Alex Ferrari 3:48
I like to welcome to the show Bridget Cook Birch. How you doing, Bridget?

Bridget Cook-Burch 3:55
I'm doing great. Great to see you, Alex. This is going to be fun. It

Alex Ferrari 3:59
is going to be a ball. I can't wait to get started with you. Up, first of all, thank you for coming on the show. Your story, you had, you died, you came back, you have some brought back some stuff. It's, it's a, it's an amazing story. So, before we jump into your near death experience, can we talk a little bit about where you came from, the spirituality that you grew up with up into the point of where you, your near death experience, and then we'll jump into the NDE.

Bridget Cook-Burch 4:27
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So, I grew up, I was adopted when I was six months of age, so I already had three sets of parents by that time, because I had my birth parents, foster parents, and then my, my adoptive parents, who were amazing, but I, I carried a little bit of a well, I carried a deep wound inside of me that was, wasn't I good enough, wasn't I pretty enough, wasn't I smart enough, that I, that they had to give me up, and unconsciously I was always trying to. Do things for myself. I was very fiercely independent, because you know the big people would always leave, and so this was rather exacerbated by my religious upbringing. So I grew up Catholic in Brigham City, Utah, so absolutely surrounded by the Mormon culture. There were very few of us that were not. I already had enough guilt to be a Jewish princess, so I was living this, you know, very interesting story. Also, I had older brothers and sisters that were partiers, and that was absolutely taboo in our small town, and so, you know, there was all these black and white dichotomies and other things that were around me, and one of the things that was tough was I was always trying to prove myself, like that I was worthy of being seen and heard, and you know, so sometimes my behavior would, would be way out on a limb, but there was also this deep yearning inside me, my my dad was a deacon, one of the first level deacons in 1976 and my mom helped bring in converts, and you know, so here they're off on their spiritual journey, and I would go into the chapel in between masses, and sometimes I'd just really yearn to know who that figure was up on the cross, but I didn't feel anything, and I also thought that I was pretty unworthy. Then I had a couple spiritual experiences, and I thought, whoa, wouldn't it be great to become a nun? Like, I could have these experiences all the time, this could be really cool, but Alex, the there was a deeper part of me that felt so flawed, so like unable to come back from from the brink, you know, you're a partier, you're you're too crazy, you've done too much, you've made too many mistakes. How in the world could you ever become a nun, right? And so I just went off to college, I was working three jobs, I was going to school, and every step of the way trying to prove that somehow I was worthy to breathe. Often didn't feel that way, but you know, I was getting good grades, and, and my employers liked me, and I had friends, and and those kinds of things, but it really started to take a toll, and inside my body stress and ulcers and fissures in my colon. I started to eat away at myself, and I didn't even know it. And so, you know, I'd move from job to job, and then try to take a test, and I started failing everything.

Bridget Cook-Burch 7:34
I was failing my 23 credits, I was failing to pay my bills, I started really letting friends down, and I was letting my parents down, and I would do anything not to let them know what was going on with me, so I would lie, I wouldn't, I wouldn't let them know, but at one point, Alex, I got so sick, I'd lost 30 pounds in three days, and I was a runner and a bodybuilder, and all my spare time, and I didn't have 30 pounds to lose, so I took my last five bucks that I'd made from waitressing the night before and put it in my truck, and I made my way down the canyon to Brigham City to see my mom, because I just was that sick, I needed my mommy, and I just remember pulling up in her driveway and feeling like this horrific level of surrender of what a bad, sick and wrong person I was, just that you know, how could anyone love or accept me, and I was just not making it in the world, and just so beside myself, and I dragged myself out of my truck, and I dragged myself to her front door, or her side door, and she opened the door, and she took one look at me, and she said, "We're going to the doctor, you do not look well, and she put me right in her car and raced me over to the doctor's office, where I collapsed. Luckily, it was right next door to the hospital, and they rushed me into an emergency surgery, and that's where they found pints and pints and pints of sepsis of infection, like in my whole abdominal area. So I, they're like, okay, we figured this out. They, they had to put me on a subclavian because I was so emaciated, they couldn't do a regular IV, and so they were giving me like six or seven different kinds of intravenous antibiotics, and what we didn't know was one of them was killing me, and so I get out of surgery. I'm expected to do well, but I start spiking these fevers, 106 107 They're worried about brain damage, they're worried, you know, about a lot of things. And my mom, she comes and goes, and she's there as much as she can, and finally at 2o'clock In the morning I'd been in the hospital for several days, 2o'clock in the morning, and I hear them say, "We better call her mom back, because she is not going to make it until morning. And I just remember, like, you know, when you hear someone saying that you're going to die, you know, when I was, I was in my early 20s, and I'm like, you know, I knew I was failing at everything, but I certainly never thought that I was going to die, and so I'm, I'm facing my own mortality, and there is like this deep sadness inside of me, because I knew I had not fulfilled the measure of my creation. Now I had no idea what the hell that was, but I knew Alex, that I hadn't fulfilled it. Like, deep inside, I'm like, whoa. I came here to do some things I haven't done them, and all I was was just the most sad I had ever been in my entire life. And my roommate, behind the curtain, she said, "You know you're dying, don't you? And I said, "Yes. And I'd had interesting spiritual experience with her that I didn't know her, but she had started reading.

Bridget Cook-Burch 11:13
She and her husband were reading from the big book before she went into surgery, and I had been through some 12 steps, and here I'm listening to words about God, and I felt that yearning come back, that little girl in the chapel, you know, the one who, who yearned for, but didn't have that, that kind of relationship at all, and so she and I started quietly talking, and what had happened when she had surgery, she had come back writhing in pain, like her, she had one of those old-fashioned gallbladder surgeries, so she could feel every cut and every stitch, and Alex, I didn't know at the time that I was empathic, but all I knew is I could feel her pain from behind the curtain, I think it's just because all my walls were down, you know, I was so sick I could feel her pain in her body. And then she had her bishop come, and he gave her a blessing, and he commanded her body to accept the medication, and I felt the pain leave as she sighed and went to sleep, and I thought, I don't know what that was, whatever voodoo or crazy stuff that was, but you know, I, it stuck with me. So, a little bit later was interesting. After she said, you know, you're dying, because she heard the nurses talking about me in the corridor. I said, yeah, I am, and it was like one of those Mack truck moments where I said, so can anyone have one of those blessings, and she said yes, she calls her husband right away, and he comes down, and he and another individual give me a blessing, and it was different than what I had experienced with with my priest, who had come, my mom had brought the priest in, and I didn't know how to balance these two factors. I only know what I felt, and that was like, whether I lived or died, it was going to be okay. And up until that moment, I hadn't felt that way. So I went to sleep for a little bit, and when I woke up, I will tell you this, that my hospital room was filled with the most incredible, like piercing, beautiful, bright white light that I have ever seen. It was just.. it was so undeniable. I couldn't believe that, you know, that the whole hospital team, I, all I knew was that right in front of me was was Jesus. He was right there, and he was looking at me in the eyes, and I knew him. I just, I knew him, and the cool thing about it is he knew me, and that light that that was so bright, it was unconditional love, like I'd been loved before, very loved, but it was nothing like this, and, and still to this day, it's difficult for me to describe, but it permeated everything, and my whole body was like alive and on fire I could feel every atom moving, and I was looking at my skin, you know, my hospital gown, and and I had short sleeves, and looking at my skin, and it's vibrating with his love, and have this, like, you know, those ugly metal tray tables that the hospital feeds you on, and and my water was sitting on it, and that metal tray table was vibrating with his love. It was transforming everything in the room into something alive, and I was part of it, and he was a part of it, and I don't remember words. I, but I do remember this. He didn't care how much debt I was in, what classes I was failing, how stupid were the choices that that I was making in my life.

Bridget Cook-Burch 15:13
He just loved me for me, and it absolutely changed my world, and he let me know I was being given a second chance at life, and my heart just left, because I knew, oh my gosh, I'll have this chance to fulfill the measure of my creation, I'll be able to do something, and I fell asleep, and when I woke up, my fever had had completely gone down, and the nurse is wheeling in six or seven more of these intravenous antibiotics, and I told her, I said, "Hey, I can have every single one of these, but I cannot have this one, and Alex, she just gave me this look, like, "Who do you think you are? and she said, Bridget, we thought we were going to lose you last night. These are the only things that are saving you, and I said, not this one. And you know, in my very Catholic, very Western medicine family, like you never said no to a medical person that was trying to help you. They were like second only to God. So, and here I am, I'm arguing with her, and I'm like, I cannot have this one, and she's like, How, what, why do you know this? And I tried to explain to her, and have no words, right, but I'm trying to explain. She races off to tell the doctor that I am, you know, a fruit fly, I am, I'm a French fries, I have a Happy meal, and I'm just, you know, crazy. Well, he came back into the room a while later. He listened to my story, and he'd had other patients with near-death experiences, and he said, 'Well, we can take her off this antibiotic because she's on all the rest of these. Let's just see how she does. And in 24 hours I walked out of that hospital on my own power, like my, my body was healed, and the story that I had been telling myself that I wasn't worthy, wasn't good enough, wasn't smart enough, wasn't whatever enough, it began to shift and change, but the coolest thing was, like, you know, I could, I could look into my eyes in the mirror for the very first time, I could, like, really look at me, and I could see love there. And what I love the most was, I went out into the world, and I'm, you know, interviewing young people and high-risk youth in Denver, and you know, all of these gang members and other people, and I could love them for who they are. I began to see threads of their stories, and I could see love there. It didn't matter how dark or dramatic or difficult their circumstances were, and I really saw how much it matters, the stories that we tell ourselves, like what my narration was before my near-death experience. I lived life in a box, and it was all about being unworthy. And then I see these gang kids, and it's like, you know, mom and dad are gang members, and grandma, grandpa, and aunt, and uncle, and they lived in a box of stories they were telling themselves, but when, when something would happen, when someone loved them enough to show them a different way, when, when you know, they would have a life-changing moment, and when that box lid opened, I could watch what happened when their transformation took place, and I wanted to capture those stories, and so I had the opportunity to was amazing.

