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Now let's dive into today's episode. I like to welcome
to the show doctor Martha. Joe Atkins, Hey to Martha.
Speaker 2: That's great, Thank you so glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming. I'm you know, I
had a few of you on the show before you
are a death duela and a end of life counselor essentially,
right are specialist. Ye, not something that everybody wants to
talk about, but I'm fascinated with it because I have
aiding parents, obviously, and I think everybody is.
Speaker 2: We're all going, we're all going to get there.
Speaker 1: Were as they always like to say, everyone wants to
go to heaven, but just not right now basically. So
it's something we're all going to have to deal with.
But so many people, most people don't want to think
about it because we're in this little world and our
a little bubble, and we're going down this bullet train
of a life, and you don't want to think where
the track's going to end. And it's much more comforting
not to think about it because I have work to do,
I have things to do, I have things to do.
But sometimes you really do kind of have to think
about it, especially when you have parents, or especially when
you have ailing parents, ailing friends, you know, you know,
as we get older, you know, I remember when I
was younger, I didn't have anyone die in my life
until I was in my late twenties. I was very
blessed that way. Yeah, you know, I have other family
members who parents died early on things like that. Can
I ask who was it was my grandfather or my grandmother.
My grandmother died first, then my grand father died seven
six months later, seven months later, then my other grandmother died,
and then my early grandfather died like after a year
after I was born. So that was it. And I
still have both my parents, but they're older, you know,
and they're still good rock and roll, still hold them
the good fight. But but then I started having friends die. Yeah,
that's that's when it really starts to kick in. So
as you get older, you look around and you're like, god,
I just was working with that person. Oh god, I
just you know, oh my god. They were younger than
me and they died, you know. And sometimes its accidents,
sometimes it's health. It's just so you start to think
about this, and in the in the world that I'm
in here, I talk about it all the time, between
mediumship and the other side and the scope of the world,
the universe, why we're here, Car, I'm a reincarnation, so
I'm constantly thinking about it, and it actually has made
it for me at least much more palatable. Yeah, is
that your.
Speaker 2: Dag, Well it makes sense to me. I get to
talk about it a lot, I and most often with
people who want to talk about it. Every now and again,
I get somebody who comes along with somebody else, and
that person is reluctant, and like, I'll have conversations with
you and the other person is listening, and maybe they'll
pipe up and maybe I'll hear something. A couple weeks
later that something was opened. But I just am at
the point where I just trust the process and I
trust the person, and we open to things we need
to open to when we're ready, I think, And well, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the sledgehammer of life I like to call it.
Speaker 2: It does come along that way sometimes.
Speaker 1: So tell us a little bit about your background, like
how did you get in I'm assuming at five year old.
At six years old, you're like, you know what I
want to do when I want to be a death duela,
And your parents would be like, what the hell is
a death duela.
Speaker 2: I wanted to be a veterinarian. I loved animals and
I and I would get the remember the tic TACs.
Of course, you'd get the tic TACs and I'd put
little pecans in the tic TACs and I'd make medicine
and I'd give the animals mouse. And I know that
that was my thing. That was awesome. I was not
particularly interested in dying. I understood about it. I was
interested in hospitals. I was interested in working with children.
Had an opportunity to go to Children's National Medical Center
when I was in college and do an internship in
psychology on a children's floor, and I worked on a
orthopedic floor. One of my friends was on a floor
where there were other things happening, and I was interested
in those other things. But it was a great It
was a great experience for me that summer, and that
is the first time I met a child who I
knew was dying. The kid had HIV. It was a
foster kid, and the foster mom had like the gym
mats were on the floor in the hospital room, and
she was on the floor with him and they were
playing and he was able to pick up his head
and big giant brown eyes. And I didn't have much
interaction with them. I was leaving the hospital one day
and there's a people mover at that hospital at the time,
and they were on the people mover and I was
standing still and I was watching him and go by,
and that little guy picked his head up and looked
at me. He didn't wave, but there was a contact there.
And it was the first time I thought I won't
ever see him again. But I'm not going to see
him again, not because I'm not going to see him again,
because he's going to die. And I don't know that
I took it any farther than that, but as I
sit here four years later, that had an impact on me.
I I toodled along. I got to go work at
Children's Hospital in San Antonio. I worked in intensive care
unit as a childlife specialist. We uh job of child
job of a child life specialist is to help kids coping.
It just to hospitalization and illness.
Speaker 1: So you started that, you're already that's the gateway. I
went a gateway drug as you will.
Speaker 2: I went, yeah, I went right in. You know, somebody
who's been sedated and missed Christmas. So we did Christmas
in February. We decorated the whole unit and Santa Claus
came in and the whole there were there were two kids.
It was it was great. Another kid who'd been sedated
for a long time and trying to come back in
and shaving cream and painting with shaving cream. She had
one hand, she could use those kinds of things. And
then kids who were sick and going to die were
sick and had died. I had the opportunity to do
him prints and footprints. I had a really amazing mentor
named Glee, who taught me about being with families and
being with myself and how to honor and how to
be with these grieving people. I was young. I was
twenty twenty two, twenty three and went on vacation with
my family. We got a phone call in the middle
of the night that my brother Jim had died. He
was thirty seven and I was twenty four. Oh, my God, Yeah,
it was pretty It.
Speaker 1: Was you're that's not supposed to know, it's not.
Speaker 2: Supposed to happen. And we were a family that didn't
do feelings. And then you have to, Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 1: That's a sledgehammer.
Speaker 2: That's a sledgehammer. So that sledgehammer at twenty four woke
me up and it changed the Well, it opened the trajectory.
I don't know that it changed it, but it opened it.
Speaker 1: I've heard that from a lot of people in your
world that there's a thing, there's a moment that something happens.
More likely it's a family member or some tragedy. Yeah,
that kind of makes them rethink. Well, wait a minute,
is I always use uncle Bob? My uncle Bob always
makes an appearance on the show. Is uncle Bob? Okay?
What did uncle Bob go through? Where is uncle Bob? Now?
Before these revelations and before you started getting into it,
how spiritual were you? How what understanding did you have?
Did you even think about the afterlife? Did you think
about souls or either reincarnation or what happens? When did
you think of any of this?
Speaker 2: So I had I had an uncle Charlie also had
an uncle Bob, but Uncle Charlie was the one who
Uncle Charlie was interested in past lives and Uncle Charlie
was interested in reincarnation.
Speaker 1: Oh, he's a wua guy.
Speaker 2: He was a big wua guy. And he also probably
was bipolar. He would take off and be gone for
several months, and they he'd come back and he's a
fascinating guy.
Speaker 1: But we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: In conversations with him and my aunt Betty, his wife,
I had a little taste of that and a little
bit interested in it. We were also Methodist preacher family.
And there are rules and regulations and ways you're supposed
to be in West Texas and Texas you act, yes,
somethings you talk about and some things you don't. And
I had this patriarchal system that I lived in, and
these are the ways you're supposed to be, And this
is what religion is supposed to do. Is it programming?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And then I had these little nudges of this this
is let's think about this, But I didn't Uh, I
didn't have the what what there was to fall back
on when Jim died was that Jim was a good guy,
and Jim went to heaven, and I began to unspool
that story and think about what that meant and what
it meant for me. My family was trying to figure
out what dying was to them and where he was,
and it was a uh. And then we were sad,
we were grieving, We remissed him terribly. So that that
opened that opened many, many things for me. So, No,
there was not a lot of spirituality. There was religion,
There was not some spirituality. Spirituality came after college.
Speaker 1: So was the dog move whatever the Yeah, that that
flavor of Christianity, Yeah you had. Yeah. So then at
what point, So when you start going into becoming an
end of life counselor, yeah, uh, and then you have
the tag of death doulah, which is an interesting name
to say the least. It is.
Speaker 2: I don't like it.
Speaker 1: It's an it's not great branding, not great brand. End
of life counselor is a little bit better than death doula.
It's just like something out of the Middle Ages, like
bringing the death dula.
Speaker 2: It is it has such a.
Speaker 1: It's heavy to it.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's energy, yea.
Speaker 1: Very hendry energy. Because the word death alone is heavy.
Then you think the dula You're like, wait a minute,
but Doula like, oh, I like thresholder.
Speaker 2: I like this idea of somebody standing at the threshold
with somebody as they're moving across. And that has a
little different resonance for me.
Speaker 1: Right, But we need a brand anyway, we need a
brand end of life counselor. And so when you start
going into that world, what was what was it about
it that drew you there? Like, you know, I think
I want to do the rest of my life. I
want to go down this space. And then what did
you start seeing that started to shake your foundations in
your programming.
Speaker 2: So my mother had deathbed visions. My mother had metastatic
breast cancer, and we had conversations about what she might see.
At some point, I had done I was working on
my doctorate in doing lots and lots of research on
deathbed phenomenon and deathbed visions, and so I had this,
I had all this in me and then here she
is moving into this experience and we got to talk
about things. She had lots of restlessness and then there
was some stillness. I didn't understand what all this was
at the time. You have your first experience with dying
in the way that you get to sit with somebody
you know and you watch them have an experience that
you've not seen before and try to put all that together.
And that's what I was doing with her. She got
uh still, and she got peaceful. Her her face just
relaxed and her eyes relaxed. And I was watching her
watch something under her eyelids, and I said, Mom, what
do you What do you see? And she said, uh, Daddy, Charlie,
and Aunt Lawa and a couple other people. And I said,
bre's Jim. It's Jim. Jim's my brother who died. And
she said, oh, he's been here. And I had had
a dream that Jim was sitting in a chair reading
a book. One of his favorite things to do is
to read. I called my brother John and was telling
him about it, and he had had a similar dream.
