I remember being in surgery, and at that moment I felt LOVE. I thought I had died on the operating table.
The second thing that crossed my mind — and this is where my analytical, scientific mind still stepped in — was: wait a minute... if I have died, then what is all of this? Because first of all, I do not believe in anything, and second, my parents told me I would go to hell because I am an atheist. But I was experiencing neither. And that is when I really began to wonder what on earth was going on. Why am I here?
I asked that question in my mind, and then an answer came to the thought I had. The answer seemed to come from all around me, from the atmosphere itself, and the answer was: This is your Home.
You are a part of me. You are a part of us. Welcome Home. And when that was said — Welcome Home — I broke down, because I remembered it. That was the moment everything came back to me. And I knew
instantly: oh my God... the life I had lived on Earth had only been an illusion. What I was doing down there had only been a temporary state.
Everyone dies, but some die and return to share their story with the rest of the world about the other side of the veil. These experiences are known as near-death experiences. This is the
story of Nancy Rynes.
My name is Nancy Rynes. I grew up on a small family farm in the middle of the cornfields northwest of Chicago. I was a strange child, I was very spiritual. I looked around me and saw the divine
presence everywhere. I told my family: Look... the Gods are even in the trees! Spirit is everywhere around us! And then people would look at me strangely because we were Catholic. And my family
was very Catholic. They were not cafeteria Catholics or weekend Catholics.
When I was about 15 years old, there were many news reports about priests who had abused children, and that it seemed to be happening more and more, especially around Chicago. That is when I began to question my former point of view: does God even exist? Or had I simply imagined it all until now? So by the time I was 16 or 17, I had more or less decided that God did not exist.
Because if He did exist, how could these terrible things happen?!
And that only strengthened my movement away from religion and spirituality.
I went to university and earned a series of degrees in geology, so I became a truly rational person, a scientist, very focused on matter and the physical world. By the time I was in my
mid-twenties, I was a fairly committed atheist. After college I worked for the Department of Energy for a while and did a great deal of scientific work in the western United States. Eventually it
became mostly scientific writing, because I was actually quite good at writing and many scientists were not, so I did the editing for them — for the journal articles and books they wrote — and
that carried me through my career until I was in my mid-forties.
I was 46 years old, and I had moved to Boulder, Colorado. I was beginning to feel somewhat dissatisfied with where I was in life. Some things had not gone well, my marriage had ended, and I was
just beginning to ask myself what might come next for me, so I started looking for another job. I thought: you know what I really need? A new job, maybe in Denver or somewhere like that. Later
that month, between Christmas and New Year’s, I took a week off work.
So I went cycling, just a short bike ride through town, dropping some things off at the library, running a few errands, and then going for an outdoor ride. I entered a roundabout where the bike lane became narrower and narrower, so I rode onto it carefully and slowed down a bit when I noticed traffic to my right approaching the roundabout from the highway I was on. And it looked as though they were slowing down. But at the very last moment, the car in front — an SUV — instead of stopping, actually accelerated.
I was in a difficult position, because I was riding exactly where she entered the roundabout and the only thing I could do was some kind of instinctive reaction. I reached my hand out in front of me. I have no idea what happened from the moment I stretched out my hand until I landed on the hood of her vehicle. Somehow I flew off my bike and ended up on the hood of her car. I looked inside at the driver and saw that she was busy typing on her phone. I actually started banging on her window, but she kept driving; she did not see me, even though I was literally lying on the hood of her car.
I could not hold on. The hood of her vehicle was so smooth, so I desperately slid downward trying to grab onto something, but I could not find anything to hold onto. I hit the pavement, I heard the crack of my helmet, and suddenly she was driving over me. Somehow my backpack got caught on something underneath her vehicle and at the moment that happened, I stretched out my right hand and managed to grab onto her axle.
