She Met God in a Near Death Experience | What She Learned About Healing

[Music] My daily drug regimen was heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, mushrooms, LSD. My body collapsed and I could see myself outside of myself. That's the out-of-body experience, which is a hallmark of an NDE. It was so dark and I just remember thinking, I must be dead. And I started to hear my dad's voice chanting to me, "You are worthy of all the love in the universe." My parents were both drug addicts and they committed suicide together. I started to experience their suicide. But from their perspective, that's when I landed in the light of the near-death experience. Wow. I find myself on what feels like the deck of a spaceship. There's thousands of other souls all around me. My soul came online and activated for the first time ever. I saw the fabric of creation. My soul planned my life before I got here. Planned out all these big plot points that were going to happen. Addiction, recovery, spiritual awakening. I saw all the women that I harmed. I would manipulate women. I'd get them strung out on drugs, their faces, the pain, the agony. I was really witnessing the kind of person that I was. And of course, I feel guilt and remorse for what I've done. But guilt taps me on the shoulder and says, "Okay, make it right." If I was awoken, I know that something is happening on a big large scale. Everybody has access to their guides and angels. Okay? Our guides are our Earth customer service agents. You have to call them in order to get connection. Every soul is here to accomplish some sort of forgiveness. They're just one step away. [Music]

Hi, I'm Miami. I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our breakdown, people. I I can't explain what's about to happen to you in this episode. Today is an extremely powerful story of personal and spiritual transformation unlike anything we've ever heard on this podcast. I have never heard a story so bizarre, so complicated and with such a dramatic, drastic, intense transformation. Someone who is struggling with addiction, with poverty. This is a woman, a self-described dumpster for drugs, who experienced a life that no one that I know could even access like an understanding of what this woman's life was like. And she introduces us into a world that she was immersed in of addiction to opioids, uh, methamphetamine, heroin. She was a prostitute. She was a pimp. She grew up in poverty. She believed that there was no opening in life for her. And through a series of attempts at sobriety, which all were, I don't even want to use the word unsuccessful, they were part of a journey that led her to being unconscious on the floor of an apartment and having an experience that she believed was a psychotic drug-induced state, which revealed itself to be components of a near-death experience combined with a spiritual spiritual transformation that have led her to an understanding of the universe that echoes mystics, physicists, kundalini awakening and she dedicates her life to living guided by spirit, guided by an understanding of the soul that chose this iteration of her life. The way that she describes our existence as not even a simulation, a video game, a theater that we're all playing our roles in. She dedicates her life to helping people in recovery who believe there is no love for them in the universe. The number of coincidences, the number of messages that she received, it is a fascinating, it's a gripping story. My jaw was open most of the time. Just before we get to this episode, if you aren't already subscribed to the podcast, please do us a favor, subscribe. It helps us make the best possible episodes for you, and our promise is that we will continue to do that. And if you want to check out more about the Ballic Breakdown universe, check out our Substack, my BAC's breakdown on Substack.

Our guest today, who is going to walk us through her incredible journey, uh, is Betty Guadano. She is known as Buddha Betty. That's B U D H A B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B Betty um at her website. She's a transformation coach. She's a writer. She's a spiritual teacher. Her life has been shaped by trauma, addiction, and this near-death experience that um she's going to share with us. She survived decades of um abuse, prostitution. Um her parents uh died in a dual suicide when she was in her 20s. She's going to talk about meeting them in other realms. And uh it's just such an honor to get to speak to her and welcome her in person. Uh Betty, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. So grateful to be here. We're very eager to hear your whole story because um you know sometimes we talk to people about the work that they do now and sometimes we talk to people about what they came from and the transformation that you experienced um is so heavily weighted on kind of the life that you came from. So um in a nutshell can you explain what you do now and how you got here? Yeah. So, I do a couple different things. I work as a transformation coach. That's one of the things that I do. I also work as a peer supervisor in New York City and I do a lot of outreach. So, I'm helping the population, the homeless population with substance use disorder, trying to get them connected to care. And yeah, I get to like advocate for people. And the reason why I'm able to do all of those things is because I've undergone a major transformation myself and overcome substance use disorder and all different kinds of addictions in my life.

You had an unbelievable near-death experience. Yeah. Pretty unbelievable. Yes. Totally transformational 180° turnaround in my life. The details of this we're going to get into later in the episode, but are vivid and somewhat shocking and quite different than any other NDE. You know, we've spoken to some people. Everyone has a unique experience. Yours is uniquely yours. What can you tell people who maybe have never heard about an NDE? Just like the power of transformation of that experience before we get into the details. Yeah, I think that near-death experiences are like fingerprints. They're super unique to each individual. I felt like pieces of my personality came along with me cuz my experience is kind of comical and funny and definitely tailored to me so that I could understand it. I had never heard of a near-death experience before this happened to me. I had never heard of a spiritual awakening. None of these things were on my radar. So, near-death experiences is basically when someone's on the verge of death or they've been clinically pronounced dead. And there's a couple of very mirrored markers that happen for a lot of different people. They see a tunnel of light. They reconnect with loved ones that have been lost in in this, you know, in in this lifetime. They sometimes they have a life review. Sometimes they see their pre-birth planning. So, there's definitely markers that hit a lot of different near-death experiences. There's some mirrored experiences.

Your near-death experience um was um as you said, they're like fingerprints, right? They're all unique. Um we've spoken to a lot of people who have had accidents. Uh we've spoken to, you know, several of kind of the nation's leading recounters of NDEs. Um and and I'd say most most of those experiences occur in in hospitals um under anesthesia in many cases uh from you know horrible accidents. Yours was the result of um a near-death drug overdose. Can you explain a little bit the uniqueness of that experience? Meaning uh did you understand that you were in a critical fatal, you know, potentially fatal situation? um that you then came out of. How did you frame it at the time? Yeah, I definitely didn't know what happened to me. Even throughout the whole experience, I was just blasted out on my bathroom floor like I took too many drugs, you know.

Can we ask what kind of drugs? Because I I mean, not that I'm trying to be like which kind of drugs lead to but you didn't just like smoke some weed and almost die, right? No. Yeah. So, at this point in time in my life, I was re I was at the tail end of my active addiction. And so I was basically a dumpster for drugs. This particular day I went down my drugal log that I had that I did every day. But this day I decided to do a little bit extra of each because I was going to go do my laundry and like that's so boring. So might as well be real messed up for something so boring. And I guess just the combination of all the things at with that little bit of added extra just absolutely was not going to happen. So my daily drug regimen was heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, mushrooms, LSD, like I was really a dumpster for drugs. So just anything I can get my hands on. But yeah.

So tell me what happened. So you were in the bathroom at some point. You have a recollection of that moment of being conscious and aware and then something happened. Yeah. My body kind of collapsed. I and I could see myself outside of myself. So that's the out-of-body experience which is a hallmark of an NDE. Definitely. And I was like, "Wow, she looks really messed up." But so the first part of my experience was a a life review. That's what it felt like. I started to experience every feeling that could happen, not just in my own life, but that happened on Earth. So like every emotion, every experience was happening to me simultaneously all at the exact same moment. My whole consciousness was completely cracked open. And some of the really vivid things is that, you know, like I shared, I was an active addiction for over 20 years. And the very end of my active addiction was a horror show. I mean, like, I was manipulating people. I was tormenting them. I was stealing. I was lying. I was cheating. And so, in my life review, those were the things that I started to experience right away. And it was so dark and it was so dense. And I just remember thinking, I must be dead and I'm in hell. Like I didn't believe that anything happens after you die. I was a pretty staunch atheist, but I definitely wasn't expecting what I was experiencing. And I was like, well, this is way worse than I thought. And so, as I was experiencing all of those super dense emotions, I had some life experiences start to flood back to me to experience both sides of it. Like in my life, trigger warning, but my parents were both drug addicts and they committed suicide together when I was in my early 20s due to their addiction. And you know they were really immersed in pro poverty as well. So I started to experience their suicide but from their perspective and again it just felt like the most agonizing betrayal of life. It just felt so painful like every cell in my body was being shredded apart. And I I went through the whole process with them. Like I saw things from their suicide that I didn't know had happened. Like I watched them drive to the pharmacy to go pick up their refills that they used to overdose. I watched them write their suicide notes together. I watched them embrace each other as their bodies started dying. And the pain that I was experiencing was so overwhelming. And so I just thought, "Okay, I'm seeing my parents. I know that they're dead, so I must be dead." And and then in that moment, I started to hear my dad's voice came through to me in this very tangible, present way. And he just started chanting to me," you are worthy of all the love in the universe. You are worthy of all the love in the universe. And I didn't believe that, but I I believed him. Like, I trusted his voice. And so, I started to follow his voice. And that's when I landed in the light of the near-death experience.

My Alex Breakdown is supported by BetterHelp. Running a podcast with a mental health and wellness focus. We come across a ton of mental health content online on social media. And we understand how overwhelming all the social media noise around wellness can feel super overwhelming. Just the staggering amount of material is one thing, but also there's false and misleading information. These days, it feels like there's advice for everything. Cold plunges, gratitude journals, screen detoxes. But how do you know what actually works for you? Using trusted resources and talking to live therapists can get you personalized recommendations and help you break through the noise. There's so many helpful things that I find online, on social media, all these places. But there is nothing like being vulnerable one-on-one with a real live therapist. And with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of five for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. It's convenient. You can join a session with a therapist with a click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life and switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse range of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/break. That's betterhp.com/break.

My Alex breakdown is supported by thrivecosmetics. You know, during the summer, I like to keep my makeup look relatively simple. I want to look refreshed without going full glam. Maybe a little BB cream or a tinted lotion, some mascara, a little blush. Nothing too wild, nothing too out there. Summer's about looking and feeling your best without piling it on. Thrive Cosmetics is your go-to for a simple, clean, and radiant summer look. Minimal effort, maximum impact. Every product 100% vegan, cruelty-free, and made with clean, skinloving ingredients that work with your skin, not against it. We love Thrive Cosmetics because they give back to a ton of causes that are important to so many of us, like cancer, domestic abuse, homelessness, and poverty, and racial and social justice. For every product purchased, Thrive Cosmetics donates products and funds to help communities thrive. I love their liquid lash extensions mascara. People always say, "What is on your lashes?" Well, that's what it is. It's a vegan tubing mascara with over 40,000 five-star reviews. It's sweatproof for the summer with six shades that last all day without clumping, smudging, or flaking. And it's easy to remove. Maximize your look with minimal effort. Go to thrivecosmetics.com/mbb for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics caucb.

My MB Alex Breakdown is supported by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor. IQ Bar is the better for you plant protein-based snacks made with brain boosting nutrients to refuel, nourish, and satisfy hunger without the sugar crash. Their plant protein bars are packed with high quality ingredients to help keep you physically and mentally fit. IQ Bar is totally free from gluten, dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial sweeteners. For a natural anytime snack, they have nine delicious flavors. And more people than ever are starting their days on the right foot with IQ Bars, brain and body boosting bars, hydration mixes, and mushroom coffees. Jonathan is crazy for these. I find the wrappers everywhere. No joke, I have at least one of these a day. They are absolutely my go-to. I cannot speak more highly of IQ Bars. And right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text breakdown to 64,000. Text breakdown to 64,000. That's breakdown to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. [Music]

Before we go fully into this, I have heard part of this story and it's like already you can feel the intensity of the shift when your father comes in. Um, take us backwards before this. And actually, you know, my you and I, we've spoken to some of the leading researchers of near-death experience. We spoke to Dr. Bruce Grayson. We spoke to Jim Tucker. What you're describing when you say you left your body and you could see yourself, the current medical understanding is that that's not possible. If we frame this at the point where we go outside of what's currently understood by people other than the these experts.

Well, yeah. I don't I mean I think that the notion of this out-of-body experience is one that um, you know, takes us into a conversation of like literally who are we? Um and I think some of this you can explain much better than we can. you know, we have more of a, you know, sort of lay person's understanding of like what is consciousness and who are we? Now, if anyone's had a psychedelic experience or a transcendental experience, you you can understand what ego death is. It's the part when like the anxious people who take mushrooms are like, "What do I have to go to the hospital now?" Um, but that notion of sort of like losing yourself. So what you're describing though is that there is a self that can observe the vessel that we are physically in, but that our consciousness as we know it does not have to have a body to reside. Right. Yeah. And I think that this gets into the debate of do you need scientific black and white on a piece of paper evidence or can you leave room in your life for mystery and faith? So the whole world is just this belief system. We're all designing our own belief system. I would have I would I didn't know about any of this before it happened to me and I didn't believe it for months after it happened to me either.

And but that's exactly what we're doing here. Sort of the purpose of our podcast has always been human experience from a first person lived narrative expanding the realm and people getting consciousness expansion, having awakenings, having things that they can't explain. and some of the scientists who are catching up trying to make sense of it and expanding the sort of quote unquote world order to make sense of things. And so what I love in in this moment that we're harping in on is this moment of a change in consciousness whereby all of a sudden we're seeing things that are outside of what's physically happening. You're having extra sensory experience. you've gone off to some other realm and we're going to get fully into that. Before we do that, take us backwards to how you got to that moment in the bathroom.

