, but they were always there, kind of there.
And the reason why they're there is because of love.
Like love is the answer.
It's all that matters.
It's the why of everything.
It's the answer to questions you haven't even asked.
And I also know that everything is already in completion.
Like there is no sense, there is no real time that the past, the present, and the future
is all on top of itself in the eternal now.
And in that sense, like it all makes sense when you see things from this perspective.
And by the way, the soul is never hurt.
Like regardless of what happens to us, either mentally, physically, or emotionally, the
soul is always innocent, always pure, untarnished, unburdened, and is choosing to have this experience
for the experience and for the profundity of what that offers to the soul and to the
whole.
I know that's a lot in a mouthful.
Sorry.
Do you think that one of the reasons why you felt this calling to talk about love is because
there were times in your life where you didn't feel loved.
And so you can really understand the contrast.
I definitely would say that yes to that question.
That is definitely for sure that I, and I never even like a lot of people feel unworthy
of love.
I never really had that.
I just felt unloved.
I felt like something I was doing was wrong, but it, and somehow I was making the wrong
choices.
And now that it's all energy and like attracts like, and I was in a certain energy tractor
field that attracted a certain person and people in places because that's the energy
where my soul would best be served to grow and to learn and to serve.
If we can go back to the accident for just a minute.
Okay.
You mentioned that you, that you saw different paths that you had to choose from.
I forget your exact wording.
Was that symbolic or was that a literal seeing something?
No, it was a literal.
Not only did I see the path, I saw it to its completion.
I saw these different paths from beginning to end.
Like they all, all paths lead home.
They all lead to love.
They all lead to God.
They all lead to whatever you want to call it, but this source of creation.
And it didn't necessarily matter which path I took because the end is already complete.
It's all for all of us from mother Teresa to Hitler, all the same.
The end is all, it's just a bumpy road, a dark path, a high road.
And we know we take a lot of these different paths for the benefit of the soul, having
the experience.
Because if I was to tell you, Hey, Eric, write me a thesis on apples, but you've never eaten
an apple, but you knew how to speak about apples, let's say, because you've done the
science on it.
So biology of an apple, poetically, you could speak about it, the beauty of an apple.
Intellectually, you could make references philosophically about an apple, but you've
never really bitten into the apple.
So for me, what life is, and I love the apple because it's kind of like a spiritual analogy,
right?
It's taking the bite of the apple so that you can have the visceral experience of it,
which is quite different than the intellectual understanding that maybe a computer would
say this and this and this equals that.
But the computer can't bite the apple.
We can.
That was what I was shown about.
These are the gifts of your life.
You get to have this visceral experience unavailable and unparalleled in the universe.
It's such a gift to be born and so rare in the universe to be born a human and a very
challenging and stern teacher planet Earth because of free will, choice, contrast, change.
Yeah, this is not the easiest place to be, especially right now.
No, but it's for those souls who are like want truth, that want to dive deep.
And it's powerful.
It's a powerful place of change.
Quite awesome when you see it from a distance.
Yeah, are you able to remember any of the other paths that you saw?
Well, the one where I came and I was crippled in a wheelchair, an old woman and dying and
such another where I was, you know, had a different level of intellect that meant many
other people had to be caretakers.
And you know, there was many, many, many, by the way, I'm just mentioning a few like
there it's amazing the information download that you that I had I particularly had in
that moment.
But these are the poignant ones that I remember.
And there were subtleties like they could have been like even in this path, there's
subtle roads that I could have taken.
I could have married a different person.
I could have you know what I mean?
There's it's not just one path and you're continually changing your destiny with each
choice.
I read this book, Eric, it was really interesting called Einstein's Dreams.
And in this book, there's a woman walking across a field that's covered with snow and
she's wearing a long white dress and poignantly has this beautiful red hat on.
And the wind blows the hat away, but she doesn't notice.
And there is a man up on the terrace and he notices and he's watching from the distance.