Alex Ferrari 18:46
Well, that's a, that's a heck of a story, Bridget, all the way through. And by the way, when you were saying about wanting to be a nun, I also wanted to be a priest when I was in first grade in Catholic school, because I, not because of a spiritual experience, I just felt like, oh, they seem very important. I'll, that seems like a good idea. And then my mom cried when I told her, and that went away pretty quickly. But when you said you wanted to be an, you wanted to be a nun, I feel that the most interesting nuns are the party nuns that that all sorts of debauchery. And then they come to they're the most interesting, I would, I would love to see you as another, but not right now, obviously, made in another life, but not this

Bridget Cook-Burch 19:29
one, I

Alex Ferrari 19:31
mean, but what's fascinating about your story is there's a bunch of stuff that I want to unpack here, when you were having a near-death experience in the room, and when Yeshua walked in, you said there was no words, so there was a telepathic communication, or a knowing, an understanding of information that has been passed between you two in a way that we can't really comprehend. It's almost like. You walk into a room and you just know everything, everybody, everything around you instantly, and you have no understanding. Why is that kind of what it was?

Bridget Cook-Burch 20:09
Yes. When I get emotional, in his eyes there was universes and universes and universes of knowledge. I felt like I knew everything, I understood everything. I suddenly knew why I was here. I, I understood, like generations, histories, complex layers of universes, all kinds of things in his eyes. And I did have an out of body, but only for a moment, like where I got to see him looking at me, looking at him, and it was like the everything opened up even more than, well, I can't even say that, not more than what I looked at in his eyes, it was like a continuation of that, I just got this idea of the broader expanse of holy cow, for two individuals in this tiny room in this, this thing, but it was only momentary, and just his communication to me was, it was so pure, it was, I would say it was like not laced with anything except that love, right? It just was. It was so pure, and the acceptance so far beyond tolerance, like, oh, you poor baby, you've, you know, made these stupid mistakes, kind of thing. There was none of that. It was, oh, I see you, and I saw him, you know, that avatar scene with the I see

Alex Ferrari 21:47
you.

Bridget Cook-Burch 21:48
Oh my god, it was, it was, it was just like that. It was like, you know, being seen, being known, being recognized, and I knew things about him I had never known before, never been taught in my, you know, CCD, right, in any of my Catholicism, in any of my, my own independent spiritual studies, you know, which I didn't have a whole lot of time for, but I'm telling you, what, what I learned in, in those moments was, was so valuable and irreplaceable was also difficult when I woke up the next day, because I knew what had happened. It was the most real thing that I had ever known, but my knowledge was kind of, you know, went from all of this to this, this tiny little fragment. Oh, I can't have that medication is killing me, so that was rough.

Alex Ferrari 22:45
Yeah, no, I can imagine. And we'll get to how you processed it afterwards, but I want to stay in the near death experience for a second. The I've heard that before, that you know when you're in a near and an NDE, you have access to all knowledge and everything, and you understand things in such a grand way that you can't even comprehend it, and but when we're thrown back into the body, the brain can't house the hard drive, is not big enough, you know, it's like being in the cloud, and then all of a sudden you're stuck to, you know, 10 megabytes, it's just, you just can't, but you remember glimpses, or you remember parts of it, but you can't, like I've heard stories of, like, oh yeah, I was, and I understood quantum physics, like, I knew all of, I understood what quantum physics was, I understood what the nature of the universe was, all the, and I come back, I'm like, the, like, I can't, I can't grasp it, so when you were with, with Yeshua, and you were seeing the stories that you didn't, that were not connected to Catholicism. What did you discover about Yeshua that is not taught in religion? Is there anything that you brought back story wise? I

Bridget Cook-Burch 23:54
got,

Alex Ferrari 23:56
take your time. I know that I understand. I completely understand

Bridget Cook-Burch 24:08
here, I love words, and I don't always have words at all to explain this. I will say, like complexities and times like time ceased to exist while he was there, and I, I understood time forward and back. I didn't have a life review, but I understood time forward and back, and I did understand that, like the stories that I had told myself, I, I got more information about the stories, and I didn't, I didn't wake up with all of them, but in the moment I could see patterns and people and backgrounds and ancestors and all different kinds of. Things, so that had to do with me, but with him, like I understood for the first time why Yeshua is called creator, like I saw that, like not only did he create me, but all of this, all of this, the universe that's.. I was seeing the colors I was seeing that are indescribable, these layers of stars and planets, and and other things, and he had.. there was so much more than what our tiny little capsule of understanding on earth was about him, and, and I can't even put into words, but I know, like, what he played here for us, the not just the story, but that actual what he did for us here on the planet to be what created this place and these people and all of these things, and then to be betrayed at the deepest layer, but it was, it was more than just here, it was other places as well, and I don't, I still don't understand what that means, but I just know that he has had, he has played this out. I know that there have been other places, times, eternities that that he has continued to play this role, so that we could understand ourselves, but also not be, not be tied to our darkness, not be tied to that identity of I am irreparable, I am unredeemable, I am only, you know, I thought I was dust, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and I'm dust under God's heel, and I discovered so much more, and I know I'm not explaining this very well. I apologize. Oh,

Alex Ferrari 27:08
it's.. it's no, no, no, I understand completely. It's look, you died and came back. I can't expect, you know, you had a sonographer with you, you know, or video crew with you. So it's okay, I get it. I wish I did

Alex Ferrari 27:20
be. it'd be like a 12k image, it'd be beautiful, it'd be giant, but that's, that's so beautiful. So, when you came back, and now you've got the story that you were raised with, which is this, this Catholicism, and that's the story that you were basically born into, essentially, and now you have this truth that is your truth that you have experiential and experience with. How did you start to digest it, dissect it, and process the two stories and just figure it out for yourself, because it's a problem with all of us. All of a sudden, we built our entire.. that's.. I say this all the time as a storyteller. I'm like, we all are just living out our stories, that's it. Whatever story we were born into, if you were born in Hindu, you're living out that story. You're born in Muslim, you're building out that story. If you're born in the tribe, somewhere in the Amazon, who has no attachment to anything, you follow another story. These are stories that we live, and that when something comes along that shakes the foundation of that story, which I would argue what you went through did. There's two reactions: one, anger and fight to defend the story, or one you open and surrender, and are curious to see how you can rework the story. That's a seeker versus someone who is living in the story, that and they, and they feel safe there. So you were this shook. This is not only did it shake you up as you die and come back, but the story, it could, it could crumble your entire reality, and how to deal with that. So, how did you process this?

Bridget Cook-Burch 29:13
Oh, it did crumble my whole reality, and it's interesting what I attach meaning to, or what I didn't, you know, because I'm back to just being the singular human trying to figure it out, and I had never heard of near death experiences, I didn't know that other people on the planet had had these, I just had this singular thing that I couldn't tell my mom, I barely told the nurse a few things I barely told the doctor, because already they were acting like I was crazy, right? Like, how do I share this, and then also to know that I was loved that deeply, and you know, old Bible and saint stories, and different things, like, you know, who was. I to have this kind of, of situation happen. Who on the world, you know, in the world, did I think I was? So I started having a lot of fears that came in. I was not angry, I was sad that I didn't know everything anymore, but I, I hid a little bit, but I went from being a yearner to being a seeker, and so you know, wherever I could find meaning, find truth, I would attach to it, you know, kind of like a succulent kind of thing, and I would attach to it, and, and so, you know, I went through a couple of years of going to all kinds of churches, especially when I moved out of Utah, because there was this big Mormon influence, and I'd, I'd had that, you know, blessing, and I'm like, you know, I need to detach, I need to see, so I would, I would go to the Church of the Nazarene, I would go to these incredible, you know, Bible thumping, snake wearing, I went to Jewish synagogues, I sang praises with some of the most incredible choirs, and I would get lost on my way home because I was used to mountains to guide my way. I'm in South Carolina, and I can't find my way home, but I would find my way home if it found my way home, and I kept having these experiences that there is much more than what you're seeing, but I was still stuck, Alex, in that Catholicism, and then even Mormonism, and other things of black, white, right, wrong, even though his experience with me in the hospital was exact opposite of that, as I was trying to disentangle from it. I still had old belief systems that kept on creeping up, so you know, I, I joined the LDS Church, and I learned a lot there, and I raised my family in it, and I loved a lot of things about it, but when they had an edict that was like this, is you know, it was against the children of LGBTQ and the children of polygamists, and I had done some research in both of those areas for books I was helping people with, and I'm like, that's not my Jesus, cannot be, yes, a big rut row, and I'm like, you know, and they've, they've since done some, some different things, but I just have to tell you, it was, it was a clarity moment of that was not my Yeshua, that was not my Jesus, and so I had to go a different path, a different way, and so anyway, a lot of disentangling, I would say, but I learned so much from other people. I've had so many near-death experiencers who have come to me to, to help me, you know, learn more as I'm coaching them through story, and I've, I've walked people through some really dark paths to the light, you know, my first book was about a former skinhead who changed his life, and then he was teaching others to stay out of gangs. Then I wrote about the daughter of a serial killer, and you know how she had to, to confront the skeleton and the family closet, and then the 19th wife of 65 women, and how you know she was able to put Warren Jeffs behind bars for life plus 20 years, like every single one of those stories of transformation from dark to light.

