MARRYING the Holy and Human: Brooke Grove’s EXTRAORDINARY Path to Healing and Transformation!

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you.

Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth Podcast. Your host is Brian D Smith, spiritual seeker, bestselling author, grief survivor, and life coach. Brian believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you've been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Close your eyes and imagine. What if the things in life that cause us the greatest pain The things that bring us grief are challenges. Challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried, but what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hi everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of Grief to Growth. And I've got with me today Brooke Grove. Brooke is a polytrauma survivor. She's a near-death experiencer. And she's a multidisciplinary integrative healer and writer in co-creation with spirit. She's a former psychotherapist. She has advanced degrees in clinical psychology, marital and family therapy, and clinical art therapy, enhanced by numerous postgraduate certifications, including yet not limited to shamanic energy healing, quantum fieldwork, and transpersonal neuroscience. As you can tell, Brooke is a very well-rounded, very well-educated person. She's been featured on many podcasts. I'm excited to have her on Grief 2 Growth today. She's been on several podcasts, YouTube interviews, documentaries, and she's appeared at IONS conferences. Brooke is currently writing her first book. She maintains a private international healing practice. She offers remote services. And her goal is to explore, transmute, and empower the evolution of human consciousness through gratitude, service, and light. So I also want to say Brooke, because she is a near-death experiencer, sometimes she has difficulties with technology. We've all— I mean, not she has difficulties with technology, technology has difficulties with her. So we were talking before we started recording, her video is not working today because her brand new MacBook isn't working. So this video will— or this interview will be audio only for Brooke. But I want to welcome Brooke Grove to Grief 2 Growth.

Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you, Brooke. We've known each other, I think, a couple years on Facebook. I've been meaning to get you here on the show. I know you're really, really busy and been dealing with issues. So I appreciate you doing this today.

Thank you so much for your patience, and it's an honor.

Yeah, well, I would say before we started recording, I know that you've told your near-death experience story, I know, many times. And I know sometimes people maybe get tired, a little bit tired of telling that story over and over again. But I can't assume that my listeners have heard it. So if you would indulge me and just tell me about your experience, that would be great.

Yes. So in 2010, I had been suffering from complex autoimmunity for for a few years. It began in my master's, and I had kind of gotten passed around from doctor to doctor. And it turns out during that time, the accurate diagnosis was not actually assigned. So I was taking medication that ought to have been benign to my system. However, they had missed that the liver was involved. And since the liver was compromised, taking the medication that was to help my lungs and kidneys, which were also compromised, actually shut down the liver. And it happened so rapidly that I fell and endured a traumatic brain injury, was instantaneously comatose, and dealing with systemic organ failure of the lungs, liver, and kidneys. Basically, the liver took everything else with it when it went. And so my NDE begins sometime between when they're helicoptering me to the hospital and then my arrival in ICU. And my first awareness is of exiting the body, seeing the ICU room, ICU, excuse me, room, and what they were wearing and all the machines and having this childlike curiosity, yet also feeling as if I were in a dream. I'd been lucid dreaming since childhood. And so I kept trying to wake myself up, especially when I start to realize that this person that they're working on looks just like me. So at this point, this out-of-body-like experience starts to become scary. And there is this attachment and this interest to the human body. And at the time that my mind or my consciousness, which is what it really was, my consciousness is trying to grasp what is occurring. At that same moment, I I'm catapulted out of this very human, industrial hospital space into what I can only describe as the cosmos. It was this very beautiful space full of light. There were also voids of darkness, yet everything was peace. It was as if whatever had consumed my consciousness prior was completely released. And all I knew was this ineffable, overwhelming love, just melting into that and just feeling so unified with everything around me, both the jewel-tone-like colors that most of the lights were presenting in, but also the darkness. There is no discomfort in this place. I've described it before, and I'll say this again, as just being held. And this was like being held in a way that for me, as a polytrauma survivor, in my human incarnation, I've never felt held like this before, ever. It was as if I could completely just surrender to this energy and be safe at all times. So to my consciousness, this was the most delicious feeling, having not been something I knew too much of in this incarnation. And very quickly, it became evident that the lights were communicating. This was not done with words, this was done through vibration and inner knowing, telepathy, if you will. The lights would communicate, and I noticed right away this incredible union with 3 of the particular lights, which for me presented in an emerald green, an amethyst purple, and a ruby red. And this was such an emotionally corrective experience for my soul, for my consciousness, because these lights, exactly as they presented to me here on the other side, were lights I had seen as an intuitive child and communicated with and I had often been told they were a figment of my imagination and unreal. And I had always called them angels as a young child. And here, that's how they very much felt. And they let me know I was, in a way, again, without words, home. And that I was okay, and that I was in a space of love. And yes, they were these energies or these lights, this intelligence that I had known as a child, and that they had been with me before, and they would be with me again. And they were really there just to guide and support me. And again, nothing is actually said with the construct of our language, but it's felt. And it was so yummy and delicious and comforting to me. And at that time, I began to— my consciousness began to really explore more, to go into different pockets of the space where everything is moving so, so, so quickly. There is no time in my experience of the other side. And I was there for approximately 3.5 days. Yet it felt like lifetimes, this journey through the light. There were communications that were given to me or downloaded, that I am still learning to unpack and understand. They've become more resonant as things have shifted here on the earth plane, as it's been 12 years, and some of the things I was shown or communicated, they didn't come to fruition for about 10 years into that post-NDE journey. So in this space, there's this humongous, beautiful, enchanting, bewildering, larger light that seems to be the epicenter of it all. And at some point, I become very entranced by it. And yet, for my soul, there was kind of a momentary pause where I knew how much I wanted to be with that light. Yet I was also curious about what was behind me and what was happening to, for lack of better terms, my body. Okay. And so the angelics let it be known to me that I am able to go to this light, that I am of the light. The feeling that I've described before is them suggesting that I was a fractal of that light, and that everything that I'd ever known was a fractal of that. Light. So I would be able to return to it now or at any other time. I ultimately would, yet I had the choice. And remember, in my case, I'm comatose, so I'm sort of in between. I had the choice if I wanted to go into that light, or if I want to return to the Earth realm. Now it's always difficult to describe this portion of the journey, yet they basically let me know in the most gentle ways that only the light can do, that should I come back to the body, to the human, there was going to be periods of more suffering, great suffering is really how it felt. And even my consciousness had some hesitation to that as a polytrauma survivor, having only known complex trauma on the earth walk. Even my soul was hesitant to return to that. And yet, they simultaneously let me know that should I choose to come back, I would step from karma into dharma, ultimately, and that I was a part of a group, a collective. It was not grandiose at all. They made it very self-evident. I was a part of a larger group here to help was an evolution in consciousness. And they really did show it in like these beautiful golden waves of colors of light that was here to uplevel humanity. And again, they didn't say it like that. It always sounds grandiose to me when I say it. Yet the way they communicate in light was you are part of a team. And if you choose to come back, you step into that power of the team. And they made it very evident when I expressed my hesitation to coming back, that the pain that I so much wanted to avoid encountering more of was actually my strength. And that it would be through going through more of that pain and learning to alchemize its light, that I would be able to help others and step into my power. And this therein was suggested to lead me into my dharma. Now they never expressed specifically what the dharma was, more so that it was part of this greater picture, and that these persons I'd be joining in some aspect were a community of teachers and forward thinkers. And so I felt very ramped up by that. I wanted to go back to the body knowing that I could make something of all this suffering, because in my life, that's what I had really wanted.. And there was a moment of pause and lingering into that big, beautiful Creator Light. But knowing, as they told me, that I would be reunified with it. So it wasn't a goodbye forever. It was a see you later. And as quickly as I made the commitment to return to align to what I was here for, I realized that I'm in this vast, almost infinite, like, space. How do I even get back? Because my consciousness is moving like them, just like speed of light, super, super fast. And so they tell me to look like the— I look at the light unlike any other. And so at that point, I'm starting to look for light that's different, and I'm instantaneously, like, spun around, or so it felt, to this horrific, blinding artificial light.. But right before I was catapulted into that, there are two very gentle, beautiful, I call them auric lights, because they're the way the aura appears to me now. Yet they're very different than the angelic lights, they're softer. And I see these two lights. And the fundamental difference I remember, Brian, here is that they didn't hold me, I wanted to hold them. And I had no idea what that was about. But I was curious. And one was this beautiful indigo blue, and another was a different shade of like an emerald green. Didn't get any message from that, had no knowing. Next thing I know, I follow that horrific artificial light, catapulted back into the body, open the eye, the first thing that greets me is a flashlight, which was being shown into my eyes at that moment to check my vitals. And so that was my return back to the human.

