Divine Encounters Episode 020 | Near-Death Experience Story
David Maginley was a seminary intern and student minister when, he says, he collapsed in a hospital chapel and found himself on a grassy hill with a tree at the top, completely whole and completely at home. In this Divine Encounters episode he tells Alex Ferrari about the friend who walked and talked with him there, the hard return to ordinary life, and how the experience reshaped his faith and his work as a hospital chaplain.
Key Takeaways
- David says he died in a hospital chapel while preaching an internship sermon, and that his wife at the time told him he was gone about fifteen minutes, with no heartbeat and no breathing.
- He did not see his body from above. He says he was suddenly in a different realm: a grassy hill, a tree, and a sense of being one with everything.
- He describes feeling every blade of grass move and the light flowing through him, “infused with love.”
- He says he met a masculine being who felt like his best friend, and who told him he had a lot more work to do.
- He says he begged not to be sent back, and was told, “We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
- He describes the return as the hardest part, a kind of homesickness that he says lasted a long time.
- His message: let love be your spiritual practice, because “the world needs your light.”
| Guest | David Maginley |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 020 |
| Before | Seminary intern and student minister; diagnosed with a rare tumor condition at 17 |
| What David says happened | He blacked out in a hospital chapel, two or three minutes into a sermon |
| Time away | About fifteen minutes, according to his wife at the time |
| Where he says he went | A grassy hill with a tree at the top |
| Who he met | A masculine being full of love, power and wisdom; he did not presume it was Jesus |
| The message | Love is the highest state of consciousness; let it be your practice |
Who Is David Maginley?
David describes his younger self as an insecure, extremely tall, cocky guy who did not know who he was. He is six feet eight inches tall. He grew up in a family of five, fighting for his place at the table, and he kept mostly to himself. He was very introverted and very shy.
Then a big thing happened. At 17, he was diagnosed with cancer. It was not a kind most people have heard of, he says. He explains that it was a tumor, usually found on the adrenal gland, that releases powerful chemicals into the body. In his telling, the danger is not that it spreads but that it sits waiting to release them all at once. Excitement, anger, fear or even exercise could set it off. David says he had small episodes that looked to him like anxiety attacks, so for a long time he did not know what he was dealing with.
The tumor came back four times, he says, and each time was worse. But the doctor had said it was probably benign, so he thought he was out of the woods. He remembers looking it up in the library, reading the word benign and closing the book. He had got away with that one.
From Illness to Seminary
It woke him up. He asked hard questions. What is life all about? That was a close call. Maybe he should stop living small and step out of his comfort zone. His questions led to better questions.
Because of the cancer, he says, he went to university to study the meaning of life. He had thought he would be a recording engineer and a photographer. Instead he studied philosophy and comparative religion. That led him to a Christian community, which gave him a lot of fun and a lot of belonging. But he could not swallow a faith as it was presented. He knew there was something deeper, and he had no vocabulary for it.
So he went to seminary, where ministers are trained. He kept digging. He was looking for the underlying mystery from which reality emanates. Doctrine and theology, he says, seemed like windows, but there was something beyond them. He was not a fervent believer. But he knew he was in relationship with this mystery, and he came to understand the word Christ as meaning the everything, the consciousness.
He asked why he got cancer a lot. He does not anymore, because he is never going to understand it from this side of the grass. Instead, he asks, “What am I going to do with it?” That, he says, becomes fuel for life and connection.
Collapse in a Hospital Chapel
On internship, David was a student minister with a church. Another tumor was back and getting active. He was having attacks, passing out, with a racing heart. He still thought it was anxiety, and it hurt his self-esteem. He says it is not good when the minister passes out in the pulpit.
He died in a hospital chapel, he says, which is a pretty good place to go. You have the doctors, the nurses and people of faith. He was two or three minutes into the sermon when he felt it hit. It is like a punch in the gut. You get warm, you sweat, your heart races. He tried to breathe into it and pull himself together. He could not. He blacked out. He says he was gone before he hit the floor, which is good, because at six feet eight inches the fall is a long one.
A Grassy Hill and a Tree
Many near-death accounts begin with seeing the body from above. David says he did not have that. He was suddenly in a different realm. It is difficult to describe, he says, and he calls it “the poverty of words.” As soon as you put it into words, you are reducing it.
Still, it sounds simple. He was on a grassy hill. There was a tree at the top. He wanted to run to that tree with every fiber of his being. And “I was one with everything,” he says. He could feel every blade of grass as it moved. He could feel the light flowing, and “the light was infused with love,” and it flowed through him. He could feel the tree drinking in the light.