And it shows these three different destinies that this man has where he callers out to
the woman, Miss, Miss, Miss, your hat, your hat.
And she says, thank you, she picks the hat up and goes.
The second where he runs down and he just shyly hands her the hat and shakes her hand
and goes upon his way and forever remains a bachelor.
And the third where he invites her to coffee and they get married and have three kids and
two dogs and a cat and whatever, you know.
And so the point of sharing the story was that similarly to me and my near death experience,
I was shown that even the smallest choices shift the compass of our lives and lead us
to unimaginable new lands of opportunity, growth and evolution.
And so it would be something so simple as like, should I put pink lipstick on because
I'm a girly girl or red lipstick?
And I was like, what's the right choice?
And to your point that you mentioned earlier, there really isn't a wrong choice.
It's just a choice that brings you more joy.
So if pink brings you more joy today, put pink on and feel into that.
So I got really good at feeling into, because each soul is here for the bliss of its own
existence, even if that means in a challenging life such as a concentration camp or a childhood
that's very challenging, the soul is there for the bliss of having that visual experience.
So now as an adult and a woman who's free to make her own decisions, I get to decide
between pink lipstick and red lipstick.
And the way I make those simple and obviously more complex choices in my life is by feeling
joy.
And here's one thing I've noticed and I teach a lot of my students is that most people look
at these big crossroads of their life and think, this is a crossroad.
This is where my life changed.
That's not true.
Your life changed when you made little choices that led you to this choice, to that choice,
to this particular crossroad and not another crossroad.
So our choices become very poignant when you recognize this.
It can be a little overwhelming until you realize that the answer is always love.
And love is always expressed and experienced as joy, even if it's challenging.
It's kind of the joy of figuring out a complex mathematic algorithm or something.
It's really hard, but there's so much joy being deep into the problem.
You know what I mean?
It's like delicious to be in that problem.
And by the way, I'm not a mathematician.
It's maybe another life.
That's a wishful thinking for me because I'm dyslexic and I flip numbers around.
And even though I graduated magna cum laude, I had to take elementary math twice before
I could pass what I call statistics instead of statistics.
I remember that class or class in my major classes in statistics.
I'm trying to understand something here and I hate to keep going.
I hate to keep going back.
But as I talk to people and do interviews like this all the time now, some people have
choices to come back.
Some people are just told to come back.
Some have choices like you did various paths, but a lot don't or else they don't remember
them anyway.
And it's hard to understand why if someone had a choice, maybe they would pick a path
that to us in this world seems very painful.
Like maybe the path they chose or was just given to them meant a long-term brain injury,
a long-term paralysis, who knows what.
Do you have any feeling on that?
I do.
I think everything is divinely purposed.
I think souls, many souls come back and carry heavy burdens such as that in service to others.
And so they many times are not even in their bodies, but they come back as in service to
others because there is some learning around the situation for the family, for the people
closest to them.
Or if they come back and they have a very unhappy life.
One thing I thought about a lot is like when you pass somebody on the street and you see
like a guy with a paper bag and a sign saying, God loves you, please gave me five bucks,
and you know he wants to go get drugs.
And most people look at this person and they think this guy is a loser, I'm not giving
him money or who cares, here's some money, go get some drugs, whatever the case may be.
But when I look at that person, I know from my own internal experience of it that some
people come back and they're born into, let's say a mother with methamphetamine addiction,
they're tortured as children, they come back with this very heavy life, like worse than
what we can even imagine.
And they end up on the street corner, but they are truly avatars that come and they
sit on the street corner.
So one person, in case one person, and perhaps me or you, drives by and we decide to put
our bottle down because we see what the result could be.
And so they're alive, they are, it's such a heavy burden that only a super evolved soul
or a baby soul would take that path, it's one or the other.
And so that path is either a super evolved or a baby soul that's there and embodying
this super heavy path.
