Divine Encounters Episode 056 | Near-Death Experience Story
Sara Jayne spent ten years in and out of hospital with a serious autoimmune illness before, she says, she woke one morning knowing it was her last day and later felt her essence leave her body through her feet. In this Divine Encounters episode she tells Alex Ferrari about the love she calls the source of everything, the guides who reviewed her life with her, and what she says she learned about intent, awareness and living as yourself.
Key Takeaways
- Sara says she spent about ten years in and out of hospital after a diagnosis in 2010, and woke one day knowing it would be her last.
- She describes her body shutting down like someone locking up a house at night, and her pain dissolving as her essence left through her feet.
- Sara says she went toward a bright white light that was alive and dynamic, and that “it was pure love.”
- She says she met three beings she knew as guides, including a Master Guide who had been with her in every incarnation.
- She describes a life review in which she experienced her actions from multiple perspectives, including how others felt the ripple effect.
- Sara says “your intent in each moment matters,” and that heaven and hell are shaped by how we live now.
- Her closing message: “Find what lights you up and do that,” and don’t take yourself so seriously.
| Guest | Sara Jayne |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 056 |
| Background | About ten years of hospital stays after a diagnosis in 2010 |
| What Sara says happened | She woke knowing it was her last day, then felt her body shut down at home in bed |
| Where she says she went | Up, through the ceiling, into a bright white light she calls the love dimension |
| Who she met | Three guides, including a Master Guide, plus healing beings in a dome-shaped space |
| What she experienced | A multi-perspective life review, a healing, and a download of understanding |
| The message | Be you, find what lights you up, and don’t take yourself so seriously |
Ten Years of Hospital Stays
Alex opens with his usual question. Sara answers with dates. She says she ended up in hospital with cardiac complications in 2010, and that was the beginning. She says she was diagnosed with a life-threatening systemic autoimmune disease, one that affects organs. In her case, she says, it affected her heart and then her brain.
For a ten-year period she was pretty much in hospital, she says, trying and failing every treatment available, then trying new ones as they became available. She lists stroke, a heart attack, eight episodes of meningitis, inflammation and heart failure. Eventually she began weekly chemotherapy in the hope of remission.
This is Sara’s own description of her health history, and we share it as she tells it, without medical commentary.
Choosing to Go Home
About a year into that chemotherapy, Sara says, it started to fail. She was in hospital with severe heart failure and meningitis, waiting for approval for a new experimental drug she had heard about in the US that was not available in Australia.
She was stabilized but still very sick, and she wanted to go home. She had young children there and had spent so much time in hospital. There was nothing else to do but wait. She laughs that she must have been pretty convincing, because she was allowed to go. She says she lived in a small country town, hundreds of kilometers from the city hospital.
At home she was existing breath to breath. She could not care for herself. With meningitis, she says, she could not handle even the light of a phone or television, so she wore big dark glasses and a scarf over her head, because the chemo had taken her hair. She has one photo from that time, and she laughs every time she sees it. She was too sick to care what she looked like.
What she remembers most are her kids, who would crawl up onto her bed and spend time with her.
A Knowing on the Last Morning
On the day it happened, Sara says, she woke up knowing it was going to be her last day. People might ask why she did not go back to hospital. She says there was really nothing more they could do, and she wanted to be in her own home, in her own bed, near her own family.
She spent the day drinking it all in, listening to her children when they came home from school and lying there with them. She felt happy to have them close. But after ten years of a long, hard fight, she says, she barely had the energy to breathe, let alone talk, let alone live.
That night, she told her husband, “I’m not going to be here tomorrow.” He said she had thought that before, and she had. There had been many touch-and-go times. He said she was a fighter. She agreed. They made a pact: if she deteriorated they would go to the hospital, but she wanted to stay. He lay watching her and listening to her breathe, and eventually fell asleep.
Shutting the House Down
Then, Sara says, she became aware of her body shutting down. The best way she has found to explain it is the way you go around the house at night, locking doors and turning off lights, one room at a time. It was like her body was going around shutting it all down.
She became aware of her energy, her essence. The first thing she noticed was that the pain dissipated. It dissolved, she says, especially the pain from the meningitis.
Then she felt her essence leave her body. She knows it may sound weird, she says, but it left through her feet.
As in her first near-death experience, she says, she was at ceiling height looking down at her body. This time she knew she was looking at it, and she thought, that doesn’t look like me. She felt compassion from the body she had left. She was not distressed. She did not feel attached.