More important than any of that, he says, he felt complete. Right now, he explains, there is a lot of material in his subconscious that he is not aware of. He might be thinking about the chicken smelling good downstairs, or about his day with cancer patients at the hospital. He is not fully here. But there, he says, he was completely integrated and congruent, with no part of himself suppressed or hidden.
He thinks that is why people say they felt they were home. “We don’t realize how lonely we are here,” he says. We do not realize how profound the sense of separation is. There, the connection to everything was indescribable. He says he was still himself, and had a body, a biped humanoid but not like this one. He is careful to say he feels he only touched his toe on the doorstep of whatever is out there. If you want to explore the idea he is circling, our glossary entry on consciousness is a good place to start.
The Friend on the Hill
He was not alone. There was a being, a masculine figure, human and yet so much more than whatever David is. He cannot describe how the being looked, and says it did not matter. “He looked like love and power and wisdom and compassion and beauty and wonder and authority.” He felt like David’s best friend, as though the two had known each other all their lives.
Because David is a Christian minister, people ask whether it was Jesus. To be honest, he says, he never presumed it was the big guy. He thought it might be a junior apprentice from the warehouse. But it did not matter who he was. The being was no less infused with the character of the Christ consciousness, or divine love, or whatever you want to call it.
They had a relaxed conversation. David says he was jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas, saying he was home. The being said it was great to see him, welcome, David. David said, come on, let us run to the tree.
No, said the being, you cannot go up there. Let us walk and talk for a while.
Walking and Talking
As they walked through the grass, they talked about David’s life. The being said things were going really well. David knew he meant his overall life, and that he had a life back there. But he did not care. He kept saying, that is great, let us go to the tree.
You are doing great, the being said, “but you have a lot more work to do.” It is important. David said he did not care. He was home. He was not being disrespectful, he says. He was just enthusiastic, overjoyed and filled with more life and vitality than he has ever felt here. Let us go play.
He knew that if he got to the top of the hill and saw what was on the other side, he would never come back. He says that border is common in near-death accounts. He really wanted that. He did not want to come back, no way.
The being said the work was really important. David understood it was not about specific tasks. It was about growth and love, his own and helping others. He felt the significance of it, and the being knew he did.
Don’t worry, the being said, it is going to be okay. “We’ll be with you every step of the way,” and it would not take long. David knew he was not going to win the argument. He said please do not send me back, not after I just arrived. The being put a hand on his shoulder, and David felt love and compassion flow into him. We will see you later, the being said. Boom, he was back.
The Hardest Part: Coming Back
David does not call it a classic life review, as in many accounts. But the conversation imparted the importance of his life and the significance of what was to come. He says he is not allowed to remember the specifics. He just knew them then, and had to forget them as soon as he returned.
Coming back, he says, is the hardest thing. It is miserable. You are forever “homesick for what you had become,” while knowing you are never separate from it. As soon as you are re-embodied, you feel the density of flesh, the pull of gravity, the muck of words, and how thoughts have to arrive one after another. He thinks that reality, so much more real than this one, descends into the subconscious because you cannot integrate it right away. He calls it existential dissonance.
He felt himself back on the hospital floor and heard the voices of doctors and nurses who had been trying to resuscitate him. His chest did not hurt at all, even after CPR. His wife at the time, mad and scared, told him he had been gone about fifteen minutes, with no heartbeat and no breathing. He did not care about that. He just felt lousy, with a headache and a confused feeling. They checked his vitals, could not find anything wrong, and sent him home.
The first thing he did was crawl into bed, pull the covers up, and grieve. He did not know why. He did not talk about it with anyone for years.
How His Faith Changed
It reanimated his faith in a completely new way. He says he was no longer lifting his prayers as petitions to an external God. He was now “participating in the consciousness of God.” For David, “God is a word for the ground of being” from which all of reality emanates. It is not an old man with a beard on a throne.
He says he did not change much in his principles. He thinks he was a pretty decent human being before. But within a few months, back in the final year at seminary, he developed a sensitivity to energy. He trained in therapeutic touch, a form of energetic healing, and he says he can still feel it between his fingers. He also began to have mystical moments and coincidences, things he could not shrug off, like thinking of someone and having them call. For more on this, see the glossary entry on energy healing.
His conclusion was that he had a lot of growing up to do. He learned how to love, to grow up and wake up. He says he did not do that without mistakes. When we do not know how to love, we injure the people we love. He did that, he says, by being selfish and inconsiderate.