Wow. So I'm curious, you mentioned, you said as a child, you had lucid dreams. And I guess when you first had this out-of-body, where you realize you're out of the body, you felt like you were dreaming. Is that right?

I did. I did. I think for my consciousness, it was a bit confusing, as I've been going out of my body for decades as a polytrauma survivor. And it wasn't some blissful out-of-body experience, it was classic dissociation. And so lucid dreams have been a gift of spirit that I had gotten. Probably around my high school, I started noticing that something interesting was happening in my dream state. As a child, I wouldn't have described it that way. But I did have an awareness that I had a superpower to alter my dreams from within the dream at a young age. Mm-hmm.

So Sounds like you were— do you think your spirituality, your connection with the other side, was that developed because of your early trauma? Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief, most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up. So you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it. The community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing. Listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

I believe that it was congruent to who I am as an individual, as a mother myself now, and having worked with young children. I believe we're all born with that capacity, and it's something that's indoctrinated quite often out of us. And so I had vocalized mine. I was a very shy child, and I was very energy sensitive. I would say from about 3, I've heard comments from my family about that, how I would behave so atypically per their perspective. But to me, I was always seeking safety. And I didn't always trust the people around me because they didn't feel safe. And so the lights and the nature spirits and the earth itself were where I really took my creativity. I took my trust and I gave it to them. And so there was a relationship that was forged there that I kept until it was really conditioned out of me.

Yeah, that's a really good explanation. Because I think that we do all have that innately when we come in. But for some reason, most of us let go of it, you know, around a certain age, I guess, 5, 6, 7, 8, somewhere in that range. And people tell us that, you know, for example, your, your imaginary friends are just imaginary, and you're talking to angels, they're like, well, that's just your imagination. So I think for maybe some people are able to hold on to it longer for various reasons.

Definitely, definitely.

So after you, after you came back into your body, I know a lot of times when people have near-death experiences, it's difficult to integrate those experiences. I'm wondering what your integration process was like, especially in light of the fact you've been having other experiences before this even.

My integration experience was quite difficult. When I came back into the body, you know, all of the beautiful information they had shared in the light, it was almost like instantaneously that switch flipped off. Because my cognizant mind, the lower mind, as I see it now, the ego, really tried to come in and invalidate the experience. Having been a child who was stigmatized for having spiritually transformative experiences or having this connection, it wasn't safe to tell anyone in my immediate environment. I also had some pretty complex family dynamics that were co-occurring with all of this. And so just in that system, it wasn't safe to even really exist in that moment, because so much trauma was being activated from multiple persons. And I was the classic— in psychology, they call it the identity identified patient, who's the person that comes into treatment. Okay. It wasn't until I started formally studying psychology, I had a professor say, the identified patient is often the healthiest person in the system, because they have decided this is sick, and they start acting out dysfunction. And it's an unconscious effort to get healing. Hmm. Okay. So having been the identified patient as a child, because it was this frenzied familial state going on, I didn't feel safe stepping up and saying, this just happened to me, in addition to what was going on. I didn't feel trust and connection with those persons to be supported. And so I didn't. And that was very difficult for me, Brian, because the minute I woke up, there was no spectrum of gentle shift. It was rapid onset of aftereffects. So I'm sitting in an ICU bed, I'm still intubated, unable to talk. They're not aware I woke up. They thought my eye movement was some sort of reflex. Okay, because I'd been having those the whole time I was comatose. And so I was in the body in this very strange state where nobody was aware I was there attempting to communicate, but I couldn't because I was strapped down at a PICC line going to my brain. And so if I moved, that PICC line would have been very dangerous. They already believed I was potentially brain dead. Okay, so all these measures had been taken. And so I can't communicate. And at the same time that I cannot communicate to a human, and no one's attending to me on a cognitive level, I start noticing that nothing looks normal. Nothing was behaving the way that I understood this realm to behave.. And so at the same time that I'm unable to really connect with anyone and find out what happened to me, because I didn't understand at this portion, okay, I start realizing that I'm seeing some sort of energy that's in between what's seen and unseen to most people. And that was very difficult for me, having been a psychologist in training, at the time and about to defend my PhD, I had been taught to stigmatize certain things in a clinical program. Okay. And much of what was happening to me made me question my own sanity. I would check my mental status in that bed. And I would be like, I'm oriented times 4, which is person, time, place, situation. If you're oriented times 4, you're not said to be psychotic. So I'm sitting in this bed going, well, I'm not psychotic. But what is happening to me?