I do not know how long she dragged me, it was at least 60 feet, and what eventually happened is that the man in the truck behind us saw what was happening. He was able to pass her, cut her off in the roundabout by driving the wrong way, and stop in front of her, so I more or less owe my life to this man.
The moment the car finally stopped, I began to wiggle my way out from underneath it. I got to the point where my shoulders came out from under the front of her vehicle, and at that moment a woman came over to me and said: “I’m a nurse, just stay where you are.” And I thought: what is the problem, you know, I’m just going to get up and walk away. But she said no, you have just been in a serious accident, I want you to stay lying on the ground. So when the paramedics arrived, they of course started trying to figure out what was medically wrong with me, and as soon as one of the men touched the side of my neck, I screamed at the top of my lungs. It was just so painful. And only then did I really realize how badly injured I actually was.
They took me to the trauma center. I had a head injury. I had a broken collarbone. Five ribs broken in multiple places. I also had a collapsed lung, but the worst was the extensive damage to my neck and back. The doctor basically said: every process in your spine is fractured, and you have major damage to your cervical vertebrae and then all the way down to your lower back vertebrae. So they called in a surgeon who decided he could repair it. So I was going in there so they could clean up all the broken pieces, and then they would place titanium rods along both sides of my spine. The surgery was scheduled for the Monday after the accident, so about three days later.
I had an incredible fear of death. That was the greatest fear of my life: the fear of death. I was absolutely wounded by that one fear. It paralyzed me in so many ways. So when I was going to have this surgery, I was truly terrified and had almost convinced myself that I would not survive it.
They wheeled me in toward the operating table. The anesthesiologist came over to me and before I knew it, he had administered it within three seconds. I had gone under before during a normal surgery I had once had. That was just gray, so to speak, there was nothing, and then I woke up in the recovery room.
But this time I drifted away, and I was even more awake than I had been before the anesthesia
At that moment I realized that something very strange was happening.
Suddenly I woke up and what I saw was this beautiful hillside.
It looked somewhat like a meadow. There was short grass and there were flowers everywhere, and I was standing on this hill looking out over more beautiful hills in the distance, and I remember thinking: wow, this is one amazing hallucination. I can stay here just fine while they operate on me.
The first thing I noticed was this wave of peace that came over me
It felt like standing in front of a fireplace while the fire is burning and you can feel the warmth flowing through you. It felt like a warm embrace. It was a huge moment of feeling accepted, a moment of unconditional love pouring into me, and it felt so incredibly powerful. And then I knew that something was wrong. I thought: oh my God... I have died.
I have really died.
I remembered that I was in surgery, but at this specific moment I felt love, so I thought: I did not make it through the operation.
The second thought — and this is where my analytical, scientific mind still stepped in — was: wait a minute... if I have died, then what is all of this? Because first of all, I do not believe in anything, and second, my parents told me that I would go to hell because I am an atheist. But I was experiencing neither.
And that is when I really began to wonder what on earth was going on. Why am I here?
I asked that question in my mind, and then an answer came to the thought I had. The answer seemed to come from all around me, from the atmosphere itself, and the answer was: This is your Home. You are a part of me. You are a part of us. Welcome Home. And when that was said — Welcome Home — I broke down, because I remembered it. That was the moment everything came back to me. And I knew instantly: oh my God... the life I had lived on Earth had only been an illusion. What I was doing down there had only been a temporary state. It was so obvious.
Suddenly I saw a person who began to materialize out of a mist. She was vague, vaguely human, and she had what looked like long hair, but I could not see her face, because it was not about her. It was about me learning what I needed to learn, and this is what she said: It is time for you to learn what you need to learn in order to go back. So that you can make your life into a life worth living. Those were pretty much her exact words. And I was like: haha, what do you think? I am not going back. Are you kidding me? I am not going back to that place!