Yeah. So, I it's some of my origin story that I think kind of really sets up for the the impact of the near-death experience. I grew up in this really traumatizing environment. It was super chaotic. It was full of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, addiction. And so my whole life I was just taught that if anything uncomfortable happens to you, don't talk about it. Just medicate it and sedate it. And I just and and the reason that I learned that is because I watched everybody else in my family do that. And so I just took all these mental notes. Nobody ever shot me up with drugs, you know, nobody ever handed me my first bag of heroin, but I just kept making all these mental notes. I was watching what the adults in my family were doing and I said, I'm going to do that the second that I can.

And where did you grow up? I grew up in Las Vegas. So, perfect setting for absolute debauchery to take place in a person's life.

Talk a little bit about sort of what your entry point was into the world of addiction. Um, there's many different kinds of stories and for those of us who grow up in the disease, we see it um all around us and some of us have different coping mechanisms. some of us choose the same coping mechanisms. Um, you know, when was your first attempt to say, "I'm going to fill the god-shaped hole with this." Yeah. I think when I really think about it in a in a tracing it back sort of way, I think that sugar was probably my first addiction. Food really came in and comforted me. And it was almost weaponized too a little bit food in my house and it was used as a reward. And so there was just all of these different things around it. Fantasy addiction came into my life really early, too. I would love to just escape the world that I was actually witnessing and just pretend that I was somewhere else. And then drugs came into my life around 12 years old, probably the first time that I tried substances. And maybe by the time I was 15, I knew that I was in love with substances. Really truly in love with them.

What did it do? What did it feel like? Yeah. So my first my first real drug was methamphetamine because I grew up in Las Vegas and this is like little pre-Breaking Bad era. That's really what it was like. There was just like all of these trailers that were blowing up because they were meth labs out in the middle of the desert. And I was a really good student. I was actually a good kid. I was trying to escape the cycle of my family, which again is like no education, poverty, rinse, repeat over and over again. And I was in all these advanced placement classes. And one of the girls from one of my classes came over to study and she said, "Hey, do you want to stay up all night and study?" And I was like, "Yeah, I definitely do. That sounds great." And then studying went right out the window after we did this drug for the first time. And it just progressed from there. It got really bad. The first time I went to rehab, I was 18. And I knew that I had a problem, but I wasn't going to stop using substances at 18. When am I never going to have a glass of champagne when I turn 21? As if I was ever going to drink champagne. That was like not my my thing. But yeah, it really, you know, the progression of the disease of addiction is so insane. And it just swept me away. But after my parents died from their addiction, I had these two voices. One said, "You need to stop using drugs. They just killed your parents." And then the other voice said, "You have to keep using. It's all that you have left of them. What kind of this is your legacy. You have to continue the legacy of your family no matter how you know no matter how bad it is."

What was the home like that you grew up in? Did you have siblings? Was there extended family? Yeah. So, grew up around cousins, aunts, I have a little sister and the life inside the home was a lot of physical abuse. My parents really they didn't like each other but they stayed together because this is what they were taught to do. You just stay unhappy and you stay miserable and you take it out on each other. So I think I learned really young that fighting equals love, that abuse equals love, danger. Yeah. And yeah, mistaking chaos for connection. And so I repeated all those patterns well into until I got into recovery and I was like, "Oh, wow. I am also a toxically codependent person. I don't actually want to die with somebody like my parents did. I want to live with someone. I want to learn how to actually live a real life."

The subject of your parents is I think one of the most painful you know circumstances um that anyone could imagine. Um you were out of the house by the time that your parents passed. Correct. Yes. And um were you aware that they wanted to end their lives? My mom was super suicidal for many years before she actually completed suicide. She had probably tried to kill herself at least a dozen times. When you Wow. Yeah, definitely. And that's just in the last couple of years before they actually died, but I never in a million years could have ever conceptualized that my father would do that or that they would do it together.

What was it about your father that felt like you couldn't imagine that? I don't know. He just even though his life was really hard, he just seemed like that was not an option. And I used to see how upset he would get every time that my mom tried and he would call her names and tell her that she wasn't allowed to leave us like that and that wasn't the way that we do things. And yeah, and you know, in my life review, I felt how desperate they felt just on that verge of it was agony.

Yeah. I guess I'm curious and I I know it's hard. Um, generally when you ask someone this, that person hasn't had interactions with these people in an NDE. But I'm wondering before that NDE, what was your understanding of your parents' decision to sort of leave that way? Was it simply that the cost of living was too high emotionally? Like what what was it? So this was the height of the oxycotton epidemic. And my parents would go around, they would doctor shop, they were prescribed over a thousand pills each every month. And they would sell half their pills. They would eat the other half. But every month they would always run out. And there was never enough pills to make money. Money enough to pay the rent or the lights or the gas or the phone bill. And so I know that I had gotten married three weeks before their suicide. And so I think that in their minds they were thinking, well, the big one has a husband now. She'll take care of the little one. My sister had just gotten her first grown-up job in a casino. So in Las Vegas, when you get into a casino, you're set for life if that's all that you want to do with your life. And so I know that they had some rationalization to their decision. And they were going through a really intense detox. And the day of their suicide was the day that they were able to pick up their refills again. And they just decided, I can't do this again next month. that I'm just going to be done with this now.

What was it like when you found out? Oh, I found them. Yeah. My sister and I found them. And it was terrible. I've done a lot of healing around it. So, I'm able to talk about it without falling apart, but me 10 years ago, I could have never been able to do this. Uh, we got to their house. My sister had spent the night at my house for her weekend from work, which was like a Tuesday Wednesday. And my dad called us on on Wednesday in the day and he said, "Hey, keep your sister for another night. The lights are still turned off. The gas is turned off and there's nothing for her to do here." And I was like, "Okay, no problem." And the next day we were calling them all day to see if it was okay to bring her home and no answer. And I just started to get like this eerie feeling and so did she. And so we drove over to their house to see what was going on. And when we pulled up to the house, we could hear the smoke alarms from outside. And so, of course, we run to the door. We touch the door handle. It's not hot. Bust inside. My first instinct is to run to the stove because they would nod out all the time. They were opiate addicts and benzo addicts. So, I'm thinking, okay, they were cooking something. They left the stove on and now there's some sort of fire. I run to the stove and I put my hands on it and I could see this fine layer of soot. I see my handprint on the stove. And then I remember, oh wait, the gas is turned off. There can't be a fire on the stove. And then I hear my sister's scream from upstairs in their bedroom. And she comes tumbling down the stairs as I go climbing up them. And I get into my parents' room and I just see my father's body slumped over the side of the bed. And I see the whole blanket is just littered in pill bottles and pills. And because there was no electricity turned on, they had lit candles inside the room. And as their bodies were dying, they flung themselves off the bed. and my mother's body hit the candle, which then caught a lamp on fire, which caught the the wall on fire. By the time that we had gotten there, it had extinguished itself, but the sound of the smoke alarms was still going off. And yeah, it was so traumatizing. And my sister was screaming her head off. And I was so scared that they were going to take her away from me because they were going to put her in an insane asylum. And now I realize that that was the only normal reaction to have to a situation like this. But yeah, it was a really messed up situation and it kept me strung out on drugs to medicate that.

So, I was just going to say you weren't clean at the time. I was I I had about two weeks clean. I had just detoxed myself and and I was at this war with myself and I remember my parents left the pills that they knew that I could sell on the bed and I said, "All I have to do is just grab these and put these into my pockets before the police get here and I I'll be okay. I'll feel better." And I was at this crossroads and I just I just told myself that there was no way that I could get through this pain without using.

So how old were you at this time? 23. I'm trying to do the math now. Yeah. This was 17 years ago. It'll be 18 years ago this this year.

So what was the course of that kind of journey for you? And then how did that get us to the NDE? Yeah, you know, my whole life was just trying to medicate this wound and and I and I abandoned my sister and I left her across the country. I said that I couldn't deal and I said that I didn't want to be her mom and our mom didn't want to be our mom and I just destruction everywhere. I wanted everybody to hurt as deeply and badly as I hurt. I didn't even know that there was a way to heal from anything. And so I just kept going around causing harm everywhere that I went.

What was the next decade of your life like? Oh, it was total chaos. Total chaos. Marriages, divorces, apartments found, apartments lost, like dozens of jobs just bouncing around from place to place. No foundation, no stability. Just use, destroy, rinse, repeat over and over and over again.

Where were you in the in I had I had moved uh back to New York where my extended family is and that's where my parents were from and I I was born there. So I I'm in Brooklyn this whole time just, you know, causing havoc in the streets of New York City.

And did your sister go back to New York as well? No, no, no. I left her in Las Vegas and she built a whole life for herself despite, you know, the most tragic circumstances and her sister abandoning her for drugs. It was like the whole family for the whole family except for my sister, drugs was more important than anything else. Um I want to ask about you know an aspect of your story which a lot of people don't talk about and a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about it. Um, sex work is part of a lot of um, addiction stories and um, you know, we talk about sort of the the lengths that we go to, you know, and the situations that we find ourselves in and I wonder um, if there's a perspective you can offer us about sort of, you know, I'm not going to ask you why you did that. I think we understand, right? Um, but I'm curious, you know, with your hindsight, what sort of that feels like for you to think about, you know, also how close you were to sort of losing so many parts of yourself, right?

Yeah. Oh, I did lose a ton of parts of myself. It took me I mean, I'm still on a healing process from, you know, how I treated myself and my body. The one thing that I took away from my spiritual experience was that there's no such thing as condemnation. So, if I want to be a prostitute and do whatever I want, I'm still going to heaven when I'm done here. Like, there's there's no way that I'm not getting back there. If I already made it there once, I'm definitely going back there again. But, you know, and I know that sex work is very empowering for a lot of women. I mean, so they say, I I'll believe them if that's what they're going with. For me, this was something that I did because I needed money to get drugs and no other reason. And it caused a lot of damage to me. I saw men in this really distorted way and then I became very empathetic and compassionate towards them and I started to hate women and I was just like this very selfhating. I was like an anti-feminist. I used to go on these long rants about how women are the worst and I just really really did not like myself and I didn't have any scope of what it meant to love my body like love my temple and to not share it with everybody. this is not meant for everyone. And that's something that I've had to learn over time and heal all those pieces of it. But yeah, you know, for me, sex work was not an empowering thing. It was really the end of the line and it was the bottom of rock bottom.

We're we're you know kind of taking this decade of your life and we're sort of like you know shrinking it and you know trying to sort of arrive at um, you know, you came to a point where you obviously were using to the level that it could kill you really at any time like once you're, you know, and this is something I tell my teenagers, you know, once you enter the land of, you know, and like insert drug here, whatever, um, there's a certain dance with death that you're doing. Can you sort of talk a little bit about what looking back now, what was Betty experiencing that there was a level of comfort in dancing with death?

Yeah, addiction is soft suicide. So, I wasn't going to flat out do it, but I was absolutely ready for it at any moment. And again, I was an atheist. I thought that it just meant blackness and nothing else. And I was totally okay with that. darkness and nothingness was way better than what I was experiencing. And I think that it felt it felt comforting to be in that level of chaos. It felt so normal. That's how I grew up. I grew up in that level of chaos. So just not knowing felt empowering. And you know, it's funny because in recovery they say like just live for today. And in active addiction, I was just living for today as well, just in a totally different way. Hey, it was like just live for today because you might die at the end of the day and today it's like just live for today because that's all that we can do is we just need to stay present. So yeah, it's so strange how like both sides of that coin. But yeah, you know, this soft suicide that I was dancing with for so long was really just to hide the pain.

Mind Alex Breakdown is supported by Shopify. Starting your own business can be intimidating and downright stressful. Thanks to all the hats that you suddenly have to learn to wear. Like when we started this podcast, it felt like we had to figure out everything on our own. Book guests, film, brand design, release episodes. It's very overwhelming and every day seemed to introduce a new decision that we needed an answer to. We wish we had found Shopify then, but thankfully we have it now to simplify our podcast life. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gym Shark and brands that are just getting started to an indie podcast like my NBA breakdown. Get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. Accelerate your content creation. Shopify's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you've got a marketing team behind you and easily create email and social media campaigns. Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/breakdown. Go to shopify.com/breakdown. shopify.com/bredddredddown.

Mindball breakdown is supported by Symbiotica. So many people are struggling right now with stress management, with sleep issues, disrupted focus. Well, Symbiotica is here to the rescue with high-quality supplements you can trust that your body can actually absorb. Jonathan and I love the magnesium L3 and 8. It reduces brain fog, calms and balances mood, and helps support restful sleep. Magnesium L3rionate is the salt formed for mixing magnesium and thriionic acid, a water-soluble substance derived from the metabolic breakdown of vitamin C. Its liposomal delivery means faster nutrient absorption and its patented compound effectively crosses the blood brain barrier. Plus, we're big fans of the very yummy vanilla cream flavor. I love that it is stress-free to incorporate Symbiotica into healthy habits. Even during vacations and road trips, the packets fit right into my bag for whenever I need support. Stay consistent this summer with Symbiotica. If you've been feeling off, give it a try. Made a huge difference for us. Go to symbiotica.com/break for 20% off plus free shipping. That's symbiotica.com/break for 20% off plus free shipping.