Bridget Cook-Burch 33:31
I had to learn things about myself that I wasn't comfortable with, and then come to grips with it, and feel it, and then help them to write it, to put it on the page and change my world, and then when you know I'd had some discoveries about near death experiences, I'm like, I am not alone. I had started talking about that at times when, when I was talking about my second book that had come out on Oprah and Dr. Phil and different things, and just in small audiences I would tell them about my experience, and I had heard this quote from Mother Teresa, who said, "I am a little pen in the hand of a god who is writing a love letter to the world, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's me, that was the part of myself that the nun, but also the woman in the world that knew there were so much more than we can even comprehend and know, and, and that's what I became the little pin in the hand of a god who is writing a love letter to the world, and so every time I hold a judgment, God will bring me a story, I'm telling you, what, and I feel like I'm still disentangling from old beliefs. I've let so much go, and I'm just so in the joy of the discovery, you know. Listening to some of your podcasts, I'm like, oh, you know, I will, I will find things that remind me of. Of that feeling in the hospital room or other things that have happened and provide incredible truth and there's other things I'm like, well, that's unusual, and I'm gonna put that on the shelf for a hot minute, but I, I never go into the black white, right, wrong anymore, because he showed me there's a whole different way to live,

Alex Ferrari 35:21
the yes yes, agreed 100% And I always say, with everything, you know, we explore every aspect of spirituality here, and every corner, and every tradition, and it, everything doesn't ring true for everybody. I always say that, like, if it rings true to you, use it. If it doesn't, put it on the shelf, maybe later you'll pick it up, or just discard it and move on, but for some people what's on the shelf for other people might be the thing, and vice versa. So it's all relative, you know, it's all relative exploration, you know. As dealing with my own unraveling over the years, and I, for me, it wasn't - I didn't go as deep as you did. I kind of early on was like, wait a minute, there's some plot, there's some plot holes here in this story that they're telling me. There's, you know, I always like talking about the yada yada years of Jesus, like he was 12, yada yada yada, he rode in on the donkey. I always want to know what happened in those yadda yadda years, so right, the yada yada years, because that's anytime you ask the nun, they're like, we don't talk about those things. I'm like, we don't, okay, it's a big plot hole there. I would like to know the Son of God showed up, and how he became who he became. Yeah, but anyway, that's a whole other story. So, unprocessing and unraveling is a big thing, and it sounds like your journey, it wasn't black and white, in a sense of like, after I died, I was like, I see clearly now, you know, everything is now perfect, no, you still had to unravel things and deal with stuff, and that's what I find so fascinating about the stories we tell ourselves, as even with the experience of seeing Yeshua in front of you, feeling everything you felt, understanding it to the core of your being. Your brain was like, yeah, but right, is that it was like, yeah, I hear the noise you're talking about with the G, but if you remember back when you're seven, this is what was said, and this you still had to unravel it and deal with it. So that is, I think, a lesson for everyone listening, that it's not just because you have this spiritual experience. It doesn't erase years of trauma, years of programming, years of beliefs and stories that you tell ourselves. It does take time to unravel these things, and sometimes a lifetime, if not multiple lifetimes, to figure out. Well,

Bridget Cook-Burch 37:48
and I got to the point where it's like it does take lifetimes, but now I'm like a voracious learner, listener, reader, you know, because I now know there's more and more and more, and you know, I get a lot of criticism sometimes because I, I left that black and white, and there's people who feel very comfortable in the black and white, and that was part of my identity for a time, but I was never more freaking miserable than black and white, and now that I'm open to color and layers and complexities, and and I love learning from Jewish authors, from Baha'i authors, from Hindu authors, from Buddhist authors, from these different people with different experiences, near death or not, like their belief systems, the things that are sacred to them, they're beautiful to me, and so I love working with all these different backgrounds, because I'm constantly learning, and just seeing, wow, and I'll tell you, Alex, one of the things I've seen, you know, because people do want to try to pinpoint, like, here's the truth, and this is not truth, and this is not truth, and that's not truth, it's just this truth, but the more I understand story, and the more I'm able to unravel story, and see even in one individual, like all the things that happened before, all the patterns, and then all the things that they're engaged in right now, and where their vision is going, it's like God has, however, many people are in the world, 8.18 point 2 billion ways of reaching us, and what matters is our reaching back. And when we open ourselves to be able to reach back, that's where I see so many miracles happen in people's lives, and definitely in mine.

Alex Ferrari 39:40
What I, what I find fascinating is the any, any religion, any spiritual practice, any, and this works in all aspects of human society, the absolutes. If you're in an absolute in any part, in any world, absolute medical, absolute education, absolute spiritually, if. You're like, this is the only way. Absolutely, this is the only way it could be. You negate everybody else's experience, and that's what I always found fairly arrogant about people who stick. This is my own personal opinion. I feel fairly arrogant to go, "Oh, the way I found is the way, and those guys over there, you mean the billion people who believe in something different than you and those other billion people who believe something poor, them they're just not the chosen people that made no sense to me. Because if you believe in an all-loving God, why that makes no sense. Why would you do that? It's like, no, everyone has a different path, and every path teaches something different. So, if you believe that a soul reincarnates and is here to learn, the Christian path is a certain path, you will learn a whole, and there's a Christian path, a Mormon path, a Catholic path, a Baptist Catholic, and all the different paths of poor Yeshua, poor John, poor Yeshua. was

Bridget Cook-Burch 41:02
right. I mean,

Alex Ferrari 41:04
Yogananda, the yogi behind me, said it the best. Jesus was crucified in one day, but his teachings have been crucified for 2000 years. And I think that's one of my, one of my favorite quotes of him. But if you go down a Hindu path, that's a very different path, but teaches you very different lessons. A Buddhist path teaches you very different lessons. A Muslim path teaches you very.. atheist path teaches you very differently. Just a spiritual path, of you know, a Wicca path teaches you very different.. all these different, you know, ways of looking at the universe and trying to figure out this insanity that we call reality is what I find so beautifully. This tapestry of story, and I think that's when I, when I came into the spiritual space, I came in as a storyteller. So I think that's where you and I kind of overlap a bunch, because I always look at everything through a story lens, as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, and I see, like, oh, we're just, you're killing that person because you don't believe his story, or your story has been threatened, that's the only reason you're doing that, whatever that story might be, religious, financial, power hungry, whatever it is, but this story, it's all it is, it's a story, and the happy

Bridget Cook-Burch 42:20
thing, too, like, how a story can actually enlighten and bring people together who don't have these views in common, but if you go deep enough into the story, if you show me story, right, that you're able to do with film and other things, it's like, oh, all of a sudden you know they, they might not believe exactly what that person believes, but for the first time they understand why this person believes what they do, and it opens doors, it plants seeds, it's, it's freaking amazing.