Chaplain, Lutheran Minister and a Practice for Hard Moments
David is a Lutheran minister, and a hospital chaplain who works with cancer patients, palliative patients and people in the ICU. At its heart, he says, the Lutheran faith is a reform movement, always upgrading the faith. His own language focuses on consciousness. He helps people use suffering as a process that deconstructs the ego and moves toward waking up and transformation.
He shares a meditation from the Buddhist tradition called Tonglen, which means receiving and giving. Close your eyes and breathe into what is hard. Find where you feel it, maybe in your heart. Allow it and stay with it. Then breathe in more of it, from someone else who is suffering, and when you breathe out, send back compassion, perhaps light, perhaps the words I understand, I am with you. He says compassion is not “some wishy washy nice thing.” The glossary entry on meditation is a gentle place to begin if you are new to the idea. If this practice feels like too much right now, it is okay to skip it.
His Message: Let Love Be Your Practice
David closes with encouragement. Love, he says, is the highest state of consciousness, and we are all on an accelerating path of evolution toward becoming that. He asks us to “let love be your spiritual practice” where we are planted, and to trust that we make a difference with the people around us. That is the ripple effect.
He adds: be serious and creative and have fun with it. Hang on, he says. It is a wild ride, but it ends well. Keep shining and do not panic. “The world needs your light.”
He also offers a simple guide for living: be kind, be gentle, and be able to tell what is your homework and what is theirs. Then do your homework.
How David’s Story Fits With Other Near-Death Experiences
Themes that appear often in near-death accounts include a boundary or border that cannot be crossed, a figure of love, a sense of home, and a message that there is more to do. David’s account includes all of these, and also something less common: he did not see his body, and he did not claim to meet a named religious figure. For the bigger picture, see our complete guide to near-death experiences.
As with every episode, we share David’s account in his own words. We make no medical claims.
Questions to Sit With
- David stopped asking why he got sick and started asking what he would do with it. What hard thing in your life might that question change?
- He says we do not realize how lonely we are here. Where in your life would you most like to feel connection?
- What would it look like for love to be your spiritual practice on an ordinary Tuesday?
Try a gentle version of Tonglen this week: breathe in something heavy, breathe out kindness to yourself or someone who is hurting. Two minutes is enough.
Spiritual Takeaways
- David describes feeling completely whole and connected to everything, from grass to light.
- He says the work he came back for is about growth and love.
- He describes God as the ground of being from which reality emanates.
- He says suffering can be a doorway to waking up, when we meet it with compassion.
- He says love is the highest state of consciousness, and a practice to live where we are.
Please enjoy my conversation with David Maginley.
Guest Links: Connect With David Maginley
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is David Maginley?
David Maginley is a Lutheran minister and hospital chaplain who says he had a near-death experience while serving as a student minister on internship, years after being diagnosed with a rare tumor condition at 17.
What happened to David Maginley?
David says he blacked out two or three minutes into a sermon in a hospital chapel. His wife at the time told him he was gone about fifteen minutes. He says he found himself on a grassy hill with a tree at the top.
Did David see Jesus?
David describes a masculine being who felt like his best friend and who embodied love, power and wisdom. He says he never presumed it was Jesus, and that it did not matter who the being was.
Why wouldn’t the being let him go to the tree?
David says the being told him he could not go up there, and that he had a lot more work to do. David believes that if he had reached the top, he would never have come back.
What was the work David was told about?
He says it was not specific tasks. He understood it was about growth and love, his own and helping others. He says he was not allowed to remember the specifics.
What was it like coming back?
David says it was the hardest part. He felt homesick for what he had experienced, and he grieved in bed after being sent home from the hospital.
How did David’s faith change?
He says he stopped praying to an external God and began to participate in what he calls the consciousness of God, which he describes as the ground of being.
What is Tonglen?
David describes it as a Buddhist meditation that means receiving and giving. You breathe in another person’s suffering and breathe out compassion.
What is David’s message?
He says love is the highest state of consciousness, and encourages people to let love be their spiritual practice and to keep shining.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as personal accounts in the person’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What consciousness means in spiritual teaching
- A plain-language guide to meditation
- Dr. Mary Helen Hensley on a Southern Baptist faith transformed
- Father Nathan Castle, a priest who helps lost souls cross over
- Dr. Laurence Brock on a Jewish man meeting Jesus
- Nancy Rynes on being shown love without dogma or religion
- Anton Grosz on discovering that we are one
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
David Maginley 0:08
Well, it was the life of an insecure, extremely tall, young, cocky guy who didn't really know who he was in the world, but was taken like most young men do, and stumbling along.