Did you try or did you go into rehab other times? Oh yeah, definitely. How many times did you try? At least a dozen times. And what was that like when you would go? You know, I never really went into detox and rehab with the intention of getting clean and staying clean. I just went into Where were you going? Just to rest, recalibrate, reset so that the so that the drugs will work again cuz they stopped working. Yeah. What does that mean when when you say they stopped working? Yeah. You know, you could take you just you build up a tolerance. So maybe I would use five bags of heroin a day and at one point in time that would get me high. But then it just became maintenance and it was just to not get sick and I wanted to be able to get high again. So I would go into detox for a week. Sometimes I would go for a couple weeks into rehab. I did try once to really truly give it a shot cuz my second husband had left me and I thought, okay, if I stop using drugs, maybe I can get him back. And my favorite reason to stop using drugs. Definitely, which didn't work. And yeah, I left I left the long-term facility that I was in because they wouldn't let me draw on my eyebrows and I was like, I'm not staying here.

Your eyebrows are kind of unfruitful. Well, now they're tattooed on my face.

For someone who hasn't been in this world or known people in this world, can you just check into a facility? Like, how does it work? you're sort of clearly inactive addiction and then you just decide and you're just able there's just opportunity to check yourself in. Tell us a little bit about the I love that you're making space for this because some people really don't know and they think that you have to have a bunch of money to go into a detox or rehab maybe a fancy one but there's all of these state funded detoxes. Yes. Yes. And so yeah, I would just go to the hospital because most hospitals do, at least in New York, I don't know what it's like out here, but most hospitals do have a detox and a rehab within them. And so I would just go to the hospital whether my insurance was turned on or not, the hospital would help me take care of that and I could get a bed inside of a detox or a rehab. And it's multiple weeks. Like what is that process like? And the second part of that question is tell us a little bit about the agony of detox because I think a lot of people don't understand. and they're like, "Oh, you should just stop doing drugs and get your head right and this is a moral issue." Like, tell us about the hook of and pain of detox.

Yeah. So, just, you know, and I I work in the the field of substance use disorder today and insurance isn't great. And so, today it doesn't let you stay in rehab as long as you used to be able to. It used to be 28 days. Now, it's more like 11. And which is impossible. How's a person supposed to get well after 11 days? It's totally insane. Well, they'll get you dry, right? Yes. And then maybe not even, you know, I don't know. They don't really set you up for success either. You know, I'm a product now. I went into a long-term treatment facility that I'm so grateful for. And I stayed there for a year and a half because I just needed foundation. And it was, it sucked. It sucked. I had all these rules I had to follow. I hated all the people I was there with. I hated myself. I didn't know who I was.

But I was draw your eyebrows. Yeah. They let me after a month, you're allowed to draw your eyebrows on. They're like, "You will detox with no eyebrows." Right. Right. Right. Um, but yeah, you know, the system I don't know if the system is set up to help people, but that's why I put myself in those spaces. That's why I want to work in that field. That's why I want to be present for people going through recovery because maybe the system isn't set up to help us, but you know, we can have little lights set up along the way. And that's the people who choose to work in that field. Like, it's not glamorous. So when you go into a facility like that and your body is addicted and with heroin like every single cell and every mechanism of every single cell is addicted to that drug and the definition of addiction is when you stop using it the symptoms become intolerable and you start using again to prevent the symptoms. So explain what happens when you go in uh the first handful of days are apparently hell on earth. Talk about the withdrawal process and kind of that detox process and then what happens at let's say one week versus two weeks versus four weeks.

Yeah, withdrawal is hell. Literal hell. And you the worst part about opiate withdrawal is that there's nothing there's nothing physically wrong with you, but it feels like someone is stabbing you over and over and over again in your eyeball and it's just so insanely painful. And so it feels like physical pain. So, you know, our our pain receptors in our mind are all messed up because we've been feeding it these opiates. And so, they have the feeling of euphoria. And so, when they don't have euphoria, they don't have the drug inside of your brain, then your body assumes that you're in pain. And so, everything's all messed up. And it takes about a week for it to reset itself. But people run away from that week of pain for decades of their life because that's how unbearable that week of pain is. The craving is so it's so visceral, right? And just to escape the physical pain. And yeah, the mental addiction is terrible as well. And the worst withdrawal that I ever went through was from alcohol. That was the absolute worst. I had a bunch of seizures as a result. It was it was terrifying. So, you know, there's only a couple drugs that you can have a physical addiction to, and that's opiates, benzo, and alcohol. But my mental addictions to the other drugs were absolutely insane. you know, methamphetamine totally destroyed my brain and it made me think that I couldn't operate or do anything without a stimulant inside of me.

So, yeah, you know, the the process of getting through that first week of detox, if you can get through that, then you're looking forward to the next couple weeks of What do you do in that week? Nothing. You

Sleep, uh, that they might... You pray to sleep, right?

Oh, yeah. Definitely. That's all you want to do. Like being awake is bad. I remember in one institution that I was in, I went up to the nurses' station and I said, "I need more Adavan. I need more sedation." And they said, "No, you're maxed out. You can't have anymore." And I said, "Then find a rock and hit me over the head." I was just so ready to be knocked out, 'cause I could not sleep. And it really is so, insanely, you know, sleep deprivation is insane.

So, talk about what happens after that first week, and then what happens at two weeks versus four. Yeah, I think like maybe you can find a little glimmer of hope around four weeks, but the first month, everything is just so confusing. And, you know, there's science that says that it takes 21 days to reroute a neural pathway. So, I think that that maybe might be why they used to have people stay in for 28 days, because there's some science around it. And in 12-step rooms, they say to make 90 meetings in 90 days, because the science used to say that it took 90 days to reroute a neural pathway. So, we need to create new habits. Do they make you go to meetings there?

Sometimes the meetings come into the institutions. Yeah. I work for a... You think that would be an important part of recovery, is trying to give people tools?

Well, so, you know, now the model is not abstinence-based recovery. The whole world of recovery is based around a harm reduction model today. And I won't get into, like, all my resentments against Big Pharma or anything, but...

Please do. We're very resentful.

So, you know, they want, they want you to be on some sort of medication. So whether that's methadone or Suboxone or Vivitrol, they want you to be on a medication because that's how they make money. But really, I've, I'm a product of, of 12-step fellowship. I'm a product of abstinence. And it's not easy, but it's way worth it. Way, way worth it.

Do you want to rail on Big Pharma for a second?

I'm never going to defend Big Pharma. And I've seen all the documentaries. I've seen "Dope." Like, I've seen them all, and I'm obsess- obsessed with this whole notion. And also, you know, this is, I mean, I, I think people should be marching in the streets over this, like, what, how, how, um, but, you know, I think something that is also true is that, you know, those, those medications are a, a crutch for many people who are not finding sobriety. And so, for, for some people, for some people, it is a way to be, um, entered back into society in ways that without it, they, they would not. Um, I, I'm not advocating one way or another, and I happen to be, you know, a person who believes in, like, the, the 12-step formulation, you know, and not Southern California 12-step, like, just general, like, sobriety. Um, but it's very complicated, though, because I do know people for whom they get their kids back, and they get, you know, aspects of their life back that, you know, I don't want to say that people who can't stay sober don't deserve to have lives, but it's very, very comp, it's a very complicated thing.

Yeah. And I will say this, you know, the drugs have changed, and so drugs are killing people. Like, drugs aren't getting people high, they're murdering them. And so the thing about using a secondary medication is that you won't die. And that's really what we want. We want people to stay alive long enough to figure out what does life look like? What does sobriety look like for you? So let's just at least keep them alive. So there definitely are benefits.

So, you did this, let's say, 12 times or so?

Over and over. And, um, take us to what happened now when you're kind of going about your life. You're doing all the things that you need to do, essentially, right? To survive. How many times were you married?

Three.

I'm quite a catch. They just throw me back and forth.

And you didn't have children?

No children.

Okay. Were you divorced at the time of the 2019 NDE?

Not divorced, but defin- not together.

Okay. Got it. So, um, you've lived this kind of 10 years, let's say, right, or so. And now I want you to reframe for us, right? Here's your regimen of the drugs that you do. Also, I'm going to ask a heroin question. How long does one bag last? Is that one experience?

Well, it depends, I guess, on the person. And at that point in time, I really didn't have a lot of money. So, I was making a bag last, you know, just to not get sick.

I see. Not to get high anymore.

But heroin doesn't even exist anymore. The whole drug supply now is just fentanyl. So...

But, you know, like, so the, the shelf life of fentanyl would be like a four-hour high. Heroin would be like an eight-hour high, but heroin doesn't exist anymore.

Okay. So, you've got your regimen and you're in the bathroom.

Yeah. So after this kind of dark life review experience that I was having, I started to follow my father's voice and I go into the light. And...

Actually, hold on. Before we go there. So the only thing that I understand distinguishes your experience from a clinical NDE as they usually are, are are kind of classified, is typically NDEEs are overwhelmingly positive and don't have dark aspects. But I'm going to go ahead and give Betty the benefit of the doubt here, because there could have been altered states of consciousness that occurred in a transition to what otherwise sounds like a completely standard issue NDE.

Totally. I... Does that feel accurate?

Yes. Yes. You can feel all the emotions, but I, I like how you describe the emotions as dense, right? There's the, which to me sounds like kind of like a visceral, like, you know, feeling all the things. Does, is that clear?

Absolutely. And just to walk us back into the story that you're going to tell, I don't know what day of the week it is. I'm imagining it's a Tuesday. I don't know why.

It's a Wednesday.

Perfect.

It's a Wednesday. You have to do laundry. You're re-upping. Trying to make laundry less boring. You take more drugs than you normally take. And now you do, you start to feel sick? Like, walk us, like, through the moment. Did the laundry get into the wash, or would you not even get there?

It did get into the wash.

So, this is all happening with wet clothes.

Got it.

So, the laundry. So, you, you get high enough to go do the laundry, you come back into your apartment, I, I'm imagining, because you're waiting for the laundry. And now you start to feel sick. Like, walk us into the moment before you get onto the bathroom floor.

Yeah. So, yeah, it started in the laundromat. I had taken the drugs before I went there. I live in Brooklyn, so like, we don't have in, in the apartment washers and dryers. So, my laundromat was about six blocks from my house.

That's a long walk.

And I went and I started putting, I put the clothes into the washing machine. I'm putting the quarters in. And then all of a sudden, I know something's not right. Just this whole body tingling starts to take over me.

But not in a good way.

Kind of in a good way, but then also in a super terrifying way. Like, oh, I, it like a wave coming. Like, oh, this is not just going to be a regular wave. This is going to be a tidal wave. It turns into a tsunami. And I sort of had that awareness that something was about to happen. I tried to record myself on my phone 'cause I was like, "This is going to be crazy. I need to document this." And I couldn't because I couldn't figure out how to use the phone. So then I leave the...

Tell me you're high without telling me you're high.

Right. Right. I leave the laundromat and I start running home like I'm booking it 'cause I know something terrible is about to happen. And it felt like I was stuck inside of a loop. I would make it to the corner and I saw the street signs and it said Stson and Madison. And then I run to the next corner and it says Madison and Stson again. And then all the buildings around me started to crumble and all that was left was the green lines of matrix code that make them up.

Wait, so you're you're hallucinating, or you're in the matrix? Like, you're, I mean, you're out of the matrix.

I feel like the way that I can conceptualize it now is that my soul took the VR headset off, right? Like all of our souls are just kind of chilling in heaven and we have these VR headsets on and we've fallen asleep with them on, like we've forgotten that we're inside the game. But in this moment, my headset came off and I could see the whole architecture of the game. And then this bright white light came and just flooded everything.

And you're on the street.

I'm on the street losing my mind. Yeah, losing my mind. I finally made it back to my house and I, I closed the door and I was in the entryway and I thought, "Oh, I'm definitely dead because this is like the movie Beetlejuice. I don't know how long it took me to get back here. I can't remember where I was before this and I don't know what the heck is going on." And and that's when I started to collapse and have all of these feelings take over my body from my crown to my feet, just over and over and over again. This rapid firing of energy. And that's when the spiritual experience really started to take place. And I was downloaded with, I, I have language for it today. I experienced a spontaneous Kundalini awakening, which is like this life force energy activation. My soul came online and activated for the first time ever. Definitely never was before. And so I saw the fabric of creation. I remember asking the question, why? Why? Why does Earth exist? Why this? Why that? And just being downloaded with this.

What's the answer, B?

So, I guess like the short way to put it, and again, I came back with this two-gig drive, like, I don't have the whole infinitess, you know, that, I don't have a big enough hard drive for that, but...

It's bigger than mine.

It was supposed to be this really fun place where we exchanged energy and, and we created, so like a Sim City that we were all collectively building together. The simulation theory is like a big part of my experience. And I, I like using video game analogies because I feel like it, it connects with a younger generation that, you know, they all need this information, too. They're having awakenings as well. If I'm having a awakening, they're definitely going to have awakenings. So, we all decided to create this thing together. And then some of the energy got in balance. Some of the divine feminine, the divine masculine, the shadow, the light, the whole idea of duality started to take place. We fell into duality. At first, it was just this beautiful spiritual experience and we were all in our light bodies. And then the fall of, you know, the fall of creation was, I believe it was us falling into human form, or believing that we're in human form, falling into a layer of the dream that we forgot that we were dreaming, and we think goes really, really slow.

You mentioned having a lot of questions on the other side. Did you have, were you a question-asking person before this? Did all of a sudden, were you surprised that you had all these questions when you got there?

I don't know if I had a lot of questions. "Why?" was definitely a question, like, why? Why does this exist? I was a quiz person, but at that point in my life, my whole life was just drugs. So my questions were more like, where can I get? How much money do I need? Who can I manipulate? But I, I had never pondered, what is the Earth experience? What, what does it mean to be a human? I had never had any quantum questions come into my mind. I didn't even have any vocabulary before my experience. It was just this long laundry list of drugs that I used and how much money it cost to be with me. I didn't need any other thoughts in my head.