So when Mom said that, I had this beautiful image
that I have a little emotion as I think about it,
of him sitting in the room just kind of hanging
out and waiting for her. And I I took that
experience and grabbed hold of it and thought, there's something
here that I want to learn more. About I read
Final Gifts by a couple of nurses. It was written
in nineteen or published in nineteen ninety two. And Mom
did a number of the things that those nurses were
talking about. There's a lot of metaphors and behaviors. And
I then got more interested and more interested continue to
do coursework. And then my dad got sick and I
watched him do the things that I was reading about
in these research papers. And they kept telling me he
was getting well and he was not getting well. And
I would say, the doctor, but he's doing this and this,
and she said, no, it's no big deal, don't worry
about it. And I said, can we could we change
the antibiotics. I just I'm not sure it's working. They
ended up changing antibotics three times, I think. And he
he did reaching. He saw people off the side of
the bed, He saw my mother, He saw people around
the corners of the room. He was way far away.
He would he would get annoyed when people came in
the room because he was off somewhere. He the woman
came in to bring his trade eat and she said,
I watched him put his stole on that he saw
in the rest of us goodn't se put a stole on,
and he probably opened his Bible and he was about
to do something, and she said, pastor, I'm sorry. I
didn't mean to bother you, and he said, I'm about
to teach sunny school. So he was off somewhere, and
what I imagined about that he's back in time somewhere. So
I started watching and listening to him and pattern tracking.
I'm an introvert. I have that thing where I really
pay attention and see how things fit together. And the
other part of this was I was probably scared out
of my mind, and if I could track patterns, maybe
I could make sense of this thing that felt really
out of control. So I watched and watched and watched,
and I would put that against the research that was
in my brain and started seeing these patterns emerge and
got super super fascinated by it. He didn't die. He
came back one morning. My brother said, Dad, where have
you been? And he said, traveling. He couldn't remember where
he'd been, but he did say traveling. He was off
with a bunch of people singing. At one point he
let us know that there was some gathering and he
was with these people, and he was singing, and all
of those other people look at that and say, always confused,
and these hallucinations and and and and and and and
none of that made sense to me that there's got
to be it seems that there's something else happening. And
so I have pursued that. That's been my spirit spirituality
moved from religion to spirituality into this bubble that's in
this larger field of dying. And there's a bunch of
us that are that are in this particular field field
of energy, that are surfing it and learning and making
sense of it. And you have you have these people
on your show, and it's really it's fun for me
to listen to where other people are plugging in and
what they're learning and what they're taking back and how
it's helping. Yes, and it's super fun.
Speaker 1: It is, and not only in this this field which
is the end of life, but then I do that
with a lot of different feels and yes, individuality as well.
So he's like, okay, so here are all the Buddhists, and
here are all of this, and here is the psychics,
and here are this, and here's the Atlantis and.
Speaker 2: All this kind of consciousness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, let me ask you, what is your
take on consciousness now? Because the story you just said,
I mean, I lean towards. I'm a storyteller, so I
lean towards the stories and the mystical and the the
the bigger ideas because they make sense to me. So
when he's like traveling, I'm like, yeah, it doesn't even
I didn't. I don't, I don't hesitate. Obviously he was traveling,
but Mike, but obviously because of my understanding of not
only metaphysics, but just my experiences with gurus from India
and and and the mystics and all these things that
they talk about, these ideas. So from my understanding, the
story that he's saying like, oh I was gone, but
the fascinating they came back. So he didn't have a
near death experience. He had a something else happening to him,
because he didn't die. He was just on the brink.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: He was on the brink, so I will bet money
on it.
Speaker 1: So he was traveling and he was going to either
now we're going to go a little little We're going
to go a little deeper. It could be alternate realities.
It could be past lives, it could be parallel lives,
it could be the future of the past. You know,
all of this stuff, and he's exploring all of it.
But when the veil gets so thin, where he was
on the brink, the silver cord as they call it,
is being tugged also tightly. Yes, he's able to then
and go and do these things where it was almost
like a dream like state, yes, but a conscious dream
like state. So it's it was interesting, it.
Speaker 2: Was it seemed to be conscious to him. We're I mean,
we're we're we're watching sitting, I'm watching, I'm watching him
reach for things. I'm watching him. So he was open.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just like you know, he was.
Speaker 2: Here, sometimes he was away, and sometimes he was here
and he's he's doing this, and he's he's he's licking
in his hands. I said, what are you what are
you doing? And he said, he said, on me, it's
a sonic Hamburger. So if you're in Texas, we have
sonic Friday Friday evenings, we'd go have Sonic Hamburger. So
he had opened the wrapper and as he was wont
to do. If there was something on the rapper he needed,
he would lick it off the wrapper. So in his reality,
in that moment, he'd gone back to a time where
he's licking off this wrapper. So I'm I'm watching him,
and as he experienced my meaning making was as he
his body was moving further and further into sickness, further
and further into shutting down. These other things started happening.
So he's getting sicker, and he's putting a stole on
and having a Sunday school class. He's getting sicker, and
he says, does anybody else see the Blue Angel? And uh,
this is what I've got to talk to William about
because he was able William Peters talk about experience. Yeah,
so there's a whole thing about a very particular kind
of guide that comes in and he got very the
researchers got very excited about this blue Angel. And I
guess this is something that comes up every now and again. So,
you know, Dad is sicker and he sees the blue Angel,
and then he is sicker, and my mother's there and
she's cooking something in the corner. She's here on the ground.
The angel was up a little bit and I just
paid attention to all those things. So he was he
was going and I was sitting by his bed one
night and I watched him reach up like this. This
kind of reaching is not far from going. When when
somebody has the uh the energy, did reach like that,
it's a big deal. I recognize now because they're because
they're dying. He had the energy to do that. But
it's this straight up something here. This is different. This
is a little before you get to hear.
Speaker 1: But so here is the portal here if you will.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were at a bode. We had the second
room and abode. There were several guests that came in
one after another. I keep looking up, like it's there,
there's a light in the ceiling, and that we didn't
tell the guests about the person who was there before
who saw a light in the ceiling. They would talk
about it. I was like, wow, okay, so the portal
is in room too right.
Speaker 1: Now, and it's staying there.
Speaker 2: It's for whatever reason. So I make up that Dad
was seeing something and I was videoing doing a phone.
How old am I videotaping filming? There we go and
I heard my inhalation when he reached up like that,
because I thought, oh crap, we're far, We're far here,
he's going to die. And I called my brother and
wondered about do we get hospice in, and it was
this whole thing. And then he got better and then
we had this like gosh, we shouldn't have told people,
and a little embarrassment about that, which I was also
able to share. And people came back to me and said,
oh my gosh, we were there too. Our person was
right at the edge, our mother was right at the edge.
And then they came back. So I've gotten really fascinated
about that too. And there's this conversational hospice around. I
call them surges, so these surges of energy that people
have and they're up and then they go down and
they're five days, seven days, nine days, they're not talking,
and then they'll come back for a little while. And
I was with a woman named Glee who did that
over a couple of months, and I started tracking her
surges on post it notes. I've had a whole wall
of she's down today, she's slept this much today, she's
been awake for four days. And it was like she
had all this energy and she'd go down and rest
and rest and rest, and then she'd come back and.
Speaker 1: When she was resting, what was happening. Yeah, that's the
question because it seems like she's from my understanding, from
what my experience is that when they're going down that way,
that they are off somewhere. Yes, you know, and I've
heard of this through I've heard the same thing happen
to people with dementia, Yes, the men and Alzheimer's, and
that they're they're here, but they're not here. Yes, they're alive,
but they're not they're not actively here, but they are
somewhere and there's reativity and there is definitely activity. I'm
not sure if there's been any scientific research done on that,
like they put something that, Yeah, I would love to see,
like if they're gone, like what's going on? Are they dreaming?
Are they Yeah, it's something going on of what's happening
during that time and then they then they come back.
But it's interesting like on a soul level, why, I mean,
I guess every case is different, so like why are
you going through this? It's it's really up to the
soul and why they tend to do that. You have
no idea why. I'm Dean taken to the brink and
then coming back. So great example when your dad came back, Yeah,
did you have conversations like, Dad, what did you see?
Speaker 2: I did? And he didn't remember. He he he doesn't
even remember the saying to my brother that that he
had been traveling and I that it needs to be
this this Signposts of Dying that I wrote, it was
from watching him, and it's it's one thing to do.
You do your you do your work with dying people.
You're in and out of a house. Maybe you go
once a week, maybe you go twice a week at
Abode where our our hospice house in San Antonio. You
see people every day. You you are in a different
kind of intimate space with them. So there's a different
kind of learning in patient unit, same kind of things.
You're still in and out of the room, and you
may recognize some things and not recognize some things. But
when it's your family member and you you know how
they are and you're interested. Some people are not so interested.
There's a different level of awareness that can happen there.
And for for people who do hospice works, it's a
whole different animal. When you're with your own people, of
course a different.
Speaker 1: There's emotions, there's anger, there's peace, there's love, it's all
of it.
Speaker 2: There is all of that, and there's all this knowledge
you have or you think you have, about what dying
looks like. And then you start to see the layers
of it and you hold it differently and you feel
things differently. Because they talk about the field again, you're
in a field of energy with your family, which is
different than anybody anything else. And you, if you have
that kind of connection, you feel things and you may
know or may not know what's cooking. But because of
those experiences with my dad, which went they happened a lot.
He was in and out of hospitals. That particular instance
was it was. It was powerful for both, It was
powerful for all of us.
Speaker 1: And do you remember me asking is he still with us?
Speaker 2: He's gone? He died in sixteen, okay?
Speaker 1: And did it was it? Was it end of life
or was it quick?