Yeah.

And in the absence of being able to talk to people, at that point, I said, I don't even know if I believe in God, because at that point, I'd actually been agnostic. Okay. In my clinical training, I was— I never went as far as to be an atheist. But I was like, I don't know what it is. And I'm not going to define it, that kind of thing. But it could be there. Okay, well, suddenly I'm sitting in this bed, I'm seeing all this stuff move. I'm still seeing those three colors that I've seen on the other side— the red, the green, and the purple— and they're floating all around the room and moving. And I'm like, if you're real, you're all I can talk to, help me. And so at that point, I started realizing that I could work with those lights. And that they would assist me. And so they just started intuitively teaching me how to place them like on the organs and things in the body with my intention, because again, I cannot move my physical hands. And so I had a good probably 48 hours where I played with the light before I had a nurse realize I was awake and started attending to me as a person. So that was the beginning of my After Effects journey. And it only got more trans— personal and psychedelic from there on out. But at least I had that very grounding experience where, yes, it was outside of my comfort zone. And it was outside of everything I've been taught. And yet, they attended to me with the same love and reciprocity that they did on the other side. And in that moment, a relationship that's become the most substantial in my life now was forged. Or reforged, reilluminated.

Yeah. So it's been several years now since your experience. Do you still see auras? Do you still see energy and stuff like that?

Yes. And now it's become normative to me. And the times that I don't, I get concerned. But yes, I see the quantum field almost all of the time. There's particular times where it's more present, like when we have full moons, we have certain events in the cosmos, it's thinner. The veil is thinner. But yes, I see auras. I've, I've learned to cloak them. That's for my own sanity. So that's just so if I'm going in to say, like, you and I have presented at IANDS, say I'm going into a big conference like that, it's very emotionally and spiritually loaded, then I'm gonna do everything I can to cloak persons so that I'm not receiving everybody's auric signature and everything that's coming through it, because that's very hard to calibrate all that information. And it can be very dysregulating to my nervous system as a trauma survivor. So that was the hardest part, honestly, of reintegration, was learning how to ground that.

Yeah, that's— it's interesting you say that, because I was just at the Helping Parents Heal conference in August. So just a few months ago, about 4 months ago, as the time we're recording this. And the energy— and I don't have that sense, but I just, I could tell. And there were a lot of sensitive people around that. When you have that many people there that are, that have gone through loss of a child, and we had a bunch of mediums there and stuff. And I know my daughter is very sensitive to energy. And we came back and she was just like, she was like buzzing. So I think that that's an experience that people can have when you have that sensitivity.

Definitely. And I joked about this a little bit when I was at the last conference, yet I was very scared to be in person and communicating because when I started speaking about my NDE, it was right before everything shut down. And so I spent years doing interviews online and speaking online and doing conferences online, yet not in person. And so when I got there, I was like, okay, well, we know how technology responds to me. So that's already anxiety provoking, right? I'm like, and now we're gonna have a live audience. And I'm not sure how my energy system is going to respond to this. And there was a moment where we were having technological interference for currently, I couldn't tell if they were hearing me right, because of how my aura was responding to all the technological stuff. And I just was like, you know what, let's just go into Q&A because their fields were all lighting up like Christmas trees. And I'm like, instead of trying to shut this down, I can just embrace it and roll with the energy. And as soon as I did that, it was a lot of fun. And I got over that fear quite quickly. Yet it was a test. And it was upleveling as well.

Well, I love your talk at IONS, by the way. I've listened to it a couple of times. And I want to get the title was Practical Oneness: Grounding Luminosity into the Lived Experience of Our Humanity. And I think this is where— and you made some comments there. Because a lot of times people, people like myself who study NDEs, maybe not existentially, but I have, because when we first hear about NDEs, we go, I want one of those. You know, that sounds like a great thing to have. And I hear you, I hear you laughing as we were bringing that up. So, but you addressed that in your talk. So talk to people about what it's like to go through that experience.

I feel that there's a lot of romanticizing that goes on for any mystical experience. Okay. And that's because the transcendent is so yummy. And it, it gives purpose and meaning. It's, it makes sense why we would be, you know, attracted to it, and some would want to seek it. Yet, like anything that is going to radically shift you towards growth, it's going to make you uncomfortable. Okay, so you can have this beautiful peak experience that by its nature is temporal, yet the minute you come down— so as I like call it this hard and holy human ground back to this earth walk, you then have to not only embody what just happened to you, but you have to actually alchemize the change within your system to hold that. And one of the great lessons my aftereffects continually give me, and I see constantly with other people I work with, is our system can only calibrate so much light at once.

Okay.

So when we have these transcendent experiences, we're immersed in the light quite often. And then we're coming back down here. Now there's something within our field that's being activated by this transcendent that's being turned on or reactivated by it. Yet we then have to allow our bodies to hold space for that. And as they used to say in old computer science, garbage in, garbage out, right? Well, a lot of us in this realm are constantly putting junk into our systems, whether it's food, alcohol, TV, relationships, the internet, it doesn't matter. There's so much stuff coming in. It's not energetically a match for the light. Okay, so you can go through very intense purification journeys when you're going through light upgrades in the field. And I'm very cognizant of all this and have studied and can express it and work with it. Not everybody has those opportunities or that awareness or that training. And so sometimes they're having these peak mystical experiences in complete isolation. They're not reaching out or talking about it because they're not— they don't have the language for it. Initially, and they don't feel safe. Okay, or they're afraid of the stigma. And so they carry it alone. And so what often happens, and I've spoken so much to and I'm passionate about, is acknowledging those first 7 to 10 years, and 7 to 10 is a really loose approximation for how long it takes to integrate a profound peak mystical experience, be it an NDE, spiritually transformative shared death experience, you name it. Well, the more time you spend in the light, or the more it shifts your field, the harder reintegration generally becomes. And so you can go and have this beautiful experience that all these persons romanticize and seek out. What they don't understand is some of the things that they didn't want to deal with, like the shadow work, the healing prior, are going to be amplified by this mystical experience. Experience. So there's really a lot of work that co-occurs with it. And it's about your willingness to allow yourself not just the death of what happened to you prior to the NDE, but the recurrent death of the person you were before to make space for the person you came back as.

Wow.

And they're often quite different people.