This is one of the, you know, really fascinating components of NDEs is people often describe coming back, and I want to get into some of your other, kind of, special abilities, right? Um, but one of the, the very unique things, um, you know, that that we've often heard about, and when we spoke to Elizabeth Cone, who was struck by lightning and came back with very special abilities and changed her whole life, um, and had, has precognitive visions and things like that. You know, the download that she received was not in her vocabulary, right? So, she was on the pavement after being struck for a few minutes and had a world of information that was downloaded in those few minutes, right? And that's what's so interesting to me is that, like, something is getting downloaded that definitely feels like it's from outside of Betty, right? And when, when you describe these things, when Elizabeth, when a lot of people with NDEs describe these things, they sound like Kundalini mystics. They sound like Kabbalists, right? The Jewish, you know, Kabbalah system. Uh, they sound like theoretical physicists, because if you talk to quantum people, and we talked to a lot of theoretical physicists here, they have almost an identical description from a different perspective, right? From a transcendental perspective or from a mathematical perspective, right? And this notion of, you know, Thomas Campbell, like talks about like, it's just all zeros and ones. Like, we're, and the way you've described it is like this, Betty, this is not who you are. This is the avatar that we call Betty.

And in this iteration, you've been placed in this body. But tell us what you learned about your soul when you were in this state.

So, what I learned about my soul is that I'm part of a tribe. I have a soul family that I came here with. I learned that my soul planned my life before I got here. Planned out all the major markers of my life. So, all these big plot points that were going to happen in the story of my life. These are some of the things that I learned about what a soul is. And, you know, how a physicist might have a different approach to how to process this information. Because I was a methhead prostitute when I entered the space of eternity, the only thing that they could do to help me understand about what is Earth and what is life was they just started showing me little clips of movies because that was the only, I, I needed pop culture because I had never read a book on philosophy. I don't know anything, really. And so they showed me "The Matrix," they showed me "Inception," and they showed me "What Dreams May Come," and they said, "These movies are the blueprint."

Stop it.

Yes. Yes. For reality. So...

"Dreams May Come" is a fantastic and very underrated movie, but a lot of people don't know about it.

So, all of us Matrix heads who are like, this is really touching, and like the Wachowski siblings are like, definitely touch something.

Well, so, you know, "The Matrix" is a modern-day telling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Of course it is. Of course it is, Betty.

Everybody knows that. These are things I know now.

So, the thing about, you know, the Allegory of the Cave and and "The Matrix," it's not about necessarily escaping the matrix. We don't, we're not going to do that. It's not going to happen in this lifetime. We're not going to escape the matrix.

Not with that attitude, we won't.

That's true. Maybe if enough of us get together, maybe we can. But it's about manipulating the energy inside of the matrix, or not allowing the matrix to win. So the, you know, it's a video game that we're inside of. The matrix is the video game that we're inside of. And the big boss of the video game is the game itself. So, am I going to be distracted by matrix tricks, like paying attention to politics or whatever's going on in the world, or things that are totally out of my control? Or am I going to do what my soul came here to do, and that's to focus on my individual mission, to connect with the members of my soul family, to do righteous things, to be of service, and to live a fulfilled life?

Okay. I'm going to ask you a hard question. I love you, first of all. Like, this is amazing. I'm going to ask you a really hard question.

Some people think you're insane.

Oh, totally. Some people think that people, and not just you, I don't mean to make it personal, that people who had NDEs and who were like, "I have a soul family. I came, I met God." Like, "Oh, you're what we call clinically insane." And Western medicine knows how to solve that, and that's to sedate you. Like, you were on the wrong kind of drugs, Betty. We're going to give you the right kind that makes Big Pharma a lot of money. We're going to quiet all that down.

You're okay. Stop being so uppity. Stop trying to find your purpose. What you probably need is to get married and have kids, right? And like, you know, so what do you say when people hear your story and they're like, "Oh, that's a woman who had a mental breakdown because she was a poor drug addict, prostitute, and that's what happens." And guess better pull herself up by her bootstraps 'cause she's crazy.

I never want...

I don't think that.

No, I totally, I hear you.

I never want to be considered sane in an insane world. Never. I never ever want to fit into the box of what society says this experience is supposed to be like. And my life is awesome. Hello. I'm sitting here with you guys right now. Like, what the age? I used to be a homeless methhead prostitute strung out on heroin just six years ago. Okay. And now I'm sitting here. This is like incredible. Incredible. So it doesn't, I don't...

Surprise. This is hell.

Yes. So, okay, on my two-gig flash drive that I have, right, I had to bring in new belief systems, which means I had to delete some of the old ones. And one of the old ones is needing validation from other people. Some of the other things I had to let go of was guilt and shame about who I used to be. And that those are some of the programs that I deleted in order to upload these new programs that I live my life by, which is living by spiritual principles, by being in recovery, by living a life led by spirit. So when people say, there's this great TED Talk, let me just reference this. It's called "Spiritual Awakening or Psychosis." And it's incredible. Incredible. And what this, what this man says inside of his TED Talk is that in indigenous cultures, when people start to hear voices, they cultivate that gift. They bring them to the medicine men and women of the tribe, and they cultivate this. And in the Western world, we medicate, sedate, institutionalize because we are so disconnected from spirit. And I think that, and I love LA because there's like a lot of woke people here. There's just like everybody is...

They're so woke. They really, I mean, there's a lot of people. I've walked down the street and people are talking about source and the universe and I'm like, this is wild.

Don't breathe in too deeply, you'll inhale IA.

But I do think that there are these, there's mass awakening happening. If I was awoken, I know that something is happening on a big, large scale. This was not part of my story.

Bring us sort of a little bit more chronological in terms of what you experience. So all of a sudden, you were describing, you have this whole life review. You're seeing all these aspects of your life.

It's dense.

It's very dense. It's in- it's intense. You're seeing details of your parents' suicide, which is just so painful. I can't even really imagine the intensity of the emotion that's happening. If you're seeing them write their notes and make that plan, how long does that feel? Like, walk us, let's really kind of dive in here and slow down. Like, help us understand what you're experiencing in that witness state.

Yeah. Felt, it felt like three seconds of time. Not even like a millisecond of time. I can't even conceptualize it in linear time. It was instant. Instant. Everything was happening instantaneously. It could have been 10 years that I was there, or it could have been 10 seconds.

Do you know how long the entire experience was, roughly?

Around eight hours.

Wow.

Yeah. 'Cause it was daytime when I fell out, and it was nighttime when I...

Were in the mood.

Oh, yeah. They were mildew. They were done. Yeah, they were.

And when you're watching your parents, is that happening really quickly in the other realm, or but, but it feels really intense? Like, how are you processing it? It's just like this screen that things are flashing through, like, describe it to us.

I mean, it's a download, the same way that you download something on a computer, like it's in-

It wasn't there and then it's there, right?

But you're processing it in a way, 'cause like when it downloads on a computer, you have to kind of open it and review it, but it's not. It's like downloaded and instantaneous, and you feel it and you know it, and it's like all of a sudden...

Yes, deep innate knowing. Everything is just knowing. And, yeah, it kind of plays out like a movie, a lot. And there's nothing actually going on. You're just in blankness, but then your mind's eye is creating all this scenery.

So you see your parents. What else do you see in that life review?

I saw all the women that I harmed. I harmed a lot of women in active addiction. Like, I would manipulate women. I'd get them strung out on drugs. I would prostitute them and prostitute myself, and they were all there, just like their faces, the pain, the agony, the emotions, and I was really witnessing the kind of person that I was. And wow, really not a good person. I thought that there was no consequences to anything that I did, and then here I am being confronted with the consequences. The consequences being that I have to feel this, and even though it's instantaneous and it's not super terrible, no, I don't want to live the rest of my life like that. So the life review kind of caps at that, and then I start to hear my dad, and he's telling me that I'm worthy of all the love in the universe. And so I start following him, and this is where I'm introduced to the concept of pre-birth planning. This is how the, the scene shifts, and I find myself on what feels like the deck of a spaceship. There's thousands of other souls all around me. Yeah.

What the spaceship look like?

The Gravitron ride from carnivals. Do you remember that? It's like a spinning disc that like you throw yourself up against the wall and like can go up. Divorce. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, I'm, I walk through the side of one of those walls. I don't know why that's important, but they always tell me to say it.

Maybe it's like shifting through a parallel reality, or that's just how... Oh, you broke through a barrier.

It's just like we're all so close. We're just one step away. Just like one little door into another realm. I'm surrounded by thousands of other souls. There's a commander in the center, this bright white light, and this commander is telling us that we're the most special volunteers. We've all signed up to go to Earth for the transformation of consciousness.

Stop it.

Yeah. This is, and, and I think that the light was Christ, or Krishna, or Buddha, whatever. Some sort of higher consciousness, right? Source.

But didn't have a form.

No form. Just a tube of light.

Tube of light. What color light?

Just white. Like...

A pillar of light.

Pillar of light. Yeah.

Biblical.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very biblical. Yeah.

And, um, you know, like, I don't really know what's going on, but I know that I'm a part of it.

No one knows what's going on.

Nobody knows what's going. What are the, what are the souls like? When you say there's thousands of just light bodies?

Yes. So like human shape, no gender, no features, just light. No gender.

No gender.

That's what I was imagining. Keep going.

Okay. So again, I don't know what's going on, but I know that I'm a part of it. We're all stoked. We're so excited. We're like, on Earth, here we go. Like, everybody is so happy.

And then my awareness shifts over to another scene. And I find myself in front of a table of beings, these four beings. It was a crappy banquet hall table, collapsible, like in a 12-step meeting. Yeah.

And it was nothing ornate. It was nothing beautiful. Nothing that you would expect in heaven. And I didn't know who the people were, but I knew that they were in charge of me, at least, if not all of creation. And they had this big giant book, and that was beautiful and ornate. And what kind of book?

It was like this big golden book. It was velvet. There was like red velvet and gold all around it. Records.

Yeah. And they were thumbing through it and they said, "It's really nice to see you. You're not meant to stay. You're only here for information." And I'm like, looking all around me. I'm like, "They're not talking to me, are they? Because I am definitely staying here. This place is tits. I love it. I am not going anywhere." And they said, "Nope, just information." And then they shove me into another scene and I find myself with this man and he, like an NPC. He had like a little thought bubble come up on the top of his head and it said, "Okay, let's pick your life." And he had this big empty grocery cart, and he starts, he starts pushing me through the aisles of a grocery store. And lining the walls of the grocery store aisles were these gigantic cereal boxes. And every cereal box had a life experience on it. And I'm this hungry little orb of light, this little soul. And I'm like, "I'm going to Earth for the great awakening. Let's do this." And I just start grabbing every cereal box that I can get my metaphorical hands on, because there's no physical hands there. And I was grabbing really dense stuff like...

How do you grab it with no hands? Just, just in it goes. You think it and there it is and it goes into this cart.

And I think that my imagery came through like this again because it felt like a video game. And I think that, you know, this, this kind of description is helpful to somebody, right? Like, there's all these amazing NDEers who have these super angelic, beautiful, light experiences. Mine's kind of clunky, and I love it. I love the way that mine came through for me.

Feels a little like pop culture. Feels a little fast. It feels a little like a lot of energy to it.

Definitely.

Okay. So, shopping cart, all the experiences going there.

Addiction, prostitution, family trauma. I picked my parents. They picked me. And because I was coming to Earth for this great awakening mission, which is the transformation of consciousness, I was, I had picked my family line because I was going to be exposed to a lot of life lessons that needed to be transmuted for the collective itself. Not just for me and that family, but for the whole collective. So as I heal, and the one moment that I like to talk about a lot is that I picked this cereal box that said "Childhood Sexual Trauma" on it. I threw it into the cart, and as I did, a little orb of light came out with the box, and that orb of light was the soul of the man who molested me when I was a small child, and we came orb to orb with each other, and we made this contract, and we loved each other so much. And again, my human brain cannot understand this at all.

We were just talking about this yesterday, like, you can't understand what it means to feel forgiveness in that realm. It's not like what we think of it now.

Yes. And also, because there's no such thing as linear time there, that's my soul doesn't know, like, "Oh, you're going to deal with that trauma for 40 years of your life." My soul just thinks like, man, that was, that's a little uncomfortable. I can deal with it. And it happens in an instant. And, and the underlying message is always forgiveness. So that's like what I think every soul is here to accomplish, some sort of forgiveness. Forgiveness for the world, forgiveness for other people, forgiveness for themselves. And so that is one part of the story that I like to highlight because out of all of the traumas that have happened in my life, now I'm experiencing this scene where I'm seeing that I chose all of it. All of it. All of these things that I felt victimized by my whole life. So now my chains of victimization are just completely broken off of me. And I feel like I could fly into the ether of outer space forever and ever. And I find myself back in front of the table of beings, and I throw myself on the ground. Again, like my mind's eye is constructing everything. I don't have a body there, but I'm crying out to them, and I'm like, "I can't believe this. This helps me so much. This makes so much sense. This is the information I've been waiting for my whole life. I'm not a victim to my circumstance. I am a divine co-creator of my reality. Thank you so much. I will still not be going back to Earth because that place sucks. But I'm really glad that I have all this information." And they were like, "No, you're going back." And I was like, "No, no, no. Like, I'm good. This is totally, like, I love it here. I feel reunion. I feel bliss."