Speaker 2: It was end of life? I went, I went to
so how did that difference? So fascinating. I have a
friend who does energy work and she was working with
a kid who had down syndrome and who was dying,
and she said, uh, called me and she said, his
web of life is just tatters. And I said, tell
me what that means, and she said, think of a
spider web. She said, I can. I can see a
web inside of him. I can see yours. She said,
his is just it's falling apart. Yeah, because he's got
exactly I loved that imagery. So I went to visit
Dad and he was awake for about five minutes and
then he went to sleep, and it's the first time
that had ever happened, and I knew that we were close.
Not long and I got a call from his I
got a call from his assisted living. He'd been at
the hospital. He was back home, but they didn't think
he was okay. And I went to visit him, and
his kidneys were failing and I said, you know, you
can go to the hospital. We can take you back
to the er. If you stay here, you're going to die.
And I said it like that, and he said, I
don't want to die, and I said, well, we got
to go to the er then, so went to the er.
Very kind man came in and said, if if you
were my grandpa, which made me laugh. Dad was forty
years older than me, I would tell you to go
home and be with your family.
Speaker 1: So we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be at the hospital that night he
got some fluids. I went home to take care of
the dog. Woman from somewhere in the hospital came in
and visited with him and gave him some kind of peace.
He told me he was not afraid to die. But
something happened in that exchange. I never found out who
that woman was. Was the a So they came in
to draw blood and they couldn't get blood from him,
and I said, Dad, you don't you don't have to
get blood draw and he said, he said I don't.
And I said, no, you don't. Never have to get
a blood draw again. And he said, I don't want
a blood draw.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: They were in that room. Mister askins, if you don't
have blood draw, no dreatment, you're gonna die. And he
said it's okay. So we went home. My brother and
I tag teamed. He Dad was at an assistant living
in Taylor down the road. And that experience was different
in that I could feel if you think about the
web of life, the energy was so different. The the
breath was different, the movement was different. And but you.
Speaker 1: Could feel it.
Speaker 2: I could feel it. Uh yeah, I could feel it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And and.
Speaker 1: Yeah that.
Speaker 2: And it was hot it was summer in Texas. And
and and he'd let me videotape him, and I taked
a lot of it for research. Say for yeah, I said,
you know, you want you want to teach, so he agreed,
But he would say things. And those things ended up
being things that were in the book that I read
when Mom died from the hospice nurses and things that
folks I've worked with have said. And there's this there's
this common trait, common trait that I think is in
the ze. Not in the zeit guys in the in consciousness.
There's there's this language.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's like the near death experience. Yes, yes, so
near death experiencers have key things. It doesn't happen. Everything
doesn't happen for everybody, but there are a group of
you know, six to eight things that are common. Some
are you know, less common, more common. So the same
thing happens with someone's dying. They go through these stages.
From your point of view, Okay, so you've gone through
this process, what do you think of consciousness at this point,
what is consciousness from your point of view, from all
the experience of you seeing people pass because it has
to open up, it has to open up a different
idea now of all of this, and in the concept
of reincarnation and souls, does that play out any part
in this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have been on a search. I spent time
in Peru. I listened to the shaman talk about the
true God and my ears perked up and I thought,
what's the true God? The real God and not the
God of religion and not the God of your parents?
And on that when and I thought, okay, maybe I
can get behind that. And then this idea that we
are all pieces of consciousness. We are we are part
of the universe. We are part of this evolving consciousness.
You're doing your work in the world. That's adding to
what comes next. I'm doing my work that's coming that
that is adding to what's next.
Speaker 1: And when you say what's nextually talking about the evolution.
Speaker 2: The evolution of consciousness, the evolution of the world of humanity,
where we're we are our little fractal part of that
and what we do matters and that feels that feels right.
Speaker 1: So from your I mean, we've spoken about your father's
passing and his experiences, which you're interesting. It's on an
experimental standpoint to see that as a researcher, to see
that firsthand, those two elements one when he actually passed,
but the other one that we thought he was going
to pass and being able to compare those two is
pretty fascinating for you. So, yeah, that was the kind
of it seems like it was a foundational for sure,
part of your journey. So now since then, you've probably
been witnessed to so many other passings. As a death doula, as.
Speaker 2: I started calling myself a death doula because other people
were calling themselves a death doula, so might as well.
Speaker 1: Right, it's branding, I get it. So so as as
an end of life counselor, you've seen so many people there,
you go, as you've seen so many people pass and
go through that transition, what are what's some of the
phenomenon that you're seeing deathbed phenomenon that you're seeing that
stuff that I'm assuming at this point you're not surprised
at anything because you've seen it so much, But there
are moments then you're like, well, yeah, this happens, and
you know, Uncle Bob shows up and you know this
and that, and Uncle Charlie's there too, and all of
this stuff, right, But at certain times you're just like, oh, yeah,
this is new. So what are some of the common
and what are some of the outliers?
Speaker 2: Well, let me so, Aunt Betty, Oh.
Speaker 1: I love this Uncle Charlie, Uncle Bob, and Eddie.
Speaker 2: They're all together and they're all they're all over here. Yeah.
I got a call from my cousin, Aunt Betty. She said,
I've got something here I want to read to you.
And she started to read me this letter that said,
I'm I'm got the car loaded and ready to go.
I can't find the car keys. I'll call Charlie. So
at this point I sat down. Uncle Charlie's been dead
for twenty years. When the car is packed and ready
to go and you can't find the car keys, the
person is in a I estimated, in a dying experience
of some kind, and there's a little hitch in there.
But when they find the car keys are going to go.
I'm in Conroe. So she's back in time. She'd been
in Conro forty years before. They worked for Exon. It
looks different than before. This woman is with her, don't.
I don't know her, but she's nice. She's smoking a cigarette,
which made me laugh because I think I think of
this person as a guide and that aunt Betty had
a guide who smoked cracked me up because she didn't
smoke or drinker any of those things.
Speaker 1: Very but that made sense to her.
Speaker 2: In that So she's she's written all this out. Kathy says,
I called Mom this morning. You coudn't get her to
answer the phone. We found her in the chair. She'd
had a heart attack, she'd had a stroke. She's alive.
We've got her at the hospital. Betty died Friday. She said,
I think this letters for you. I think this is
you know, this is your work. I think she wrote
this for you, and she Betty had tried to date it.
She had gotten the month, but she she didn't get
the year. But it's in her hand and it's a
deathbed phenomena experience that she wrote for me. And I
get to use that for teaching and that documented. Wow,
that was powerful for me, super powerful for me, really rare.
So I I have that and when I go and
talk to people, I'll share that sometimes and that opens
people's memory to things that somebody said somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I didn't. I didn't know that's what it was. I
didn't know. I thought they were confused, but maybe they
weren't confused. They were talking about this. They were talking
about jet on the runway they didn't have any doors,
or they were talking about the train. That's the train's
been by. Next time the train comes, I'm going to
get on it. That's one that I hear a lot.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, and is it consciousness? Is it our internal
self trying to make sense of dying and our body
is doing whatever it's doing. I just think it's fascinating,
and the more stories I hear, the more interested I get.
Speaker 1: Well, what's interesting from this. It's the same concept of
the scientific argument for near death experiences, that is just
your brain doing something, your chemical is going off. And
I'm like, well, then they all should be the exact
same thing. They're not. They're not, they're not. It's a
very custom. But what I find fascinating about what you're
saying is that it seems like a in a end
of life thing, not an accident, but in a life
situation when there's time for the soul to transition. It
seems like the universe is do or i'll use the
term universe god, whatever you want to call it. The
other side is constructing a runway in a way for
them to be comfortable to take the ride, because this
is a jarring coming out of this and going into
the place again. From a lot of near death experience conversations, yes,
it's you know, in near death experiences, after interviewing one
hundred and fifty of them at this point, the understanding
is you get a customized experience. Yes, what is pleasurable
for you? What is going to calm you? Who's going
to be there? You know, if you're Christian, Jesus generally
is the hardest working man in show business, so he
does show up. We'll be right back after a word
from our sponsor, and now back to the show. But
there is a rare occasion that Christiana will show up
for someone who never was a Hindu. It happens. But
generally speaking, whoever's there, it's either a deity. It's either
Sometimes it's a that's aute teacher in second grade that
you had a connection with, yes, which is like wow,
that's random, But those are the people that kind of
are placed their characters that are placed there, and then
the environments are very customized. So that's in the near
death experience.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I find the same thing in deathbed phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I hadn't heard that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the things I wrote about in
my dissertation was it is it is. I didn't use
the word customize, but it's that it's it's specific to
the person and what they need. One of the examples
of that was a gentleman who wasn't letting go and
his family was getting kind of like, you know, what's
the issue here, and he didn't want to see his father.
His father had beaten him. He knew. People came to help. Yeah,
I was trauma. And after he said that, after the
family was made aware, his wife came in one day
and the man was talking to somebody beside him and
it was a little boy. And that little boy ended
up staying with this guy for the next couple of weeks.
And that was his I'll call it his transition partner.
Speaker 1: But that was that was not in reality.
Speaker 2: It was in his reality, but that and that transition
partner was who helped ease the way I didn't hear
any other story about any other kid that showed up
in that particular in that that kind of way to
help somebody. Other people, you well, I people will see
people they don't know and and then began to see
and hear people they do know. And it may be
people from a long, long time ago. Butch was a
South African soccer player and his soccer team came in
one day. You know. He was in his twenties when
all that happened, and he was I don't know, eighty
five or eighty eight, and he was mad and his
family didn't know what was cooking, and he said, the
team is here, but they left, and they left ladders
in the room. So he's seeing the things in the
ceiling left ladders in the room, but the ladders are
too short and I can't get up them to get away.
