There are moments when the veil between worlds feels thin not because something dramatic happens, but because something deeply familiar is finally remembered. On today’s episode, we welcome Virginia Drake, and the conversation unfolds as a gentle exploration of what lies beneath fear, belief, and the stories we tell ourselves about life and death. This is not a tale meant to convince, but one that invites listening at a deeper level.
Virginia Drake is a spiritual experiencer and intuitive whose life was profoundly reshaped by encounters that revealed consciousness as far greater than the physical body. In this profound conversation, she speaks with a grounded sincerity that keeps the discussion rooted in lived experience rather than abstraction. What stands out immediately is her calm clarity—there is no need to dramatize what she has lived, because the truth of it carries its own quiet authority.
Virginia shares how her experiences did not arrive as an escape from life, but as a deeper immersion into it. What she encountered beyond ordinary awareness felt less like entering something new and more like remembering something ancient. She describes a state of awareness where fear dissolved naturally, replaced by a sense of being completely known and accepted. “There was nothing I needed to explain or defend,” she says, pointing to a space where judgment simply did not exist. In that absence, a profound peace revealed itself.
As the conversation deepens, Virginia reflects on how these experiences transformed her understanding of death. Rather than an ending, death appeared as a transition—one that strips away identity while preserving essence. The self that worries, compares, and strives fell away, leaving behind awareness itself. This shift did not distance her from humanity; it softened her relationship to it. Life, she explains, became something to participate in rather than control.
We also explore the challenge of returning to ordinary life after such experiences. Integration, Virginia explains, is often more difficult than the experience itself. Language feels inadequate. Priorities shift. Relationships sometimes strain under the weight of unshared understanding. Yet this return is where the real work begins—learning how to embody what was seen, rather than clinging to the experience as something separate or special.
One of the most resonant themes in our discussion is compassion. Virginia emphasizes that encountering expanded awareness did not make her immune to pain, but it changed how she related to it. Suffering no longer felt like punishment or failure. Instead, it became a signal—an invitation to respond with presence rather than resistance. In this way, spirituality became practical rather than idealized.
As our conversation widens, a collective dimension naturally emerges. Virginia believes many people are experiencing subtle awakenings—moments of intuition, connection, or inner knowing that don’t fit neatly into established frameworks. These experiences, she suggests, are not anomalies, but reminders. Humanity, in her view, is gradually remembering a deeper truth about itself, even as old structures fall away.
What remains most striking is Virginia’s humility. She does not position herself as an authority, but as a witness. Her experiences did not elevate her above others; they brought her into greater empathy with them. Awakening, she reminds us, is not about leaving the world behind, but about meeting it with less fear and more honesty.
SPIRITUAL TAKEAWAYS
Consciousness extends beyond the physical body and is rooted in awareness, not identity.
Death is not an end, but a transition that reveals what is essential.
True awakening deepens compassion rather than separating us from life.
In the end, this conversation offers a quiet reassurance: that beneath the uncertainty of human experience, something steady and benevolent remains. When fear loosens its grip, life reveals itself not as something to survive, but as something to trust.
Please enjoy my conversation with Virginia Drake.
Follow Along with the Transcript – Episode DE109
Alex Ferrari 0:46
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Virginia Drake 0:09
I was a teacher. I really thought I was living the life. I mean, I had a big house, I had the pool in the backyard, I had horses, I had what we would call the American dream of success. And when I had my first heart attack in 1998 it hit me so hard that I realized that I was really living a dream. I was living a lie. I was 46 years old. I was at the farm, and this was about two weeks, about a week and a half before summer break, and I taught sixth, seventh and eighth grade, and I taught nine subjects a day, so I was really tired. And I was tired because our nuns, everybody was tired during that year. So I was just setting in the week before the school, you know, was going to end in June. The second, I was watching something on TV, and I was in my den by myself. I wasn't thinking about anything. And this man comes out, and he looks like he's about 90 years old, and he's got oxygen in his nose, and he's leaning into that TV, and he said, Don't get a heart transplant. You know? I thought, wow. And he was explaining that he had a Tran a heart transplant, and it was awful. He was taking 90 pills a day, and I remember him thinking that. I thought 90 pills a day. Oh, my God. I just almost wanted to choke right then, but he kept coming into the screen saying, don't get a heart transplant. And I thought, Is he talking to me? I mean, I looked around. I thought, Okay, now that doesn't work. Then he said it again, and then I just finally said, I raised my hand and said, I'm not going to get a heart transplant. I'm 46 years old. I walk four miles a day. I am very healthy, you know, and I'm really declaring myself, however, the next week, I'm looking at that and had had a massive heart