I was very introverted, very shy. Grew up in a family of five, so, you know, you're you're fighting for your place at the table. And so I kept mostly to myself, right? And stumbling upon friends and interesting experiences and topics that sort of made me go and then a big one happened. I was diagnosed with cancer, and I was 17 years old, and this was not a kind of cancer that most people have ever heard of. The full name is paraganglioma, and it's 90% of these grow on the adrenal gland. It's an encapsulated tumor that it's on the adrenal gland, and it's making a molatile cocktail of chemicals. So it's danger is not that it's going to spread out and compromise the body's metabolism and different organs, but instead, it sits there waiting to explode. It's got dopamine, norepinephrine, catecholamines, these are very dangerous, and it's like the trigger the fuse is lit whenever my adrenal gland is activated. So the moment I got excited or angry or afraid, even if I exercised to trigger the adrenal gland and that would cause the tumor to explode. Most people die in about 30 seconds. I was lucky, I would have small explosions, and they looked to me like an anxiety attack, so I didn't know I had this tumor in me. And the thing is, my metabolic response was lower because the first tumor was in my bladder, so I was peeing out the metabolites, and it wasn't going directly into my circulatory system. So I survived it. The doctor said, Oh, it's a paraganglioma. Most of those 90% are benign. Don't worry about it. You're good. But it grew back again and again and again. At it four times, and each time got worse. Well, I didn't process it either, because the doctor said it's benign, right? So I thought I was out of the woods. I thought it was just this weird tumor. And when I went to the library to look up the paraganglioma after the word benign, I just closed the book and said, Hey, I got away with that one. But it made me wake up, and it made me ask some hard questions. What is life all about? That was a close call. Maybe I should stop living small and step out of my comfort zone. I kept asking questions, and they led to better questions. So because of cancer, I went to university and I studied the meaning of life. I thought I was going to be a recording engineer and a photographer, that was what I enjoyed. But no, I studied philosophy and comparative religion and dug deeper and deeper. Eventually that led me to a community, a Christian community, and experienced a lot of fun and a lot of belonging and but couldn't really swallow a faith as it was presented. I knew there was something deeper in there, and I didn't have a vocabulary, a language or a context for it. So I actually went to seminary, where you're trained to be a minister, right, a pastor. And I dug deeper and deeper. I just kept going. I was looking for this underlying the nature of the underlying mystery from which reality emanates, and that the doctrine and the theology seemed like Windows, but there was something beyond that. And then I was on internship, so I had a church. I was a student minister. Though I wasn't a fervent believer, I knew I was in relationship with this mystery, and this mystery was personified in the Christ which I came to understand is a word that means the everything, the consciousness. And so I'm on internship, and the tumors, another tumor is back, and it's getting active, and I'm starting to have attacks and passing out, and my heart is racing, and it was really hard, because I still thought that this was anxiety. It really hit my self esteem. I was blacking out. I was having dizzy spells. Getting in the pulpit, I put a lot of people to sleep on a Sunday morning, but it's not good when the minister passes out. Because I'm the candidate, I asked that question quite a lot, but I don't do that anymore, and because I'm never going to get an answer. I'm never going to understand it from this side of grass. So instead of why did I get this, I now ask, What am I going to do with it? Then it becomes fuel for life, for living, for connection, for adventure. And I am not a thing in the world. I am a thought of the world. So it was on internship. It was that second tumor I was it was really fortunate, because I died in a hospital chapel. That's a pretty good place to go. You got the doctors, you got the nurses, you got the people of faith. And I was getting up to do I was like two, three minutes into the sermon, and I felt it hit. Whenever the tumor hits. Like a punch in the gut, and you get really warm, and you start to sweat, and your heart's racing, and I breathe into it. Breathe into it, pull yourself together. But I couldn't, and I blacked out. I was gone before I hit the floor, which is good, because I'm six feet eight inches tall, and so the concussion is pretty bad. Long. Went down, I passed out, and I was gone. And suddenly, like a lot of near death experiences, you have an out of body, right? You see yourself in both. I didn't have that. I was suddenly in a different realm. And it's difficult to describe. I I'm sure all of your guests talk about that. As soon as you put it into words, you're reducing it. The poverty of words just are inadequate. However, it sounds simple. I was on a grassy hill. There was a tree at the top of the hill. I wanted to run to the tree with every fiber of my being, and I was one with everything. I could feel every blade of grass as it moved. I could feel the light flowing, and the light was infused with love, and it was flowing through me. I could feel the tree drinking in the light. But even more important, I felt complete. So as I'm talking with you, there's a massive amount of