Alex Ferrari 42:52
It is pretty amazing, and I, you know, it's one of my goals in the work that I do is to bring that awareness to people that your belief system is based on a story that you were given, or that you believe, that's it. You're born into this pretty blank slate. Yeah, there's definitely some programming at the factory that you come in with, karma, trauma, other instincts, and things that your lifetimes brought in with you. But generally speaking, you don't have a belief system when you come into the earth. You don't, it's given to you by your caretakers, your parents, whoever those that might be, and then you start to develop, either you go down the path they gave you or you break free, and then there's different kinds of versions of that. So, like, for me, I was born Catholic, but I'd never had any guilt, no one told me, I mean, excuse me, let me reframe, I had lots of guilt because I was a Catholic, but, but my family was, they were like, they were more Easter, Christmas Catholic,

Bridget Cook-Burch 43:47
yeah, you

Alex Ferrari 43:48
know, yeah, the casual Catholic, you know, but I always find it, the casual Catholic, so I was never, I left, and I explored, and I read books on Edgar Cayce and Yogananda, and in, you know, masters, and all that stuff, and it was never like, what are you doing, nothing like that for me, but there are like yourself that, that I can't talk to my mom about that, but you know what's funny, when my kids were born, my mom, and she's watching this because she watches everything I say, but my mom would say to me, so are you going to get them baptized? I'm like, what are you going to get them baptized? I go, why? Because they're born with original sin, and this is the only way to save their soul from going to internal damnation. Is that what you're telling me, she's like, well, just in case. I'm like, wow, I thought that was the best. Just in case, just in

Speaker 1 44:49
case it's kind of like,

Alex Ferrari 44:51
like one of my, one of my kids, we were at the Vatican, and you know, in the gift shop, they have holy water you could buy that's blessed by, I guess, the Pope. Yeah, and it's beautiful, or innate little glasses with, like, metal - it's, I mean, it's Italian, it's gorgeous stuff, right? It was like three or four euros a bottle of holy water. What a scam. But anyway, it's like, oh, well, we're at the Vatican, we should buy one, and I wasn't thinking of buying one, but my, my kid turns to me, she's like, 'Dad, are we gonna.. can we get some holy water? I go, 'Why are we getting holy water? You don't.. this is not.. this is not just like.. well, just in case I go.. just in case.. what a vampire breaks in.. like, what do we.. what are we talking about here? Like, I'll just dabble some garlic on your bed. We're good. I don't understand. It's kind of like they, it's like they say sometimes, like, "Can you close it? Can you close the closet door? I go, "Why? When they're going to bed, "Why? Like, just in case, just in case. What a monster looks. Have you seen Monsters Inc? They're nice, but

Bridget Cook-Burch 45:56
oh, they're nice. There you go. Oh, I was, I was going to mention to you, it's, it's fascinating, like you were talking about, you know, what you had learned and what you were given. My father came back to visit me after he passed a few very significant times, and one of them, he told me this was my last time, I'm like, is my dad the deacon, right? You know, Catholicism all the way, etc. etc. but he, he told me that was my last time, and immediately it opened doors for me to be begin to think something different, but when you're talking about the just in case, when I was working with these fundamentalists, Mormons, which are very different from the mainstream church, these are people that believe in fundamental origins of the church, including polygamy, and, and it's so interesting because of, like, under Warren Jeffs, under ruler, and first, but especially under Warren, where it just became the stranglehold of, you have to look a certain way, you have to wear a certain thing if you're a girl, your voice has to be really high, you can't make any decisions. Those are for the men to decide. Pretty soon after he'd been arrested, it was like, you know, it only bread and water, because you know you have to be fasting and praying for the walls of the prison to come down for me. And then it strangled even worse, like you know, nobody is allowed to have sex or have children, you know, because if he couldn't do it, then you know who else should be able to, and I'm watching these people get be strangled spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally, and I'm like, you know, when they, the ones that did come out, and I had an opportunity to talk to, and some of the ones who were still in, it was like you're, you've been witnessing all of this, you know what kept you, or what has kept you, and it's that just in case, like, well, if, if I'm making a mistake, God will understand why, and maybe He'll forgive me, but what if this is the true path, you know, just in case I'm going to stay here in this strangled situation, and I was like, "Wow, this is this is what the black and white thinking can do, and this is also what can happen if you're under spiritual oppression. So one of the things I totally believe in is is spiritual freedom, and there are certain places where that's just not allowed, and it's also where it is deserved the very most. So, anyway, I love your just in case the thing is

Alex Ferrari 48:30
that these stories that we tell ourselves when we refuse to leave them, it's fear, it's always fear, it's fear of the just in case, the fear, like, what if I'm making a mistake and I go to hell, which I was introduced in first grade, which, what the hell was that about? I was terrified. I'm like, what a go to hell. It was just the indoctrination was insane, going to Catholic school, but it is fear, and I find that the more I've opened myself up to learning more about myself and learning more about my spiritual path and other people's spirituality, I am not a, I'm so not afraid anymore about things, and sometimes my, my story is challenged, as you can imagine, talking to so many different people, and my own story is challenging. Some, my story has been evolving every time I have a conversation, some new part of this new character, new idea gets put into my story, and in this tapestry of my own belief system that makes me understand and walk through this planet, and this reality is always constantly moving and shifting, there are core pillars that I don't really, for me it's my truth, and it's not hurting anybody else, and it's what I, it makes my story make sense to me, but there are elements of it, and I can, and that's been reaffirmed hundreds of times by people I've had on the show, so I'm like, well, wait a minute, if everyone keep. Saying similar things, and that's the one thing I have from my perspective, is so many different walks of life, but I see the patterns constantly, all the patterns, no matter the master, no matter the background, no matter the near death, there is patterns that I constantly am seeing again and again, and that's what I've built my foundation on, but like listening to your story today, certain things are interesting. What would that place here? All this is happening in the background of my own head, and if I'm like, that sounds, that's interesting, but I feel free, and I don't feel any judgment, because once you understand that there is no judgment, that that's ridiculous, that there's a man with a white beard, and in the heavens somewhere, judging us. It's like us judging our kids, and you and I are both parents, and we do judge our kids, but either of us would take a bullet for them, and

Bridget Cook-Burch 50:55
absolutely,

Alex Ferrari 50:56
and neither, and none of us would ever damn them to an eternal hell for mistakes they made, because you know what, you and I both made plenty of them on our along our path, so it's part

Speaker 2 51:08
of the journey,

Alex Ferrari 51:09
so it's part of the journey, it's part of the process, so it's it's it's quite fascinating to see what people do with their stories. Now, speaking of stories, I always like to ask, when people come back from a near-death experience, a lot of times it opens up certain things in, in them, their abilities that are inherent in all of us. I think all of us have the ability to connect to spirit, to have either psychic abilities, intuition, heightened intuition, see, see, hear, taste, smell, all the Claire's. All of us have the ability to do it, just like all of us have the ability to, if you're physically sound, to throw a basketball into a net, but none of us are all Michael Jordan, so it's all it's all levels of it. But near-death experiencers will come back a lot of times. I hear that they brought back something, and when I say brought back, it sounds very pet cemetery. So they open things, it's very pet cemetery. When I say they brought something back from the dead, no, no, it opens things up in them that been dormant, because you're energetically able to do so. So what did you, what did you bring back? No, what opened up for you?

Bridget Cook-Burch 52:21
Well, it's, it's interesting, because I was like a voracious reader when I was younger, you know, everything, but I absolutely love, like, Diary of Anne Frank when I was just eight years old. There were certain things that always compelled me, but when I came back from that experience, and I was number one, no longer afraid of a single soul, because I could see what God was seeing in them, like it, it let down a wall, a veil, the fear was gone, and just this voracious curiosity about people in their stories, and so I asked a lot of questions, and I listen a lot, and before I was just a talker trying to prove myself, and after that it was like, oh, it's so delicious, and as they would share stories, you know, these gang members, these, these, these other individuals, all with these unique stories, different backgrounds, walks of life, etcetera, you talked about the tapestry, like I'm able to see the tapestry of people's lives and the colors, and especially like these golden threads of rises and falls, and you know, oftentimes we want to portray that we've kind of delicately dance through life, and all of a sudden there's unicorns and rainbows, you know, at the end of our book, or the end of the story we're telling, or something, and we don't always want to go into deeply vulnerable places about turning points, you know, what brought us to think certain things about ourselves. I know you, as a filmmaker, have heard of the hero's journey, of course, and in, in that ascent into the dark cave, that for me, after, after the near death, you know, before that I was so afraid of shadow and darkness, and anything that was, that was even remotely, you know, had had the appearance of evil, had the appearance of darkness, was too vulnerable. I couldn't go there, but after this, it was like, oh, when did your inner battles and your outer battles meet? You know, where was the time you had the cave experience? You know, and some people, they have extraordinary heroes, journey one after another, after another, but the, you know, I love hearing about dark nights of the soul, because there's so much truth when you know you meet the dragon in the dark cave, and then you realize you're looking in the mirror that you've been the dragon all along, these belief. Systems, these things, the stories you've carried about yourself, what you believed and didn't believe you were capable of, all of those things, and then what was it that caused you to step back out of the cave and into the battle, knowing you are completely unworthy of the test, completely, you know, we're probably bound to fail, yet you step out anyway, and you go back into the battle, and you reclaim yourself, your truth, your story, despite these deep vulnerabilities. Oh, I just.. I am in love with human stories and human journeys, and what we're here to learn, and honestly, to what we take with us on the other side. So I can see these threads of story, and I often have intuition come when I'm working one on one with a client that I can tell when they're being deeply vulnerable, and it's not just body language, I can feel it inside my own. I often am given signals inside my body, but also generally their healing team if they're avoiding something. And yesterday I was was with a, with a client, and and she was running away again, and she's run away three times, but in her mind she's going somewhere to write her story, and her angel said, wherever you go, there you are. So, what are you going to do? Because this will show up again, and this will show up again until you decide that you're going to take a look at it. And then they shared, sorry, I get a little emotional. They shared something that she was in such deep condemnation of, because of the big ripples of drama that it had created, and they said, "Look at you, and they celebrated this beautiful thing that she had done when she, she actually rescued little innocent, and and and and they said, and this will happen wherever you go, and so what, what will you do with this now?