Yeah, well, that Yeah, that was brilliant. I love what you said there, the death of the person that you were before to make space for the person that you're— that you've come back to be. And maybe that's why people that have NDEs often struggle, and the divorce rate is fairly high for people that have had near-death experiences, because their spouse will say, you're not the same person that you were, and their friends and family will say, you're not the same person that you were.

Yep. Yep. And you have to make tough decisions. I mean, I walked away from a marriage as well. And I've chose to completely reauthor who I make connections with now, because there was such a— there was a pronounced period where I attempted to stuff this into a closet and be who I used to be so I could maintain those relationships. Yet that became a hindrance to where I was going and my own happiness, because if I'm not connected to the light, I really don't want to be here.

Yeah, I think I don't know when you made the shift even career-wise, because you're a psychotherapist, you've got advanced degrees in clinical psychology and marriage and family therapy. So did you make a shift after that to the more shamanic and quantum field work and those more, what we would call mystical?

I did. Okay, I did. And it was little by little. It began by leaving clinical psychology, which was a very painful decision for me. Because again, I'd been at the— I was candidate, I was defending my dissertation, yet I came back and wanted to integrate the mystical in a very rigorous, revered program that's very clinical. And they wanted nothing to do with the mystical. And so we happen to have another school nearby that was Transpersonal Psychology. And they were the founders of it. And they had plenty of room for the mystical. Yet when I got there, is when I started to realize what's become so much of a thesis of my work, which is spiritual bypassing. I saw very early on that going into that realm was not going to serve me any better than clinical psychology if I was seeking authenticity, because there were persons really chasing and seeking the transcendent, yet they weren't embodying it. You know, it was almost like the drug of choice of the moment. Like, you know, let's go meditate forever and have this experience. But then when we come back to the ground, we're not embodying it, we're not living in alignment with it. And to me, it was like, I don't, I don't think this feels any better. And so that's when I started looking for wisdom traditions, and healers that were kind of off the beaten path to assist me. And shamanism gave me my first taste of that. Because when I met legitimate indigenous shamans, they immediately saw what was going on in my field, and named it as a gift from spirit, and that all the illness had been my initiation, and that I was to use this light to heal. And they had ancient traditions as to how to ground it and how to work with it. And it was completely normalized. And finally, it was like, okay, someone understands who I am. And I can take this and use it on myself, and then I can help others learn to use it for themselves.

Yeah, I noticed you did, you did touch on this phrase, but you use it often in your talks, hard and holy humanity. So what is, what does that mean to you?

Part of my medicine and what I'm here for is to find balance. And so when I say that, I'm acknowledging that it is very difficult to to be human. Yet it's also holy to be human. You know, I've joked in my poetry before that the angels are jealous of those that get to walk the earth at these times. Okay. And all I mean by that with love is that it is a very spiritual and beautiful experience to be human. And yet right now, the bulk of persons likely would not concur with that because we're in a period of death and restructuring, and the new being born. And that looks like a lot of breaking down. Okay, but at the same time, the hardness and the holiness are always co-occurring. We will always have peak experiences of the divine, of love, of connection, all of those things. And we will, as long as we are here in this state of duality that we're currently in, I'm saying currently, then we're going to have this hardness that comes with it. So to me, to acknowledge hard and holy together makes it all okay. And remembrance that we are here out of our soul's desire to be here. Okay, and so it is a holy experience. And we ought to cherish it, excuse me. Yet at the same time, we do not have to bypass the fact that it hurts. And there's a lot of pain and a lot of suffering in humanity.

Yeah, that's, that's what I got out of your talk, I think, almost more than anything. And it's, it's interesting how these things come around to me. That's been coming back to me many different ways for many lessons the last couple of weeks. Because we do get in a time, I think all of us as humans, sometimes we forget you know, why are we here? And we'll hear people say, well, it's a privilege to be born human. It's a privilege to be here. But we focus so much on the pain. We're like, are you serious? This is supposed to be fun.

Definitely, definitely. I mean, even with all the experiences I've had, when I get into the really nitty-gritty of the pain, it's— there's times I'm like, why would I choose to come back here? And I think if you talk to any NDEer that's honest, even though we love what we're doing now and the depth and the expansion it's brought to our lives, most of us are thirsty to go back. Yeah. You know, and we often second-guess— if we were given a choice, we second-guess that choice.

Yeah, I, I think that's, that's— I think that's very real, and I appreciate your authenticity when you say that. And I'm— something you said at the conference, because I know you've had some, some— you still have health challenges. And you made a comment, I think you said illness is the way my system likes to upgrade.

Yep, that's true. It is. And it's just something I've had to make space for. And owning it has given me a confidence, A, in my authenticity, which is so important to me given how much such a lack of authenticity I saw in academia, my early explorations of spiritual healing. And so for me, there, there's been this illusion that's been projected often on other talks, which is that if you healed from the coma and you healed from the organ failure, then you're like miraculously fixed for life. Okay. And so it makes it hard to openly say, hey, I'm still going through this. Yes, my organs fully healed, and I don't need medication for them. But they have consequences to that. Like, I'm hypersensitive to inflammation because my— some of the organs that control that failed. So they're more sensitive to certain things. And I've had to make shifts in my life. And when people were first meeting with me with that projection after I started speaking out, I almost felt like shame for the fact that I was getting ill. And then I was like, no, I've worked with spirit all the time. And they keep telling me that this is part of the upleveling. And every time I get through it, I do get stronger. And I have new wisdom to communicate to persons. So it became very important to me in the past few months, with all the shifts that are coming through with humanity, and this really rejuvenation and interest in NDEs that we see in the populace, to own I am still tenderly human, and I am still healing every single day. Spirit gave me some beautiful gifts and some great wisdom, but that does not make me any less human than anyone else.

I think it's so important that you say that, Brooke. And because, you know, it's interesting how we as humans, we tend to gravitate to different extremes. And I hear a lot of people in the spiritual community, you know, saying, well, if we just think the right thoughts and believe the right things, then we'll, we'll never be ill again. And if you're, if you're ill, if you're sick, that just means you're not thinking correctly.

Yes. And, you know, see, that's where balanced medicine, again, to me, Brian D Smith, becomes so important. Because as a child trauma survivor, when I hear people subscribe things like the law of attraction to all forms of abuse, I get really triggered or activated insofar as I'm I'm sorry, but my 12-year-old self did not call in the violence that happened to me. I don't believe any child does that. So we have to be very mindful of our spiritual integrity. I believe that there is a time and a place for almost all of the major theories and practices out there. But when we become dogmatic about anything, be it science, spirituality, politics, whatever. When we become dogmatic, we are unable to grow.

