Divine Encounters Episode 041 | Near-Death Experience Story
Dr. Yvonne Kason was a resident physician on a medical evacuation flight in northern Ontario when, she says, both engines of a small plane failed and a force field of peace came over her before the crash. In this Divine Encounters episode she tells Alex Ferrari about the voice that told her to swim, the white light she says she entered while her body fought the water, and how the experience changed the way she loves.
Key Takeaways
- Yvonne says both engines of the small plane she was flying in as a resident physician failed in a snowstorm, and that her near-death experience began before the plane hit the ground.
- She describes a “force field of peace” pushing down her fear, and an inner voice saying, “Be still and know that I am God, I am with you now and always.”
- After the crash into an icy lake, she says the voice told her three times to swim to shore, and that she argued with it until the third time.
- She describes her consciousness rising 20 or 30 feet above her body like a split screen, and then entering a realm of soft, glistening white light.
- She says she understood that God is not a judge on a throne but an infinitely intelligent, infinitely present, infinitely loving force.
- Afterward she felt she was “drunk with love,” reconciled with her father, and says they shared seven loving years before he died.
| Guest | Dr. Yvonne Kason |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 041 |
| Where | Northern Ontario, Canada, during her residency training |
| What Yvonne says happened | Both engines of a small twin-engine plane failed in a snowstorm; the plane belly-landed on a lake and sank |
| Where she says she went | A realm of soft, glistening white light |
| Who she met | A luminous face of light, and what she understood to be a loving higher power |
| Return | She says she felt her consciousness pulled back into her body in a hot whirlpool bath at the hospital |
| The message | Everything is going to be all right; we are all going to make it home |
A Medevac Flight in Northern Ontario
This happened in northern Ontario, Canada. As part of her residency training, Yvonne was assigned for a month to work with Native Indian communities, as she describes them. On this particular day she was assigned to a medevac by small plane. The aircraft was a twin-engine propeller plane, a Piper Aztec, and the job was to move a critically ill woman from a small community hospital to the largest nearby hospital, in Winnipeg, about an hour away by air.
The patient was intubated, and Yvonne had to keep her breathing by squeezing an Ambu bag. She had IVs in both arms that the nurse tended. The plane was so small, she says, that the patient, the nurse, Yvonne and the oxygen tank filled it. The oxygen tank rode in the copilot seat next to the pilot.
When the Engines Stopped
Yvonne was tending to the patient and not watching the pilot. If you have been in a propeller plane, she says, you know how loud the motors are, and she was only about ten feet from each one. Suddenly she heard one engine stop, the propeller sputtering to a halt. She called out to the pilot. She could see him pushing levers, desperately working to restart it. He managed to.
A few minutes later the opposite engine sputtered out. Then the other one stopped again. No engines. Her reaction, she says, was what most people’s would be: immediate, intense fear and panic. They had flown into a bad snowstorm with heavy winds. The plane was bouncing like the worst turbulence she had ever felt, going down. The pilot was trying to guide it away from the trees toward a wheels-up belly landing on a frozen lake.
A Force Field of Peace
Her first thought, she says, leapt from her heart like a reflex: oh, God, help, I am going to die. She thinks that was close enough to a prayer. That is when, she says, her near-death experience began, before the plane had hit the ground.
She describes “a force field of peace that was descending upon me,” literally pushing down her fear. Then she heard a voice in her mind, a masculine voice. She had never heard an inner voice before. It said, “Be still and know that I am God, I am with you now and always.” A mystical peace permeated her, she says, and she stayed fully conscious.
The patient had woken up and was looking at her with terrified eyes. Yvonne says she told her, with absolute knowing, “it’s going to be okay.” She meant that it would be okay whether they lived or died. She had no idea what the outcome would be, but she knew in her soul that it would be okay either way.
The Lake and the Voice
The pilot, who she says was commended afterward, did manage to avoid the trees and made a belly landing on a partially frozen lake. When the plane stopped skidding, the weight broke the thin ice, and the plane nosed down and began to sink into very deep water. Everyone had to get out. Yvonne pulled the nurse out, and together they tried to pull the patient out, but could not. The patient was wedged in the doorway as the plane went down. The pilot got out the other door.
Looking around, Yvonne saw they were at the edge of the ice, with open water between them and the nearest land, an island about 200 yards away. The current was strong and fast. She later learned the place is called Devil’s Gap, on Lake of the Woods by Kenora, named for a current that is treacherous in summer and winter, and keeps the ice from freezing there.
