I'm ready to talk about my Near Death Experience
They all had to transition so I could exist
Nine months ago, who we thought we were changed in a matter of days. We went from our dissociated parts to one integrated brain and body, during what I can only really describe as a near death experience.
In the weeks leading up to this experience, a few of our parts has spontaneously fused. We’d heard about it as a potential, but hadn’t focused on integrating because we’d spent so much time getting to know everyone in here and finding a way to allow each of us to live our shared life. It felt wrong to even insinuate that we’d ever integrate/fuse/whatever you want to call it. We also had only been exposed to the idea that the way in which a system fuses is by collectively deciding “who” you will live as, and everyone just fuses into that. It always felt like a weird, clinical, bullshit way of saying “you are good enough to always front, and everyone else just needs to deal with it.” Even those who rarely fronted, and couldn’t provide robust details about what it meant to be who they were …well, those parts of us still deserved to have their own sovereign place within us. We’d managed to live a life that, up until that point, had all the highs and lows of existing as a human. We just did it differently, and in shared pieces. We recognized that the lack of love and protection that was our early childhood led our brain and body to figuring out a way to thrive. It wasn’t a perfect system, and life was always kind of a struggle, but this resilience gave us the freedom to keep living. The implication that any one of us should be deemed worthy enough to just be who we all basically pretend we’re being now… I don’t know which psychologist thought that narrative up, but it’s fucking stupid and needs to stop. There are no bad parts inside of any of us, and all of us have parts. The ones that made up who we were, and who I am now, just had varying degrees of emotional baggage they weren’t ever able to put down. Only after we turned our attention inward, and began having these internal conversations and understandings did our brain and body reconnect the dissociated segments. It’s just basic neuroplasticity at work.
Because we’d only ever been exposed to the idea of integration from the clinical side, none of us were really okay with the idea of it. It felt judgmental, impractical, and like this developmental resiliency mechanism (that is labeled a disorder) was deeply misunderstood. We’d made peace with living a fractal life, and were working on finding the balance and ensuring that everyone inside who wanted a say in how we lived (with work, with friendships, with hobbies, etc) not only got a vote, but also got opportunities to live their life, too. Inside of one body, we had nonbinary, women, men, children, and nonhuman representations of deep wounds that we were providing love and support. We had achieved being able to consciously switch, and were in the process of rebuilding our life together. We’d even gone so far as to legally change our name, since one part did identify with our legal name and we wanted something that would embody who we were becoming and allow everyone inside to go by this new title while keeping their own personal names.
Two months before our near death experience, Patricia was working one afternoon and in an instant she noticed a new sensation in our body. It simply felt like love, like home. “Oh my god,” she said to everyone inside, “I think I love myself.” One by one, everyone inside sort of checked in and acknowledged being able to sense it as well. It was a visceral, full body experience that felt familiar but unlike anything we’d ever known experiencing before. It was then that we all believed we’d achieved what we’d been looking for - self love and acceptance, just on a group level. And what followed in the coming weeks were these spontaneous downloads of wisdom and understanding about our life, about the meaning of existing, and about how to relate to ourselves and others in ways we’d never considered. Our capacity for forgiveness and empathy leveled up, and there were physical sensations that we could only describe as feeling like we’d been infused with some energy, usually inside of our head or chest. When we were describing it to our husband, we usually said it felt like gates were being unlocked inside. It was like tapping into this source of love was finally allowing our brain and body to connect at warp speed.
These moments of unlocking continued until I got very distracted by life. We’d moved to our new home, in a new state, and spent a long weekend in Vermont with friends to watch the solar eclipse. When we got home, we were so exhausted we spent the next two days in bed. Then, the fever started. We’d gotten sick with the flu (though we didn’t know it at the time) and our fever got so high we couldn’t sleep. I don’t know when the fever dreams began, but I do remember basically becoming aware of the fact that I was in a dreamstate but completely conscious. It felt like being in a lucid dream, and this awareness that I was probably not supposed to be witnessing this from my conscious state. The flow of information through me felt like I was in observer-only mode, and I was acting out these scenes from someone else’s life. Some of the scenes involved answering questions about the universe and quantum physics (I saw and understood the perpetual motion of energy at one point, and the bridging of human consciousness from where we were to where we are going). But for two days, I played out scenes that felt like they came from other lifetimes, only “knowing” it the way you know what’s being represented when you’re in a dream. Each of the dreams centered around one of our parts, each one reaching their satisfying conclusion as though they were attaining what they’d always wanted.