Did you have an awareness of the self that was Betty at that time?

Oh, yeah. I could still see her body. Yeah. I could see, I could see my body outside the bathroom floor.

And she was naked and she was just, yeah, sprawled out.

Concerned about her at all? We were like, "No, go back into that."

When I refused to come back and I kind of transformed into a small child and I said, "No way. I will not go back. You guys do not tell us what Earth is actually like. I've been lied to. I will not go back." And they were like, "You say this every time that you come back home. You're always saying that we don't tell you." But we do. You just forget. That's part of the game is to forget.

You specifically, or you humans say this?

No, I, they were talking about me specifically, that I've been on Earth over and over and over again, playing this game.

But in theory, I would imagine, could be everybody. I think it's everyone. When you think of the oneness of everything, we are all the same soul energy.

And we all come back being like, "No one freaking told me how painful this is going to be and how joints stop working."

We do it over and over again. We do. We do it over and over again for fun.

There's no game like it.

Yeah. And there's nothing to do in heaven. It's just like emptiness and fullness at the same time. There's just nothing to do there. So, we're like, "Oh, Earth is on fire. Yeah, let's go there. That sounds fun." Fire. So when, when I was refusing to go back into my body, they said to me, "Well, you definitely have to go back." And I said, "I can't go into her. Look at her." And we were like, all staring. I was like, "She looks a mess. Like, I cannot, don't make my beautiful spirit squeeze back into that horror show." And they said, "Well, if you don't go back into her, then you have to go back into a baby." And they showed me the baby that I would be born into. And...

Babies are a mess.

They showed me everything about her. Like a little screen of her stats came up next to next to her. And she was like, slowly rotating, just like an avatar in a video game. And it was her gender, her ethnicity, where she would be born, who her parents were, her traumas, her adversity, her purpose.

Going to be born.

She was going to be born in the hospital right next to my house where I was going to die, where I was going to be pronounced dead.

Easy access.

Yes. Easy. Like, right.

Slide that soul right next door or down a floor.

Yes. And I was like, in a really bad part of, of Brooklyn, and like, I was going to be born into the projects to teenage parents, and I was going to have all these other levels of societal adversity, and I was like, "I can't, I can't do it from zero. There's just no way."

Could you ask for, like, hey, isn't there a third option that that wasn't presented? You're like, can't I get someone who has like a pool?

Are you Italian?

Was it an Italian baby, or no?

No. It was a little black girl, and I know that she exists somewhere, you know, like, I know that she was still born, and that somebody hopped into her, you know, it just wasn't me. Somebody took on that mission for sure.

And so I couldn't have, like, some lavish life because my life experience cart still needed to be experienced. So it got shoved into kind of like her frame, like, "Okay, now she will be taking on your life challenges." So all the serial pockets that you chose for yourself now will go into her life. Here's a question. If you had chosen not to go back into Betty, would Betty have died, or would she had had a soul swap?

Oh, that's a good question. I think that I, no, that body was really done. You know, that body had a lot of trauma to it.

You mean the body that we know as Betty?

Yes. This body. This body had a lot of trauma to it. So, I don't know if there would be a soul brave enough to hop into that. I mean, obvious, I, I mean, of course, there would be. I'm sure. But the way that I saw it, when they showed me the alternate timelines, they showed me that I died.

So then if you became this other baby...

Yeah.

That baby would have to have some experience to get back to this spaceship existence in order for her to understand her existence. Okay.

Like, it wouldn't be like modern, I'm calling you Betty 'cause you're in the body that is Betty.

But it wouldn't be like that orb has the consciousness of that orb. That orb would be a baby who's then going through life, just like you did when you were Betty.

Right. So here's the thing with pre-birth planning, right? Is it's not, the pre-birth plan is about these major plot points. So I could have ex, here's three of my plot points: addiction, recovery, spiritual awakening. I could have experienced those things very early in my life. Again, rehab first time, 18. Okay, there's addiction, there's recovery. I would have had a slow and steady spiritual awakening as a result of practicing the 12 steps in a 12-step program, because the 12-step promises a spiritual awakening. No need for an NDE, no need for all the drama, no need for all the theatrics, the naked on the floor.

Right. So, but because I had waited, I had kept ignoring the internal GPS that said, "Stop. Make a U-turn." And so, all of my plot points compounded on top of each other, and they all demanded to be experienced in one moment. Yeah.

It feels like there's a lineup of souls waiting to come to Earth. And the longer they hang out there, the further they are away from what the reality of Earth is actually like. It's like when you have a baby or a puppy, and then like enough years pass that you forget about the sleep deprivation. You're like, "I should do that again," 'cause they're amazing. It feels like there's like, are they struggling to get souls down here, or is there a lineup?

I think that there is a lineup for sure. I mean, we've got 8 billion souls here now. So, you know, definitely people want to be here for, I mean, souls population is declining.

Okay.

Is that because there's not a line of people souls?

Well, I think that when, you know, this transformation, this spiritual transformation starts to take place, it's going to be a much different reality than what we're in right now. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but it's definitely going to look different. And I, this analogy of childbirth is a good one to use for something like this, right? So, a woman gets pregnant, carries the baby, super uncomfortable. I mean, I don't know. I've never had a baby in this lifetime, but like, I'm sure it's super uncomfortable. By the end of it, you're like, "Oh my God, murder me already. I want this to be over." Then you actually go through labor.

Like the pain, the agony.

Like, this is worth in pregnancy. Then you have the baby, and you're like, "This is worth in labor."

Right. Right. So then you forget all about it and you do it again, right? Like, you forget all about it because the reward is worth it. And so the reward of being a soul and coming here is that you forget so that you can remember. And when we go back to that space and we have remembrance again, we're like, "I want to forget and remember all over again."

You know that spot above your lip? There's a legend in like Jewish mystical thinking that when you are in your mother's womb, you learn all the secrets of the universe, is the way they describe it. You learn the languages of the animals. You learn everything that could ever be known. And before you're born, the angel Lilith, which like, you know, the angel Lilith touches you here, and you forget everything so that you can spend your entire life learning it.

Wow.

But that you have all the wisdom is held. But that's what they say that little, um, spot is, is Lilith basically saying...

Wow.

"Forget." So that kind of reminded me of that. I mean, there's so many mystical things that you say that are...

Also like the Men in Black forgetting device. So that just, the thing, um, here, here's a question. If you hadn't had that experience, what would have happened? Meaning, like, does everybody have their own, you know, path, and that was yours because that you have a special message? Or if that were to happen to me, which I wouldn't want it to happen in a bad way, God forbid, bite my tongue, but if that were to happen to me, I might have a different experience. Like, your spaceship supermarket experience might just be yours. But what would have happened? Do, do you have any concept of that?

Yeah, so I, yeah, I think that it is individual to each person. I've, I've met people who have had similar experiences, not in the same exact thing. But the more people that hear, we, you know, we have a message at, like, people who have near-death experiences, spiritual experiences, who feel brave enough to come out and share their experiences because there's a lot of closeted near-death experiencers, again, because society says, "You're crazy. I'm going to institutionalize you." So, people stay quiet out of fear. I have no fear. So, I, I say whatever. But I do think that, well, you know, for me in particular, I saw what would happen to me, you know, if, um, if I didn't come back and like continue on this spiritual path, I would have died. And I saw this scene where I was dead on my bedroom, I was dead on the bathroom floor. My cousin came to my house to see why I had gone quiet for so many days, because at this point in time, I was really heavy in active addiction, and everybody was very scared that I was going to die. Not that I had a lot of people in my life. My cousin was kind of the only person, but she was terrified, and at the time she was eight months pregnant. And I saw this scene where she came into my house and she's screaming over my body, and then all of a sudden, my soul leaves the body on the floor and goes into her unborn baby. Again, we're talking about the multiverse. So like a million things can happen at once, right? Even though I saw this scene with this baby in heaven, this was another scene that I had seen, and I thought, "Oh God, I can't let that happen." Because could you imagine like having to breastfeed on your cousin to survive? Like, that would be...

That's what you thought, Betty. When your soul entered your cousin's unborn fetus, that's what you thought.

I was like, I do not want to latch on. I'm not latching on for dear life on this one. That is not, we can't have this timeline happen. So, life review, you have the option to go into the baby. You choose not to go into the baby. So you're told now that you have to go back. You accept this. You're like, it's either this new baby that you don't want to have to start from zero, or back into Betty on the bathroom floor. Bring us to that moment.

Yeah. So again, I'm very, I feel very defiant in this moment, in this space. And they, they told me, my awareness started to to shift back into my body as soon as I made the decision that I can't start from zero. I, I'll go back into that glitched, broken body that I just came from. And I just kept telling them, I just want you to know that there's no way to fix her. She is beyond fixing. And they kind of held, it felt like they were holding my face again. Like I don't have a body there, but this is how it was coming in my mind's eye. And they said, "Listen, the first part of your life was boot camp. Nobody likes boot camp. It's brutal. It's raining sideways. You're doing a thousand push-ups. Someone's shoving your face in the mud. There's a bald guy screaming in your face. The second part of your life is going to be carrying out your mission. You're going to have soulmates, kindred spirits, mentors, teachers, communities. You're going to be safe and supported. You're going to be living in spiritual awareness. Your life is going to be so much better. Just trust us." And I was like, "I do not trust you guys."

Not after the first part.

Hell no. I didn't trust any of this. And I just found my awareness back into my, inside my body. And I woke up on my bathroom floor. I kind of shook my head and I was like, "Wow, I will never be that high ever again. That was crazy. I got so high that I thought I was talking to God. I thought I planned my life. What an insane thing."

So, you thought it was some sort of hallucination.

Yeah.

And right in the moment when you wake up, or I imagine sort of your awareness coming back slowly, you're probably disoriented. You're like, "Where am I?" Okay. It takes you a minute to sort of relocate yourself, and then that starts to be like, what the, like, so you have some of these images in your head that you're trying to parse out.

Definitely. And, you know, I didn't get to bring everything back with me. Not everything stuck. And even now, certain things kind of come in and out. But I definitely just thought that it was drug-induced psychosis. I didn't think that it was anything else. I had never heard of a spiritual awakening.

I

had never heard, even though I was eating tons of psychedelics. I was not exposed to any part of culture around it. Like now, I know that lots of people eat psychedelics to induce spiritual awakenings.

"You had never had that experience with psychedelics. What was it like when you took psychedelics?"

"Well, I felt smarter, you know. I definitely, I could tell that I was getting a little bit smarter each time that I was taking them. And so I kind of became addicted to them because I liked the feeling of being..."

"Did you hallucinate? I, I never really, like, I didn't have a hallucination like that, like what I had hallucinated in this particular experience, but yeah, like I'd see colors or like somebody's face would melt or whatever."

"The walls would cry."

"So you wake up, is you're, or you're coming back into awakening. You're processing these things. You kind of recognize that it's dark out and it was light before."

"You put on a bow tie on your naked body and you record yourself. You looked great. I have to say."

"It's a filter, but yeah, thank you. Um..."

"It's a filter. I just almost died from taking all the drugs and I used a filter."

"I still had to like maintain my appearance. Um, yeah. You know, like I was living my life was so reckless then. So, what we're talking about is that the next day I went on Instagram Live and I was like, 'You guys, I died. It was crazy.' But at that point in time, I was soliciting myself 24 hours a day. And so I would go on to Instagram naked and I would be like, 'Hey, do you want to come hang out?' My whole Instagram was just full of guys from Tinder. And it was just like a way for me to solicit myself, but I was trying to get out these very deep thoughts. And then as I was interacting with people inside the live, it was like they each had a piece of information for me. Like this one girl was talking about Osiris in Egyptian mythology is the god of the dead. And I was like, 'I saw him. Oh my god, I'm remembering that I saw him.'"

"Them and it was amazing because little pieces of the puzzle were coming together, but again, I just thought that it was some crazy hallucination and so I just wrote it off as, you know, an insane trip."

"What is the next week?"

"I was like, 'Yeah, then what happens?'"

"Like when? Yeah. Talk us to the next week and then we'll sort of incrementally keep going."

"Okay. So my life was chaos. It was total debauchery and hedonism and just really, really chaotic."

"Just back in the disease."

"I was totally. Yeah. Back to prostituting myself, back to using drugs, back to manipulating, back to stealing, back to lying."

"Because you weren't feeling like this was your spiritual awakening and I'm this soul. You were just like, 'That was crazy.'"

"Yeah, that was weird. Okay, back to business as usual. And I kept things kept coming in my path to stop me. But again, I have no awareness of what all of this means. But the tracks have been laid so that now when you're experiencing these signs in the external world, they're interacting..."

"Coming into the station."

"They're interacting with something very different inside of you."

"I had been rerouted onto a very narrow path, but I still thought that I was on this big highway. And so every time that I tried to make a step on the big highway, something would come and say, 'Wait,' and put me onto this little narrow path again. So, one of the things that happened to me was that all of my drug dealers simultaneously on the exact same day decided to stop selling drugs, block me, and have nothing to do with me ever again. These are..."

"How many people are..."