attack in June 2, 1998 it was the first day of summer break. How quaint for a teacher to be good. It was amazing, but it was scary, and I was very scared. What was going on is my son was in that classroom. I was closing down my classroom on June the second, and I kept getting these really hard pains, you know, and I just had three weeks prior to that, I'd had acid reflux, and I was in the classroom, and my son, what my youngest son, was in that and I didn't feel like a heart attack at that time. I just felt, it just didn't feel right. So I went down to the secretary, which I'm kind of a jokester, you know. And I'll say, you know, Mary, I'm really, I think I'm having something going on. And she wouldn't look down, you know? She was just and I said, No, here, I think there's something wrong. And when she looked up, she saw that, oh. She said, We need to call the ambulance. Well, they called the ambulance. They ended up taking me to the emergency room, and I had acid reflux, and I remember they took this, this medication down, and it was like, Oh, my God, it relieved everything. It just cooled. And I thought, oh, it's done. Three weeks later, I'm looking at I'm having a heart attack. And I thought, now it's acid reflux, because before that nurse told me, said you're going to feel like you're going to have a heart attack over and over, and you want to come in here a lot. And I thought, I will not do that. Well, it was hurting this time different. You know, you think for a woman, it came through this part of my chest, but it went through my shoulder, and women tend to have that kind of heart attack. It's in their shoulder. So I wasn't recognizing it also, because I was 46 years old, and that was not even in my mind, except knowing that I was told the week before, don't get a heart transplant. So I'm sitting there, and I remember came home, and I said, I'm gonna lay down for a little while. And I laid down, and my cats were the ones that made me look down, and they kept looking at me, and I thought, there's something wrong. Now I'm an animal communicator. I've been an animal communicator because I'm an only child, so I've been doing this all my life. So my cats were trying to tell me something. I thought, what's wrong? But I heard this voice inside, a very sweet, very gentle voice. It said, go into the bathroom and look in the mirror. Well, when I walked in, my eyes were already shooting back, and I was already ash ashen hell. And I heard a voice said, You need to go the emergency room now. And so I went down to the steps, down to my husband at the time, and I told him what was going on, and he's well, I've got the doctor. I said, I need to go to the emergency room now. Now we were in the farm, so we're about 20 minutes out, so when I get in there, he's already parking the car. And I remember, this is how you think. So I walked in and the girl that was waiting at the ER, I said, I'm having really, I'm kind of hurting a little bit. And I said, oh, it just, I better think it's acid reflux. And she goes, go right back. Well, in our, er, it's a very small little community. You sit out there until you're next. And then I thought, well, I've done a lot of community things. I'm a teacher. It recognized me, because when I came in, there was a nurse in there that I went to high school with, and her name was. Punky branding bird. But we called her, you know, punky, but she was Janet. She's no longer with us, but she looked at me and she said, What's wrong with you? I remember thinking, why would she say that to me? I mean, I knew it personally. So I laid down, and she kept saying to me, stay still. Now I'm always a sudden going down into my body going what she mean by staying still? I don't think I'm doing anything out here. What's going on in here. So I'm coming in and I'm going back out. So I don't even realize that I'm out of my body half the time I'm coming back in because they scared me enough, because it doesn't matter. It doesn't, you know, doesn't match. So then the next thing I look up, my nun, who is my principal. She's standing there, not my husband, because they'd already told him, your wife is having a heart attack. You better go get the children. And this is massive. I mean, I you know, I didn't know that until she came in, and then I heard him say, she's having a major heart attack. And everything slowed down, and the next thing I knew, I looked over it, through my body, and I saw myself sitting in the corner of the ER, going, that's not possible. That can't be. I can't be in here and over there at the same time. And then it would be I could fall down from here and go down into my solar plexus. And I could see inside of my solar plexus, watching them do everything real slow, nothing that doesn't make sense. Even though you're having a spiritual experience, you're still trying to logically put it together. And you these are two different worlds that you're dealing with. You're dealing in a supernatural world that really that can happen, and then this logic world where they're telling you, when you come in your body, you feel like solidified so you really are confused. I remember I didn't realize I'd been there for three or four hours either. I mean, I've been in and out so many times. And finally the ambulance came because they had to get me settled down just to be able to go in. Now, I didn't know anybody going in there, but when they put me in the ambulance, I remember they kind of juggled me in. Now this is when you also and I had to do a lot of this work, because I had to go down deep enough to figure out what had happened to me. And I spent 1617, 18 hours in meditation, just in my body, trying to figure out, why did that work that way? Because I remember the ambulance driver as he was shoving me, and I heard him say, as plain as day, she's not going to make it. And it made me mad. I thought, I'm going