I get to leave. So it's that I call it
almost ready, But like there are.
Speaker 1: Some past I didn't jump on.
Speaker 2: There are some hindrances. They're just not quite ready to
go yet. And I think about that in terms of
our ideas of somebody should be ready to go, and
why can't they let go? We don't know, we don't
know what needs to get sorted. And I watched this
guy Abode. I swear probably fifteen people came in and said,
it's okay for you to go. You know, you've got
to give permission. And I thought, if fifteen people came
in and told me that it was okay for me
to go and just to leave, I would be so sad.
So I switched that. Because of that experience, I started
changing my language to we're here with you until you're
ready to go. We're right here with you whenever you're ready,
but we're right here with you, instead of it's okay
for you to go, get out of here, get out
of here. So I don't beautiful that inside there's something
that's just not quite ready yet. And I love that metaphor.
Sometimes they took the letters all the way away, but
his were too short. There's a rope, but the rope
is too short.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of that. Yeah, okay, I'll tell you
a story if you don't mind help me. Yes. So
I was speaking to a medium as one does, yes,
and she told me a story of someone who's dying
and he wouldn't go Yeah, And the family knew her,
like can you come in and just let us know.
He's been here for a few weeks now. He just
won't go. I mean it's tearing us apart watching this.
We don't want him to suffer anymore. What's the problem. Yeah,
So she came in and she had a conversation with
him because she's able to talk to him on the
other side. And she she tells the wife or the daughter.
She's like, listen, can you go to his office in
his house. She's like, okay, there's the daughter and the
wife's still alive. She goes to the house. She's like, oh,
go to his desk in the It's funny when I
tell this story because it's so ridiculous, but it meant
a lot to him, and he wouldn't go before this, yes,
you would think. But go to the right top drawer.
Open it. There are his taxes. They're filed, they have
a stamp on it. You just need to put it
in the mailbox. And he can't go until that is done.
And she's like, are you kidding me? My father is
hanging around for taxes literally death and taxes seriously, and
she's like do it. And she's like, look, it's no harm.
Just put it in the mail. She put it in
the mail. He died within hours. He left. It was
that simple. And she's like, I can't believe he was
holding on to make sure the taxes got But it's
fascinating what a soul, a personality, and a soul will
do in this reality. So we are so ingrained in
our mask, in our character, and of these worldly things
which mean truly nothing in the grand scheme of the universe,
but in our experience and our soul's journey is extremely important.
But that tax, that tax example, it's a great one.
It makes no sense whatsoever to us outside, but in
his world that meant something. So I'm thinking about like
my parents and things that mean something to them that
is insane to me, but in their world and in
their experience that's super important. Like if my dad's not
watching baseball on Saturday and Sunday, I mean, it's the
end of the world. To me, it's like it's a game, yeah,
you know, but for him there's a meaning to it.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Just like when I'm going I'll probably there'll probably be
some sort of movie stuff going on. I'll probably like
you know that I'm in the theater, honey, yeah, and
Steven Spielberg's here and that that would be my experience
probably I'm just throwing that out there, but like something
that is meaningful. And then also Yoga Nanda's here as well,
so like what is happening, So like those would be
you know, George Lucas is here, is this star am
I in Star Wars? That would be something that would
be really meaningful and impactful to me as my soul journey.
But to the outside advice like dad, are you watching
a movie right now? Kind of thing. So it's it's
it's really fascinating.
Speaker 2: If your family knows Your family knows you sure, and
knows what you love and don't love, and what drove
you crazy and all that stuff. As you as you
begin to as your web begins to dissolve and the
metaphors begin to happen and the language changes and the
behaviors changes, they can see things that will make sense
in terms of your life that other people don't. So
hospice folks are are fabulous and wonderful and they don't
know you the way your family does. So there's some
things that you're doing they you know, he's patient and
Bedfords doing some things. It's no big thing. But if you,
if you as a family member, can see that and
hold that a little bit differently, it makes the dying
experience different. So I talk about going back in time.
So if you, as a family member, are watching and
you hear something like, you might say, I need I
need the suitcases. That is a classic piece of language
that that people say. They'll come up out of a
sleep they've been sleeping for nine hours or ten hours,
and they'll see it. I need get my bags, I
need my luggage, I need the map, I need my
dad wanted his knife, his pocket knife, exactly the yes, yeah,
And you either blow that off or you go, yeah,
all right, let me let me go find your pocket knife,
and find your pocket knife and put it there. We
had a adult sons who went home and got the
suitcases and brought the suitcases. So when the dad woke up,
even just for a flash, he could see the suitcases
were by the end of the bed. A beautiful picture
of those suitcases and the dad's feet at the end
of the bed, and it's black and white. I love
that picture, and I love that they they did that
for him. It wasn't just it wasn't just a thing.
And I think that's the that's the part of the
the dying experience that I want more people to understand
so that it can be meaningful in a different way
and maybe a deeper way, and maybe make it more special.
Speaker 1: Because a lot of times the relatives and family members
are only thinking about themselves and how they're grieving the situation,
which I get sure, but for them to step out
of themselves just for a moment and make sure that
the person who's a dying what do they need? Yeah,
I know you're You'll have time to grieve, will be
right back after a word from our sponsor, and now
back to the show. And but they're so complex, there's
so many different emotions. There's so much like I hate him,
I love and my trauma, the no trauma, you know,
like he was great, he was horrible, like this whole
it's just this, that's what human humanity is. This this
beautiful soup.
Speaker 2: Of stuff, beautiful super stuff that is exactly right.
Speaker 1: But people who are watching a loved one pass, if
they can be empathetic for that moment and helped like that,
that's a beautiful story about the luggage. Yea like to
go get or go get the pocket knife. Yeah, and
it put it in their hand. These kind of little
things to get over the pain that you're going through.
So if you can put it aside for a minute
and make sure that they need what they need is
there for them. Yeah, And it's not just being in
a hospice unit. Sometimes it's about going through the theatrics
of let's go get his bags. Yeah, let's go get
the pocket knife. Yeah, it's here's the book. We're mailing it.
We're mailing it. And by the way, it wasn't in
the room. He just knew on a cosmic or you know,
a quantum field level that that was in She didn't
walk in and go Dad, I already know the second
she did it.
Speaker 2: He knew.
Speaker 1: I think it was thirty minutes later the call CLLIK
came in from that doctor. Yeah, he's gone.
Speaker 2: That's the part that I love, those those pieces of
wisps of energy that passed between us. I'm like somebody
you're thinking about in the phone rings, and it's them
that makes sense to me. In terms of dying too.
There are things that happen that get sent across airwaves
and people know and the person comes to say goodbye
in California before they feel them beside the bed, that
all that stuff, those after death communications.
Speaker 1: A classic one is like, you know, Uncle Bob came
to visit me and Jenny or and Betty showed up. Yes,
that's a week before they passed, and they were talking
to me like it's okay, I'll be here for you
when you're ready, and all that kind of stuff. I'm
gonna tell you another story that happened to me. This
is this is one of my deathbed situations that happened
to me when I wasn't near her when she passed,
but my aunt we were. I mean, I wouldn't say
we were close that we talked all the time, but
I loved her tremendous and she had a lot of
love for me, and anytime I saw her it was
you know, but she did help, you know, when I
was that when I was a young boy, we spent
a lot of time together. I went over and played
with my cousins all that kind of stuff. So I
had a connection with her more so than a lot
of my other relatives that I grew up with. And
there was a lot of love there and I loved
her her black rice. I said. She used to make congri,
so it's called congrie in Cuban in Spanish. So it
was the dark rice with beings and stuff that she
would to always make for me. So we had a
deep connection. So when she passed, I heard about it.
I was in La at the time, and she was
in Florida and she passed. And then three days later
I was doing a project, a filmmaking project where I
was I needed like some VHS footage like textures and
stuff like that. Was creating something for a project that
was doing. So I was like filming VHS like you
know tracking, you know, the old all that kind of
stuff to apply it to current footage to make it
look more VHS. Yeah, that kind of stuff. So I
was creating all of that, and I was like going
through my archives of stuff and then all of a sudden,
I pressed play and there's this scene that I shot
for thirty seconds a minute. I was testing out a
I never forgot it. I was my first job. I
had a steady cam Junior, which is a gimbal essentially
what gimbal used to be. Yeah, and I had a
high eight camera and I was testing it out at
Thanksgiving and they were all there. I'm getting chills thinking
about it. And she was there, my grandmother was there,
my other aunts were there, and it was so I'd forgotten.
It was lost to time. And just three days later
that video showed up and I was like, son of
them and I sent it to my parents. I sent
it to my family and everyone was crying and I
was like, oh my god, I'm like, I completely, I
mean completely. It was literally a minute a footage. It
was a some test footage. Yeah, and they were all there,
and it was just like my dad was there when
he was like I think probably my age now, So
it was, but she was there, smiling and everything, and
I think it was just a way. The way what
I like to believe happened is that she she was
trying to tell me I'm okay and send me a
little kind of love love letter to not only me,
because she knew I would send to everybody else. Yes,
And I was the only one that could.
Speaker 2: Do it yeah yeah, or would do it yeah.
Speaker 1: And I did it. And this is years before Next
Level Soul, this is years before I'm having these insane
conversations all of this stuff. It was so beautiful. But
I always was like, oh.
Speaker 2: It's love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it was just so specific, so random, the timing.
It was just yeah, come on, except not exactly like
come on, this is you know so one other. So,
as far as death phenomenon go, there's the grabbing up,
there's the train, there's the ropes, there's the thing, all
that kind of stuff is there. Julie Ryan, who's a
friend of ours, she's she deals with a lot of this.