Then she heard the voice again. Swim to shore. She was, as she puts it, inexperienced with spiritual experiences and higher guidance, and she argued back. She had taken lifeguard training and knew you are not supposed to swim to shore. You will drown. The pilot was shouting for her to get on the ice. So instead of following her inner guidance, she swam toward the ice.
The ice was too thin. It was below zero, in a blizzard, and her heavy winter coat and boots were dragging her down like dead weights. The voice repeated, swim to shore. She kept struggling. Finally, the third time, she stopped, turned and started swimming for shore. It was, she says, a long and difficult swim.
Above Her Body, Like a Split Screen
Partway there, she says, her near-death experience deepened. She heard a whooshing, roaring noise, similar to what she had heard in her Kundalini awakening. Then her consciousness was 20 or 30 feet above her body. It was more complicated than that, she says, because her body was still alive and still trying to swim. Her consciousness was in two places at once, like a split screen TV: a big image above, and a small image still in her physical body.
Then most of her consciousness went higher, into what she calls a place, realm or state that is hard to name, filled with soft, glistening, bright white light. It was a dark, stormy day below, but where she went was beautiful and bright. She saw, briefly, a luminous face of light that shifted into something like the perimeter of a cloud.
What She Says She Knew in the Light
In the realm of light, she says, no voice explained things to her. Her soul simply knew. She knew that the incredible love she felt was the love of a higher power, of what she had been raised to call God. And what she was experiencing was nothing like what she had been taught. It was not an old man with a long white beard on a throne, judging whether you have been good or bad.
She describes it as the higher power, whatever name you give it, Allah, Brahman, the force. She uses the word God. It was “infinitely intelligent, infinitely present, infinitely loving force field” that interpenetrates all of reality, past, present and future. She also knew that whether the body below lived or died did not really matter, because what she thinks of as herself would live on.
Coincidences, a Helicopter and a Hot Bath
Through what she calls a series of coincidences and miracles, she made it to shore, and so did the pilot. A helicopter happened to have touched down about five miles from the crash. An Air Canada plane directly overhead heard their Mayday and relayed it to the ground. The helicopter pilots, who she says did not know each other and had only met because they were grounded, got in the air, found them and flew them to the nearest hospital.
Yvonne says that she was out of her body and partly in it throughout the rescue. She watched from above as they landed on the hospital driveway and the emergency staff came out with stretchers. She watched them wheel her in. She was hypothermic, almost frozen, and a near-drowning victim. They warmed her in a hot whirlpool bath in the physiotherapy department. There, she says, she felt her consciousness re-enter her body, like the way a genie gets sucked into a bottle on TV, through the top of her head. She remembers rubbing her frozen hands on her legs and saying, “I’m back, I’m back. I’m gonna live.”
Drunk With Love
She was off work for a couple of months because of frostbite and the near drowning. It took her a long time to understand what had happened and find a name for it. The impact, she says, was profound, positive and spiritual. She felt she had brought some of the love back with her. She was, in her words, drunk with love, oozing it. She would watch the squirrels playing on her front lawn or children on the street and feel waves of love.
She also came back with a greater capacity to forgive. She and her father had been feuding for years, as young people do, and were not speaking. After the experience she phoned him and said, Dad, I love you, let’s be friends. They reconciled and had seven wonderful years of a loving father and daughter relationship before he died. She calls it a gift. Nothing about her father had changed, she says. She had. The little things that used to bother her no longer mattered. The love they shared did.
Where Yvonne’s Story Meets Other Near-Death Accounts
Researchers who study near-death experiences note that they often begin in moments of acute danger, and that people often describe a profound peace, a sense of leaving the body, a light and a changed view of life afterward. Yvonne’s account has these, and also an unusual feature: she says the experience started before the crash, while she was still fully awake.
The field has a long history. Bruce Greyson built a 16-item scale for measuring the experience and published it in 1983. A 2001 paper in The Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues reported that 62 of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, about 18 percent, described one. Explanations are still debated. Start with our complete guide to near-death experiences, and see the glossary on kundalini, which Yvonne mentions.
A Happy Ending for All of Us
Yvonne says a fulfilled life is experiencing, firsthand, your direct relationship with the loving higher power, and being an instrument of the divine in whatever small way spirit calls you. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she says. She defines God by her own experiences, not by a mental construct or a book.
As she perceives it, this is a loving force with infinite intelligence and a beautiful plan for all of us to have diverse, interesting experiences as our souls learn and grow through many lives. She believes “we’re all going to make it home in the end.” We might get lost for a long time. By following the hints and clues spirit gives us, sometimes whispers and sometimes explosive experiences, she says, we find the path back to the awareness that we are children of God.