Well... she said, you already agreed to go back. I answered that then I would only go back as a younger version of myself, the version that had been quite difficult for my parents. Because I have always been a challenging person, I challenged her too. I said that I really did not want to go back and that I also did not remember ever agreeing to do so. She continued: Well, actually, you already gave your permission before you began this life. I will show you. And suddenly there was this strange movie-like moment, where it materialized in the air in front of me like some kind of screen.
She showed me how I had been planning my life before I was even born
So in a way, the experience had more or less been planned, and that is what I was shown. And there was a moment when I looked behind me and all I saw was mist. It was this foggy gray, while in front of me everything was very vivid; maybe it was a forest or a canyon I was walking through or a mountain or something. But behind me everything was simply gone; gray. And I asked her about it. What is all of this? And she said: the place where you are now is not the ultimate reality of where you could go, it is kind of — she called it a waiting place — and she said: this place is your learning place, and what we do here is create an environment that is comfortable enough for you to learn, with things around you that you like, in places where you feel comfortable, so that this allows you to learn the things you need to learn in order to go back and make your life into a life worth living.
She was going to teach me things, not only about this spiritual place where I was, but that everything is based on an energetic structure, not a physical structure. Everything you see around you is an illusion, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was true.
The time between when I was lying on the operating table and when my heart stopped lasted at most two minutes
If we on Earth were to do what I did on the other side, in terms of the places I traveled to and the things I learned, it would probably take two or three months to do all of that here. At the same time, the experience also seemed to last forever. It was truly a completely different experience of time. What I realized because of that is that it is not that time passes differently there, but that they exist on a spiritual level, beyond our perception of time.
I went to a place and around me I saw the map of my life. It was like a virtual reality map, like an old-fashioned — you know, like a sea chart — that I could see all around me, and I was standing in the middle of it. And there was this large thing, I think they call it a compass rose. I looked at it and there were different paths running from one end of the map to the other, and I knew that these were all different paths that I had taken — or could take — and that they would all lead me to this point. And there were many paths that branched off from where I was now, but all the paths would eventually go back to the same place.
The point of that particular lesson was, first of all, that we can take one of many paths in life, and almost all of them will bring us to the same place. So it is not true that there is only one specific right path you have to follow.
The other thing was that I noticed the compass rose was figuratively centered in the area of my heart, and the point of that lesson — which she later explained — was: do not use only your brain, your human mind, to make decisions. You also have to dig deeper into what we call intuition, or rather that deep inner Knowing. And she said that you have to balance those two, so that you make decisions from a truly holistic place within yourself, instead of simply making an analytical decision. Up until that point in my life, I had completely ignored that. I had not paid any attention to it at all.
After this, I had what people call: a life review
You have to understand that I did not know any of these terms. I knew nothing about near-death experiences, I knew nothing about the life review. I truly had no idea about any of these things. So she brought me to a kind of mountain valley, to what looked like a pond high up in the mountains, and she said: Okay, I want you to kneel down at the edge of this pond and simply touch the surface of the water. So I did. And I just leaned back a little on my heels and looked at the surface, and the ripples moved outward.
I could see that on top of the ripples there were all these little pockets spread across the entire surface of the pond. To me they looked like little videos of specific moments from my physical life, but when I focused on one video thumbnail, I was back inside it. It was not as though I was watching it from the outside. I was in it again.
I experienced a situation from my own perspective, but I also experienced it from the perspective of the other people who were involved. I could feel everything they felt, as though it were my own feeling. And this touched me so deeply, because there were moments when I helped someone or said something kind, and then I could feel that the person was touched in their soul by it. I could feel it! I could feel how they felt, and they felt uplifted because someone had said something kind to them. So if I said something positive and encouraging to someone, I could see how it made them more positive about life.
So this lesson was that you have an impact on the people around you, and not only physically. There is an energetic or spiritual component in every interaction you have, whether it is a verbal interaction or something that is never spoken, it does not matter.
Be more aware, therefore, of how you affect others
So it was balanced out for me so that I could learn from it. Just as I also got to experience the things that were not so pleasant.