The Light That Was Pure Love
Sara describes an anti-gravity pull. The ceiling no longer existed and there was no real sense of direction. If she has to describe it, she says, she went up, because in our human minds that is up.
In the distance she saw it, and also felt it, and also became part of it: the most magnificent, bright, white light. It was not like light here. It was alive and dynamic, and “it was pure love.” She calls it “the most beautiful love I’ve ever experienced,” like love here but to the power of a million, a billion.
As she got closer, she says, she knew it was unconditional and non-judgmental, and that it was the source of everything. She knew where she came from and where she returned to. “It felt like I was coming home,” she says, like returning from a wonderful holiday to your own bed and favorite mug.
She believes we all point to the same thing with different labels, depending on our beliefs. For her, she says, “love is the foundation of all consciousness.” Our entry on consciousness explores the idea further.
Three Beings Who Knew Her
In this space, which she now calls the love dimension, Sara says she became aware of three beings. They were familiar, she says, like someone you met in preschool and have not seen for decades. The more time she spent with them, the more she remembered.
She says everything was communicated telepathically. The beings were her guides. One had more prominence, and she knew this was her Master Guide, who had been with her in every incarnation. She says they communicated that she was about to review her life.
For more on this kind of presence, see our guide to communicating with spirit guides and the glossary entry on spirit guides.
The Life Review: Many Perspectives at Once
Sara compares the life review to watching a movie in which you are the lead actor, but you are not just watching. You are experiencing it, from multiple perspectives, and reviewing it with your guide, all at once.
She says she experienced the intent she had in each moment, and the ripple effect it had on another person. If she had a positive effect, she experienced how the other person felt. If she had affected someone negatively and caused suffering, she says, she experienced that too, along with how it rippled out into that person’s reality.
Her guides directed her awareness to particular scenes. “What you put your awareness on expands in consciousness,” she says. She compares it to a camera operator zooming in on one point while everything else still exists around it.
That is why, she says, the life review highlighted two things: awareness and intent. She now understands how important intent is, and the big role it plays in co-creating the reality we walk into. “Your intent in each moment matters.”
For related reading, see our entry on the life review.
Heaven and Hell as How We Live
Sara offers her own take on heaven and hell. If you review a life in which you mostly did, thought, said and acted in ways that brought happiness and joy to others, she says, that is what you will experience in each scene, and it may feel like heaven. If your life mostly brought pain and suffering, that is what you experience in each scene, and it may feel like hell.
So her understanding is that “how you’re living your life now becomes your heaven or hell.” She describes infinite expansion of consciousness with an image from childhood: watching the fog roll over the Scottish moors, only in reverse, rolling away and expanding forever.
This is Sara’s perspective, shared as her own understanding of what she was shown. Our entry on heaven offers other views.
The Healing Space
After the review, Sara says, the presence of the light receded and her guides became more prominent. She was told she would go to a healing space. It was a dome-shaped room with an arched doorway, and her guides directed her through it and asked her to lie down.
She says she had a sense of form, though not a human body. Her Master Guide was at her head and her other guides were at her arms. Three other healing beings were at her feet and around her legs.
The healing, she says, was for her soul and what it had been through in her human incarnation. It was a beautiful vibrational hum, a feeling and a sound that traveled through her, through “a warm liquid gold.” She compares it to a really beautiful massage that you never want to end.
If this appeals to you, you may enjoy our glossary entry on energy healing.
Plugged In: A Download of Understanding
As she was falling back toward her body, Sara says, it was like being plugged in to consciousness, like putting a power plug into a wall socket. She felt everything she had been curious about downloading, including past lives.
She had always been curious about time, space and energy and how they work. She was shown, she says, something like the grid paper you use in math at school, imprinted onto consciousness. It is fluid and dynamic and moving, she says, and those grids are unified fields of time, space and energy.
Be You, and Lighten Up
Sara’s message is simple. Live it as who you are. Don’t live it the way other people think you should. “Find what lights you up and do that,” she says, and grab it and live it all.
“Life is so much fun.” Instead of putting our awareness on the negative, look at what there is to be grateful for. Be where you are. And, in her words, “don’t take yourself so seriously.” She adds, with a laugh: literally, get over yourself.