And when I drive by someone like that, I just think how challenging it must be to have an
addiction, to not have family, to live on the streets, to not have any potentiality
in my future, and what that soul must be going through.
And again, I don't believe any soul will be left behind, even the basest and most vile
creature that we call human will eventually evolve and find its way to its source, which
if the seed is love, the source is love, then that which comes out, even if it's full of
weeds all around it, that's what it will find its way to the light.
And so there's a couple of answers, I don't think there's a one size fits all for sure.
The fact that I was shown multiple destinies, I truly believe even if you were told you
have to go back, it was a soul choice that you made with this divine being that at this
point I probably won't want to go back, but you need to send me back.
I think it's a choice.
I don't believe anything is put upon us that we do not, of our own free will, choose.
That's why we're on planet Earth.
But we do have guides, we do have angels that whisper in our ear that for some reason you
took this road, not that road, intuitive hit, and there's a big car accident.
I've had many occasions as such where I feel like angels and guides and spiritual masters
have been by my side and I'm really grateful.
I don't think I would be sitting here.
The woman, powerful woman I am, had it not been for all the love that has been poured
out to me from these spiritual family that I have, that we all have.
How do you know when it's them whispering in your ear versus just Crystal's own thought
patterns going on in her brain?
There's a very big differentiation because thoughts are disconnected from feeling.
Feeling is not necessarily connected to thought because you could say, for example, love is
a good experience, like an intimate love with someone.
Your mind could say, this is crazy, I shouldn't love this person, but your heart is open wide.
There's no connection to this.
It doesn't make sense.
I think that the intuitive hit of knowing is just a feeling.
There's been some times when I've had near fatal accidents in my life where you're an
inch away from some kind of big disaster and you know that someone was watching out because
it wasn't your time.
I think your time, by the way, when you talk about time to come, time to go, when there's
nothing more to learn on this planet and there's no more love to give or to receive, there's
no reason to be here.
For me, I'm happy anytime I'm supposed to go when I'm not here for another meal, I'm
not here for another pair of shoes, another anything.
If my soul can't learn, can't be of service, can't love, then I no longer need to be here.
I think if we're staying here in this realm, and again, we could leave and come back too.
If a lot of people can leave, like let's say they commit suicide or whatever, they're going
to come back.
I don't believe that you're going to hell because you created, I don't really believe
in hell, first of all, but I don't believe that there, I do believe there's consequences,
that the consequences are rooted in love, not fear.
At any time, I think a lot of people manifest illnesses to leave the planet because they're
just so unhappy in their life.
When you're unhappy in your life, you start to decay in your cellular tissue.
Again, each soul, the most healing thing you can do.
Oh, by the way, just for your listeners, I was also told for those out there listening
to this who are healing that sound and light is the future of medicine, and to include
that in the book.
It's been a basis of my own personal healing.
I do sound baths weekly.
I don't know about the light expression, how that is meant, but I was told to write it,
so I did.
It's in the book.
I know that sound has a really powerful healing effect because we're all vibrational and there
is an attunement, and being in the presence of somebody with a high attunement is very
healing.
So for example, going to sleep with the TV on is not healing for the body.
It can be very the opposite of that.
Or watching the news, it can have a very detrimental effect because it's so much negativity that
it starts to shut the joy down in your body.
Oh, yeah, you can feel it.
You can just feel yourself shutting down.
People say, well, don't you know this horrible thing's happening?
I'm like, no, I don't know.
I typically will know because somebody will tell you, but I don't absorb that.
They call it programs because it's programming you, in my opinion.
What is a sound bath?
A sound bath is high vibrational instruments, and they're only high vibrational because
of the practitioner sending energy through them.
So it could be a bell, a gong, a chime, but when you're in a certain space, you move energy.
When I'm in that space, I almost feel like, and I give these every Friday night, I feel
like I'm moving healing energy through the vibration of my voice, out of the instruments
that I'm playing as a healing modality for many, many people.