to come out of this, out of this table. But also, I remember I was in the ambulance we're going down to I knew exactly where we're going, Lexington. You know, Versailles, Lexington road. I've been there. You drive it 100 times. You already know where it is, but the next thing I do, everything in the ambulance just doesn't have any light anymore. I have left the ambulance and I'm riding next to it. I could look through while we're driving right next now, I could see my body sitting in that ambulance, but I also knew I was over here, and I'm thinking, this is not working for I mean, it was really it takes you to a different state of mind. But then it felt like I had a ponytail up here, and I got jerked and I got jerked really high, and I ended up sitting in a room with a council, and they called it the council of 12. Now I do know nothing about the council of 12. I am still a teacher in the logic world of science and this work, and I'm sitting there, and these people are in white robes, but they had golden tassels and a golden belt, you know, like rope. And I knew it was go. I knew everything in this room, but it looked like I was in a circle, but I could see through the windows, and I could see all the planets, or wherever I thought I was. Because I think a lot of this is programmed, because you don't realize you're just in, like you're in a station or a channel area waiting to go into another level, you know. But this is why I got to meet these now, I never heard them speak, but through telepathic ways, I remember sitting in a chair. I was sitting in my chair, but I couldn't I looked down, and I had no hands and I had no body, and I kept thinking, but how come I have a body and I can, I can feel the chair, and these people are talking about me, and they laughing at me, and they would, I would say, what is going on? And they go, and I thought they're laughing at me. Now they're laughing at me. And see this is where your ego, your soul and everybody is really gelling in here trying to figure it all out. And then then next thing I know, I'm gone from that altogether. And all I had to do was just close my eyes that I thought they were eyes, and just think something. And I was up somewhere else, and I thought this is the coolest thing, because it's fast zone, I mean. And then I just started asking questions. When we finally go over, I had to literally turn around and look at myself again and release that part of myself. It's not real. I had participated in but this is who I really am, and I did not have a body. I remember, I've gotten several emails. They said, You can't, you know, cremate your body. I said, your body doesn't exist. It's Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That's how I learned about the Bible, from that time I've been with Jesus in the time I saw the Bible, how it really is. It made sense what this was going on out here, and I was never afraid, though. I was never afraid. I was only afraid when I was in my body. I was never afraid out here, because you don't have the same kind of understandings in those two states of mind. I remember when I came back in, I'd gone through, the ambulance came back into my body. And I remember when they pulled me out to, you know, put the stretcher down, it brought me back into my body. And I remember thinking, oh, and I could feel, then the pain again. It was all there. It thought, wow. How can that? You know, you're still trying to grasp what, what happened to me. How can I be here? Be over here? So when I'm laying down, though, I remember drain and there was, I was looking up in the ceiling. I thought, This looks just like er on those, you know, the series. I thought that's exactly what they were talking about. So this is kind of things you'll come in and out, because that's your programming that's bringing you back in. But you're also not aware that this is also going on with your soul. So you're having two total energy fields going on at the same time, and you're really thinking, how does this work? So I remember, then they wheeled me into the not the ER, but where I was going to meet my cardiologist. But my friends were there. They we were like I said, the first day of summer break at school, they all met me up there. That's when I first realized that I was going to go. I remember they were looking down. I was laying down, and I couldn't talk. It was very painful to talk. It was the pain was excruciating. And I remember they said, well, let's just close our eyes for two will be yes, and one will be young. No. You know, we did a little, and they said, are you okay? And I went, No, no, no. But I remember thinking they were trying to tell me that Ron, well, my husband, at the time, had picked up the kids and they they were coming, and I realized, no, I'm not going to make it. I'm only going to see these three people's faces. And it just gave me such a sadness that I wasn't going to get to say goodbye to my children or say goodbye to my husband. It was really a whole different it wasn't like outside. It was a depth of knowing that was deeper than I even experienced that before you can take God in from the breath that you take, that's what God is to do, what I'm doing right now, be me. Be proud of what I am, and know that I have a spark of God, as everyone else does, and we get an opportunity to change the world. And you don't think I'm not going to that's what I'm here to do. Your tone will be different. Mine's going to be different. And the frequencies will family ring that consciousness enough to where we can see the real truth here. Be honest with self. Be true to the self.
Guests Links
- WATCH this episode AD-FREE on Next Level Soul TV — Your Spiritual Netflix!
- Virginia Drake – Official Site
Full NDE Story: Woman’s Heart Attack Leads to Urgent Message from Beyond with Virginia Drake
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