I completely agree. And you, you know, you mentioned karma earlier, which is an interesting system. It's misunderstood by I think most people. But you, you again, you get into that trap, you take it to an extreme, and you see someone suffering. And you could say, well, that person obviously deserves that suffering, therefore, I'm going to leave them in their suffering so they can burn off their karma or whatever, which can lead to a really, you know, sick kind of world that we live in. And as you said, you know, even the law of attraction, I think it has its place. But it also has limits. It doesn't mean that everything that happens to someone, they called into themselves.

Exactly. And that said, it's really being mindful, you know, you hear a lot in spiritual communities, a lot of bashing on religion. I'm not a religious person. I don't like any kind of system that is patriarchal and going to bring harm. Okay. Yet at the same token, some of the way that the spiritual people attack religion is the same thing they're complaining about. So that lack of integrity, that lack of humility in that there is a middle path in all ways is something we need to be most cognizant. The more passionate we are about something, the more we need to step in a place of neutrality and really see what about this am I really aligned to, and what do I really want to, uh, grow from and spread from this, or what is really just some projection that's coming from my ego and my shadow. Yeah, because it exists for all of us no matter what walk of life we're on. And I just want to be part of communities that can own both the light and the shadow. Because if we're still walking this earth, we still are human. And we owe it to ourselves to really honor the full expression of that, which is the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in the middle.

Yeah, well, I could tell you as a person who came from a very religious fundamentalist background, and, you know, getting into this, the quote, spiritual community, I see the exact same mistakes being made in in the spiritual— made in the spiritual community. For example, when I heard about the law of attraction, I'm like, this is just the prosperity gospel that I heard of when I was in Christianity, that if you just did the right things and prayed the right things, then God would, quote, bless you. And if you were, if you were sick, or you didn't— you had any lack in anything, that meant there was something wrong in your mind. That's the exact same thing that people that get dogmatic with the law of attraction are saying. Exactly. You talked about— in your talk, you said, I love this line, you said, my shadow is as brilliant and radiant as my light. So tell me what you meant by that.

Well, the shadow gets a bad rap in both psychology and spirituality quite often, as kind of this place for repressed monsters. Yet the reality is the shadow, it's seeking light. The shadow wants to come out of its cave. It wants to be alchemized to light. I know for a fact, Brian D Smith, that the work that I do now, and the passion I have for so many things would not be possible if it weren't for the shadow, the darkness, the pain, the suffering, the— all the knowledge that comes from that, but really the experience of having to be in that darkness and hold space for it and find a way to love it. Because I often say this, I had to befriend the shadow, I had to invite it in as an ally, so that I didn't keep running from it or burying it. And so the more that I embraced the shadow as an ally, the more that I started to understand that these illnesses were invitations for new wisdom. Then it became, okay, when this comes up, it's not a bad thing. It's spirit giving me the opportunity to add another skill set to my toolbox. And so my shadow in a way has really paid dividends of growth towards me. It has taught me things about the light that I wouldn't understand otherwise. But most importantly, perhaps, it's taught me that I'm not infallible. It's kept me in a place of awareness that I, like any other person, am susceptible to becoming grandiose and egotistic and all of these things that I didn't like in other spiritual communities. So when my shadow has something to say or a voice, I understand it's there to assist It's there to keep me grounded. It's there to give me new medicine. And so it's not something I shame or devalue. I don't put it on a pedestal. But I very much will not be one of those people going around subscribing love and light to everything. Because the reality is this realm is not all love and light. And while I do believe that that's how spirit communicates, and they're really where we want to go and where our allegiance ought to be too. It's just not where we're at. So for me, love, light, and shadow— shadow being the accelerant for where most of my love and light come from.

Hmm. Wow. I love the way you put that. Yeah, I think, you know, when it comes to shadow, ego, these are words that, again, we can get really dogmatic about and say that they're terrible things, things that we need to get rid of. We need to, you know, I hear people talk about killing their ego. Which I think is just a gross misunderstanding of what your ego is. You need your ego. And I'm just learning about shadow. I interviewed a woman who's a transpersonal psychologist, and I was reading her book, and I'm like, the shadow is kind of like what develops to protect us, because we have to protect ourselves on this planet and in this world. So we don't want to throw that away. And we, and we want to acknowledge the fact that it serves us to a certain point.

Totally. And I mean, to give a, like, a real-world example of that, if I had just stayed in my love and light way of being, and the way that so many of the communities, you know, want us to subscribe to, I went through another one of the hard periods that Spirit had allotted to, and I needed to advocate for myself. I needed to protect myself. I need to protect my children. In the past, I had never held an abuser accountable. And I, because I've been told, you know, I was the one at fault, and I believed it at the time. After my NDE and all of this work, when this next thing happened, there was this awareness that my fight response came on, and my fight response was holy. My fight response was the shadow saying no, this time we hold someone accountable. This time we protect ourselves. This time we let people know this cannot happen to me. And so for that period where I didn't really have a lot of support, we were in lockdown at that time, my shadow was everything. And it got me where I needed to be. It protected me, protected my children. And that is a healthy amount of shadow. And I needed it because in spiritual communities, I was being told over and over to kind of stay in that love and light place. That love and light place would not have protected me at that moment.

Yes, I'm so glad you said that. I think that's, that's really important that we, we, you know, I said, that's why I was really excited to talk to you about today, because of this, this integration and this acknowledgement of our humanity, the acknowledgement of the world that we find ourselves in. I hear people say, you know, we should never be angry. And I'm like, there's, there's such a thing as righteous anger. And then, and also, while things may— everything might be okay on one level, because I hear a lot of people say, well, everything is okay, and we should never push back against anything because things are as they're supposed to be. But I'm like, but that's part of the game we play when we come here too, is we're here to push back on things. We're here to, to fight injustice. We're here to stand up for ourselves and for others. That's, that's part of the— that's part of the realm that we're in.

Most definitely. And I, I feel, you know, humans are hardwired for connection. And so that's how we're seeking to heal quite often. Yet one of our core wounds is that we have to understand that the type of connection that the soul often wants, which is just like the complete unification, this complete understanding, it's not going to happen the way that the mind seeks it. And what I mean by this is people want people to be like them so they feel connected to it, because then you're normalizing what they go through and their experience. But the reality is, we are so vast, and we are so complex, people are going to understand fractals of your experience, but they're not going to necessarily understand the totality. And that's okay. We need to stop attempting to make everybody exactly like us to feel connection and comfort.