material in my subconscious that I'm not aware of. And you know, I'm thinking about how good the chicken smells downstairs for supper, and I'm thinking about the day that I just had at the hospital with cancer patients, and I'm not fully here, no disrespect, but there I was completely integrated, congruent, completely aware there was no aspect of myself that was suppressed or that I was blind to. I think that's why people say they feel that they were home. We don't realize how lonely we are here. We don't realize how profound the sense of separation is but there, the connection to everything was indescribable. And I'm just walking on a grassy hill, and I was me, right? So did I have an ego? Well, I don't know if, maybe I didn't. It was integrated. After all, I feel like I only touched my toe on the doorstep of whatever's out there, but I was still me, and I still had a body, a biped humanoid, but not like this. Yeah. It was not like this body. No way. I was not alone. There was an entity. There a being human, and yet not so much more than whatever I am. And it was a masculine figure. If I were to describe him, I couldn't visibly. It didn't matter what he looked like, he looked like love and power and wisdom and compassion and beauty and wonder and authority. That's what he looked like. I mean, he felt like my best friend, like he had known me all my life, and I had known him. A lot of people ask me, since I'm a Christian minister, sounds like Jesus? Did you meet Jesus? And to be honest, I never presumed it was the big guy. I thought, okay, it's a junior apprentice from the warehouse or someone, right? But it didn't matter who he was. He was no less infused with that, that character of the Christ consciousness, or the divine love, or whatever you want to call it. We had this relaxing conversation. He said I was jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas. I was saying, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home. And he said, Yeah, it's great to see you, David, welcome. It's great to see you. And I said, it's great to see you too. Come on, let's run to the tree, so I'm behaving like a kid. And he said, Oh, no, you can't go up there, but let's walk and talk for a while. So we're walking through the grass, and we're talking about my life. And he says, you know, things are going really well. I know he's talking about my overall life, and I know that I have a life here, and I'm not here anymore. But I didn't care how well things were going. I kept saying, that's great. Come on, let's go to the tree. Says, No, you're doing great, but you have a lot more work to do. It's important. And I said, I don't care. I'm here, I'm home. I wasn't being disrespectful, right? I was just enthusiastic and overjoyed and filled with more life and vitality than I've ever experienced here. And I said, No, come on, let's go play. He said, because I knew if I got to the tree, if I got to the top of the hill and saw what was on the other side, I'd never come back here, which is common. There's all there's often this boundary, this border in near death experiences. Yeah, I really wanted that, because I didn't want to come back here. No way, no way. And he said, Look, the work you have to do is really important. And I knew that wasn't specific things. That was about growth and love and not only my own, but to help others. And I knew I felt the significance of that, and he knew that. And he said, Don't worry. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. We'll be with you. And I knew I wasn't going to win the argument, and I said, please don't, please don't send me back. You can't do that, not after I arrived. I I just got here, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt this love flow into me, this compassion. He said, It's okay. We will be with you. We'll be with you every step of the way, and it won't take long. We'll see you later. Boom, you're back. I wouldn't consider that a classic life review, as in most other accounts in a near death experience, but imparted the importance of my life, the significance of what was to come, the gravity of that and coming back is the hardest thing. It's miserable. I so appreciate that you summed it up. That's exactly. Exactly it, and I'm not allowed to remember that information. What those specifics are. I just knew. I mean, he showed me, told me I knew the nature of this work, but I had to forget it all as soon as I am back in this which means you're stumbling along as much as ever before. But it's kind of worse. On top of that, you are forever homesick for what you had become, and yet I know that I emanate from that. I'm never separate from it, but it sure feels like I am, because I'm left in this reality, the one you're embedded in. As soon as you get reconstituted, as soon as you're re embodied, you feel the density of flesh and the pull of gravity and the muck of words and how thoughts have to come one after the other, and how they're totally inadequate. And that reality, which is so much more real than this, I think it descends into your subconscious. It it goes into the core of your being, because you cannot integrate it right away. You're going through existential dissonance. You've moved from this level of consciousness to one so expensive, and then you're compressed back into this. That's what happened. I felt myself back in the hospital on the floor. I heard the voices of the doctors and the nurses who had been trying to resuscitate me, though my chest didn't hurt at all if they give me CPR. And my wife at the time, she was mad and scared, and she said, You were gone like 15 minutes, no heartbeat, no breathing. I didn't