"10 people, okay, that I would been dealing with for 10 years. All of a sudden, I'd call up one guy like, 'Hey man, I got to pick up. What's up?' He's like, 'Listen, I found Jesus. I want to be a good father. I'm out of the game. Don't ever call me again.' Click. Blocked. Weird. Okay. Call the next guy on the list. I got plenty of guys to call. Same exact story. I'm like, 'Where has Jesus been hiding all of this time? How are all of these men finding Jesus? Like, where is he?'"

"And it was insane. But again, it was the universe was shoving me onto this very narrow path that I did not want to be on."

"So, did you still find a way to get drugs?"

"Of course, I'm a drug addict. Of course, I found ways. But every time that I would pick up drugs, like, you know, I live in New York City, so like going to the projects or go go to this spot, go to that spot, go to a bar, blah blah blah. Every time that I would pick up, it would be bunk. It wouldn't work. It would rain. It would get wet. I would, I had a hole in my pocket. Like everything that could go wrong was going wrong. And it was impossible for me to stay on this path."

"This is the story of uh the guy who gets to heaven after dying in, you know, a horrible uh fire. There's a fire and the firefighter comes and he's like, 'I'm waiting for God to save me.' And then he gets to heaven and God's like, 'I sent you a firefighter.' That was so this is kind of interesting because it was kind of like what, whatever you believe in, there were all these possibilities to see openings that you were coming to see."

"Yes."

"So do you get high again after that or do you start to go into withdrawal?"

"Yeah, I started to go into withdrawal."

"So you can't get high? You, you just cannot find drugs."

"I cannot, like I was buying drugs and they just were not working."

"That is some divine intervention."

"I know. Really? Yeah. Except it didn't feel like that. It felt like a punishment. It felt like the universe really hated me."

"Yeah. And when, when um people talk about this with alcohol, you know, um what they say is that, you know, the thing that helped you escape from being sober, right? The problem is not the drinking, it's sobriety, right? So, when they, when you hear people talk about this, what they say is that like the one crutch when it stops working, you're just stuck with all the things that you were drinking in the first place to make go away. Except they're not going away. And that's usually like when you're on your knees, right? So, what happens when you're in this place when you essentially are at a breaking point?"

"Yeah. So, I was going through withdrawal. I was on day three, which is the worst day because it's like right at this hump. And I was welcoming death. And I remember saying out loud, 'I, I can't even kill myself because I can't even get out of bed to figure out a way to do it. I can't even go grab a knife. I don't have any strength. I don't, I can't even go to the store and get like a hundred Tylenol because I can't move.' And right then I heard this voice and it told me that I could request what I wanted fixed. And so I was in the throes of desperation. So I was like, 'Okay, strange voice.' And I was very over-intellectual about it because I had been to rehab enough times to know I want my pain receptors and my neurotransmitters fixed. I want to no longer be physically dependent on heroin. I didn't say that I wanted to be rid of my drug addiction because I still definitely wanted to smoke meth and eat LSD. I just didn't want to be physically tethered to this one substance. They told me to lay back."

"What did the voice sound like?"

"Just like a very, uh, like stoic, manly kind of, but like comforting."

"Like my voice, Betty."

"Not quite. Not quite. It was like, uh, you know, it was like very stoic. It was..."

"Was it Morgan Freeman?"

"Oh my god, that would be so good. I don't know. I've never really thought about it. I don't, I've never thought of a calm..."

"Male. It was calm."

"Yes. And it was very steady and safe. And I laid back and I counted backwards from 10. And as I did, these two little men appeared in my mind's eye. And they were wearing these white lab coats and they had these bulbous noses. And they had these two little lawnmowers that manifested in front of them. And I watched them take off in separate directions inside my mind. And they started plowing out the crevices of my brain. And as they did, I felt these intense hot tingles start to take over the whole crown of my head. And then as they finished, there was this bright white flash. And in that moment, I was instantaneously healed out of day three of heroin withdrawal. Moments before I was sick all over myself, welcoming death. And then here I was completely well and healed and fine. And I was crying out. I threw myself on the ground. I'm crying out, 'How could this be happening to me? I don't believe in this.'"

"You could tell you were healed. Absolutely. It was instantaneous. I was just in agonizing pain and then all of a sudden I was completely fine. And I threw myself on the ground and I was crying out like, 'I'm not worthy of this. Like you could not have picked a more unworthy person to bestow this kind of grace on.' And for the contrast, I was a militant atheist, an orphan to suicide, a liar, manipulator, thief, prostitute, drug addict, terrible human being. And I was completely covered in grace and healing. And as I was affirming, 'I'm not worthy of this. I'm not worthy of this.' I heard them chanting, 'But you're worthy of all the love in the universe.'"

"That's what you're dancing."

"'You're worthy of all the love in the universe.' And after that, I just, I thought it was the second coming of Christ, obviously. You know, I was like, 'Well, I got to go out and do good deeds and like lay hands on homeless drug addicts because I am the Messiah.'"

"Hold one second. Day three..."

"Of withdrawal."

"Of withdrawal. Wild, miraculous recovery. Two men reorganizing your brain to cure your pain receptors. Sounds fine. You feel great. Day three, you're now like, 'I'm cured. I need to go save people.' Or is that like, 'Let's have a meal and a bath and or a shower and then go on day four?'"

"No. I was like ready to go out and like spread the word even though I had no idea what the word was."

"Yeah. So, so I mean, we don't know obviously clinically what happened, but what you're describing is there's some sort of revelatory moment that I can't explain, but it seems to have sent you into some sort of mania and I, it was like a delusions of grandeur, right? So, this is like we're entering a different realm of some of the mental addiction stuff, right? That's coming in. And when a mind experiences what you experience, there is no way to comprehend it. So you will make up whatever you can to give it structure. So what made sense is like, okay, I must be having some sort of revelatory, you know, religious experience and I've been awakened and it stimulates a whole set of chemicals that are like, 'You're God.'"

"Yeah. Absolutely. So and it's the extremes. It's the same thing with addiction, right? From self-deprecation to delusions of grandeur. There's no in between because I..."

"I'm the most important piece of [ __ ] you've ever met."

"Yes. Yes. Yes. So that's what temperance and balance is all about. That's what integration is all about."

"And you didn't have a therapist to hold your hand and be like, 'Let's do an integration on your experience' like they do with all the psychotherapy, you know, assisted psychedelics, right?"

"Yeah. It was it was very, very intense. But yeah, now I went out."

"I tried to go buy an RV because I thought I was supposed to travel the country and preach."

"On day three."

"Yes. Like right after this happened, maybe it was the next day that I went to the RV dealership and I was like, 'I, I have a message from God. I'm supposed to preach about it. I need an RV to do it.' And they were like, 'Great. We just need a credit card and your license.' And I was like, 'Oh, I don't have those things.' They were like, 'What?' I was like, 'I don't have a license. God didn't tell me I needed a license. I have negative $300 in my bank account. Will that do?' They were like, 'No, that's you got to go. Bye.'"

"But I was unhinged. You know, like the crazy people that you see on the subway, that was me. Like I was on the subway."

"How long did this last?"

"It lasted several weeks."

"Whoa. Yeah. And you're lucky you didn't die in that time because you could have thought like, 'I also can't, I'm going to step in front of this subway.'"

"Oh no, I did think that. Yeah, I did think that I was dead. I didn't think I could step in front of a subway. I mean, but I did think that I was dead the whole time. I still kind of do think that I was just dead. But I think that I don't understand what death is. And so death just actually means like, oh, I was sleeping and now I'm awake. Like now I have a new layer of awareness that I'm inside of. And so I've awoken to this new layer of the dream that I'm inside of."

"What happened when you were walking around New York on the subway laying hands on people? What was the reaction to that? Did you get any positive affirmation that the things you were doing..."

"Powers? Did you heal people?"

"It's so funny. No, I didn't. Maybe I could have if if they believed and I believed. I mean, you know, and a lot of it what you're talking about with the delusions of grandeur is confirmation bias, too, right? So, like I'm walking around thinking that I'm God and then I'm seeing 11-11 on a clock and I'm like, 'Of course, there's the proof. It's right there. Like, I am God. Like, I'm doing this, you know?' And so, I was running around on the New York City subway system and I was proselytizing and I was evangelizing. But again, I don't know anything about God. I don't know. I definitely don't know anything about Jesus. So, but I think that I am."

"He was very popular back in the day."

"So I'm, you know, people are running away from me. people don't want to be near me. And then one day I was sitting on a train and I had no destination, just hoping to preach to the masses. But the whole train car was empty, which is bizarre. In New York City, there's 9 million people there. And the doors open at a train stop and a man steps inside and he sits directly across from me even though the whole train car was empty. And around his neck was a big blinged out 12-step fellowship emblem. And I heard this voice in my head and it said, 'That's your path. Follow him to a meeting.' And so I went up to this strange man on the train and I said, 'Hey, I could use some help. You aren't on your way to a meeting by any chance, are you?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'm on my way. Come with me.' And that was the beginning of my recovery journey, which happened."

"Did you marry him?"

"No, I've never seen him again, which is crazy because..."

"I don't think he exists."

"I don't, I really don't. I was just in spirit form."

"He was an angel. He really was. And you know, cuz like New York, this the 12-step fellowship that I'm in, you know, like it's a big city, but we all see each other, you know, and I've never seen him again. But so I went to this meeting and they told me that I had to keep making meetings, that that was going to be like my new drug, you know. I did drugs every day. Now I got to make meetings every day. So the next day I went to another meeting and I didn't look the way that I look now. When this process was happening, I was gray. I had these huge holes all over my face and my arms because every time that I got high, I thought that bugs lived inside me. And so I would rip myself open trying to get the bugs out of my skin. I was missing most of my teeth. These are paid for. I mean, I and my eyes were dead and my, and everything was just so dead on me. And so I walk into this, it was a women's meeting and I walked into this room and this woman grabbed me as soon as I walked through the door and she hugged me so tight. And she whispered in my ear and she said, 'You are worthy of all the love in the universe. You are worthy of all the love in the universe.'"

"And I melted and I had this deep guttural cry. This, this was my deepest moment of surrender. And I rested my head on her big boobies for as long as she would let me. And I just really seriously cried because the whole thing was, it felt like psychosis. It felt like delusions of grandeur. I kept hearing this message, 'I'm worthy of all the love in the universe.' Me, like I'm a, I'm a POS. Like I'm not worthy of anything. And but those all those voices were invisible. And now I'm with an actual tangible person that is holding me and whispering in my ear and saying the exact same words. And so even though I didn't feel worthy of all the love in the universe, I believed that maybe I was worth more than drug addiction and prostitution and poverty and dereliction and degradation. And so yeah, that was really where my recovery journey started."

"So from that day, have you, this has been your path?"

"Yeah."

"And that's been how many years?"

"A little over six years."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"Coming back to the timeline again. You have this, you get to a 12-step meeting. You have that massive moment of surrender, but there's an integration still."

"Definitely."

"Talk to me about how that integration goes. Is it that you start to get more stability? You, you mentioned going into a long-term treatment facility. How do you start to integrate that experience on the bathroom floor? What is the timeline of that?"

"Yeah, so I went into this long-term facility which was also, I was sent there through all these magical synchronicities as well."

"How long after going to that first meeting did you go into the treatment program?"

"Three days."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Yeah. On the third day, I went to another meeting and there was this woman inside the meeting and she was the program director of that long-term facility. I knew her from before because she was the lady who said I couldn't draw my eyebrows on. So, I, I was like, 'I have to ask her for help. I have to ask her for help.' And so, but my internal monologue was like, 'You're a loser. You can't ask for help. We're not built that way. Don't you dare. We'll figure it out by ourselves.' And so, the whole meeting, I was just trying to get my courage up. And I was like, 'I got to talk to her. I know that she's going to help me.' And when the meeting ended, I walked over to where she was and she was gone. She had left the meeting early. And so I felt totally defeated. And then my internal monologue, 'Man, you can't even do that right. Look, you want to ask for help and you can't even do it right. You're a loser.' So I go onto the bus to go home. And when I stepped onto the bus, that woman was sitting right there. She was on the same bus as me, but she left the meeting early. And she wasn't at the bus stop in front of the meeting, cuz that's where I was. And I ran up to her totally manic and I was like, 'Oh my god, I didn't think that you're an angel. You're sent to earth. You're here just for me. I want to talk you in there, but of course I couldn't talk to you in there because you're here and this is crazy. I can't believe it. Please help me. Can you help me? I think that you're supposed to help me.' And she said, 'Yeah, we can help you. We have a bed. Come by tomorrow.' And that was it. I went there the next day with just the clothes on my back. And you know, in that process of integration, I didn't know what had happened to me and nobody there knew what happened to me either. And I, I didn't have access to a cell phone or the internet for 18 months while I was in there. So I had to learn things out of books. It was very archaic. But once a week, they would let me go to the library. They'd let all the girls go to the library. And so there was this small little section on religion and spirituality. And I would just devour every book that I could get my hands on. And I really wanted to educate myself. It was the first time in my life that I was ever using my brain. And I really, really wanted to learn. And then one day I went into the library and there was this book and it was kind of halfway hanging off the shelf and it loo, there was glitter around it and it all I saw on the side was the word miracles and I was like, 'Ooh, I'm a miracle. I love miracles. I'll read a book about miracles.' And the book was A Course in Miracles Made Easy by Alan Cohen. And I ate that book up. I really did. He does such a great job explaining the course in a really digestible way. And the clinical director at the program when I went back, she had checked my bag and she saw that I had all these books in there about A Course in Miracles. And she said, 'Oh, you know, I have a copy of the course. You can borrow it if you want.' Because I didn't have the $30 to buy it because I was homeless and living in a rehab. And so this woman let me borrow this book. And my whole time in treatment, I spent reading A Course in Miracles and implementing the lessons into my life."