Wow. Yeah, I like to talk about that more. Because when I hear people describe their near-death experience, a lot of them talk about this, connection that they feel that's so deep and so complete. I recall a friend that shared her experience, and she said she saw all these other beings, and she's like, I'm not sure if they were past lives, or if they were relatives or what, because we were so connected, it was hard to know where I began, or I ended and they began. And I think we do seek that. I mean, I know I'm attracted to that. But it's— that's not really possible here, right?

Well, that's the thing. It can happen in peak experiences. And peak experiences do not have to be some profound NDE thing. We can have a peak experience with a familial celebration if everyone's in alignment and enters it from the heart. So those type of peak experiences of relational connection are entirely possible here. Yet what you alluded to in your friend's description is what we're all thirsty for, because in some level, the oversoul, which to me is the seed of the soul that exists beyond the physical chakras. It remembers all of its past lifetimes and incarnations and experiences. And one of the things it remembers is being completely unified with the Creator. It doesn't have the separation wound that we all have. However, the minute we become embodied, we have the separation wound. And we attempt— for our human experience, our soul is thirsty for that type of deep, intimate connection that we know from the other side.. And you can be thirsty and hungry for it. You can cultivate it in your lived experience, but you must understand it will be temporal. You cannot hold onto it all the time here because things are always in flux and in shift, but most importantly, because we're still in a polarity realm.

Yeah.

Okay. So there's two things always co-occurring. It's not that this experience of the divine and this profound connection cannot be here. Absolutely it can be here. Yeah, we have to consciously co-create it. Okay. And part of what I often see is rather than co-creating and saying, this is me, I bring this to the table, this is you, you bring this to the table, we can be in loving connection with the awareness of our gifts and limitations. Is this instead desire to only sit with people at the table that are just like you, or subscribe to your beliefs or your religion or your whatever. And the reality is, that's causing what I call more disqualified vibrations, it's causing more separation. So if your goal is to actually unify, then we have to be, in a way, like the Creator in many NDEs, to say, hey, you're a piece of me, I'm a piece of you, we don't have to look and operate the same way. We're still intrinsically at the end of the day. And when we're all back on the other side, we're all part of the same light. We just choose to express ourselves in different frequencies, colors, and vibrations here. And that's okay.

So what is it? What is the point of coming here for incarnation, for this, to this hard and holy place? What are we here? What are we here to accomplish?

To me, it's really giving the soul an opportunity to have new experiences. Really, I don't know that I can— I don't feel that I personally have some all-knowing wisdom to say there's a definitive what I know. But for me, from what I've seen in my experience, in my experience with spirit, it really comes down to embodying love, embodying love in the midst of pain. To me, that's what being human is about.

I know when you— in your talk, you talked about— I don't know if you call it channeling, but you've been putting messages on Instagram. And one of the ones you said was, our feelings know the secret. We didn't come here to make sense. We came here to make sensations.

Yes.

So for you, do you feel it's a— is it about experience? Is it— do we come here to have experiences?

That, that's— yeah, that's really what I meant there is that we're coming here to have experiences, to have you know, this tender experience of the full gamut of the spectrum of emotions. Okay. And, you know, my experience with the other side, working with them and dialoguing with them all the time for my personal growth, they, they're pretty much at the vibration of love all the time. Okay, which is what we are when we're on the other side, too.. But as we've talked about over and over again today, that's not the frequency that humanity's at right now. Right? So no matter what the soul chooses to come here for, you're going to have a multitude of experiences. And no matter what they are, it seems that they are to recalibrate our system to come back to love. We were born love. It's as if we just have to return to it over and over and over over again. And that doesn't need to make sense to anyone else. It just needs to be experienced and felt by the person.

That's the conclusion that I keep coming to. It's like you said, we're born in love. I think even when we're incarnated, we still have that. And there's an Earth, Wind Fire that talks about this, you know, child's born with a heart of gold, and the way of the world makes his heart grow cold. And then we're always— but we're— then we're trying to get back to that. It's like a game that we play with ourselves. It's like, let's go to this hard place. And let's forget who we were, who we are. And let's pretend that, you know, let's just have this little game of pretend and see if we can find our way back.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And who knows, maybe we get to go somewhere else later. That's not so hard. Or we'll just stay with the love.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, you know, as I said, it's, and it's interesting that you talked about in your experience, you were told, and it doesn't sound grandiose to me at all that you know, you're part of a group here to, to raise the vibration, or to, to whatever, lead us to the next thing that, you know, is for humanity. That makes, that makes sense to me. I think there are people here who are here to be helpers, who are here to, to help the rest of us wake up.

Definitely. And we're seeing more and more of that, like just activations. I mean, even all the hardship we've gone through as a collective in these past few years, you're seeing people radically alter their lives as a response to this. And that's all part of it too. And as we returning to what we talked about before, you don't have to have this peak mystical experience to get there. For some of us, it's necessity to radically alter our trajectory. To each their own.

Yeah, I heard a woman who had a near-death experience talk about the fact that she she felt that it was a course correction is the only word I can think of right now. She was like, she felt like she was not going in the direction she should be going in. And so she planned this, you know, near-death experience in case she was off of her path. And just like, if I, if I'd been on the path, maybe I wouldn't have had to break my spine, you know, but that was, that was the thing that set her back on her path.

Well, totally. And, you know, I've never talked about this before. Yet, prior Tukoma. I had had multiple awarenesses that something was coming. And it involved death. I wasn't shown anything specific. Yet I remember I was up in Palo Alto studying at the time. And this lady approached me, and I've been having some really intense experiences on this retreat site we were on. And now I understand they were spiritual experiences. At the time, I thought my roommates and people on the grounds were messing with me. Like, things were moving all over, like stuff was happening when nobody was around. And I was feeling presences of spirits, but I was very bothered by it. Okay, because again, this wasn't my norm. It made me uncomfortable. It was dysregulating my nervous system. And then I had stuff disappearing when I needed it to get to class. So I wasn't really stoked. Well, as I'm up on the campus walking around, this woman comes up and she introduces herself, and she says she's from First Nations of Canada and she's a shaman. And she's like, I have a message for you, would you like to receive the message? I have no idea of how the rules work back then, but she asked nicely and I say yes, right? And she goes, very soon You are going to have a choice. She is like, you can go or you can stay. She is like, I hope you stay. We need you. She walks away. That was November. My coma happened in early December. And that was just one of a multitude of things that had come up. But at the time, my ego and my human could not understand it. And so I kept just, even with the doctors, I told my doctors, I said, I believe this disease was caused by trauma. I believe somehow my body is responding with inflammation, which is causing all these systems. But I don't think your diagnosis is right. And you are going to kill me if you don't get it right. And sure enough, you know, my NDE happened. So for some of us, I feel there is an awareness, but because we've been taught, or we allow ourselves not to trust intuition, we don't hold that as a sacred type of intelligence, we often will have to take the harder path. Because we've ignored all the mile markers along the way. And I definitely did that.