Bridget Cook-Burch 57:09
And so it's okay for you to go run off again, but you will be there. So it was just, it was so stunning, it was so beautiful, and you know, I meet people where they are, so if they're writing a professional book, and they want it to maintain a certain amount of professionalism, and this and that, I meet them where they are, but I will still ask the deeper questions, and that's the places where we reach each other in humanity, and I love it.

Alex Ferrari 57:39
Well, you know, if you don't mind, I would love.. do you.. so you do this one on one with people, so I mean, if you would love to use me as a guinea pig to show people what you do and how you do it, I would.. I'm willing to be vulnerable. I am always vulnerable with my audience to do this, so if you're interested, I'm more a game to do it,

Bridget Cook-Burch 58:01
wonderful. Okay, so Alex, I heard some of your stories, felt some things, your Catholic school, your catechism, you know, these other things, you come from an open, you know, the casual Catholics, but here in Catholicism, in the thick of school, you're hearing a dichotomy from what you're hearing at home, but there's also something inside of you, because you were not that just in case, right? Or you didn't become that just in case, so there is a conflict inside of you as you're as you're seeing these story holes, right, as the as the the plots are are too thin, as there's these things, and the I love that. What, what was the moment? Was it in talking to that one particular nun, and she said, "We don't talk about these things. Tell me about that particular moment.

Alex Ferrari 59:04
The moment I went to Catholic school from kindergarten to fourth grade, then I went to public school until half of eighth grade, so half a fifth was Catholic, but then half a fifth all the way through half of eighth was public, and then half of eight through high school was all Catholic again, so I was reintroduced to Catholic, so I had, I had a both sides, I, you know, I book-ended my, my education, my first 12 years in Catholicism, but in the middle was just public school, and my family was, they were definitely a just in case family, Catholics, just in case, they were just kind of born into it, but they didn't, they weren't hardcore about it, but they, it definitely was around, I mean, there was, I mean, my grandparents had, like, an altar at the house with Mother Mary, and you know, like, I don't think she had Guadalupe, that's Mexican, but she had Mother Mary. And Jesus and I remember these altars in the house, so it was definitely in rosary beads, and so there was a lot of the mythology and iconography of Catholicism, but it wasn't beaten into me, the nuns did that fine, and it was the nuns, not the priests, the priests were pretty okay, but the nuns really did do that, but I think in high school, is I think even in, if I remember correctly, there was a moment that we went to confession, and I was probably in the fourth grade, living in New York, New York City, and I was in the fourth grade, and we went to confession, and then afterwards my friends and I were joking about how ridiculous this is, they're like, hey, we just went to confession, or we were about to go to confession, like, hey, let's sin a little bit more, so we can get that stuff cleared up when we get to confession, and that's another confession, never made any sense of it, so you can kill someone in five hail marys, you're solid, like, it just didn't, like, there's so many plot holes in that, but I think that moment was one of those moments, I was like, huh, this just makes no sense, it just doesn't make any logical sense, and my friends around me were about it as well, so that was the first time, and then by the time I got to high school, I was already so far gone, like I just was like, you know, I've said this, I've said this story on the show before, and please, whoever's listened to it, please forgive me, but I think Bridget needs to hear it, my confirmation story. If you want to skip fast forward, but it's one of my favorite moments of my Catholic upbringing. I'm assuming you were confirmed.

Speaker 3 1:01:30
Yes.

Alex Ferrari 1:01:30
Okay, so you know when you're confirmed, you get your own confirmation name that you create your own. So I was in eighth grade, when that happened, and they said, "You can make your, you know, what's your confirmation? I'm like, "Wait a minute, I can make any name up I want that you, yeah. And the priest has to read it out loud in front of the entire congregation, that yeah, I got you. So I wrote down this name, and I showed it to my friends, and like, there's no way they'll ever say that name, there's no way, there's no way, and I'm like, it's gonna happen, so it wasn't like ridiculous, it was ridiculous, but it wasn't ridiculous enough for them not to say it, it wasn't crude or anything like that. So we're sitting there in the mass, everyone's name, and you know, Jane comes up and Jane's confirmation name is Mary, blah blah blah, you know, whatever, and my other friend, like John, the Peter blah blah and then I come up and Alex is and you see the priest pause and he knows who I am because

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:02:30
I'm you have a reputation by that I have a reputation

Alex Ferrari 1:02:33
and I have there's an energy about me and he's the and you could see him getting a little angry as he's about to read and he goes Bartholomew Humperdinck, Bartholomew Humperdinck is my confirmation, and the entire class just starts pissing themselves, trying to hold back their laughter, legendary status for the rest of eighth grade, but that is my confirmation story. So, by the time I got to high school, and by the time I got to eighth grade, I guess those years in public school really, really kind of detached me a bit, and I was really exposed to other cultures a bit more, other religions. I had a lot of Jewish friends, I had a lot of other friends that I was just like, well, wait a minute, so I was just a very.. I was always questioning, I'm a big questioner. I'm a troublemaker by nature, you know. I'm a rebel rouser, that's who I am. I love to cause trouble, and I have been since I was a kid. So that's kind of the moment that I started to really go in. And then, in my 20s, I started to read things, and that's where I met my spiritual teacher, who I've had for closing in on 30 years now. When I met her, and she started me slowly, because the programming was still deep. It was very deep still. It was.. I.. it didn't make sense, but I didn't know anything else. So, when she started showing me Edgar Casey, then she introduced me to Autobiography of a yogi, and I read that I was like, this is way too weird for me, and I put it down. I had to wait 10 years to pick it up again to understand it. I couldn't grab, I could like, wait, it's teleportation. What is the meditate? What, what? No, it was so far outside my world, I could not wrap my head around it. Edgar Casey, I started getting into a little bit more, I could understand that, and started reading other books about religion. There's a great book called The Age of Aquarius by Gina - I forgot her last name - about religion, and just breaking down what religion is, and the stories that tell in all religion, fascinating. So that's kind of where I started. I'll talk forever. I'm a podcaster, so please forgive me.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:04:42
No, I love that, and I love the, I love the, the different places, because you had, you had more of this, you had that interruption, so then it was easier for you to be the questioner, the rebel, the, you know, that kind of thing, plus you love the notoriety that. As part of your, your personality, which is great. What brought you back to the autobiography of a yogi?

Alex Ferrari 1:05:12
My spiritual teacher, Connie, who's been on the show many times. What

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:05:16
brought, what brought you back? She told me to read it

Alex Ferrari 1:05:20
again, she told me she did.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:05:22
After 10 years, she's like, "You should,

Alex Ferrari 1:05:24
you should read this again. And I read it, and then I started.. Oh, I get it. Oh, I get it now. I started to understand it at a different level, because I was a lot more open. I was in my probably 30s, if not my 40s. It might have been more than 10 years, it might have been like 20 years before I got back into it. I might.. it's hazy, but I did remember reading, and I remember feeling the, the energy of it now. Let me,

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:05:57
let me ask you a question. You know, we were talking about dark night of the soul. If you were to look at your spiritual hero's journey, from, you know, what you were a victim of in the beginning, you know, indoctrination, only knowing certain things, questioning and not having any surety, but they were still so entrenched to the other side, where, where you are now, so open, and you, you know, listen to other people's experiences, and your, your judgment, your judgment is like way down. What was, what was your dark night of the soul in terms of your spiritual journey

Alex Ferrari 1:06:38
during my spiritual journey, because I've had multiple dark nights of the soul, but there was

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:06:51
Alex. There are dark evenings, which are similar, but there's generally a really dark night.

Alex Ferrari 1:06:59
So, for me, and I haven't spoken about this on the show yet, but for me, I didn't have a dark night of the soul spiritually. I kind of just once I was on the road, I just went, so there wasn't a, there wasn't a, an area of conflict, or a.. oh my god, what am I doing? All that was gone by the time I started to process it and start to open myself up to this. This is way before Next Level Soul, way way before Next Level Soul, because I was doing all of this behind the scenes as a filmmaker. I was listening to it. I mean, my first movie had spirituality just everywhere in it, and it was a comedy about an actress who's trying to make it in Hollywood, and I have an ayahuasca scene in it, and she's listening to self-help gurus, and I made a fake guru character who was like a ridiculous person, and it was all completely on a subconscious level, it was all included in there. Wow, so yeah, it was weird. It's it's on my platform, people can watch it now, but it was like I went back, I was like, "Oh God, this is a spiritual comedy. How did that happen? I just not even aware of it. So it was already starting to seep in, but I never had a specific dark night of the soul that a lot of people do when it comes to spirituality. Once I got on the road, it was not a straight shot, it definitely was a little bit of ups and downs, but there was no crisis until recently. So, within the last couple of years, obviously since Next Level Soul, well, there's one, all right. So, there was one one crisis, but it's not spiritual, it's a combination of spiritual and next level soul, and then I'll tell you what is currently happening. So, when I started Next Level Soul, April of it was Easter of 2021 and I went through it and went, did episodes here and there, and had some cool interviews, and all of that, but then towards the end of that year I stopped, because I was terrified of doing this work, and I didn't want to lose everything I'd built with my other shows in this filmmaking space, and my other business, and all that stuff, because I was putting food on the table, so I was really challenged at that moment to, like, all right, man, you gotta, you gotta take a leap here, and I'd never really done that before, so that's when my spiritual teacher, Connie, called me up. It's like, you know, you know, blank or get off the pot, because the universe needs this, and you've been chosen, and you chose to do this. So, if you don't do it, the universe will find someone else to do this work. And I'm like,

Speaker 4 1:09:37
oh,

Speaker 5 1:09:37
it felt like..