Questions to Sit With
- Yvonne argued with her inner voice twice before she listened. When has your inner guidance been clear and you argued with it anyway?
- She found that nothing about her father had changed, only her view of him. Who might you see differently if the small things stopped mattering?
- She calls it a gift to have had seven more years with her dad. Who do you want to reach out to before another year passes?
Reach out to one person you have been out of touch with and send a short message that says, I love you, let’s be friends. No agenda, just the sentence.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Yvonne says that a force field of peace can meet us even in the middle of fear.
- She says her inner guidance repeated itself until she was ready to follow it.
- She describes God as an infinitely intelligent, loving force, not a judge on a throne.
- She says that what we think of as ourselves continues, whether or not the body does.
- She believes we are all eventually going to make it home.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Yvonne Kason.
Guest Links: Connect With Dr. Yvonne Kason
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dr. Yvonne Kason?
Dr. Yvonne Kason is a physician who describes a near-death experience that began during a plane crash in northern Ontario, when she was a resident doing a medevac flight. She shares it in this Divine Encounters episode.
What happened to Yvonne Kason in the plane?
She says both engines of the small twin-engine plane failed in a snowstorm. The pilot made a belly landing on a partially frozen lake, and the plane sank through the thin ice.
When did her near-death experience begin?
She says it began before the plane hit the ground, when a force field of peace descended on her and she heard a voice say, “Be still and know that I am God, I am with you now and always.”
What did the voice tell her after the crash?
She says it told her three times to swim to shore. She argued with it and swam toward the ice first, then turned and swam to shore on the third time.
What did Yvonne see in the light?
She describes a realm of soft, glistening white light, and a luminous face of light that shifted into something like a cloud. She says she did not hear a voice there; her soul simply knew things.
What does Yvonne say God is like?
She says it was nothing like the old man on a throne she had been taught about. She describes an infinitely intelligent, infinitely present, infinitely loving force field that interpenetrates all of reality.
How did Yvonne return to her body?
She says she felt her consciousness pulled back through the top of her head in a hot whirlpool bath at the hospital, like a genie being sucked into a bottle. She remembers saying that she was back and going to live.
How did the experience change her?
She says she felt drunk with love, noticed love for squirrels and children, and had a greater capacity to forgive. She reconciled with her father, and they had seven loving years before he died.
How was she rescued?
She says a helicopter had by coincidence landed about five miles away, and an Air Canada plane overhead relayed the Mayday. The helicopter pilots found the survivors and flew them to the nearest hospital.
What is Yvonne’s message?
She says everything is going to be all right, and that we are all eventually going to make it home. She encourages following the hints and clues spirit gives us.
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Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Dr. Yvonne Kason 0:08
This happened in Northern Ontario, Canada. I was assigned to work as part of my residency training for a month in northern Ontario with the Native Indian communities. And on this particular day, I was assigned on a medevac by small airplane. So it was a very small twin engine propeller plane called a Piper Aztec to do a medevac of a critically ill Native Indian woman from where I was in a small community hospital in a place called Sue lookout, where I was to accompany her to the largest nearby hospital, which was Winnipeg, which was about an hour away by plane. And so the patient was very critically ill. Just so you know, she was intubated with a tube into her airway, where she had this bag that I had to be compressing, an Ambu bag to keep her breathing. She had intravenous is in both arms that the nurse was tending to. The intravenous is and the patient, the nurse myself and the oxygen tank, we filled the plane. That was how small the plane was. And then in front of us was the pilot in the copilot seat. Of course there was a pilot and the oxygen tank was in the copilot seat. So it's a little tiny, little twin propeller plane. Anyway, as we were flying in the air, I was tending to the patient. I wasn't really, you know, looking so much at what the pilot was doing, but if you've ever been in a propeller airplane, you know, the motors are really loud, and you could hear them. And so I was only, like, 10 feet from each of the motors, so I could really hear the noise of both of the motors. All of a sudden, I could hear that the noise from one of the engines had stopped, and the propeller was like sputtering to a stop. When I looked out the window and I shout out to the pilot, what's going on, what's going on. And there he is, you know, he's pushing levers, pulling things, doing stuff like you could tell he was like, desperately trying to get the engine going again. And you have to remember this so small. I was like, right, right behind him. I could see everything he was doing and but he managed to get that engine going again. Thank goodness. And then so I went back to 10 to the patient. And then a few minutes later, all of a sudden, I heard the left engine, the opposite engine, sputter to a stop. And again, I'm going like, what's going on, what's going on? And again, he the pilot was pulling levers, pushing stuff, trying to get the engine going, and then the right one conked again, so that we had no