Speaker 2: Julie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No she's not. She's she's a psychic medium in
the heel. Yes, but she does. She wrote a whole
book about the stages of death. Yes, so I'm looking
forward to having you guys having a conversation. That should
be fun. But she talks about every day. There's like
a twelve day pro there's like there's different phases of
things like on if this happens, then like you're a
few days away, if this happens, you're a few days
away if this happened, And it's getting closer and closer.
So the relatives, the animals, the deities, the the experiences
you're talking about, there is this there's a systematic thing.
What is your experience for that?
Speaker 2: There is I call it a trajectory. There's a trajectory
of experiences that happen. Everybody's different, right, And you can
look at somebody and think their pulse is what it is,
they're breathing, is what it is, they're gray. You are
certain they're going to die in the next three hours,
and they come back and they're there for another two weeks.
I listen to seasoned hospice people who will not say
it's going to be you know, families want to know
it's going to be in the next couple of hours,
the next couple of days. We're gonna I'm gonna it
could be here, it could be here. This is what
I'm seeing, but I I have I was hesitant for
a while several years to talk about the trajectory of
experiences as I saw them, because I didn't want people
to take them literally because sometimes you just can't. You
can recognize them as signposts, which is what you talk
about mile markers in life, and that's what these are.
And it doesn't mean this kind of reaching. I hear
somebody said they're going to go in twenty.
Speaker 1: Four hours, you can't know.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think it works that way. No,
if they're if they have the energy to reach like that, maybe, yeah,
I wouldn't I if they're if they're reaching like that
and they're on hospice, uh. And there are people to
call that need to come or want to be with
the person, I would.
Speaker 1: Call them a day. It could be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's different kinds of breathing, you know, the physical
things that happened. Oh, that's that's different. When when my
dad said he came out of a haze and he said,
lift me up, lift me up, up, up, and my
brother and I dutifully went to the bed and scooted
him up in the bed and he said, well, that's
one way. And when he said that, I realized he
wasn't on our plane. He's trying to figure out how
to get out of here. Lift me up, up up?
How do I go? Take the take the chains off?
He kind of mumbled, and I said what he said,
take the chains off? And I said okay. So I
reached down and I touched his hand and rubbed him
a little bit and I said they're off now. He said, okay.
You could see his whole body just this relaxing happened.
So how do we how do we get out of
this suit? How we get out of this body? And
those little pieces of language to me are indicators that
they're they're working to get out. And Uh, my opportunity
as another human who is coming along somebody who's dying,
is to sit in that space and be peaceful and
let that peaceful energy be in the room. Frank Osistski's
a Zen. He started Zen Hospice in San Francisco, and
he talks about having the best case scenario. You have
somebody that works with the body, takes care of the body,
and the somebody that takes care of the spirit. You
have those two people in the room or a bunch
of people in the room to do those kinds of things.
That's a beautiful way to accompany somebody as they're leaving.
So when I worked at a bode I often would
sit There's a couch that was up against a wall,
and then the bed was there.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: And I got to a point where I would recognize
when I needed to be on the couch or when
I needed to be beside the person. And I don't
know that I could always tell you what that was.
When you get to a place where you know something well,
you take it in with your whole senses. And that's
what I do when I walk into a room when
somebody's dying now and I can't, I don't separate it anymore.
It's just there's a knowing, And it's the smell, it's
the feel, it's the movement in the room with the
other people there. It's the way the bed looks. All
of those things are pieces of information that guide me
about what's the best way I can be helpful.
Speaker 1: You know what's really interesting. You're a doctor and you've
been in.
Speaker 2: The counseling doctor, counseling doctor.
Speaker 1: About a doctrine of the less, but you've been around
many doctors and hospice and end of life is a
very interesting aspect of the medical field. Yeah, because you
know doctors in general. When I've spoken to doctors who
are not in this field, they look at it as
almost an oddity. Many times some love it and really
why they but or they're confused by it. Yeah, they're
just like, I don't know what's happening there. But then
someone like yourself, obviously an educated woman, you know, someone
who's gone through stuff and you're speaking articulately about very
woo woo stuff like it's like I feel the energy,
I feel this, I feel this the web. It's hard
for them to wrap their heads around it because they
are so not only programmed but trained in the physical
as they kind of need to be for the work
that they do. Like I always say, if I'm shot,
don't rub a leaf on me, don't do that. Take
me to an urgent, take me to the emergency room
and a trauma center, please, yeah, don't like, Okay, it's
time to get some sage out, no, please, for God's sakes.
But anything long term, I always like to go more
natural homeopathic if I can't, yeah, yeah, yeah, But there's
places for both in the medical field and the healing
and the healing arts and so on. I think so exactly.
But looking at hospice in general and speaking to doctors,
they just looked at it as an oddity, almost like
I can't it's over there. Yeah, that's it's sounds the
hospice they can't because it's kind of like they can't
wrap their head around it's really interesting. So I imagine
that you've had to encounter that in your work over
the years of other people in the field, in the
medical field who are just not dismissive of it. I can't.
I don't. I mean, I find that very rude if
it beat someone being dismissive of it because something is
happening but nobody really knows what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there there are people on the planet
who have a very materialistic view of the.
Speaker 1: World and very three dimensional ass We like this.
Speaker 2: Three dimensional and then something happens if you're lucky, and
there's a little bit of an opening and you start
to make meaning of things that maybe didn't mean something
to you earlier. An example I can think of is
when I talk about deathbed language. Some people get it.
Some people are like, yeah, okay, whatever. If you went
to an emergency room, emergency department and said I feel
like I've got an elephant on my chest or i
feel like I've got a you know, that means something
to the people behind the desk, and they're going to
take you back and check your heart see if you're
having a heart attack. Deathbed language is the same for
me when I hear somebody say lift me up, up up,
or how do I get out of here, I want
to go home. That is that makes sense to me.
Or somebody standing in the corner, or there's a blue angel. Yeah,
all of that stuff in the realm of that, that
all makes sense to me. And it's part of my
I say constant. I think it is part of my
constitution at this point. This is it's just part of
how I see the world and how I experience dying.
And this this field that people are in and yeah,
some people don't they're not in there. Did a doctor
say about this guy, he's not in there? And he
did a sternal rub and he was looking in the
guy's eyes, and I asked him not to do that again.
I said, you know, he's here for a conscious dying experience.
He didn't want all of that. Please don't do that again.
We got mad and eventually was able to come around
and that man who was dying in the bed, who
was so far away, and you know, this is all
for it, he came back and opened his eyes and
it was thirty forty five seconds. But those two had
a moment. I was having a moment. I don't know
what it took for that guy to come back. I mean,
I imagine it took a lot, a lot of energy
to come back to be able to open his eyes.
He couldn't speak, but he looked at it, but he
looked at him and there.
Speaker 1: Was there was something there.
Speaker 2: It was I have goosebumps's hard. It was incredible. Did
it change him? I yeah, I think I imagine it did.
In that moment, he was like.
Speaker 1: You're here. You know what's fascinating too, is that you know,
you're talking about people who are very in the material
and I get that in the material world and understand that.
But all of us will have to deal with something
supernatural in our lives at one point or another, which
is death, because it's beyond what we are now. It
is an unknown question. So it's whether if your parents
die or something like that. And some people will see
that experience that you just explained and they just put
it down somewhere and I don't want to deal with it.
I don't want to think about it. But others, like
you said, it's a crack, it's a slight opening that
will open their idea, their perspective of life. And some
doctors that we've had on the show, like doctor William Peters,
he went all in, Yeah, because he was fascinated and
let's so let's bring let's bring his work into this
a little bit. Shared death experiences. YEA, what is your
have you had to share death experience and what can
you explain to people what a shared death experiences as
well as in near death.
Speaker 2: So the way the way William talks about shared shared crossings,
shared death experiences are experiences that witnesses. You're at the
bedside with somebody who's dying, and you and the person
who's dying have an experience where an example that William
gives he was reading to a man. It's in hospice,
and William said, we were out of our bodies. He said,
the guy who's in the bed is a peer and
I'm a peer, and we're looking at each other. The
guy who's dying in the bed is he's up here.
He's just grinning at me, and I look down. He's
in the bed. I'm reading the book and I'm looking
here and looking here, and I'm thinking, what in the
world is happening. That's a shared crossing experience. People who
shared death experience, you have an experience of crossing with
your mother. Yeah, a woman talked to me about sitting
beside her mother, having an experience of seeing her mother.
They were up out of their body. She could see
her mother and she was asking her mother where the
dad was, and she could hear her dad in the distance.
This was a shared experience. William's research expanded what shared
death experiences included to include dreams.
Speaker 1: So I had dream with your brother.
Speaker 2: Dream with my brother would have been one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I've bought your brother brother had the same.
Speaker 2: My other brother had the same one exactly.
Speaker 1: So that's exactly the sample of that.
Speaker 2: And I really had not thought of that until right now,
so thank you for that. I thought of one on
the way over, a person who was at abode who
was not going for whatever reason. I really didn't think
about it like that. But they were there in the
bed and still for a long time. And I had
a dream that they were in a parking garage, a
cement parking garage, and I walked down and found them.
They were facing this cement wall, and I found them
and brought them out, and I don't remember where I
took them, but it was out of the garage. And
that was a shared death experience. There was some kind
of hindrance for them. I wouldn't have thought that until
I heard William talk about his work. I got to
talk to a person this week who will be accompanying
their spouse with medical aid and dying in a state
that allows that. We don't have that in Texas.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: The spouse has been working with a Buddhist scholar and meditating,
so this is not death is imminent, because the cocktail
will be happening in the end of end of this year. Yeah,
it days so offhandedly, the person I was talking to
said about their person who's dying, they're seeing people in
their meditation who they don't know, and I got all excited.