There was a time when I was a teenager and my younger sister and I got into an argument. We fought like cats and dogs when I was a child, we simply did not get along. I loved her, but we did not get along very well, and there was a moment when I think I was about 17 and she was 14. I said something to her that was not very nice and then I never thought about it again. It was simply a way to push her away from me. I was just so tired of the fighting we had, so I said something stupid. It was not kind, but she did not react to it. At that moment I did not see any reaction from her. She even smiled as she walked out the door. But in my life review I could feel the pain I had caused her in that moment. And that is really the second great thing that always touches me: that I could feel her pain because of what I had said to her.
And that was truly the biggest lesson of all
That is also what I want to pass on to people: have understanding. A deep-rooted understanding of the impact you have, how you affect another person, how your actions affect someone else, how your words affect another person. And at that moment I truly realized: okay... from now on I am going to change the way I interact with other people.
This was it, this point woke me up like nothing else
This was truly that great aha moment, and ever since I came back here, I remember it almost every day and it helps shape the way I deal with people every single day. I have become very careful.
And then suddenly — for the first time during my near-death experience — I looked up and saw clouds in the sky. Together we simply looked around. Just like when you are little and you look for animals in the clouds, so we did that for a while. And then she stood up and said: All right, the time has come for you to go. And I was not happy to hear that. I thought I had passed some kind of test, you know, I was planning to stay there. I was even coming up with ways to get away from this teacher. I thought: if I start running from this side, then I can run around her and just keep running until I eventually find where I am supposed to be. That was one of the things I wanted to do, and I also thought: if I make enough noise, maybe they will just let me stay.
By then I had also become a little sad about leaving her, and at that moment she placed her hands on my broken shoulder, on my broken ribs and upward to my throat, along the part of my sternum that had cracked, and then she sent me back. Suddenly I awoke in the recovery room and I screamed.
I was not happy. I was so angry to be back
The nurse who was helping me literally jumped backward, but I kept shouting: WHERE IS SHE? Where is she? I do not want to be here, can I go back? Can I go back? The nursing staff probably thought I was having some kind of psychotic episode. The anesthesiologist came in, talked with me a little and managed to calm me down somewhat, but I kept asking: can you please bring her to me? Please, bring her to me. But they had no idea who I was talking about. I had a friend sitting in the waiting room, so they went and got her. They brought her in and I said: no, I am not talking about her, I do not want to see her (sorry dear friend ;-). I am talking about the woman I was with during the operation.
And the staff were like: what on earth is going on here? So eventually I realized: okay — my rational mind kicked in here — I remembered everything that had happened, but I thought: okay, now you need to be quiet. They are not going to understand this. They have no idea what you have experienced. So I stopped talking.
I was in a Catholic hospital, and the next morning one of the chaplains from the hospital came by. She stuck her head in the doorway like, are you awake? And I could see who it was and I said out loud: oh thank God, you are here. And she came in and we talked about what had happened. She was wonderful. She was truly wonderful. If she had not responded in the positive way that she did, I probably would never have told anyone about my experience. But she was very accepting. She was very positive and explained that I had died and that I had had a near-death experience. I thought, what is that? Well, she said, that is something that sometimes happens when people die. They die, they come back, and they have all these kinds of experiences. And that was the first time I had ever heard of a near-death experience. She helped me understand that it was normal. That I was not crazy. That the experience was real and that I now had to ask myself: what does this mean for me? She tried to help me understand it, but I knew that this could possibly blow apart my entire life in a way I never could have imagined.
It was a complete change in everything I thought was real, in what I thought truth was, and everything I did or did not believe in
And at that moment I knew that I had a choice. I could go back to living the way I had before the operation. I could completely deny everything that had just happened; I could completely deny the experience itself. Simply deny everything I had learned and just try to go back to my life the way it had been before. And that felt safe, because then it would be predictable. As though I knew the path I was on. I did not like it anymore, but at least I was on that path.