Placing Sara’s Story Beside Common Themes
Several elements here appear often in near-death accounts: leaving the body, looking down at it, a bright light that feels like love, familiar beings, a life review and a sense of return. Sara adds her own touches, such as essence leaving through the feet, the multi-perspective view of cause and effect, and a healing space.
Researchers have studied these experiences for decades. A well-known 2001 study in The Lancet led by Pim van Lommel found that 62 of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, about 18 percent, reported one. What they mean is still debated, and we share them as experiences without medical claims. Start with our complete guide to near-death experiences.
Questions to Sit With
- Sara says what you put awareness on expands. What are you giving most of your attention to this week?
- If you could feel the ripple effect of your last day, what intent would you want behind it?
- What lights you up, and what is one small way to make room for it?
This week, choose one interaction each day and set an intention before it begins. Afterward, notice how it felt to carry that intent.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Sara says love is the source of everything and the foundation of all consciousness.
- She describes guides who have been with us in every incarnation.
- She says a life review lets us feel how our actions rippled out to others.
- She says intent matters in every moment, and heaven and hell grow out of how we live.
- She says to be yourself, find what lights you up and not take yourself so seriously.
Please enjoy my conversation with Sara Jayne.
Guest Links: Connect With Sara Jayne
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Sara Jayne?
Sara Jayne is the guest of this Divine Encounters episode. She says she spent ten years in and out of hospital with a serious autoimmune illness before a near-death experience at home.
What happened to Sara Jayne before her experience?
She says she was diagnosed in 2010 with a life-threatening systemic autoimmune disease affecting her heart and brain, and had a stroke, a heart attack, eight episodes of meningitis, heart failure and weekly chemotherapy.
Why did Sara go home?
She says there was nothing else to do but wait for access to an experimental drug, and she wanted to be at home with her young children, in her own bed, instead of hundreds of kilometers away in a city hospital.
What did Sara say to her husband that night?
She says she told him, “I’m not going to be here tomorrow.” They made a pact to go to the hospital if she deteriorated.
How did Sara describe leaving her body?
She says her body shut down like a house being locked up at night, her pain dissolved, and her essence left through her feet. She says she was at ceiling height looking down at her body.
What did Sara experience in the light?
She says it was alive, dynamic, pure love, unconditional and non-judgmental, and that it felt like coming home.
Who were Sara’s guides?
She says three beings she knew from before were her guides, including a Master Guide who had been with her in every incarnation. They communicated telepathically.
What was Sara’s life review like?
She says she experienced her life from multiple perspectives at once, including how others felt her actions and the ripple effects of her intent.
What does Sara say about heaven and hell?
She says how you live your life now becomes your heaven or hell, because you experience what you caused in the review.
What happened in the healing space?
She says her guides and three healing beings surrounded her in a dome-shaped room, and a vibrational hum passed through her like warm liquid gold, healing her soul.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the person’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What a life review is
- Who spirit guides are
- William J. Peters on what a life review taught him
- Maria Lupita Gurule on facing every soul she ever hurt
- Susan Dyer on meeting her spirit guides
- Hal Elrod on mindset through illness and survival
- Mariko Frederick on hidden realms and life between lives
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Sara Jayne 0:03
I was ended up in hospital with cardiac complications in 2010 and that was the beginning. Was diagnosed with a real life threatening autoimmune disease and a systemic autoimmune disease. So a systemic disease affects organs. Mine affected my heart and then my brain. And that was a 10 year period of pretty much in hospital, a lot of it trying and failing every treatment available at the time and as new ones became available, try, trying those. But had, I guess, stroke, heart attack, eight episodes of meningitis and inflammation and heart failure, and eventually was started on weekly chemotherapy in hope that that would get me into remission. And I was close to a year into that when it started to fail, and I was in hospital with severe heart failure at that time, and I had meningitis, and was awaiting approval for a new experimental drug we'd heard about that was available like over in the US and other but wasn't available in Australia. And I was stabilized, but still really sick, and I wanted to go home. I had young children at home, and I had spent so much of my time in hospital, and there was really nothing else we could do but wait and see if I could have access to this drug. And so I was allowed home. I must be pretty convincing. I don't know how I was allowed home, but I was I don't know how I managed to talk my way up, but I got home, and I was pretty much existing breath to breath. I couldn't care for myself. I was in my bed when you have meningitis, the inflammation in the brain and the light, I couldn't handle light of even a TV or a phone or any sort of light, so I had some like, really