Alex Ferrari 1:09:40
it felt like a.. so that was a ton of, that was a ton of bricks falling on me. So, when I, when I finally literally just had a, I call it the come to Jesus conversation, I spoke to God, and I said, God, all right, I, I believe that you will take care of me and my family, and I will do this work. I just have faith that you'll take care of me. If I only.. that's all I ask. Is that's my only concern, really. I'm not afraid of doing the work. I'm afraid of losing what I've built. I'm afraid of losing my, my way of making income to support my family and to provide your

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:10:14
reputation, your safety. Oh, it

Alex Ferrari 1:10:17
was a lot. I mean, it was everything. Yeah,

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:10:19
your girls were like nine years old,

Alex Ferrari 1:10:21
I don't even know how old my kids were. No, they were.. I don't know, the younger, much younger than that, I think. Oh, well, maybe they were.. I don't know, it's.. I think so. Yeah, around something like that, maybe. I don't know how old they were, but yeah. So, I was afraid of all of that, and I said, okay, I'm going all in now. I kept doing my other business. It wasn't like I was going to stop doing the other stuff. It was just that I didn't want this to interfere with that. People think I'm crazy. I'm talking about spirituality. Alex found God all of a sudden, all this kind of stuff. I had friends of mine that like, so you found Jesus. I'm like, no, no, I didn't find. First of all, Jesus is not lost, so I didn't find him. I'm talking about a lot of other things besides Jesus, and because they couldn't wrap their head around it either, so I lost friends, but I've gained a lot of new ones, and so anyway, I went all in, and that's when I built a little set in my, my, my office at home, and started doing four episodes a week, and I was like, I'm all in, let's start grinding, and I started doing that, and then about seven or eight months after that, the show exploded, like it went nuclear, went from like a couple 100,000 views a month to 1.5 million in like three weeks, it was explosive, and then every week it just kept growing and growing. There was this rocket ship, and that was the first time in my life I go, oh, wait a minute, I'm not in control. Oh, I get it now, because I'm not doing anything different than I've been doing for the last six years on my other shows. Why is this? Why is this happening? Nothing I'm doing is controlling who's seeing this. So it was the first time I felt like, oh, I just have to do the work, and everything else will kind of fall into place. Oh, so that was that's the closest to a spiritual dark night of the soul, and I wouldn't call it a dark night of the soul. I think that would be more of a turn. It's, it's, it's a fork in the road that you have to make the decision. I could have stayed, and by the way, if I would have the way the film industry is now, and all of it, my business would have, I wouldn't have been able to support my family if I would have just stayed in that space. So, and I was already bored, I would not bored, but I just, I mean, I did almost 2000 interviews, so I've spoken to every big celebrity, and you know, directors and writers and all that kind of stuff, so I was kind of bored of talking about the hero's journey again, you know, like I get

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:12:46
it, but no, no, I don't mind

Alex Ferrari 1:12:48
the he.. I love the hero's journey from this perspective, it's different, it's entertaining, it's interesting for me, but so that was the moment that I decided to, that I had the big moment, but recently I've gone through a lot of, I'll call it stress and ups and downs in my life, that not my personal as much as my physical and our business and everything that we do, and a bunch of that, and I found out, I discovered I was, it was kind of the universe going, okay, mr. mr. Spirituality, let's put to the test what you've learned, and that's that's when I, because I've been going through it for almost two years, and I've just started to come out of it, and people have noticed it on the show, and things like that, but I've always been.. it's nothing that would stop me from doing my work, but it was very difficult. So the energy I have now, even my physical appearance, has changed dramatically from where I was, because of a lot of things I've chosen to do differently in my life, but it was a test, because I got to the point where there was so much pain that I said, oh, I got to get out of the poor me, and I turned it on a dime, and I said, What is this trying to teach me? And when I said that, things started to shift. It wasn't overnight, but it started to shift, because once you ask that question, answers appear, you have to ask the right questions. So, when I started doing that, and then certain things started, I started becoming more open to certain things, and then I started to go down certain paths. I'll break all this down for my audience later about a lot of the stuff that's happened with me, and I know a lot of people are curious about it. A lot of people see my physical change because of the weight I've lost and things like that, and I'm doing it in a very healthy way. It's not because of stress, it's actually I feel great. I feel very energetic. My energy is very different, and people notice it. Even teachers who come to the studio and who do our mastery courses with us, they would. Like people I knew from two years ago that come to like Jesus, what, it's not about your body, it's like what are you doing, like your energy is off the chart, yeah, kind of energy that they see. So I'm like, oh great, you know, so but that's been the closest to a spiritual dark night of the soul. It was like I was tested to see can you apply all of this stuff that you think you know, and, and, and it sucks. It sucks. It's much, much nicer to live in the, the ethereal, and go, yes, my chakras are opening. Yes, I feel it. Oh, I feel intuition flying through me. Oh god, yes, I see the future. Oh my god, is that a channel? Like, that's really lovely. And the universe is laughing, and all my spirit guides are laughing, and the angels in the rumor, and the ascended master's like, "Oh, wait till we get a hold of this guy, he's got a path ahead. And now this is this, so now I'm coming out of that kind of dark place, but this is one of the darkest places I've ever been in my life in this last couple years, because it's the longest.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:16:07
What was going on with your heart in those two years? I'm feeling like this deconstriction and pain, even what was going on with your heart. There

Alex Ferrari 1:16:16
was there was nothing, there was no trauma. I didn't lose anybody. There was no traumatic event. I think it was the stress of the pressure that I was putting upon myself, all that kind of stuff. It was just there was a tightness that was just tight everywhere, everywhere, muscle, physical, spiritual. It was very tight. So it's an interesting place, because I was able to still do the work that I've been doing for the last couple years, and I've done some amazing work, and I don't mean that in an ego-centric way. I mean, I've, like, I've done amazing work of being able to open the door for people like yourself and to shine a light and all that kind of stuff, and still have a good time and still have energy, but there's days, and you'll see it in old interviews, that I was just like, so you

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:17:02
died and

Alex Ferrari 1:17:02
what did Jesus say? And maybe I'm being difficult to myself, and no one else noticed it, but I, you know, I felt it in something. You

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:17:09
know your truth. Yeah, yeah, like some of your early patterns, but the, the one where you know your reputation is on the line, and your, your financial viability is on the line, and your ability to take care of your family, and that's such this huge thing, right, and you, you go to God in that moment, and then you decide, all right, I'm, I'm, I am gonna, or get off, you know, I am gonna do this thing, and you step into trust, but then later, as you hit this, this dark, darker night of, of the soul, all these things that you've come to trust, there's something else that's that's still going on. So, if we were working together, I would ask you more, deeper questions about that, because the conflict character arc is really delicious on this one, Alex, and so you know, like in these turning points, what came out on the other side, and you went into trust, but now there is a different embodiment of trust, where people are seeing it in your energy, in your vitality, in, and you're, you're renewed in a different way, so I would ask you all kinds of questions of that, because

Alex Ferrari 1:18:24
it's, it, yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting because of the being in that dark place, and being in pain as much as I was, was not only humbling, and I don't think it was about humbling, it wasn't. I don't think it was about that. I think it was a test to see if I could use what I've learned. Every one of everybody who walks the path is tested, because that's the only way you know if you've actually learned something. And tests suck, all of them. All of the tests suck. There's not one test really that I doesn't, I mean, maybe there is, but they all generally they don't, they're not pleasant a lot of times, they're stressful, they're all this kind of stuff. So, for me, I think the test of, and this is still recent, I mean, we're talking about weeks that I've been coming out of it, this is very fresh, so you know, probably a hand, probably a handful of months, I would say that I've been slowly coming out, and I'm definitely not out of the woodwork by any stretch, but, but I see the light where before there was no light, so that's a really interesting thing. So, a lot of the questions I would ask guests would be wrapped around those ideas, because it was something I was going through, and if I know if I'm going through it, others are going through it, and if what I'm going through helps others, and that's what I'm going to do, because that's the work that we're, we're here to do with Next Level Soul, and everything like that. So it's, it's been, that's one thing I