engines going. Now my reaction immediate is probably what most people's reaction would be. Was like immediate, intense fear and panic. And I remember because the plane was going down, and we were in a snowstorm. We've flown into a really bad snowstorm, and there was really heavy winds. And the plane, if you want to know what it's like when a plane is crashing, it's like really severe turbulence, like the worst turbulence I'd ever been in. And the plane was bouncing like crazy, going down to the ground, the pilots trying to steer it to try and get us not to crash into trees. He was trying to guide us. He was trying to do a wheels up, belly landing onto the surface of a frozen lake to avoid us being killed crashing into trees. But my immediate reaction was intense fear and panic, and I remember it just leapt out of my heart like a reflex, like, oh, god help. I'm gonna die. And that thought, and I guess that is close enough to a prayer, because that is when my near death experience started. It was actually before the plane hit the ground, and so the plane's still going down. And all of a sudden I started feeling it was like a force field of peace that was descending upon me, and it literally was pushing down my fear, and I felt this incredible sense of calm and of peace. And then I heard a voice in my mind, and it was a masculine voice. And I've never heard an inner voice before this point in my life, and the voice very clearly, spoke, Be still and know that I am God, I am with you now and always. And with those words, there was just this incredible, mystical sensation of peace that just permeated me. I was still fully conscious. The plane had not crashed yet. I then turned and I started comforting the patient, because she'd woken up, and she was looking at me with these really terrified eyes, and I said to her somehow with absolute knowing it to be true, it's going to be okay. And I meant that it's going to be okay whether we lived or died like because at that point, I had no idea what the outcome was, but I knew somehow in my soul that no matter what happened, it was going to be okay. Well, the pilot really heroically, and he was commended afterwards. Did manage to avoid crashing into the trees. He did with the wheels up, do a belly landing onto a partially frozen lake, but when the plane stopped skidding on the ice and came to a thaw a stop. Off the weight of the plane very rapidly, broke the thin ice, nose dived and then sunk into very, very deep water. So we all had to get out of the plane. While the plane was rapidly sinking, I managed to pull the nurse out, and together she and I tried to pull the patient out, but we were not able to. She was wedged in the doorway of the plane when the plane nosedived and went down. The pilot went out the other door, and then I looked around and to evaluate my situation, and I saw that we had crashed and the plane had sunk right at the edge of ice, right by open water between us and the closest shore. So the closest land, which was an island, was maybe 200 yards away. And what was separating me and us from the land was this open water with a strong, fast moving current. It turns out that the place that I crashed is called Devil's gap on Lake of the Woods by Kenora. And it's called Devil's gap because of the really strong current that is treacherous both in the summer and in the winter. In the winter, the ice doesn't freeze there because of the strong current. So I heard the voice in my head again, and it said, swim to shore. And I remember I was, shall we say, inexperienced with spiritual experiences and higher guidance. Because what I remember I mentally argued with this voice, you know, no, I've taken life guarding. They say you're not supposed to swim to shore. You're gonna drown if you swim. And the pilot was shining, shouting, try to get on the ice. Try to get on the ice. And so instead of listening to my inner guidance, I turned away from the shore, and I swam towards the ice, and I tried to get on the ice. Well, the ice was too thin, and it took a tremendous amount of struggle. And you have to remember, this is in the winter in Canada, it was below zero. I was in the middle of a blizzard, strong winds. I was wearing heavy winter coat, heavy winter boots in the water. They were just carrying me down like dead weights. And it took a lot of energy just trying to stay on, on on the surface, trying to get on the ice, but it would I could not get on the ice. It was too thin. The voice repeated, swim to shore. And finally, the third time the voice said, swim to shore, I finally stopped struggling, and I turned and I started swimming to shore. That was a really long and a really difficult swim, and part way to swimming to shore is when my near death experience deepened. And what happened was, all of a sudden, I heard this whooshing, roaring noise, again, similar to what I heard in the Kundalini awakening. And then suddenly I found my consciousness, maybe 20 or 30 feet above my body. And you know, it's more complicated than that, because my body was still alive. My body was still trying to swim to shore. So it was actually like my consciousness was two places at the same time. And I compare it to like a split screen TV, where you have the big image and you have a little tiny image, the big image of my consciousness, or most of my consciousness, was up above my body, you know, maybe 20 or 30 feet above my body. But there was still the little image, a little part of my consciousness that was in my physical body, desperately trying to swim to shore at the same time. Then what happened is the bulk of my consciousness went higher, and I went into this place or realm or state of consciousness. It's hard to know what to call it. That was this incredible place, state, realm that was filled with this beautiful, soft white light, soft, glistening, bright white light. It was a dark and stormy day in the world down below. But where I went to was this incredible, beautiful