That makes sense to me. And it really, you know, it's, it's interesting, because people a lot of times will think about these events as like punishment, you know, so I had to get ill, or this had to happen to me. But that's looking at it from a very human perspective. And we, of course, as we've been saying the whole time here, we're both human, and we're, we transcend that at the same time. But from a spirit perspective, it's like, well, that's what it takes to get us back on course. And if we know this is all a temporary experience, and one day we're going to be happy, healthy, and whole, then I think we'd be willing to say, oh, I need this little— I need this bump. It's got to be this, this illness, or this loss of a job, or divorce, or all the things that we go through.

Definitely. I mean, when I— the familial thing that I referenced earlier, I'm just gonna call it what it is, because I can say this now. Yet it was domestic violence. And at the time, given what I had gone through in my history, there were moments where my human really struggled with, did I call this in? Is— are these law of attraction people right? Because of my past, I'm just continually going to go through this. And at the time, and I still to this day would never wish this on anybody as how they grow. Okay. Yet, it— in the end, when I made that pivotal decision to actually name it for what it was, go to the police and take the actions that were necessary to protect myself and my future and my children. That ended up helping my human and also helping the child who had suffered through that and never had anyone validate their experiences ever. That helped that part of me heal in ways no amount of therapy could do.

Yeah, wow. I just got goosebumps as you said that. I'm— there's a book, a series of books I'm obsessed with called The Team, by, written by Frances Key. And there's, there's channeled from her mother who's in spirit now. And one of the concepts is that we're all on teams, which we've talked about here today, but also that we can actually heal the past. That, you know, we think about being in the present and healing the future. And we know that the present actions can affect our future. But she actually says, that we can heal our past by, by doing things. So by like, for example, someone who has been a victim of abuse, who maybe weren't able to stand up for themselves in the past, but when they stand up for themselves in the present, it actually has a way of rippling back and healing their past.

Exactly. And at the same time, it gives an ancestral healing to the generations that come afterwards. You know, like my little boys, in this case, the dad's mother had died from domestic violence. Okay, statistically, when that happens, and they start being violent, guess what would happen to the person like me? The story replicates, and then the children of that carry it on. Yet by breaking that cycle and naming it, not only did it bring me healing, but it knew that no matter what my boys would grow up to believe, and no matter what anyone told them, they can unequivocally say a judge and a court of law agreed this to be true. And so no matter what everything else, it gives them that to know that that's something that they're going to have to walk with tenderly throughout their lifetime, but it was real. And for me, as someone who was told half their life horrible things that happened wasn't real by a family that wanted to protect its wounds, that was a very powerful experience.

Yeah, very powerful.

And I'd also like to argue— oh, thank you, thank you. I'd also like to say right there that that's part of why I argue against things like fully giving your power to something like the law of attraction, because if that theory was fundamentally right, then when I was highly reactivated by the trauma that presented in that form, I wouldn't have fought back the way that I did. I would have been operating from fear. And I did not operate from fear. Okay, so there is something to the soul and the ego as well, and the shadow that is beyond that type of thinking. I feel it's too basic for what we are.

Yeah, I completely agree. We, and I said, we as humans, we tend to, we tend to go to these extremes, and it's got to be all one way or all the other. And it's not, we are, we are this, this mixture, we live in this, in this polarity, as you talked about, Um, you— one of the things you, you put up when you were doing the Iain's presentation, you said it was messy, yet it was authentic and beautiful. The mess became my prayer. Um, so embracing the, the messiness and the humanity and wrestling with these questions that don't have easy answers.

And that's the thing, perhaps we're just here to live the answer, and each of us has a different answer. And that's what the uniqueness of our experience is about. And maybe that's why our ego doesn't like someone else telling us most often how to do it. Because our souls are rebels. They know that we each have our own unique way of doing it.

Well, you know, it's, it's interesting, because doing this, doing this show, doing this job, my job is my job to ask people questions. And it's funny, I talked to people that have near-death experiences. Sometimes we think, oh, well, they've got all the answers because they've been to the other side. So I have to ask the questions, even knowing that, you know, you don't have all the answers, because I think that's part of the reason why we're here. And what you just said is really profound. The answers are probably different for all of us there. We don't— there's a guy I study with, his name is Kelvin Chen, and he's an afterlife expert. He has memories of past lives and stuff.

I know Kelvin.

Okay, so yeah, you know, Kelvin. So we know, we all go to Kelvin, and we ask Kelvin questions. And it's funny, because he's really practical. He's really down to earth. And there's this idea that we all come here to learn. And the Earth is just a big school. And we're here to learn our lessons. And if we don't learn our lessons, we're sent back to do it over again. And Kelvin's like, that's not the answer for everybody. Not everybody is here to learn. He said, you might be here to learn. And I might be here to learn. But there's some people here just to mess around. There's some people who just have experiences. It's not one answer for everybody. And he's one of the first people I've heard actually, you know, say it that way, because we all think, well, It's got to be this way. It's got to be, we're all here for the same thing. Well, no, some of us come here just because we like— he said some of us come here because we like ice cream. It's like we just want to taste ice cream.

Definitely. If you think about that, we're all fractals of Source, or the Creator, then it's really God just choosing to have these experiences and all these vast multitudes. I wouldn't want to have the same experience over and over again. If I were expressing myself through a different consciousness. So it just, to me, it intrinsically makes sense that we're all going to be very varied expressions. Even the light, when I see it moving through the field, the light is constantly shifting how it expresses itself. It's never consistent, right?

We— I don't think we can even comprehend the vastness of, of Source, or whatever it is that we come from. And, you know, to think about what it is, almost 8 billion expressions on Earth, at this moment, not to mention how many souls there have been and however many lifetimes and whatever dimensions and other planets there might be. It's just beyond— it's beyond my comprehension anyway.

I concur. And that's the thing I love when people like, like, as you said, with Kelvin, as you are yourself, and as I strive to be, when they're just open about that, because again, every single person is gifted with these nuggets of wisdom. It's just whether we choose to reveal them and run with them, or we kind of hold them in our heart space or in our, you know, sacral or wherever and not express them. But the truth is, we all have psychic and spiritual potential. We all come from the same place. We all have access to this if we choose to nurture it. But so much of who we are and what we become, it comes by where we do give the attention.