So that's what it's been for me.
But I also feel that as I offer this, I get a lot of healing myself, necessary healing
for my own soul, which I think we're all in a continual process of healing because there's
always the little hits that come in life, little disappointments.
I would like to say that after near-death experience, you're completely enlightened,
but that's not true.
You're human.
We're all human, and I get to evolve along with everyone else because I've had an extraordinary
experience, and I've done a lot of deep inner work and research.
I don't proclaim to be all-knowing or have all the answers.
I have the answers for me that are true for me, and if they resonate with you, then I'm
happy about that, and if they don't, I'm okay with that too.
Okay, I have one more question, but I'm going to mention the title of your book, Love Letters
to Your Soul.
That'll be interesting to find out why it's named that.
It'll be out about the same time that this podcast is for people that are wondering.
Your theme seems to be, love is why.
How do we apply that into every decision that we make every day?
Okay, here's a question that I ask, especially in challenging decisions.
I ask myself, what is my most loving response?
Not what's the easiest, not even what's the kindest, the most generous, the most convenient,
what is my most loving response?
When I ask that question, I guess you have to ask yourself, what is love?
For me, the best definition of love comes from a great Indian sage, Ramana Maharishi,
who said when asked, he wrote nothing down, but asked by his disciples who translated
his words, master, what is love?
This one statement changed my life.
He said, love is the pure light of undifferentiated consciousness.
If you break that down, it is quite profound.
When I say I ask myself, what is my most loving response?
I ask myself, what is the pure light, untarnished decision of undifferentiated consciousness,
meaning from a neutral space of absolute acceptance of all outcomes.
That most generous, loving, giving thing I can do.
Sometimes that means slamming the door.
It's not necessarily what people think.
Sometimes that means opening the door and giving someone a hug, but it's like this feeling.
I don't always, I wish I could say I always move from a loving place, but I'm human.
I don't always do that.
My husband has this innate ability to really trigger me in good and bad ways.
It's a continual process, but I do move most poignantly.
I think you said when you have a deadline that you're really, is when you're really,
when I'm under pressure, when things get really serious, I go really quickly, really deep
and I land right back in that space of pure light, of undifferentiated consciousness.
When you speak from that space and when you move from that space, it's a different life.
It's amazing.
It's transformational.
It's a simple question.
What is my most loving response?
Let's say someone flips you off on the highway.
Never happens, right?
Never.
Let's just say it does.
Then you say, what is my most loving response?
Maybe it's look the other way.
Maybe it's wave.
Maybe it's say a prayer.
I love the O Pona Pona prayer, very healing.
I'm sure you know about this prayer where it is to all beings, you say, please forgive
me.
I didn't mean to hurt you.
Thank you.
I love you.
And so you take any responsibility for the vibrational alignment with a person who's
willing to flip you off.
So there's no enemy.
You take full responsibility and you're fully self-reliant on your own purpose in life.
So nothing outside of you is even outside of you anymore.
You say everything is in vibrational alignment with my soul.
And to your question about love letters to your soul, it's an inspirational book that
really is a poetic guide to living this life based on love and having a more free existence
as a result of that.
The other book that's coming is going to be the book about the near-death experience,
but that's next.
I had to write the book I was told to write first.
Okay.
One thing at a time.
I think this world would be a great place if each of us, when we were asked a question,
why did you do this or why did you do that or why did you make this decision?
If our answer was love is why.
Love is why.
Thank you, Crystal.
Appreciate you being on the show today.
It's such a pleasure.
Nice to meet you and I extend to you and all of your listeners, all my love, all my blessings.
If you have had a round trip death experience, we would love to hear about it.
Send an email to eric at roundtripdeath.com.
And lastly, if you have found this program uplifting, if it's given you just a little
more hope in the future, share it with a friend, hit that follow button and take a few seconds
to write us a review.
Until next time, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the
next.