white light. And while I was in this realm of light, I just knew things not I didn't like hear a voice explaining things to me. No, nothing like that. Although I did for a second. I did see a face of light, a luminous face of light, and then it sort of shifted into the cloud, like perimeter. But it's just somehow my soul absorbed or knew new things. And what my soul knew, or remember, it's hard to say, just knew is that I knew that this incredible love that I was feeling was the love of the higher power, or what I had been raised to call God, and what I was experiencing God to be was not anything like what I'd been taught God, supposedly was like. It was not like an old man with a long white beard sitting on a throne judging me if you good been bad, which is what I'd been taught. But what I was actually experiencing was the higher power, whatever name you want to call it Allah Brahman, the force. I use the word God that the higher power was like an infinitely intelligent, infinitely present, infinitely loving force field. That's like interpenetrating all of reality, past, present, future. And I. I also knew, while I was in the white light, somehow in my soul, I knew that whether my body, that was still struggling to swim to shore below lived or die really didn't matter, because me, what I think of as me, will continue to live on, even if my body, even if my body down there doesn't manage to make it to shore through a series of coincidences and miracles, it all unfolded that I was able to swim to shore. I made it, and so did the pilot. That a helicopter, by coincidence, had touched down about five miles from where we had crashed, and by coincidence, there was an Air Canada plane directly over us that heard our May Day message when we crashed, relayed the message to the ground helicopter pilots who actually didn't even know each other. They just met because they were grounded, got in the helicopter, looked for us, were able to find us, and were able to drive, fly us to the closest hospital, and I remember, I'm still out of body and partly in my body throughout the rescue, you know, I'm watching from above as they land on the hospital driveway and the emergency staff come out with their stretchers and, you know, put me on the stretcher. They wheel me in the emergency department, and then finally they resuscitated me because I was hypothermic, which means I was almost frozen to death, and I was a near drowning victim, and they warmed me. They resuscitated me by rewarming my body, by putting me in the hot whirlpool bath in the physiotherapy department. And it's there that I felt my consciousness re enter my body. And what that experience was was like how they depict on TV a genie being sucked into a bottle. I was just suddenly from this big, expansive space above my body. I was sucked in. It felt like through the top of my head into the smaller confines of my physical body. And then I was back. And I remember saying as I'm rubbing my frozen hands against my legs in the hot water. I'm back, I'm back. I'm gonna live. I'm gonna live. So that's how I re entered my body. Now it took me a really long time to figure out what on earth this was and to put a name to this experience. And I remember when I talked to I was off work for a couple months afterwards because of the frostbite, and then you're drowning and everything. And I mean, the impact was so profound on me and positive and spiritual, I just felt like I brought back some of the love with me. I was like, I was drunk with love, and I'm just oozing love. And I look at the squirrels playing on my front yacht lawn, I feel waves of love for the squirrels or for children on the street. I just was oozing love, but I also came back with an enhanced capacity to forgive, because my father and I had been feuding for many years. You know, as young people do right? And we hadn't been speaking, we weren't on good terms, and after this experience, I phoned up my dad, and I said, Dad, I love you. Let's be friends, and we reconciled, and we had seven wonderful years of a loving father daughter relationship before he died. I'm so grateful. I feel it's like a gift from God that I got out of this near death experience, that I had those seven precious years of relationship with my dad. And you see, nothing about my dad had changed. He still had the you know, whatever it was that used to bother me so much in his personality, it was I had changed that those little things weren't important to me anymore. What was important to me was the love that we shared. I think living a fulfilled life is experiencing, first hand, your direct relationship with the loving higher power and being able to be an instrument of the divine in whatever small way spirit is calling you to do that, and that is what gives me fulfillment. Everything's going to be all right. Everything's going to be fine. I define God based on my personal experiences of God, rather than a mental construct or anything I've read in a book. And how I experienced God, how I've experienced God through the blessed glimpses that I've been given is of this incredible loving force with infinite intelligence that has this beautiful plan for all of us to have these wonderful, very diverse, very interesting experiences as Our souls are learning and growing through many incarnations, over many lives, and that it's the divine design of this loving intelligence force that we're all going to have a happy ending, that we're all eventually going to find our way home. We might get lost for a while, for a long time, but this is what I perceive, and that's the beauty of the Divine. Plan is that we're all going to make it home in the end, and that by following the little hints and clues that spirit is trying to give us through whispers or sometimes by explosive experiences that will help us find the path that's going to lead us to that soul awareness of our true nature as children of God.
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