Yeah, and it's, it's okay. It's whatever, whatever we're here to do. I think it's okay. People, people can choose, you know, what, what works for them, reject what doesn't work for them. We all grow. It's, it's funny because I think about myself now, where I was 30 years ago, where I was 10 years ago, the things that I've learned, and that's okay. We shouldn't, we should never judge our earlier versions of ourselves either, because we're all, we're all changing. We're all growing as we go through this process.

Most definitely.

So I know, Brooke, I think you're working on your first book now. Can you tell us what that's about?

I think I'm working on two at the same time. One is more— it's memoir. I really— I knew when I came back I didn't want to write an NDE story, and that's no, like, offense to anyone that wrote an NDE story. It's because for me, trauma has been the teacher. Okay. And when I first started speaking out about my NDE, we were in a very different culture.. And just trying to talk about the transcendent and trauma in one sentence got me denied over and over in certain rooms and at certain types of events. And so I kept, I kept sticking with it. I'm like, there's something here about the NDE and trauma, the NDE and trauma, I'm sticking with it. Okay. And ultimately, my perseverance worked in my favor. And at the same time, the world shifted. And trauma became a collective experience. And so it was something that had to be talked about in conjunction to spirituality. Well, I've been very blessed. Despite all the challenges I've been through, I've had this uncanny ability to call in support, both in embodied human form and from the other side. And I've also had a great education, and I was able to learn techniques and things to assist me. And then when I walked away from them, I was able to really discern and say, hey, this is what really works for complex trauma. This is what doesn't. This is the stuff that I'm learning from spirit. This is what doesn't. And so I really want to tell the story more in a sense that you can see how the NDE didn't fix it. I don't want to offer some story of like, she has this experience and everything's all holy and perfect now. No, I want them to see Hey, I came back. And for 10 years, I was brought to my knees by this growth-oriented process. And even when I thought I just figured it out, I went through this other awful experience with domestic violence. And it was spirit. And it was my intuitive gifts from childhood that guided me out. So I want to tell the really bigger picture of it to help the people that are going through it. And fundamentally, as I've been talking to so many people in our community about, I want to take the stigma away from calling out your abusers. Like, we just live in a culture where so much of this is being swept under the rug because unless they catch someone red-handed, there's not much the law can really do.

Right.

So instead of telling women that it's a story that always ends up in these awful statistics and that they can't get out, I want to really say, here, my system was hardwired not to succeed. And yet I did. This is why you can too. Awesome. Yeah. And then the second project is really poetry. And that's been because writing a memoir, when you are a polytrauma survivor, and your central nervous system still wants to tell that story over and over, has been one of the most challenging experiences of my life. It triggers my system more than anything else, because I have to go through the somatic experience of it. And so poetry became a flow state practice that taught me how to use creativity with trauma. I was trained as an art therapist, but that is more visual art, and finding how powerful it is, even for persons who don't identify as writers, to find a way to tap into this flow state of creativity and use that for personal healing. So the poetry is more for people that aren't really— don't really care about the story, but want to really learn this technique, which to me has been radical in allowing me to alchemize— excuse me— the trauma little by little without being overcome by it.

Yeah. Wow. That's, that's amazing. Fascinating. I look, I look forward to that. And I think, you know, I love studying NDEs. Ken Ring has talked about how we can all, you know, experience some of the good parts of NDEs without going through the trauma by studying them. So I I appreciate you sharing your story. I still, I'll never get tired of reading them. But it's, it's really, as you said, another thing you said, I don't think I covered this yet. You said awakening is not the destination, it is the beginning. You said radical embodiment is the journey. So the NDE, a lot of us, you know, we hear the stories like, oh, it's really cool. They went to heaven and they came back. But and then they don't want to hear the rest of the story, what happened after that, for 7 or 10 years when that person was trying to integrate that experience.

Definitely, definitely. And I feel like, you know, there's a big emphasis in spiritual communities on awakening, whether it's plant medicine, or go to— on this trip and learn this technique, or this type of breathwork. You know, there's so many different ways it's marketed to us. But the reality is, you could have a plethora of awakening experiences. But if you are not embodying them, you are missing the point of the whole journey.

Yeah.

And so I feel that like these type— oh, go ahead.

No, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

This types of discussions that you and I are having now, I feel they're so important to shifting that narrative because it is— we're not seeking, you know, a new technique of yoga or meditation or whatever to hit this plateau and then just stay there because that's not what the human's capable of. The human gets there, learns from it, and then has to bring it back down to the ground and integrate it. And that's when the authenticity of the awakening becomes, to me, most quantifiable in any story I hear. It's not what beautiful thing happened on the other side, because to me, no matter what they experienced, they all contain beauty. It's what did you make beauty out of when you returned from it?

Yeah, well, the NDE, to me, it has a couple of different things. And one is, for me, who hasn't had one, it gives me hope. You know, so it's like, I, it's like, I know someone that's been there. So it gives me hope. But the lessons of it, and this is what you just said, I'm just kind of reiterating it. It's integrating those lessons. It's really important. I'm putting together a course now I'm teaching people about like the lessons from NDEs and to believe in the afterlife, stuff like that. And one of the things I'm like, I always ask the question, so what? So someone had this experience, what does it mean? Well, first of all, it means we all have hope that we can live beyond this life? Okay, great. But what does it mean about living this life right now? And that's what that integration experience is like that you've had. And it's like, how does that— how does that play into the rest of your time here? Because people that have had NDEs have to come back and live on this plane just like the rest of us do. And this is where the— this is where that— that— where you take that lesson and you apply it. That's the important thing.

Exactly, like applied spirituality. That's what we need more of.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Brooke, thanks so much for being here. I'm glad we were able to do this today.

Yes, me too. Thank you so much for your questions.

Yeah, let people know how they can reach out to you.

Okay, so my website is www.brookegrovehealing.com. One word, Brooke does contain an E, so B-R-O-O-K-E Grove, G-R-O-V-E healing.com. That is my website. There's a contact page, you may reach out to me from there. On Instagram you can find me at Brooke Grove Writing, also all one word, or at Brooke Grove Healing, which typically is just clients, but I do occasionally take some persons from interviews if you DM me and we connect. And yeah, those are the primary ways to reach me. I am on YouTube for interviews quite often. So you can just check Brooke Grove NDE. There's other resources on there for interviews.

Awesome. Well, thanks for being here, Brooke. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you so much, Brian D Smith.

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