"For people who don't know what A Course in Miracles is, there was just um incredible, I think I sent it to you. There was just an incredible article about um kind of the history behind it and some of the controversy around um A Course in Miracles. I think it was in Harper's um can you explain to people um what, what this book is?"

"Yes. A Course in Miracles is a metaphysical text. It's a channeled message from Jesus. It's channeled through the mind of a militant atheist psychotherapist from Columbia University. It was published in the 1970s and it reads like stereo instructions. It's super dense. You can tell that it's not from a human mind. And inside of A Course in Miracles, there's three sections. There's a text, a workbook, and for students, and then a manual for teachers. And the workbook has one lesson for each day of the year. There's 365 lessons. And it's a reprogramming. Some people call it the graduate work to the 12 steps because it really is about getting down to like bare bones reprogramming, letting go of old systems and uploading new ones."

"And it was a woman. She was actually Jewish. Um, it was a woman and it was her and what was his name?"

"Helen Schucman. And..."

"Right. What was his name?"

"Bill. I don't know."

"Yeah, I think it was Bill. That's right. I remember it was Bill. Um, and they, they had this very interesting relationship and it was very complicated and she was channeling and he was writing down and it was just coming out of her like information that anyway, so a lot of people um use this. Echartole talks about like there's very interesting conversations about it. So, A Course in Miracles for you was kind of this text that sort of bridged this phase of your recovery."

"Definitely. Yeah. And I did A Course in Miracles before I did the 12 steps."

"Wow. And but it really helped me. And you know, I was in a dynamic where I'm inside of this long-term rehab in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I'm with a bunch of people I'm forced to be around. I don't get to like pick my friends in this stage of my recovery. Like, I'm forced to be around people who mirror my trauma, who mirror my character defects, who show me what I could have in life if I stay on the right path because we're all at different stages in our recovery in this program. And that book helped me so much. It just, it helped me see the deeper meaning in everything."

"So did you then start integrating what happened in your NDE now that you had this new framework for it? Like, we're curious when it kind of clicked that this was not drug-induced psychosis, that something happened that has lasting meaning."

"Yeah. So I think the, the major marker of evidence for me was the spontaneous healing. I was like, 'Oh, okay. Maybe that wasn't a hallucination. This is something real.' And then it took me until I left that treatment program to find information about other people who have had similar experiences. I heard Dr. Mary Neal share about her near-death experience. And I thought, 'Oh, wow. That's, that's actually what happened to me. Where can I find community around this?' And I found that there was some virtual communities and and I started to build relationships with people who had had similar experiences and it was really super transformative. And then even in the rooms of 12-step, when I first started sharing my story in 12-step fellowship, I used to share about the near-death experience cuz I was just sharing my truth. I was sharing whatever, even though it's not really the space for it. But every time that I shared about it, somebody would come up to me after and be like, 'Oh my god, that happened to me too. I can't believe it. I've never heard anybody in a meeting talk about this.' And so I found all these other people in recovery that had had spiritual experiences like mine as well. And so I was able to form little communities and I built my own and I'm a part of a couple of different ones. I study the Baháʼí Faith and that's, you know, very all-encompassing for me as well. Uh, but A Course in Miracles, Baháʼí Faith, 12-step fellowship. These are my tools."

"I mean, it's amazing and it's such a powerful, really a powerful story. Talk to us a little bit about shadow side and the work that you're doing now. I've heard you describe uh relating to the addiction that you have experienced. Talk to us a little bit about that."

"Yeah, a big part of my healing was doing shadow work, which is just basically embracing the darkness. I'm not trying to kill it. I'm not trying to murder it. I'm trying to compassionately understand it and integrate it into my being. So for the whole first part of my life, my shadow was my whole personality. And then I come into recovery and I don't know who I am. So at first, that was really daunting and I would beat myself up every morning like, 'You don't know who you are. You're 35 years old. How could you not know who you are?' And then one day the voice wasn't mean and it said, 'You don't know who you are. That's incredible. That means that you get to design her. How cool is this going to be? It's going to be so creative. You get to design the most authentic version of yourself.' And so through that process, I had to begin to love that old version of me, which is still very, very challenging for me. She embarrassed me. I feel like a lot of resentment towards that part of me, but she was just doing the only thing that she knew how to do, and that was just survive. So what I did was I started to compartmentalize all the different parts of myself. So in Western therapy, we would call it IFS, Internal Family Systems, parts work. And then, you know, in Jungian and philosophy, it's called shadow work, but it's all the same thing. So I do character development around all my parts. So my addiction, he has his own shape and name and face. He's a man. He's a gay man. His name's Richard. He thinks he's so fun and fabulous, but he's a dick. And, um, and so I have to like keep myself in communication with him because if I don't, then he'll just run amok and he'll be screaming in my head all day long to drink or to use or to blow up your life. And I had to do it with all my eating disorders. When I let go of drugs, a million eating disorders came to the surface that were always there, but I was too sedated to recognize that they existed. Sugar addiction, um, you know, like porn and masturbating, uh, codependency, lirance, when you get obsessed with another person, that one's my favorite. Just like fake relationships inside my head with invisible people. And I used this method of, you know, developing personalities for each of them so I can continue to communicate with them. And I do the same thing for my light part of myself as well. I develop my spirit guides. I develop my angels. I develop my ancestors. And it's just a lot of really creative character development to communicate with them."

"Is that the work you do when you work with other people? And do you specifically work with people who are recovering from addiction? Who do you work with?"

"Anybody. Um, yeah. I, I work with a lot of men. I, I'm still not exactly sure why spirit leads me in that direction, but um, I really help people find courage. That's like the underlying theme from years of doing this is that everybody's looking for courage and everybody wants to let go of shame and guilt. If I can sit here and tell you that I was a prostitute, I was a pimp, I was a drug addict, I hurt other people and say it with no shame, you know, like of course I feel guilt and remorse for what I've done, but like guilt taps me on the shoulder and says, 'Okay, make it right.' Shame doesn't have any place in my life today. So really, I work with people who are looking to let go of shame and looking to cultivate courage to live their biggest, baddest, boldest lives. You used to be a sperm inside of a testicle and now you are an actual human being walking, thinking, living. Like this is not an accident that we're here. We're not supposed to be small. Society tells us to stay small, to be safe. But so yeah, I'm just always trying to empower people to be the best versions of themselves. What I, what I like and is so powerful is that there's a raw authenticity and an embracing of our, of all the parts because there's so much spiritual bypassing. And when you were talking about LA, I kind of like held my tongue for a second cuz it's, you know, there's really amazing people who are on great paths here. And then there's also the bypassing who's like, 'I'm amazing. My farts smell like roses. Nothing I've ever done has ever hurt anyone. And I just only manifest love and I'm just like the most pure being and if someone has a problem with me, it's they're just projecting on me and like it's just nonsense.'"

"It's whack. That's like so ridiculous. I, yeah, I've only been in LA for a day so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about."

"I, I don't mean to..."

"No, I get it. I get it. I've, I've heard the same things. I think now though, even all of those kind of love and light spiritual people and teachers, I think even now they're really beginning to become confronted with the fact that the shadow demands to be integrated. It absolutely does. And anybody who thinks that they don't have any flaws, they are delusional. Absolutely. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about some of the most common narratives that people have that are torturing them because I heard a lot in your story. You know, the loser, you can't ask for help. You have to do this yourself. You're not deserving. What are some of the other narratives that you see that people are transforming?"

"Yeah. I'm not worthy. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not pretty enough. Um, that inner critic, it just absolutely needs to be assigned a new job. Again, like I'm not, I'm not going to kill my inner critic. They're a part of me. They exist, right? My inner critic looks like Regina George from Mean Girls. She's like blonde and perfect and fabulous and whatever she thinks she is, anyway. And she loves to come in and just tear up everything that I'm doing. And she's been a full-time employee inside of the working space of my mind. And so I had to have a conversation with her and say, 'Hey, listen. We're pulling you off the payroll. We're making you freelance. You're only going to come in when we call you and it's only going to be solution-based feedback that you're able to give. You can't just come in and yell a bunch of stuff. Like you have to be able to offer solution to what it is that you think the problem is.' And so that has been really super helpful like when it comes to that. But I do think that for most people, it's their inner critic that and and and wounded inner children. That's a big theme as well, you know, like not knowing how to process trauma, how to let go of resentment."

"Do you work on a daily, hourly, minute basis with your guides and angels? And do you think everyone has access to that?"

"Everybody has access to their guides and angels. Okay. Our guides are our Earth customer service agents. You have to call them in order to get connection. If there's something wrong with my cable, I'm not just going to like stare at the TV and be like, 'Oh, I wish that was better.' I'm going to call up the cable company and say, 'Hey guys, I need you.' And so they're just waiting for us to invite them into our reality and again, do character development around them. I designed all my guides. I have 12 of them. Maybe still Messiah complex a little bit. But my, my one guide, the first guide that I ever developed, his name is Philip and he's my manifestation guide. He helped me manifest this experience and um, he wears like a green polo and khakis and they're pleated. I'm like, 'Philip, come on. Get with it.' But I didn't know what his name was, but I knew that he was with me. And so I asked him to show me his name three times and to make it really plain that I couldn't, you know, write it off as a coincidence or whatever. And then I came across a Phillips disc man. I was like, 'Disc man? Like this is crazy. CDs are obsolete. They don't exist anymore.' And then I went down and this is when I was in rehab and I went down to the community room and the TV was on and the captions were on and on the screen it said Phillip. Phillip Phillip exclamation point. I was like, 'Okay, that's his name.' And you can just design it however you want. It's all about childlike imagination and intuition. Again, if we're looking for concrete black and white evidence, it's you don't re, you don't leave any room for faith or mystery. So, like just be open to knowing that you are the designer of your reality. Your thoughts shape your reality. It's something actually that you said at the very beginning of the interview when you were talking about yourself as a child, which was your creative imagination as a kid coming back now as a core skill in order to help you create the relationship with these extra sensory beings. Um, tell us how you man worked with Philip to manifest this experience."

"Well, I'm always asking, I'm always asking my guides for whatever experience I think would be beneficial for all of humanity and for the highest good for me and the highest good for all. So, if that means that I get an opportunity to come and share my story somewhere, I'm going to take all those opportunities. You know..."

"You weren't like, 'I want to talk to my...'"

"I would never even be that specific."

"I would never be even able to conceptualize meeting so amazing. I have like all these stories that I want to tell you, but my boyfriend said I shouldn't."

"You can tell him. You can tell him after. You can tell them now."

"No, no, no. I don't want to."

"Yes, you can. This is my favorite part of the show."

"Okay. I'll just share this one little story. So, when I was young, my mom used to make me audition for commercials and TV and stuff, and she made me audition for Star Search."

"Okay."

"So, I sang your song from Beaches as my as my Star Search audition."

"Really funny."

"But I forgot the words halfway through and I just sang one line over and over again. It was totally traumatizing."

"That's amazing though. That's a great story."

"That is a great story. I'm glad your boyfriend was wrong and that you should tell us."

"I have a question about some of the, some of the changes that occurred in you besides obviously this um, you know, spiritual awakening. Um, you know, sometimes gradual, sometimes instantaneous, but um, there's other things that you kind of came back able to do that you didn't before. Can you talk a little bit about what you can see in people now that you never were aware that you could see before?"

"Yeah, I think I'm much more intuitive when it comes to people's energy. And my gifts used to be really turned on. Like I used to be able to see auras and I would see spirals coming out of people's ears when they were lying, but everybody was always lying. So it was just a whole world full of spirals. And I, it used to be so intense. And I asked my guides to turn it down. I said, 'If you guys want me to be human, I got to be human.'"

"What did it look like to see auras?"

"Just, you know, like an energy around people. Sometimes just an intuition of what the color is. Like, you wouldn't even really be able to physically see it. You would just say like, 'That person feels green. I don't know what green means, but they feel green.'"

"What do I feel?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, okay."

"She turned it down."

"I feel yellow. Okay."

"Yeah. Yeah. I did have it turned down, though. Yeah. It was. And now my gifts show up in different ways. Like, I love shepherding people to communities. I love connecting people, um, you know, with resources that will help them. If I don't get to work with somebody directly, that's totally okay. I want to be able to make sure that people have access to what they need. So many people hear my story and they are struggling with addiction, you know, and there's so many free resources, you know, like I very rarely work with somebody who's dealing with addiction because all I'm going to tell them to do is go to a 12-step meeting because I know that that's what works. And there's no point in spending money on a coach when really what you need is a community. You don't need a coach. Do you believe in a hell?"

"No. I think that hell is a state of mind. So my life before was hell and I just believe that everything is a system of thought. So if you believe in something very negative, then you will create something very negative for yourself. What do you..."

"I wonder if you can talk a little bit about timelines because um you've talked about how you've been able to tap into other timelines for example and communicate with your dad, I think was the example that I heard. Um, what do you know about time and what was that experience like?"