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:19:57
absolutely love about your work. This is when I can tell someone has graduated, per se, even in the midst of testing, is when you're doing things to, you know, you've brought back your elixir of life, and now you're wanting to serve it to others, and that's phenomenal, because would you be still asking these deeper questions about this if you hadn't just recently gone through this, you know, knowing that someone else might be on the brink of suicide or the brink of feeling physically at failure, or you know, questioning themselves and their and their their power or what they're doing in life, and by asking those questions and receiving the answers that some of them might fit you, some of them not, but what a gift you're giving to the world, because you're not afraid now to ask those deeper questions. That's

Alex Ferrari 1:20:48
well, I appreciate that, but the thing is that it's not even that, it's just I was forced to ask the questions, like that's the thing, you, when you get to a point, and I'm stubborn, so the universe

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:21:02
Mack trucks, too. Oh no, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:21:04
it's sledgehammers, match trucks, piano fall on top of me. There's.. I can't.. the whisper and the nudge is not enough for me. I want to make it nice and hard for myself. So it got to a point where I was literally, I mean, literally on my knees in pain that I could not function, and I'm like, oh, you get to a point where you can't fight anymore, you can't fight back about because fighting won't do anything. It's like, it's like, it's like a crazy person walking into the ocean trying to have a fist fight with waves, you know. I did that when I was a kid. Fun, like, aha, we're gonna play, and we, a lot of kids do that, right? But it's

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:21:49
right,

Alex Ferrari 1:21:49
but it's insane. You'll never win that battle. So

Speaker 4 1:21:53
the

Alex Ferrari 1:21:53
mind and the ego thinks that you could beat this physically, or anger, or things, but you get to a point where you just are so tired of walking against the current that you have to lie down and let the current take you where it goes, and that's the moment when you go, oh, oh, this is what this is about. Okay. Well, then, why is why am I? Why is the current taking me down this path? And then those questions start to open up answers for you that are not open to you until you ask the questions, because you're not ready to hear them, and it's really difficult when you're in the pain. It's, it's so difficult when you're in the storm. It's so difficult to see clearly. That's when the storm beats you down so much that you have no other choice. I mean, you always have a choice, you can keep fighting, but you're so tired and exhausted that you have to just relent and just go.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:22:48
I love how you shifted that, Alex. You were like Jonah in the whale moment, right? And you just kept fighting and fighting, but you were also in a little bit of victim mentality, like why me, even though you had no reason to think that way, that's not your normal thought processes, but you were so tired, you were so, you know, burned out, all of the things, the why me, but I love how it shifted, you got spit out onto Nineveh right when you said, show me what is this, what is this for me, what, what, what do I get to do with this? What I get

Alex Ferrari 1:23:25
out of here, how, what do I need to do to leave this space? I don't want to be here anymore. What do I need to do? And then answer started, started coming into my life. I was like, oh well, I guess I can do that. All right, I'll do that. And then that starts to work, and then that starts to open doors up, and then I'm like, well, you could do that. Oh, okay. And all of a sudden things started to shift, that the seas parted, the light showed. I was like, oh, I can see now, I can see the light, and now it's.. I see a direct line without any.. I still have to walk the path, but it's clear now. It's clear, and that's a very different place than where I was, it was completely in the dark, could not see clearly, just fighting the ocean waves with fists, that makes no sense. So then finally, once I had direction and the light was shown, I was like, oh, okay, it's not a, it's not like it's all over, no, no, no. You have to walk this path, and this path is a path you have to continue to walk, because that's still waiting for you at any moment. Whenever you want that lesson to come back, it will. So that's the way I look at it. And I don't look at it from a sense of fear. I now look at this as a sense of gratitude, because without it, without it, I wouldn't be where I am right now, and it's the same way I look back at the time when I made a 20, almost made a 20 $20 million movie for the Mafia, and my life was threatened on a daily basis for a year, and all that craziness, that was the darkest place I'd been in my life in my 20s at that point, this recent. Has been the darkest place I've ever been. It makes that look like child's play, but I'm so grateful. People always ask, if you can get away with not doing that, would you have done it? I'm like, no, that's without that experience, I wouldn't, would probably not have the same empathy for human beings as I do, because I've gone through so much with that experience. That was a year experience, and then the aftermath was that aftermath rippled for years to I till I realized when I wrote the book about it, and it still held on for 17 years after it happened. Only after writing the book, it opened up, and I still have stuff I gotta probably unpract, wrap from that, but it's just sitting there. Maybe when I make the movie one day, I'll, I'll open all those wounds up again for everybody to enjoy, but this is, but this has been, this has been one of those moments in my life that's been eye-opening, and it's been really interesting. It's, I literally hear, like, my spirit guides going, "Okay, he thinks he has a grasp on things. All right, let's see what he's, let's see what he's learned. It's, it's basically mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. Why am I waxing the car and painting the fence and sanding the floors? And mr. Miyagi finally had to teach him this is what you've been all of that was because you needed to know, you know, that's yeah, I call it being mr. Miyagi. I call it mr. That's my term. It's I got mr. Miyagi.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:26:27
So, I have a question for you, because you're a giver, and, and you, you live out loud, Alex, in really tremendous ways. So, it's, it's wonderful. So, already, even today, you're gifting your audience with this personal journey, this dark night, so you're giving again from this to other people. What are you going to give to yourself based on what you have discovered?

Alex Ferrari 1:26:57
Walking the path is now giving to giving to myself, which is something I didn't do before, so there's a very big difference now. So before it was very external, very I got to do the work, I got to do the work, but I wasn't thinking about myself. Where now I got to do the work, I got to do the work, but by doing the work, and it's very difficult to explain, by doing the work, I'm now feeding myself and taking care of myself, so for me it was a lot to do with the physical, that was something I got disconnected from. So now that aspect of it is opened up a lot of doors, because now the vehicle that is working, doing the work, is now humming at a different vibration than it was before.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:27:40
Good, see, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:27:42
you see what I mean. So it's just

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:27:44
you embodied it, you embodied the test and the change, and it's working. I drank the

Alex Ferrari 1:27:51
elixir, I drank the elixir that I'm bringing back, essentially. Yeah, so I'm not just bringing it back, and it's an external. I've now encompassed it within myself for my own personal journey, and now I'm going to try to bring that out to others, and I'll have a much deeper breakdown of all of this in a book or a course or something one day, but it is something that I, I needed to go through for others to learn, and that was that was a verbatim message that came to me in a message in a meditation, I asked in the meditation, like, why is this happening? I'm like, is you need to go through this so you can teach others, and I'm like, son of a, where did I sign up for this stuff? I mean, I mean, I would love to be just on the Amalfi Coast on my yacht, drinking juice, because I don't drink alcohol, but, and you know, eating, you know, Bahamas, I don't know, so that would much rather do that. There's a funny meme that I see on Instagram, on Instagram every once in a while, which is genius, like, you know, God, I think I really want to be challenged with the lesson of having lots of money. I want to be challenged. Why not? I really need to learn the lesson of being wealthy beyond all recognition, and I need, I need to have a beautiful spouse, and, and, oh, I also love to have, like, 7% body fat. So, I would like to, I really need to understand what it's like to go through that, to

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:29:11
suffer through that, to suffer that. Yeah, I'm

Alex Ferrari 1:29:14
willing, I'm willing to make the sacrifice to be immensely wealthy. I love

Speaker 5 1:29:21
you.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:22
Isn't that amazing?

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:29:24
Yes. And be careful what you wish for. I will say, oh

Alex Ferrari 1:29:29
yes, very. You ask, I'm

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:29:33
just joking. I'm just joking.

Alex Ferrari 1:29:36
Exactly, exactly. So, so this is the kind of work that you do with people. So, from this, from going through this kind of experience with me, is there something that you show people, is it more about where they are now, where they're going to go, or is it this open up a kind of almost like a precognitive idea of where they're heading, or anything like that, or is it just more about working with them at the moment

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:29:59
now? Yeah, it's, it's different for every person, because it depends on where they're at on their journey. I start working with some people, and they're finishing their rides right out of the dark night, but by the.. I know that by the time they get finished writing their story, that this will be completely not only conceptualized, but they're living it out loud, and some people, their conflicts character is so apparent because they're already out serving and doing, and people are saying, "Oh my gosh, you should write a book, and they're recognizing that there's more people they can touch and reach by by sharing that one, and they might, you know, be on another journey, but this is this is the one that needs to be exposed because of how they can help, and you know, for some people it's, it's career-oriented, you know, it's, it's, it's about, you know, where they're headed, but for most people that I get a chance to work with, it's really profound in that measure of their creation, about, you know, what is their, their purpose, their hedgehog, you know, as, as Dan Collins says, so what you know, where is it that passion meets purpose, and how can we, how can we see this take an even greater flight? Because stories, I mean, you're a storyteller, and you know stories have their own power, they, you know, when they get out in the world in a film or a book, or other things, they're continually creating ripples as long as you make sure they're visible and seen, and, and so I do always ask my authors, like, what's the work you want to be doing in the next one, three, and five years, like, if money was no object, no, no worry for you, like, what would you do for free, who would you serve, who, who gets to be touched and reached by this story, this book, this movie that you're working on, whatever it might be? Who do you want in the end? And usually, if they can have an intimate conversation, Alex, with one person that, that you know, that they don't have to vindicate or validate, they're just going to share, because they know it will serve that person. That's where I see miracles, and miracles happen. The case in point, the daughter of the serial killer, right, Melissa Moore. So, when we went to write the book, I said, Who do you want to serve? And she said, Well, there's her father, was the happy face serial killer, and she said there's a young girl, and her father is the Spokane killer. And when that all came out, I wanted so badly to reach out to her, but I knew the media would crucify me. She said, so I want to write this book for her, and so she wrote it for one person, but Alex, you wouldn't believe the people that wrote us hundreds and hundreds of emails, particularly, you know, directly to Melissa, and they're like, you know, I'm a 72 year old, and my grandmother was a serial killer, and I thought I would be chained to the secret for the whole rest of my life. I'm like, 72 right? She wasn't our avatar, she wasn't the one person Melissa was writing to, but she was deeply affected, and Melissa's husband goes into, he was a manager for a large shipping company, and he went into one of his clients, and she's looking down on the factory floor, and she said, I read your wife's book, and she says, Well, what none of those people down there know is that my grandfather was a serial killer, and I have been so worried about this story getting out because of all of