dark, big Hollywood style, glasses on, and I had no hair because I had chemo, so I had a big scarf wrapped around my head, and I was in bed, and I've got one photo of that period, and I look at it, and I just laugh every time, because I had no idea what I looked like. Was it too sick to care? But my kids, the my kids would exist in my room with me and on my bed with me. They would come and crawl up on bed with me and spend time with me. I am on the day I woke up knowing that it was going to be my last day. You could say, why didn't I go back to hospital if I knew I was going to decline? But there really was nothing more we could do. And I wanted to be in my own home. I wanted to be in my own bed, and I wanted to be around my own family. I didn't want to be I lived in a small country town. I didn't want to be hundreds of kilometers away in a city hospital, if that was my last day, I literally just that, like just drunk my whole everything in or listening to my children when they came home from school, just listening to them and lying on my bed and just lying there, drinking it all in. And I remember that I felt happy to have them near me, but I was 10 years into a really long, hard fight, and I barely had the energy to breathe, let alone talk, let alone live. So they went off to bed, and I remember, I told my husband, he came to bed, and I said, I'm not going to be here tomorrow. And he said, Well, you've thought that before, which we had, I've had many, many times where it's been touch and go and and I, you know? And he said, Oh, you're a fighter, you know, you always fight. And I went, Yeah, okay, that's I do, like I am a fighter. And he just said, I just said, If I deteriorate, you can take me, but I want to stay here. Because he said to me, Well, if you really feel like that, we should go to the hospital. And I again, I must be very convincing, because I managed to talk him into a pact of, if I deteriorate, will go, but I would like to stay here. And he went. He watched me. I remember him lying there watching me for a while and listening to me breathing. And he eventually went to sleep. And I was aware of I'd like, I don't know how to explain it. I was aware of my body shutting down. And the best way I've come to explain that is as you would go around the house at night and shut the house down, lock the doors, turn off, the lights, switch a lot of that room shut down. That room shut down, and you're just shutting it all down before you go to sleep at night. It was like my body was going around, my body shutting it all down, or I was but it was shutting down to then I was really just aware of my energy, and by that I meant my essence. I was in a lot of pain with the meningitis, and the first thing probably I was aware of was the pain dissipated. It dissolved. I the moments before I felt my essence leave my body, and this may feel. Weird sound with it left through my feet, a weird thing to say, but for me, that was how it happened. I my essence left through my feet, and as with the first nd, I was aware I was at ceiling height, looking down at my body. But this time I knew I was looking at my body, and again, thinking I don't look like that, or that doesn't look like me. So I had that awareness, and I remember feeling a lot of compassion from that body that I had left. I wasn't distressed as I as I said the first time, I wasn't distressed. I didn't feel attached. I always just that awareness, and I'm existing as me, and I'm looking down. I was aware of a anti gravity like a pool, an anti gravity pool through the ceiling. The ceiling no longer existed, and there really was no sense of direction. If I really try and accurately describe it, I have to say I went up, because in our human minds, that's up. In our spatial understanding of Earth. I traveled up, and then I was aware of that, pulling into a space where there was in the distance. I saw it, but I also felt it. I was also became part of it, this most magnificent, bright, white light. It wasn't like light here. It was alive and it was dynamic, and it was pure love. I have to say it's light, but it was the most beautiful love I've ever experienced, like love here, but to the power of a million, a billion, like it was, it was love, and I knew as I got closer that the most it was unconditional, non judgmental, love that I knew was the source of everything. So I knew I just as I'd woken up with a knowing I'm not going to be here tomorrow. I knew it was a source of all. I knew it was where I came from. I knew it was where I returned to. It felt like I was coming home. It felt like when you go on a really nice holiday and you have a lot of fun, and it's really, really great fun, and you come home and you go, oh so good to be home, and you've got your own bed and your own favorite mug and your own cup of tea, and it just feels so good to be home, even though you've just had a really good holiday, it just felt familiar. And I was happy to be home. I knew it was the foundation of everything. I knew it created me. I feel that it's what we all reference, but we use different words depending on our beliefs. We all have a different label for what this light is. It was love, and it was sourceable, and it was the foundation, like love is the foundation of all consciousness. So while in this space of this love dimension, I now refer to it as I went to the love dimension, I became aware of the presence of three beings, and they were also familiar, like meeting someone I'd met in preschool. You haven't seen them for a very long time, and you're now in your 50s. They're familiar. You know them, and that remembering as you spend more time with them, you sort of remember them more and more. I knew them, and they knew me. Everything about me, I'm existing as consciousness and able to have a conscious