I kind of leaned into the computer and I said,
tell me more, and she said, well, that's what it's
what I can tell you. They're just these people are
starting to show up. And I said, that's what happens
when somebody's dying in a hospice situation. So I am
fascinated that with this practice that there's some kind of
similarity there, even with medical aid and dying, and I
know the person is dying, they're on their trajectory but
they're not supposed to go, supposed to go anytime soon.
Speaker 1: As you're talking about these that's fascinating. I think it
is just that's fascinating. I haven't heard about the meditation
stuff because that's generally in the West. It's not something
that right, it's done. I'd imagine in the east's probably
something that's done a little bit more than here in
the West. But what I find fascinating as you're talking,
like in my gears, are all the experiences, all the
conversations I've had about this stuff, is that there seems
to be on a sole level and this is going
to go deep. So we're going to get into some
deep weeds here.
Speaker 2: I'm not scared.
Speaker 1: I know, I know you're not. I know, I definitely
know you're not. You're definitely not. But on a soul level,
you know, if you believe in in reincarnation, in soul blueprints,
in soul contracts, that we come down here to learn
something and this is our life, and that there's a
sole group with you. There are certain souls that just
keep hanging around you and interacting with you in multiple life,
just play a different partners. Sometimes you're my wife, sometimes
I'm the wife. Sometimes you're my son, I'm So's daughter,
that kind of stuff. So if you believe that, let's
say I'm the daughter or I'm the son and you're
the mom. Let's say and you're on your deathbed and
I'm meditating, and all of a sudden, I start seeing
Uncle Bob and Betty, and then I'm also seeing people
I don't recognize who are dressed in fifties clothes, I
don't know whatever. Yeah, something like that. That's a deep
connection because as a son and a daughter, or a
mom and a dad or son, you know, I'm talking
about like a relative that that connection is so deep
that in the death scenario, I'd imagine that connection would
stay deep if you're open to it. So something like
a meditation, if you're open to is the very key
point of this. If you're open to it, you can
actually really connect with your loved one in a deep way.
Meditation is a great way of doing. Dreams is just
another way. It's another opening. But meditation is a way
for you to kind of control or at least have
an opportunity open the space for something like that to happen,
where you can actually be given kind of not only
a glimpse at what's happening to your loved one, but
also give you peace. That is something that most don't
get when a loved one passes, generally speaking, but just
saying that, When you're saying that, I'm like, oh my God,
that would give me a lot of peace if I
didn't already believe everything I believe in my experiences. But
if I was scared, I'm like, it's mom going to
be okay? Like where's Mom going to go? And if
you're meditating about it and you see things starting to
come in, it's almost like you're opening up. Is now
now we'll get into the quantum world, which is the frequency. Yes,
we're opening our vibration or our frequency up to a
level that can open and see these things. Hence, a
shared death experience is they're now raising their frequency so
high that they're leaving this space. Masters have done this,
All the masters on the wall have done this. They
elevate their frequency to go beyond the third dimension. And
as a relative connected to that, you already have a
very deep vibrational connection to that person. So if you're
able to raise your vibration or frequency through meditation, which happens,
you'll be able to connect to that experience and get
information that will be not only beneficial for the loved one,
but beneficial for you in this journey as well. Because
this is a two part scenario. Does all of any
of that make sense?
Speaker 2: And do you agree with any of it? It does
make sense to me. One of the things I love
about William's work is that he's got a protocol now
where he works with the person who's dying and whatever
family members want to work with them, and they do
meditations and it's kind of like seeding the seeding the space.
So when the person is at the point where they
can't talk anymore and they begin to leave their body,
the opportunity for some kind of connection, which might be telepathic,
which might be something a sign that we see in
the physical, but butterflies or dreams, there's a likelihood that
those kinds of things can happen. I like this because
it gives the family from a psychotherapist being here present
kind of conversation. It gives the family an opportunity to
talk about the dying experience. This person is really going
to die, and there's this kind of call and response.
He does about a memory. You find a shared memory
and you tag it, and when I think of this memory,
I'm going to know that you're okay. And so that experience,
along with meditating together, thinking about what dying is, thinking
about that I'm going to miss you, thinking about that
I may come back and give you a sign. And
then that sign happens, or some kind of experience happens,
gives the person the people who are left, and gives
the person who's dying opportunity to really be in the experience,
to have some grief moved, some energy moved. And then
if one of those experiences happen, there's a whole other
level of I'm going to say goodness or it's not
even goodness is beyond that, it's it's it's love conditions,
it is it is love. So when the person and
their experience, I can think of that they did the protocol,
had the experience, and when the person died, the sister
saw swirlies, some kind of swirlies, and it gave her
so much peace. And nobody else in the world needs
to believe or understand. But between those two, yes, it mattered,
and that kind of that kind of experience is something
that I hope more people will do. And I think
about these these made deaths which I think are going
to happen more in our country. I think that the
medical aid and dying people are able to make a
choice about when they want to leave, and so there's
more planning. There can be thoughtfulness around meditation and these
kinds of things.
Speaker 1: It's a whole other that's a whole other podcast to
talk about, but I agree with you. I agree with you.
Have you in your work run across someone who's passing
who has such a strong programming in them about what
hell is, what heaven is, and that they are so
terrified of dying because they were bad, whether that might
be a prisoner in jail or someone who was abusive
to their family or something like that, and they're like
at the end, they're like, oh my god, am I
going to go to the other place? Sure, what's your
experience with that and how and does that transition into
a peaceful place or sometimes they just need to go
through that, like in a near death experience. There have
been hellish experiences. They're not often, but they do happen.
And the people I've spoken to said I needed to
go through that because I believe I needed to go
through that interesting I needed. I believe that I had
to go through seven days in my mind of a
dystopian hell where demons and lower energy beings were torturing
me until I finally said God help me. Yeah, Jesus
helped me, or something like that, and then all of
a sudden, a light shows up. Everyone scatters and they're saved.
But they had to make the decision, but they had
to go through it. And then when they came back,
they're like, it was all bs. There is no hell,
there is no this. It was just something I needed
to go through because I believe I needed to go
through it. So what's your experience with that.
Speaker 2: I have seen people who struggle to get there's a
point where people aren't able to talk anymore, and there's
a lot of mumbling, but there can be a lot
of moving and we call it terminal agitation. But for
some people, there's no medicine, no amount of medicine that's
going to keep that angstiness and that movement and that
agitation away. And when that happens. I have a doctor
friend named Heather, and she talks about that. That's how
I know somebody's in an act sistential crisis. There's something
in them that has to get worked out, and I
give them, give them as much medicine as I can
give them, and we circle them and hold them until
it ebbs. And sometimes it takes several days for it
to ebb. I don't know. I don't know what to do.
There are people who would say calling a priest and
call you seeing and you there's I don't know. I
don't know how that works. That's interesting, and I've seen it.
Speaker 1: Do they go? Have you seen them leave like that
with that kind of energy in them? Like oh my god,
Oh my god, I'm going to or is it like
finally am it's I'm good. We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: I have not seen I've seen one time where a
person has left and nobody was comfortable. Nobody in that
room was comfortable when they left that way it was
it was, it was awful, and they they were suffering,
and we somehow imagined they were suffering. Maybe they were,
Maybe they weren't. It sure did looked like they were.
Speaker 1: And you feel it.
Speaker 2: I yeah, well you seem like a very empathetic person
most days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you pick up on people's energies, Yeah, pretty pretty easily.
So you can feel it out and you walk in
a room.
Speaker 2: You're like, oh yeah, and I don't. Yes, yes, And
most of the time, when somebody says to me, somebody struggling,
I walk in and it's that's not my experience. My experiences,
they're trying to leave. It's not a it's not a
there's not a fight. And I think because I've seen
so many people, and most people see two, three or
four people die in their whole life, and that's their image.
Whatever it is they see, that's their image. So there's
just such a continuum about what bodies do and what
I imagine spiritual doing in the body to release and stillness
and movement and sound and all of that.
Speaker 1: So in your experience as well, to these emotions or
guilt or things like that come up. I mean, obviously
when they're at a stage they can still talk. Yeah,
is there like oh my god, I see I see
Aunt Betty and I used to beat Aunt Betty, you know, like,
or I used to have some sort of I did
something bad to that person, or I did something bad.
It's almost like Christmas Carol, you know, Marley shows up
with the chains, you know, and it's like, oh god,
I'm looking at what I did to these people, and
it's their projection of them. Do you see that?
Speaker 2: Every now and again. I think the thing with that
is there, when something like that is said out loud,
it's got to be said to a person who the
person who's saying it trusts enough to hold it and
and they won't be judged or they won't be left
or abandoned or whatever it is. So people would come
into abode and there are stories that people tell for
the last time, and I would watch who among the
volunteers or the staff would connect with that person and
what story was told for the last time to that person.
And there were a couple of those people who would
get those kind of those really hard stories because they
needed to get it off them, They needed to get
it off their chest, off their heart. And uh. And
those there are two guys I'm thinking of in particular,
and they can handle it, they could do it, and.
Speaker 1: They can sense that. Yeah, there's so many things here
that there's no Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head
around because it's not tangible. None of it, none of
it's none of the thing you can hold on to. Martha.
I have to ask you, how the hell do you
do this?
Speaker 2: Oh? I love it?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think what I love about it is the intimacy
of it. I mean, you and I have had a
conversation today that is pretty powerful and pretty deep. And
that's what I get to do. I it's fast, you
you're and it's hard to heart. And when somebody's ready
and we can both sit in that space together, there's
a I will say it energy on I know it.
There's a there's a feeling and uh, that feeling is
nourishing and it is peaceful and enlivening and I like it.