Speaker 6 1:33:29
them,

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:33:29
until I read your, your wife's book. Like, so just getting clear. Who do you want to serve? What would light you up, but also what would light others up? That's when you know you, you start to co-create your destiny, and what the platform of this book can create, and sometimes people are just so limited, like, like to speak on a stage, talk to people, you know, stuff like that. But when you get really clear on what lights you up, oh, that's some of the most beautiful co-creation I've ever seen. Go ahead,

Alex Ferrari 1:34:01
so, so then, so what do you see? Where would our session take the next steps? What would you see, or do you see anything for us, for me? What do you see? I'm just curious.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:34:13
Absolutely, I.. there's certain things, though. You're still in enigma, because there's some things you hold back, you're you're not completely an open book, and so what I, what I would do if I was working with you is I go back through and we would put together a timeline of of your life and experiences and have you, you know, so I could get to know you as as a child, that that child in Catholic school, right, that that young almost teen in middle school, and those experiences that shaped you, and then what happens in high school when you're back in the Catholicism, and those kinds of things, and then what brought you into two things, because they're very relevant. Here in not including your spirituality, but one would be the falling in love and becoming a father, and the other one being like how you got into storytelling in the first place, like it's natural talent for you, but how did that work? Because it plays into these threads of stories, your rises and falls, your dark evenings, and your dark night, and then in order for us to understand, like how huge that rises, I have to understand how deep that dark night was, because then people really care, the audience cares, the readers care, the people watching your movie, they really, really care, because they'll have fallen in love with you, understood you more, you're approachable, and then when the stakes are so high, they're like, and then when you rise, they're like, oh my gosh, if Alex can do this, if Alex can learn to embody his purpose to this degree, where I'm seeing him shine, where I'm watching him get out of his funk, where, where he is so vibrant, maybe, maybe I can overcome my diabetes, maybe I can have a brand new life, maybe I can trust in God where I never have before, maybe I can recognize that there is a greater purpose than you know, sitting on my couch watching Netflix all day, you know. So, anyway, that's what I would do. I would get, I would dig in and get delicious with you. How's that?

Alex Ferrari 1:36:34
That's great. Well, and I'll tell you, the storytelling came from working at a video store for five years in high school, high school, and a little bit before, a little bit after, I worked at a video store for five years, and that's where I fell in love with, really fell in love with movies and becoming a filmmaker, and all that. You know, it's a classic story, the late 80s, early 90s, working at a video store, mom and pop video store,

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:36:56
Blockbuster,

Alex Ferrari 1:36:58
no, not that corporate stuff, no, no, no, no, I worked at him. I was, I was street level mom and pop, that was his independent video city, called Video City. I'll never forget them, and it's still some of the greatest years of my life. I still remember them with so much fondness, because you were completely free. All you watch five, six movies a day, play video, and playing Nintendo in the back, hanging out with your friends. It was just a beautiful time in my life that I don't ever let go of. It was a beautiful, beautiful time in my life. So, yeah, and I move, and I blame it for all the pain that I've been through throughout the rest of my life, trying to be a filmmaker, but, but it's interesting when you said that the the identity of who I was and was afraid of losing it, that identity I had to kill that old version of myself, he had to go, it's done, he played his part, and then this new version of me had to come up, but the thing that surprised me is how that other version of Alex showed up down the road a little bit and said, "Hey, I'm ready for you now, you're gonna need me, and I'm like, "Well, wait a minute, I'm like, "Oh, so that's why I did 30 years in the film industry. Oh, because I need to be doing this now. It was, I didn't see it coming. I truly didn't see it coming. I had changed my story, and then as our streaming platform started to come up, and we started making movies and shows and other things like that, like, oh wait a minute, my skills are needed again, and I was like, oh, and then, so now, like, also, that's why I went through all that crap, because I was everything - it all came together, and now, and I haven't - I still haven't seen the whole thing unfold yet, but there was a combination that needed to happen, you know, that I'm like, oh, I get it now. So that was a really big surprise for me. I was not expecting filmmaker Alex, storyteller Alex to come up fully again, he's always there, because I tell you, know, you know, jokes about filmmakers and, and filmmaking, and movie stories, and they're always going to be there, but the actual skill set, the experience, I had no idea was going to combine the two in the, in the profound way that we are starting to do it now, and I haven't even started truly yet, you know. When I start doing movies again, when I start doing TV shows again, full-blown, you know, theatrical things that I want to do, tell stories that nobody else is telling, those are the things that are, is really going to start to see, oh God, this all makes all so much sense now, but again, you can't see the whole picture, that's why it's so difficult for your brain to wrap around it, because it wants certainty the entire way, and that's not the way this, this game is. You

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:39:49
want certainty from God too, and you weren't, you weren't necessarily getting that, because as you said, your guides and your angels are like, hmm, what are you going to do with this? You, you reminded me a little of. Dallas Jenkins, you know, he, he has written and directed The Chosen, but yes, he had some of those really humbling experiences, and then he recognized, oh, I am only responsible for the loaves and the fishes, so you were saying I just gotta show up and do the work, because the rest of this is in God's hands, and then it just takes off, you know, and you recognize, oh, wow, this is this is bigger than me, that's huge, that's huge,

Alex Ferrari 1:40:27
it's humbling for sure, it's humbling, and then you start to understand your place in the whole, you understand the character you're playing in the story and your part in the story, and when you understand that part, man, things start to feel a lot cleaner, and I might not understand it. I probably don't understand it completely. I actually, I know I don't understand it completely, but I understand it enough to make the ride a bit more calm. But when something else shows

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:40:53
up,

Alex Ferrari 1:40:55
right, and when, when that, when that other version of me shows up, or another thing that I need to do shows up that wasn't expecting, I'm in a much better place to kind of accept it, and go, oh, okay, so this is what I got to do now. Okay, great. I have to be in front of camera, yeah,

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:41:11
and expanding, which is phenomenal. Good for you. Ready things, where they, yeah,

Alex Ferrari 1:41:18
right. So, Bridget, where.. um, this has been such a beautiful conversation. Where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:41:26
Sure. Thank you. I'm.. I have a website called Your Inspired Story, and has everything about my publishing company, but also the ways that you can work with me. I do two inspired writers' retreat on a crystal lake up in the mountains twice a year. I love working in small group settings. I'm also the sponsor for the bookstore at Ions this year in Seattle, so that's going to be a level.

Alex Ferrari 1:41:53
I will see you there.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:41:55
I heard that just the last couple weeks, I'm like, oh, this is fun, I more questions, by the time we get there, I'll be like, okay, Alex, so tell me what's happened since then.

Alex Ferrari 1:42:09
Yeah, I'll be, I'll be, I think on that Saturday, I might be mistaken, but I think it's a Saturday I'm doing the keynote, so that's going to be a lot of fun, and I don't do those, I'm invited all the time, but I don't do them often, but I, I love the Ions organization. I love the, you know, in the near death community. I have a tremendous joy and love for them, and I've spoken to so many of them over the over the years that I felt that this was a good, I felt that it was a good, a good place to do a talk and to connect with that community. So, yeah, it's in the end of August, so it's going to be so much fun.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:42:44
Oh, I'm super excited, yeah. And any, any Alex fan should go there to Ions in Seattle. I'm excited to see you on the stage. I already put it in my calendar once I found out you were speaking. I'm like,

Alex Ferrari 1:42:56
I still find it fascinating that anybody cares about what I have to say, but it's just the, it's, it's the Catholic in me. I'm like, I'm not worthy. Who am I kind of energy? So, Bridget, it has been a joy speaking to you. I love your energy, I love your story, and I love the work that you're doing in the world to help, to help everybody awaken. So, thank you, so, so much, and I appreciate you, so thank you for being here.

Bridget Cook-Burch 1:43:25
Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it too. Love the work you're doing. Keep on opening doors in people's minds and hearts. It's amazing. Thank you.