But this other path that had opened up was completely unknown
I knew that I could embrace what I had learned and that I could learn even more from it, but I had no idea where it would lead, and I was really worried about what it would mean for my career, because I was still in science.
I assumed that I would never be able to get another job in science, because people might begin to notice that I was “crazy.” Let’s not hire her.
I was afraid of this path, but about two weeks later, when I came home from the hospital, I realized: you know what, I am just going to try this new path. Even though I do not know exactly where it will lead, I will see what happens.
After 4 weeks and 2 days I was out of the cast.
The expectation had been that it would take 16 weeks, so it was a very, very rapid healing. What I began to do was go out into nature every day and meditate. That was one of the things I started doing, and it truly helped me bring that soul-level consciousness into my life.
The second thing is — and yes, it sounds very simple — but it has a huge impact — and that is really learning how to Be in appreciation
I began the day — before I even got out of bed — by feeling appreciation for the basic things. Simply the fact that I could walk. I would let myself meditate on it, to really think about it and feel it: not just think it, but truly feel and experience the gratitude, the appreciation. I could have been paralyzed by that accident, and I am so grateful that I can simply walk.
Just these simple acts of gratitude allowed me to focus on what was good for me from moment to moment. And little by little, those small steps allowed me to remain more centered in the present moment throughout the rest of the day.
It is about becoming aware of your actions — in the moment itself — without going onto autopilot
It is so easy to live your life on autopilot, and that is how I used to live. Now I am no longer caught up in all the drama of what is happening in our governments. It is like: yes, all of that is happening — but I Am still in Peace. Concern? Yes, I am concerned about the world, but it does not change the core of my inner peace, because I know that it is important to be this way within earthly reality. It has things to teach us, things that we are all learning, but ultimately we are not this reality. We are a greater level of reality.
I truly learned how to live from that soul-level of consciousness, rather than only from that limited human level of consciousness. It is not that the human level of consciousness is bad, but for me it was very filled with fear. It was reacting to life instead of being proactive, and I did not want to be that way anymore. I wanted to live life from that higher level of consciousness because it simply feels better. It is more peaceful, more connected, more loving and joyful, it is a much better place to be. I have not been stressed in a very long time, and I am certainly no longer afraid. It has been a beautiful change for me. I am no longer driven by the fact that this is a material world, I am no longer attached to that. I understand that there is a bigger picture, not only for the world, but for each one of us.
The fear of death that I carried with me truly kept me from fully living my life, at least for me
It caused me to think small and safe, and that is not necessarily where we are all meant to be. Of course, for some people that is fine, and at certain moments in our lives that is fine too. But every decision based on fear is, to me, not the strongest decision you can make. It is limited in some way.
When I work individually with people, I really try to get them into that space where their decision-making comes from a place of strength and trust in themselves, and perhaps from a place of compassion or love instead of: Oh, I am afraid this person is not going to like what I do, so I will do that other thing instead of the thing that makes my heart happy.
For the vast majority of souls who come here to Earth to have a life experience — and it is funny because my teacher calls life on Earth a “near-life experience” — and so I want to tell people that they see this near-life as the real life, but that this reality is not the true reality.
So we are all here to have this near-life experience. We come here for many different reasons, and some people come here to learn one very specific thing. Many of us come here to experience things that we cannot experience anywhere else, or that would be very difficult to experience elsewhere. Having a child, for example: you are not necessarily going to give birth to a child in Heaven. So many come here for the experience of having or raising a family.
This physical reality is like a crucible, which means that it is a very concentrated place where you can learn many different things in a very short period of time. And so the real challenge becomes narrowing down what it is that you want to learn while you are here. And out of all the different reasons or purposes people may have for choosing a life on Earth, there is one core purpose.
That one core purpose is this: learning how to Be here in this environment — in this dimension — and still live from a place of love and compassion. Not only for your immediate family, but for everyone else as well. That is the core purpose we all share.
Nancy Rynes