And so to be able to be in spaces where
other people might have a hard time, it's it. It
just this is this is just what I'm built for.
There are other places I can't be, there's places I
would not want to be in a million years, But this,
this space is it works for me.
Speaker 1: If you were built in a spiritual factory for this work.
Speaker 2: I stood in that line before I came in.
Speaker 1: You're like, I'll do that. It seems that's gonna that
seems interesting. I'll do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is none no, no. Dying is the
same way of these little things along the way, but
all the nuances of it and what you'll learn and love.
Speaker 1: I have to ask you a whole question.
Speaker 2: Oh, let's hear it.
Speaker 1: I have to ask you a whole question. So on
a soul level.
Speaker 2: You're so funny, Okay, on a soul level.
Speaker 1: On a soul level, this kind of work is very giving.
You are you are helping many, many people throughout the
course of your life. Yeah, you're providing a service very
much like a nurse would, a doctor would. Even spiritual
leaders and teachers like that. They they're more so with
death though, like it's constant. It's like it's like we
were saying, it's recession proof. Like you you're not gonna
lose your job anytime soon. It's going to always be,
you know, unfortunately you always have work to do. But
it's an extreme version of giving. In my in a
normal life, a normal life, people don't give this much
on a daily basis. So this is an extremely giving scenario.
I mean, you give to your family, you give to
your work and things, but this is different. You are
in a very different stage in this humans or this
soul's experience and you're helping them again and again and again,
so on a soul level. If you believe in reincarnation, yes,
why do you think this is the life you chose?
In this life? Is it? Is it a karmic thing
that you have to give back because I did a
whole lot of other stuff, or is it that like, no,
I want this is what I want to do because
of out of love and out of this or I
need to learn about death and this is going to
teach this to me. I mean, I told you we're
going to get in the weaks here.
Speaker 2: So when you said I want to learn about death,
I could feel some emotion come up. And so that
makes me like there's something in my body that resonates
with that I need to learn about that I have
wondered from this life. Jim died. I didn't know what
to do with that. I didn't know what to do
with my family. And I have imagined I've been on
this path of sorting out his death and being in
relationship with him after his death. What does all that mean?
And I have thought about past lives and have had
some conversation as one does with a medium here and
there with a past life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're fascinating.
Speaker 2: They are fascinating. One of them told me I was
a nun in some life, and that makes sense.
Speaker 1: Oh you have none energy. Oh my gosh. Not in
a bad way, not in a ruler, not in a
ruler way. But when I think of a nun, I
think of a lot of peace. Yeah, except if you're
a Catholic. None in the eighties, that's a whole other conversation. Yeah,
I had a different experiences with that's in the eighties.
Speaker 2: I've heard tales my goodness, my goodness.
Speaker 1: But that but that makes that makes sense.
Speaker 2: And I worked with children for a long time, and
I've never I don't have my own children in this
life and in the past life, in the you know,
in this life. In this life. I worked with children
for ran a children's breevement center for seven years. So
I was with kids all the time who were bereaved.
And a woman would see the psychic and she said,
who are all these people around you? And I said,
I have no idea, and she said, what is it
with these kids? And so I told her a little
bit about what I do, and she talked to me
about a past life where I had a bunch of
kids and some of my kids died and then I
ended up dying under a horse, and I don't know,
you know, I heard that and I took it in
and I thought, okay, whatever, and there was more to
it than that. But I have wondered.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: I have wondered about what past influences land now and
I don't know, and I don't think about very much
because I asked it's kind of fun to think about.
Speaker 1: It's, well, it's interesting, what I mean. Again, I live
in this world, so yeah, yeah, constantly in this, in
this these kind of conversations, so I obviously do a
lot of self reflection on.
Speaker 2: Like what's what did what do you think? What's what's
got you here?
Speaker 1: Oh that's a long story for another time. I know
exactly why I'm hearing what I'm doing and the reasons
why I'm doing most of it, not all of it.
I know all of it. But like a perfect example,
I was talking to somebody the other day and they
asked me, what did you want to be when you
grew up? Like when you're a kid, like you said,
you want to be a vet. So we all have those,
you know, the early ones. So the first one I
can remember, there's two in my early stages of my life.
One was an astronaut because I wanted to see space.
I don't know why, I just wanted to explore. Yeah.
Second one was a priest, okay, because I saw a
priest walk in on first in first grade, and I
saw the power and the prestige and the respect they might.
That seems cool. And when I told my mom that,
She's like, oh Jesus. And then the third one was
a filmmaker. So you combine the three and explore. Yes,
a religious leader of some sort or teacher or you know,
someone was interested in spirituality, and a filmmaker to tell stories. Yeah.
So I was like, ooh, that that makes And when
someone said I was like, oh God, that's right. That
does make a lot of sense, because it's really those
are the only three. I'd never had any other. I
never had any other inclinations other than like business. I
like business, I like building businesses and things like that.
But I'd never there was no other career other than
those three that I've ever come into my mind, Like
It took me forever to figure out if I want
to be a filmmaker. And I only learned that because
I worked at a video store for five years and
then when I got out of high school, I'm like,
I got I do something like there's three thousand vhss
around me currently. I like movies, so I'm going to
be a director.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was that simple. It was like, all right, I'm
gonna be i'n go to the filmmaking yeah, you know,
which was a very steady job obviously, and you can
make millions back then at all. My father's like, what,
she's just gonna run off with a circus. I'm like,
I am. I am uh and look when I circus,
I've created.
Speaker 2: My own, my own beautiful circus.
Speaker 1: No, thank you. But I'm always fascinated about that because
if you start looking at it from a cosmic soul purpose,
you know, do you believe that there are people who
come into your life who are there for a reason.
It sounds to me, and I'm just gonna I'm gonna
be the psychotherapist here for a second for it. It
sounds to me that your brother came into your life
and he was a motivating factor into your life's work. Yeah,
I mean there's just I mean you you can't deny that.
It's like, that's exactly what happened. Yes, So to me
on a soul level, you guys were talking up in
the cloud somewhere wherever you're at, and you're like, in
this life, I want to learn about death. Hey, I'm
going to help you with this one. Yeah. I'll come
down here as your brother this time. Last time we
were married, but this time we're going to come down
as a brother and sister, and I'm gonna be I'm
gonna come ahead of you, so I'm gonna learn a
whole lot more and I'm gonna get things prepared for you.
And then on my exit point, this is going to
spawn your entire life work. And I'm going to do
that for you. And I don't want you to cry.
I'm not going to cry, but but I feel that.
So it's so much love there.
Speaker 2: I feel it too.
Speaker 1: It's so much love and it's so beautiful and we
all do that. All of our families play those parts
in different things. I'm just using your brother as an
example because it really has spawned your entires life work.
And I've heard that again and again from people like
my mom died and did this, or I had my
sibling died early on and it changed me, you know,
all these things, and it just seems like, yeah, I'm
going to do that for you in this life, you know.
And that's and this is a positive one. I also
believe on the negative side as well, where people are like,
you know, I need to learn about this, I'm like, well,
I'll be the a hole to come down and do
that for you, and I'll have to learn a whole
lot of stuff along that side as well. You did
that make sense to you?
Speaker 2: It does? It does, And I like that meaning making
as I've gotten older, because it gives more elbowroom to
breathe and think about life in a different way and
to not create more suffering for myself. It's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's the equivalent of a soul. On the
other side, like, you know, I've never been famous. I
want to know what that's like. And they come in,
they're like, Okay, how famous do you want to be?
Do you want to be like local community theater famous
or do you want to be Tom Cruise famous? Like
where do you want to go? And then you go
you know, Tom Cruse famous would be interesting.
Speaker 2: Like all right, buckle up, buckle up, butter Cup.
Speaker 1: Where are you going to be? Oh is it going
to be Bollywood or is it going to be Hollywood?
And what year are you going in? Like okay, and
like that's when I want to come in, and then
all of a sudden, like, oh, this is not what
it's all cracked up to be. I needed to learn
what that was like other ones. Other people come in
like I need to learn what addictions like I need
to go over that, or I need to learn what
this pain is, or I need to know what it's
like to just not worry and come in rich.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then.
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, well you don't worry about this, but
you got other things you got to deal with. So
it's just grand tapestry. It is of the human experience,
of the soul's experience, and we haven't even gotten into
parallel lives and multiverses and all that stuff that makes
my head hurt when I start hearing about that stuff,
which makes sense to me, I understand on a quantum level.
On a Vedic you know, the Vedic, the Vedic teachers
of the past spoke about multiverses, and how many you know,
there's multiple lives, multiple not only multiple lives, but multiple
versions of this conversation happening right now in this universe
as a human. Let's not even talk about what else.
Speaker 2: I'm like, that makes my head hurt.
Speaker 1: It makes my head hurt too, because it's it's it's
not something in our heads capable.
Speaker 2: Of comprehensive Yeah, yeah, I get that.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard the concept that everything is happening
all at once?
Speaker 2: Everything? Yes, I have that.
Speaker 1: There is no past, there's no future, that we're all
all our lives are happening at the same exact time. Yeah,
that that's okay, sure, sure, why not? Why not?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: The best example of that, though, I've heard, because I've
asked this question some mystics and some big spiritual teachers,
and I go explain this as a layman, like I'm
a child, explain that concept that just told you and
what I've gotten, and that this one's a really great one.
It's like, well, you have a TV, right, Yeah, It's like, well,
when you're watching a TV, what show are you watching?
I'm like, oh, I don't know, watching south Park? Great? Well,
you know the Simpsons are on another channel. You know,
reruns on Friends are on another channel. Oh right, you
know big Bangs on another channel? Oh great, Escape from
the Fifties is on another channel. There's a thousand channels
going on and they're all happening at this mode. But
what are you tuned into? I was like, oh, yeah,
I can wrap my head around.