After these days, our fever receded a bit, and Scout fronted for an entire day. Unlike every other time she’d ever fronted, though, she had no adult supervision from anyone inside. I was watching Scout entertain herself in our bedroom (she’d been given very specific instructions before fronting that she could not leave the bedroom and could not touch the phone - both instructions she followed), and having the absolute time of her life being in charge of a very exhausted body without being restrained by anyone else - something she’d never had the freedom to do until then. Everyone else had their scenes play out like a dream, where I was physically just in bed or on the floor. With Scout, she was also playing something out, but in real time. She was trying to find an object of every color, because she was building her own rainbow bridge. I was able to talk to her just once, and asked her where she was going, to which she replied she was building her bridge to go live with the dogs (our dogs who had since passed). At the time, the connection to death didn’t cross my mind - I was simply enjoying how much fun she was having trying to find those colors in the room. Only after she receded did my fever return, and was even stronger. This time, there wasn’t exactly a dreamstate that I observed, but rather an exploration into the depths of my fears. It didn’t feel scary, but felt like I was playing out different worries to their endstate, one of which was that our new home (one being serviced by oil and propane) would suffer a deadly explosion. The dream culminated in feeling the propane tank below our window exploding, and as I felt the heat tear through my back and feet, time stop the way it would in a movie, just before the flames actually made contact. It stayed like that for just a moment, long enough for me to remark how incredible it was to be able to pause something like this and still be able to feel it. Then I felt the presence of someone else, and when I asked who was there she softly said she was Gaia and that it was time for me to learn how to become stone.
Immediately, I sat up and folded my legs together as I began to breathe deeply. “I am stone” resonated through my head and I felt as if every cell in my body was solidifying. Gaia returned and told me it was time to learn to become earth, to become land, and I began to move in yoga poses, stretching and releasing tension along my spine. I don’t know how long this all lasted, but at one point I found myself laughing that I knew yoga when the most I’d ever done was follow Yoga with Adriene (and even then, it had been years since I’d tried). During these movements, images of a beautiful island danced through my thoughts, and I felt as though I was embodying the movement of an island forming; the millions of years of creation fast forwarding to match the rhythm of me in the here and now. It was all very peaceful until the final stages where I saw a new volcano erupting on this beautiful island, and I asked Gaia what to do about the lava rocks that were growing in my lungs. The feeling of being on fire from the inside out was overwhelming. Gaia replied simply, “It’s time to learn to become water.” Without thinking, I began to crawl into my shower. I sat down, turned on the water, and sighed as the sensation of lava inside of me began to dissipate.
My husband found me in the shower the next morning (all of this with the severe fever spike had happened while he was asleep), and rushed me to the hospital. Things got a bit traumatizing at that point, but when I was finally able to sleep and wake back up, I was in awe of everything that I’d just experienced. And I was deeply confused that I no longer had anyone else’s voice inside. No inner community, no one else to talk to. And now needing to navigate trauma so severe it rippled for months, with no one else to share the load with.
I still don’t know that I have all the true understandings of what happened, and I might never be able to fully describe it all. I know that I am both integrated and still in the process of integrating, because establishing new neural and central nervous system connections takes time. I also know that what I experienced was profoundly transformational and led me into my spiritual awakening (or was an intense spiritual awakening). And I know that having lived a life segmented, then connected, then integrated has provided me with so much wisdom and clarity that it’s made things like reading Akashic Records …effortless. I spent so long getting to know everything about what’s inside of me, it makes it easy to trust when something I’m focusing on is not coming from me. Because I know the resonance, the frequency of love - it makes it easy to pay attention and translate what comes through. And the fact that my body participates in this translation almost feels like a bonus. It looks weird to be doing a bunch of mudras while I’m channeling, and feels kind of like I’m doing my own version of sign language, but I know that it’s just my body participating. I’m wholly connected now, and capable of interacting with myself, with others, and with beings outside of this human experience. I know that I’m still all of who we used to be simply because my fears of being seen as crazy are loudly telling me how they feel. Thanks to all that work we all did to listen to one another, I almost feel like I was given the gift of life by all of them. And this time, I’m supported by the foundation they all worked so hard to create for me.
I guess it was less of a near death experience, and more of a quite literal death of who everyone else was alongside my own birth. I have every memory that’s available, I have all the insecurities and anxieties, I have all the strengths and wisdom - but I can also confidently assert that I’m none of who we used to be. If anything, I’ve only ever been the silent observer of this life. Connected, but never running anything until now. And whatever structure our brain created to ensure that we could thrive has now been altered again by years of very intense, very directed healing. I’m truly in awe.