thought, everything I thought was telepathically communicated. And the beings communicated, they were my guides. I one of them had more prominence energetically, and I knew that to be my Master Guide, who had been with me forever and ever in every incarnation, they communicated with me, and I was to review what my life was. And it's like watching a movie where you're the lead actor, but you're not just watching so I wasn't just watching my life. I was observing that. I was experiencing it, like experiencing it from multiple perspectives, and then I was also reviewing it with my guide. So all of those things all at the same time, experiencing participating it at the other and reviewing the intent I had in that moment, and experiencing what that the ripple effect that had on another. And if I had really positive effect, or I experienced that, how the other experienced it. But if I had affected someone negatively and caused suffering or pain or and also the ripple effect that that had going out into their reality, and like lots the continuum of that effect, my awareness was being directed to where my guides would have it. So the scene that we would be looking at and examining, or not examining, but reviewing. And what you put your awareness on expands in consciousness. So that sort of like you zoom in with a camera, like you're a camera man, and you can zoom in to one thing, even though everything else exists around it. Your awareness is like that, like the camera. Zooming in on one focal point, and that's the life review really highlighted awareness in that regards, and also intent. I now understand intent, how important intent is, and how it the big role that it plays in the co creation process of the reality I'm going to walk that you're going to walk into. Anyone will walk into your intent is a really powerful tool in that co creation process with consciousness, a life review is what you do, and your intent in each moment matters. And I think the concept of Heaven and Hell, think about if you're reviewing your life and you have predominantly done, thought, said, acted in a way that brought happiness and joy and all the positive, good stuff to others. That's what you're going to experience in your life. Review, that will be the experience over and over again of each scene that might feel like heaven or might be a heaven experience, if, on the other hand, you've predominantly was pain and suffering, and that is your experience through every scene as what you've experienced in it as the other that may feel like hell. I think that my understanding of Heaven and Hell is how you're living your life now becomes your heaven or hell, because you're going to experience it as what you've done here, but what you've lived your life, as I remember watching, when I was a little girl, watching the Scottish malls and the fog rolling over the Scottish malls, like coming toward like rolling towards me. And it's sort of like, make that in reverse, and rolling the other way and expanding infinitely that see, sort of the only way I can expand, like explain infinite expansion of consciousness as you're watching it unfold in front of you. Then after that, his presence or dominance seemed to recede again, and my guides came more into dominance. And I was told that I was going to have a healing I was going to go to a healing space. It was a dome shaped building room, and it had an arched doorway, and my guides directed me through it and communicated me to lie down. And as I was saying at the beginning, I had form like not human body, but I had the sense of form. Master Guide was at my head, and my other guides were at the size of my arms, and there were three other healing beings in that space. That's what I was communicated that they were healing beings, and they were at my feet and around my legs. The healing was for my soul, for what it had been through in my human incarnation. And it was really beautiful, vibrational like hum. It was a vibrational feeling and sound that traveled through me. And it traveled through like a warm gold, a warm liquid gold, just passing. And it felt magnificent. It was so beautiful. It's like, I don't know, having the really beautiful massage or something, you never want it to end, like, it's just beautiful. It was just healing. So as I was at the end, I it was like I was when I was falling back into my body. It was like I was plugged into conscious. It's like you get a power plug and put it in the wall socket. It was like that. And just downloading everything I'd been a curious, like, everything that I had been thinking about or curious about, was like downloading past lives. And I know I was curious about time and space and energy, and how does all this work? And because I don't think about the little things right? Think about a big concept, and I was shown. So think about maths. I don't know, when you're at school, you have grid paper for maths when you're learning maths, and put imprint a grid like on consciousness, and it's fluid and dynamic, and that grid is moving. That grid are unified fields of time and space and energy all imprinted on consciousness. Live it as who you are. On it like be you, but don't. Don't live it how other people think you should live it. Do. Find what lights you up and do that and just leave it big and grab it and live it all. And it's amazing. All of it's just, it's amazing. I life is so much fun. And instead of putting our awareness on the negative, look at all like everything, there's so much to be grateful for. Just live it as you, be you and you like, like, live where you are, be where you are and and don't be so serious about it all. And it's, don't take yourself so seriously. Get over yourself. Like, literally get over yourself.
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