Speaker 2: That makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, isn't that a great analogy?
Speaker 2: It is a great analogy because it's all happening right now,
the signals are all going out, Yes, And where are
you tuning yourself to? What are you tuning yourself?
Speaker 1: And if you want to take that analogy to the
next level, is like, well, on YouTube, how many videos
are uploaded on a daily basis? Well, they're all playing,
They're all up there. What are you tuning into? So
those are all different lives, all different experiences, all different entertainment,
if you will, and they're all at the same time
out there being played billions and billions of times a day.
So that's a and that's and even the speck of
the universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: Martha, this has been so fascinating. I absolutely love you.
It's been great talking to you.
Speaker 2: You are a delight. Look at that laugh. I told you,
I've been listening to you last couple of days. It's
really fun. Your laugh is great.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. People think it's fake, but please tell
them about time I'm fake at least people like, he
can't be that happy, he can't be always laughing. I'm like,
I laugh all the time.
Speaker 2: So I did it. I did a meditation before.
Speaker 1: Did an Betty or Uncle Bob Juwan know it was?
Speaker 2: It's it's a it's a way to attune that I
learn learned from a friend of mine to attune to
a situation. I'm going to be in and you know,
it's pull pull you up in. And sometimes when I
pull the person up there kind of like it's a
it's a square. Sometimes in the back of the box.
You were right in the front of the box with
this big that face that is the face, and I
I did it twice and you came in the same
way both times, and I'm not this is going to
be interesting.
Speaker 1: Oh really, you kind of you were testing the waters
to see where it was going.
Speaker 2: I think it's if it's imagination and seeing this this
uh happy seemingly connected guy in this in this box
and thinking that I was going to get to spend
some time and doing my best to be grounded and
connected and then what could we co create together? And
that's it's a it's a nice way to move into
an interview. So thank you.
Speaker 1: Oh that's awesome, thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this so this, yes, this is all real.
Speaker 1: This is all ready. Yes. I had someone come to
our event and walk up to my wife and she's
They're like, is he really? This? Is he really? Who
he is? I flew from God knows thousands of miles?
She said, I just wanted to make sure he was real.
Oh wow, And I was fascinated. But she didn't ask
me like my wife would say, no, you should run.
But she's like, no, that's he laughed, like that. He's
happy generally all the time. I mean, don't get me wrong,
I am you're human. I'm a human, and I have
children teenagers and that as well, So of course I'm
not always happy, but I generally am. You know, I
do have a good time with life. I try. I try. Yeah,
we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.
Speaker 2: Has it always been that way? Or did you is it?
It's yeah, yeah, that's my experience too.
Speaker 1: He's angry. For the youngest time, I was like, why
is in my film where we were going, Oh my god,
I want to go It wasn't going where I wanted
to go. Well, I was angry, and I was bitter
for a good decade. I'll be honest with I mean, yeah,
there was elements of this. I was always a class clown.
I was always joking, and that's who I am. But
the I was really bitter because I would help other
filmmakers fulfill their dreams and I was saving their movies
and I couldn't get one of my movies off the
ground the way I wanted to. So it was really interesting.
But I don't know, I can't remember the moment that
it clicked off, but I think it was obviously when
I started meditating about eight years seven eight years ago,
I started meditating. Meditating, not little two minute meditations, no, no, no.
And when I started to meditate, I started to calm
a lot more. My life became and my wife saw it.
She was like, I don't know what you're doing, but
keep doing it because she saw it. She's she's the clo.
Your spouse is the closest observer.
Speaker 2: Of your life.
Speaker 1: They're the witness more so than your parents. Yes, your
your spouse is your witness because they're with you generally
all the time. They see the good, the bad, and
the ugly all the time. And she felt it. My
kids actually felt it as well, and they just so
I've been become a much more chilled dude over the years.
When I was a young man.
Speaker 2: For Jesus, yeah, oh god, we evolved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was piss and vinegar boy jokey. But piss
and joke jokey. You know.
Speaker 2: I am.
Speaker 1: I am a gen xer from the eighties. So I
watched a lot of movies and I the witch will
pop off. But it was something, Yeah, that was. It
wasn't always there. It was, And as you get older,
you start to kind of let go of a lot
of a lot of things that don't matter anymore because
at the end of at the end of the day,
none of it really does in the scope of what
we give it importance to it. I'll end our conversation
with Alan Watts. Okay, I love Alan Watts, And he
said this, and it was so profound and I'm going
to paraphrase, but he goes, in one hundred years, there'll
be strangers living in your house. Anyone who remembers you
will be dead. Maybe maybe you've done something in your
life that someone will remember you for. But in five
hundred years, in a thousand, think about it. How many
Roman millions of Romans during the Roman Empire of a
thousand years? How many do we remember? How many do
we actually think about? It's usually the emperor is usually
key players in certain dramas that happen to be written down.
But there were millions and no one remembers, you know
at all. So when you look at things like that
and you start like, oh, maybe I worry much as
much as I used to about these little stupid things.
It's not easy. It's not it's not easy, But when
you look at it from that perspective, you're just kind
of like, oh, maybe I should do things that make
me happy.
Speaker 2: Percent well and for me. When when a couple of
my contemporaries died, that was the one of one of
the big shifts, like, oh they were the same agent.
She's not here anymore, she's done, so the game is over,
and my game could be over tomorrow, it could be
over in five years, and what am I going to
do today to feel alive?
Speaker 1: So that's so beautiful. Last question, what has all of
this work done for you on a on your soul journey,
meaning that you are more aware than most that death
is coming and could have come, like you just said, tomorrow,
or it can come in ten years, twenty years, whatever.
How has this changed your perspective on the dying process
in your own life because you've been a observer of
death and of transitions for many years now. But how
does that register with you now, how you want to go,
how you are opening like, how does that work for you?
Because I have a very clear idea of my exiting
this video game. I have a clear idea of how
I want to do it, and I might even have
seen what will happen. Who knows in the meditation, who
knows what shows up? But I have a clear idea
from this work. Because I can't do this work without thinking,
I talk about it all the time. So you've had
to have that self, this kind of meditative thoughts about yourself.
How has this affected you?
Speaker 2: I didn't think about my own dying for a long time,
and I was very much in the let me I'm
going to do this work and I'm going to be
of service, and did that to my detriment, and did
that in some places, those places inside of ourselves where
we want to save and we have the wholeness of
every feeling, thought, emotion in us. I think, and I've
had to or gotten to really look at my shadow
and look at my light, and I think in the
last five years especially, have really been able to hold
both of those. So as I do this work now,
I do it from that perspective that I am a
human and I'm fallible, and there are things that I love,
and there are people I love, and I make mistakes,
and the calling I feel is to do end of
life work. And it's okay. For a long time, I
wasn't sure it was okay. It felt a little weird
and odd. And as we have talked about past lives
and all those things, that was all part of the
do I say these things out loud because those things
got to be more and more. I can't. I can't
talk about I can't talk about dying in the feeling
of somebody who's died standing behind me without thinking about
consciousness and what does this all mean? What's really real?
All of that? And so when I think of myself
in a bed dying, if I am lucky enough to
do that, if I don't need to buy a truck,
that I think, Wow. I hope I get to see
people I love. And I am doing things now to
take care of my body and take care of my
spirit that I would have done ten years ago, fifteen
years ago, taking taking breaks and going to nature and
those kind of those kinds of things that are nourishing
and help me stay in myself. And I hope that
when I'm dying, I can be in myself too and
have the have the just have the experience of it.
Whatever the experience isn't I don't know what it's going
to be. I don't want to hurt, and I think
we'll have have opportunity for that not to be. And
they're particular people I want to have around me who
will care for me and care for my body and
care for my spirit. And I'm very clear about that.
I'm clear about the energy I want around me, and
I think that's that's transferred into regular life. You pick
who you want to spend time with im. I've gotten
pretty choosy.
Speaker 1: As we do as we get older. Yeah, we're loud,
as the funny comedian Nate Burghazzi says, it's like when
you're in your twenties your friend calls you and goes, hey, man,
we're going Where are we going? What are we doing?
Do you mean burn a house down? Let's do it.
Thirties you're like, where are we going? Forties are like
I'm driving. I'm driving separately. It's so intriguing, it's so shid.
Twenty you're like, I'm down to clown, let's go. Yes.
But as you're like now, you're like, no, I think
it's Tom Papa, the other great comedian Tom Papa. He's like,
one of the greatest things in my life is canceling
on plans. Oh my god. Like it's just like I have,
Oh we have a dinner day with another couple. Oh
oh I could cancel. Yes, good cancer. I just want
to stay home in my pajamas and just it's like
it's a great and as you get old, did you
know what it's such true? Yes, it's so true. Oh Marto,
where can people find out more about you and the
amazing work you're doing.
Speaker 2: My website Martha Joe Atkins dot com. Simple as that,
Simple as that.
Speaker 1: And you have a book out right.
Speaker 2: I have a book. So I'm post of dying and
working on a second book. I'll say that out loud
to spur myself on to get that finished. Been working
on it for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been such a pleasure talking to you in
this kind about things that are not pleasurable as a
general statement, but they can be.
Speaker 2: They absolutely can.
Speaker 1: Because it's part of this whole system of what we're doing.
And I appreciate you being not only being here and
helping the planet in the way that you're helping humanity,
but I appreciate the work. I appreciate the the empathy,
the love that you do the work with. And I
hope that this conversation does help others who are going
through this as well. So I appreciate you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you for spending this sacred time I am with
us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further,
you'll find the show notes for this episode at Next
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