care about that. I just felt lousy. I had a headache. I felt confused that reality I touched upon was quickly removed from my conscious awareness. They wrapped me in a blanket. I felt really out of sorts and strange. They checked my vitals. They couldn't find anything wrong, and they sent me home. The first thing I did was I crawled into bed, I pulled the covers up, and I grieved. I didn't know why I was grieving, and I don't play it well, lift, repeat, don't you don't have to believe it's going to do anything. Just do it, and the muscle will grow with sleep and Nutrition. In this game, I'm not competitive, I'm not aggressive, but I always felt the separation from the ground of being, and so it reanimated my faith in a completely new way. I was no longer lifting my prayers as petitions to an external God. I was now participating in the consciousness of God, and God was not an old man with a beard sitting on a throne. God is a word for the ground of being from which all of reality emanates. So how can I honor the divine light in everything, the sacred, ordinary moments, because you're stuck in this and you're longing for that, you still do stupid things to fill the hole. Make really unwise choices, but that's hard, because you know they're unwise, and you do them anyway. Well, I like to think I was a pretty decent human being before it happened. It's not like my principles changed very much. I also didn't talk about it. I didn't share it with anyone for years, but I did find that within a few months of returning from internship back to the final year at seminary, that I had developed a sensitivity to energy, and so I explored that, and was trained in therapeutic touch, energetic healing modality. And even as I do this, I can feel it between my fingers. Was different, and the road ahead was different because I began to have mystical moments, coincidences, things that I couldn't shrug off. Sublime. Oh, you know, it's the typical ones where you think of someone and they call or you can read the energy of someone on the thoughts, and they're so fleeting. I didn't think of it as an ability. I would just think, Oh, that's weird. But now as I look back, it's like, Oh, wow. So my conclusion was, I've got a lot of growing up to do. Well, what I did with it was learn how to love, learn how to grow up and wake up. You look at integral theory. I honestly, I didn't do that without making a lot of mistakes, because when we don't know how to love, we injure the people we love. I did that just being selfish, not being considerate, and here I am now ordained, right, a minister, but I didn't know what I didn't know, and I had a lot of maturity. So yeah, cancer did that. There's some tension there. But see, I'm a Lutheran minister. So if you know Anglican and Catholic, Lutheran is very much like that. So you got your Protestants and your Catholics and Lutherans started the mess 500 years ago, but at its heart, the Lutheran faith is a reform movement. Always upgrade the faith. And so that's what I do. And my language focuses around consciousness. And my Work cm hospital chaplain with cancer patients and palliative patients in the ICU. So I engage people to use suffering as a functional process that deconstructs the ego as a process of waking up and moving towards transformation. It's very effective at doing that, and triggers, of course, ego defense mechanisms for self preservation, and we don't like it, but that's what suffering does. I'll share a tool that I use really powerful, and it's from the Buddhist tradition meditation called Tonglen. This means receiving and giving. You're the expert in your experience and what it's like to struggle with this. Close your eyes. Breathe into it. Identify the greatest like a strong facet of what's hard about this. So maybe it's fear or die. Where do you feel it? It's right here in my heart. Okay, breathe into it. I love. Allow it, let it live, stay with it. Now, breathe in. More of it from that patient in the next room. Draw it out of their body into yours. Increase yours by taking theirs when you breathe out, send back your compassion to them. Could be light, could be the words I understand. I'm with you. I get it. I'm right with you. I say only you can do this. Breathe in, take it in powerful because compassion is not some wishy washy nice thing. Don't lose hope, because in the end, love wins, right? And love is not an emotion. Love is the highest state of consciousness, and we are all on an exponentially accelerating path that's embedded in evolution to become that, to wake up and be that practice where you're planted. Let love be your spiritual practice, and trust that you make a big difference in the world with the people you're around. That's the ripple effect. And be serious and creative and have fun with it. And hang on. I know it's a wild ride, but it ends well. So keep shining. The world needs your light. Keep shining and don't panic. You'll be hurt. It's all gonna be okay. Realize that you're the product of your life. So be kind, be gentle, and be able to distinguish what's your homework and what's their homework, and do your homework. God is the ground to being the love, which is the underlying consciousness from which reality emanates to grow up in the evolutionary process of becoming mature human being, and then to wake up this way towards that which you are, a sacred one of a kind, manifestation from a realm of pure consciousness, dimension of absolute love. You're never separate from that. So waking up from it moves you from the material realm to the causal, the subtle, the astral and the non dual.
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