"Yeah. So there's an infinite amount of timelines happening all at the exact same moment. So when people talk about past lives, I believe that they're actually talking about simultaneous lives and everything is just kind of happening in this infinity loop. So, you know, I communicate with my father and he's in another timeline. He's my number one spirit guide. He's always with me. And he lives in a reality where his suicide attempt was not successful, but my mother's was. And so my sister and I found him in time and he was able to be brought back to life. And he had a near-death experience in that reality. And so the way that I perceived it when I had mine was he told me that he's been digging the well of living water for me in his reality ever since so that we could connect in these two timelines."

"How do you communicate with him? What is that like?"

"It's just again, childlike imagination in..."

"You like get quiet? You..."

"No, I just like I could talk to him right now if I wanted to. Like it's just a regular conversation. Everything is just right here. It's right in like the center of your mind. You don't have to be, yeah, I've never been into like that get quiet, get still. Like I'm from New York. Like we, we move, we, we're moving. Um, but I do think that it's just a lot of imagination and you just have to trust and have faith that your imagination is leading you in the right direction. And so I ask for signs. So, you know, I didn't know if I was going schizophrenic or if this was really happening to me, but I knew that my, I knew I felt my dad and I was like, 'Dad, you have to let me know if you're real. Like I need a piece of evidence because I really think that I'm going crazy and I might have to check myself into a psych ward.' I saw the image of a fox pop in front of my head and I was like, 'Okay, Dad, if it's you, send me a fox.' And so the next day I went to TJ Maxx."

"I was like, 'You're in New York City. There are no foxes there, right? There's no foxes there.'"

"But I was in TJ Maxx and there was, you know, TJ Maxx is like crazy. Like a bomb went off in there. Like it's nuts. Like there's stuff everywhere. It's so chaotic. Your eyes can't focus on any one thing. But I was waiting in line to pay for my garbage that I didn't need. And at on the end cap there were all these discarded items and there was a book and it was standing up and it said Amazing Dads and it was a picture of a daddy fox and a baby fox. Yeah. And so that's his sign for me and he, he follows me everywhere. Whenever I see a fox, doesn't have to be an actual physical fox. It can come in all these different ways. I'll share another sign story if I can. Okay. So again, when I was coming into this awareness, I kept asking for signs because I was like, 'I'm losing it. I'm losing my mind.' I was reading this book, Gabrielle Bernstein's book, The Universe Has Your Back. In that book, she says, 'You can ask the universe for a sign. If it's for your highest good, the sign will manifest within 24 hours. Just get your head blank and whatever the first sign that comes up is.' So, I asked this question about some guy, because I'm always wasting my spiritual questions about some guy. And I was like, 'Is this guy for my highest good? I want to go out on a date with him.' And the first sign that popped into my head was a squirrel. And this was Christmas time in New York. I was like, 'What? All the squirrels are gone. You'll never see a squirrel. I couldn't even conceptualize that I would see a squirrel anywhere else.' And I was like, 'This assignment is stupid. I reject it. I'm not even going to worry about it. I'm just going to go out with the guy cuz I want to.' And I was walking to this guy's house. And as I was walking there, I was watching the snow crunch beneath..."

My feet. And then all of a sudden, a squirrel ran right across my feet and went up a tree, and it just parked there, eyes to eyes. And I was listening to a song about soulmates on my headphones. And then all of a sudden, the guy comes out of his apartment, and it's like this whole movie is playing out, like the spiritual sign, the soundtrack, this Adonis, my leading man waiting for me. And this was such a blessed moment. I was like, "Oh my god, manifestation is real. This is crazy. I can't believe it."

And so the next day, I was walking down the street, and there was a random book on a random mailbox, abandoned for anybody to take. And I just had this really strong intuition. That book is there for you. Go pick it up. So I walk over to the book. I open it up to a random page. The title of the chapter that I opened up the book to: The Squirrel. Big, huge, bolded letters. My brain exploded. I fainted. I was like, "This is crazy. How is this possible?"

Next day after that, walking down the street again, and on the bottom of a lamppost was this gigantic sticker of a squirrel. Okay, so in my head, I had thrown out this whole exercise because I was like, I'm never going to see a physical squirrel. And I feel like that actual physical squirrel probably froze to death and died just for their mission. So, thank you to that squirrel.

And you know, I thought that I had asked the question, is this guy for my highest good? So, like, I'm like, all these squirrels, like, we're going to get married. We're going to have squirrel babies. We're going to have a whole squirrel farm. I don't know. It's going to be amazing. And this guy rejected me immediately. And I'm on the phone with him all frantic. And I'm like, "But what about all the squirrels that God sent us?" And he's like, "Girl, you are nuts. Like, I don't know what you're talking about."

And so I realize now that, you know, it was for my highest good because it was this awesome lesson in rejection that my soul needed to have, and for me to let go and know that I'm guided no matter what. Even if the outcome doesn't look the way that I want it to. There's a reason for everything that happens, good, bad, and indifferent.

I mean, that's so hard for people to grasp, right? Like, we think we're on this linear path, and if it's not going my way, right, that something's wrong. Yeah. That message, and what I take away from this is the trust in those little instincts, the going to pick up the book, the looking for the signs, the being aware enough that, you know, don't fight the exercise, right? When you have that little sense of something might be for me, to follow it up, otherwise you'll miss the interaction.

Yeah. One of the things that, um, I wonder if you can speak to, and you've kind of talked about it in passing, you know, a few ways, and I understand that it's awkward to talk about, but I wonder if you can frame for us, like, ultimately, what do you believe about this existence and this incarnation? Meaning, are we all dead? You know, is this a dream? Is it a simulation? Like, what's your framework if I had to say, like, what, what is this? Why?

Yeah. I don't have one definitive answer, but I do think that it's a combination of all of those things. We're in a movie, right? We're all actors in this beautiful play of Earth, and I don't have to be a method actor. I don't have to be super attached to the role that I'm playing. I can just show up, read my lines, and move on to the next scene. But that's so challenging for so many of us to just not be attached to the emotions. I think of it like a video game, and it's kind of this goalless game that's happening here. So this is like this is a goalless simulation, just like how the game Sims is. There's no real goal in it, just to experience. So you get to decide what the goal is inside the game. And it's a book. It's a choose-your-own-adventure book. And I think all of those things have truth in them. And some days, some of those beliefs resonate with me more than others. I used to think that we were trapped on a prison planet and that, you know, this was totally terrible for some of us and really great for some other people, and I couldn't understand why. But then I found the information around the law of attraction, and I know that our thoughts create our reality. And so I just needed to change my thoughts and my belief systems and my habits and heal the underlying wounds underneath them. And it didn't happen in a moment. It took time. But I know that we all have access to it.

I love it. And I agree. And I think we also have to remember these things to know that we are participants in the game. You know, whether it is virtual reality, whether it's a dream, what we just know that there are levers of influence and co-creation that we each have. And when we remember that, then we can be more of an active participant.

What's your maintenance like for your mental wellness?

Yeah. Well, I make 12-step meetings all the time. I'm of service in my 12-step fellowship. I do the Course in Miracles lessons every day. Um, and I'm always connected in some way with service, with other spiritual people. My partner is an atheist, which is really funny. Um, and so he keeps me very grounded in my human experience, and then I'm floating off in outer space having all these spiritual conversations with my friends and stuff. So, you know, I have this balance in my life today.

What message would you have to someone who is feeling utterly lost, disconnected, not feeling the presence of spirit or a guide, maybe struggling with addiction? What would you share with them?

I would tell them that they are worthy of all the love in the universe and to hold on because pain ends. It really does. I just had a friend who, um, completed suicide just the other day. And he had reached out to me a couple months ago, and he was asking me all these spiritual questions, and he was saying, like, what do you think is going to happen to me? And, you know, I was really blunt. I was like, I really think that you're going to have to come back here, you know, like, we have to finish our experiences. We have to finish our lessons. We're in school. This is a school that we're in. Like, you can't just drop out of college. You have to finish your major. You have to get your degree. And, you know, I know that his pain must have been so intense that he just, he was like, I'll just start over. You know, it's not like a get-out-of-jail-free card. You know, I'm walking proof that things can turn around. You know, I had no idea that I used to be an earth-dwelling caterpillar and now I'm a butterfly. I thought that I was supposed to be a caterpillar forever and like just rolling around in the mud. I had no idea that all I had to do was turn into goo, be in a really uncomfortable cocoon, and then break my way out. It takes work. It takes discipline. It takes consistency. I didn't think that I had any of those things, but I was a really disciplined drug addict. I always made sure that I had what I needed. I just needed to turn it around in another direction, make it, you know, a positive direction.

Uh, where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, I have a website. It's buddabbbetty.com. I'm not really a Buddha. It's just a play on words. B U D H A B T Y.com. And I'm on all social media with the same handle as well. And I would love to connect with anybody. I have a little spiritual community. It's free. We meet on Tuesdays on Zoom. And if you're looking for tribe, come and check it out. We talk about a different topic every week. And, um, I work with an organization called The Wheel, and we host retreats and local groups. And so, yeah, I would really love to connect with anybody. And I'm so grateful for you guys making space for me and, yeah, just—

So glad we got conversation. Oh, it was unbelievable.

Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Yeah.

I'm floored. I'm really floored.

I'm going to start naming my spirit guides, which I haven't done yet. And I just want to use hers. They seem to be working for her.

Come on. Let's get creative. Let's build our own. We're all unique individuals having our own unique experience here on Earth spaceship.

I don't think your spirit guides are a Phillip.

Maybe a Louise.

I liked how specific hers were.

Let's set an intention. This would be fun exercise. I would like three signs to be shown a name of a spirit guide of mine.

Okay.

For creative manifestation.

Okay. So—

I like manifestation in general.

You want a creative manifestation guide. Everybody wants that for you. So, you're looking for something that shows up like three times.

Three times. How am I going to be guided?

Uh, I'm like looking at your shirt and I'm like, is is that—

It's Bow House?

Bow House. I don't think that's the name of my spirit.

If it shows up two more times, it is.

All right. I'm on the hunt. I will report back. Um, people check out Substack because that's where I will be updating this information when I figure it out.

And then we can't wait to see what you creatively manifest once you find your creative spirit guide. One of the things that I was thinking about, you know, when when Betty described her experience, it it almost always says like NDE like it's like a near-death experience like event. And I was wondering like what is that about? And I got the answer today in our conversation with her. Um, you know, I think it's pretty clear you can't die for eight hours and then come back. Meaning when we think about when we think about her experience, what we can't imagine, and she doesn't imagine that she died on the bathroom floor was, you know, flatlined for eight hours and then came back with this information. As we know, you can get a tremendous amount of information even from being gone or dead for a couple minutes, right? As many NDE cases have shown us. Um, what sounds likely from how she describes it, which is why again, she describes it as an NDE-like experience, is that she was having some combination of, you know, loss of consciousness, gaining consciousness, transcendental experiences that were also some form of, uh, you know, consciousness traveling, as well as my best guess, and I'm not, you know, an expert, my guess would be that there was a point where she flatlined or where she, if someone had found her, would have declared her dead. Um, and then she had then that sort of near-death experience. I'm not sure I could guess which components based on, I'm sure everybody listening could as well. We can guess which parts of that, you know, the positive parts, the loving parts, all that stuff, the download, uh, the father, like all that stuff sounds like more of a classic NDE, at which point she then re-entered her body obviously and got up from the floor.

Makes total sense. There was a lot of complexity and and factors around. I wonder if she ever found the laundry, if that laundry was just lost and gone forever or if she revisited the laundry mat the next day. I also wonder if she has a relationship with her mother from the afterlife.

She didn't mention it. She mentions her dad. I think it's a very different connection. But, um, yeah, I love that notion of her dad kind of being with her. Um, you know, even though they had obviously such a complicated, um, you know, relationship. Um, I understand she doesn't speak about her sister, but of course, I cannot help but wonder what her sister's life is like. Um, and I also really loved her description of the difference between guilt and shame. Um, guilt being, you know, instructive, there's a lesson to learn, there's repair to be made. And shame really not serving that kind of purpose. You know, it's that inner critic voice.

You have an acronym for shame?

Should Have Already Mastered Everything.

Very destructive because it creates secrecy. It creates protection. It makes people, uh, unintegrated. When she talks about integrating the multi and multiple parts of herself and bringing those into a whole and having a relationship with them, it makes it so that none of those parts can sort of act out in rebellion and create chaos. So, uh, addressing shame and sort of owning and being in acceptance, even with the dark parts of ourselves or the parts that feel problematic or that we're not proud of, is a, uh, important part of this transformational experience.

Such an incredible episode, and I don't think I've ever seen Valerie type as quickly or as ferociously, you know, as we were kind of keeping track of all of the moments. Um, so we really hope that you got a lot out of this episode. I'm sure there'll be a lot of conversations, uh, about her experience and, um, curious to see, uh, how everybody, um, interprets this episode.

Last idea. What did you think about guides are Earth's customer service representatives?

Well, I love the way that she kind of encapsulates things and the, you know, kind of, um, familiarity that she brings to, you know, her story, which is in many cases very hard for so many of us to, um, have access to. Um, yeah. I don't know. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not really a guides and angels person. It's just that language has never resonated with me. But if I were to resonate with it, I think the way that she described it makes sense.

If anyone listening wants more access to our version of the simulation, they can find more about us on Substack. We have exclusive content there and the Breaker community, uh, deep diving into episodes and sharing tips and tricks and experiences. So check us out there. And we'll, uh, likely be expanding on this episode in particular. So, please, um, go check that out. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's my breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, and now she's going to break down. So, break down. She's going to break it down.