William's Story
The Fall: My First Near Death Experience
On December 29,1979, when I was 17 years old, I had a high-speed skiing accident that changed my life. This was my first near death experience (NDE).
Upon slamming into the ski slope, I catapulted out of my body and soared away from the earth. I was enamored, enthralled, exhilarated as I moved rapidly away from planet Earth. I saw the ski area and the parking lot of Squaw Valley, Lake Tahoe, and then I could see Reno. As I soared higher, I saw the San Francisco Bay, the Colorado Rockies, and then the Continental United States, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and then the continents themselves – Europe, South America, Africa. As this was going on, I noticed that my life was being shown to me in vivid, intricate emotional detail. (This is the past-life review commonly reported by people who experience NDEs.) I could see how every interaction mattered. This was a lesson on karma because I realized that every thought, every action, every spoken word had had an impact on me and those with whom I engaged.
Suddenly, a brilliant, luminous golden white light appeared. It was so beautiful, so awe-inspiring. I was moving towards this light very quickly when I realized to my utter horror that I was dying. I knew this place as the space after human lives. I’d been here hundreds, if not thousands of times. In that moment I realized I had wasted a human life. I had not completed my mission or my purpose--one that I had contemplated and committed myself to before birthing into this life.
I pleaded with the Light, which I called God (I was raised Catholic and the Light felt like God), “Please don’t let me die – you know I have not finished my work in this lifetime! Please let me go back!” My body started to slow down and I was now fully embraced by this warm, loving, all-knowing Light. I stopped in the midst of this great Light….held in the arms of God, if you will. Then I received a message from the Light: “Make something of your life.”
Then I received a huge energetic push and I began spinning back to Earth and everything I had seen as I approached the Light was now in reverse moving through the solar system. All the beauty of this heavenly space in my life-review played backwards and then I saw Earth in the distance. I wondered how I would ever get back to my body, let alone find it. But I seemed to be pulled back under some amazing guidance that I felt but could not see.
Then I felt myself being pulled to North America and then to California, and then I saw Lake Tahoe, and then the parking lot of the Squaw Valley ski area, and then Siberia ski slope, where I had fallen, and finally – BAM! Back in my body.
At first, I had no feeling in my body and was terrified. I pleaded with God one last time, “Please do not let me be paralyzed,” and I felt the energy, like warm water out of the shower head, moving across my body and giving me feeling again in my limbs.
For a long time after this injury, I lost much of my ability to be physically active. I could no longer run or throw, as this caused me a great deal of pain in my back. I had lost my identity as an athletic, healthy, free-spirited young man. I was frustrated, angry, and confused about this sudden turn of events. I was grieving but no one knew, because I looked normal. The physical and emotional pain were increasing and I felt trapped in my body, feeling isolated and alienated from my free-spirited college friends.
I continued on my culturally programmed path as a college student and fraternity member at U.C. Berkeley. But something happened in the summer of 1984 at 22 years of age during a summer trip to Europe that changed my life’s direction.
The Eyes that Saw Me
I awoke early one morning on an overnight bus ride in southern Yugoslavia. I opened the bus curtains and as I peered out, I saw before me hundreds of eyes staring at me and the others on the bus. These Muslim women had their faces wrapped in scarves so that I could see only their desperate, begging eyes. Their arms were outstretched, pleading for any type of food or money. Something about these women and their sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency about their desperate state touched my heart. As I stared at them, I began to weep, and I realized that these women had something to teach me. I made a commitment in that moment to find a way to live with people who were poor and disenfranchised. In my small mind, I thought I wanted to help them in their desperate state, but the deeper truth was that I needed to be helped by them. I needed to learn something from them about my own pain and suffering, my own vulnerability. That’s all I knew.
Working in War Torn Countries
After graduating from college in 1985 I made good on my promise to myself to work with the poor, disenfranchised, or marginalized. I went to work in Belize, Guatemala, and Peru as a member of the Jesuit International Volunteers. Belize was a gentle immersion into the developing world. But Guatemala and Peru were experiencing civil wars; once again, I empathically felt the volatility, terror, confusion, vulnerability, and desperation of these people.
In Peru, I worked as a teacher and assisted in directing a center for working children. The children were Amayra Indians from the Andes Highlands. They had fled the violence and famine of their homeland and arrived as refugees in the southern town of Tacna. Displaced from their homes, many arrived from broken families, with children as young as four years old forced to work to support themselves and their families.
As I worked with these children I saw where they lived in the shantytowns. I witnessed the poverty, disease, illness, injury, and trauma that accompanied them. I learned how cheap life is sometimes considered, especially for an indigenous, dark-skinned little person. I saw how precarious and fragile life was in these circumstances. These children and their family members worked extremely hard yet usually maintained gentle smiles on their faces. Most of these children had seen a lot of violence and their families and communities had been ripped apart by the civil war. No one spoke of death, but the fear, terror, and trauma from the reality that death was ever present – and indeed stalking them – was in the air.
I, too, experienced a type of vicarious trauma through my work with these children and their families. I was confused, overwhelmed, in excruciating physical pain, and angry – actually enraged – by their pain and suffering as well as my own. I especially witnessed the apparent indifference to these people as lowly “have-nots,” by the “haves” as well as by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
In 1989 when I came home to the San Francisco Bay Area, I enrolled at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I studied systematic theology and philosophy to try and figure out the mess I had witnessed and experienced in Guatemala and Peru, believing I’d find my answers.
The Aids Epidemic in San Francisco
While in graduate school I worked as a social worker at St. Anthony’s Foundation in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco from 1989 to 1992. I found my social work to be a welcome balance to my lofty academic study in philosophy and theology. I was hired because my fluency in Spanish allowed me to work with the many immigrants arriving from Mexico and Central and South America. However, the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco was raging and claiming the lives of thousands of gay men. These previously healthy men had led normal, successful lives and were now ravaged by the plague of HIV. Their deaths were often horrific, with grotesque Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on their bodies, which were withering and wasting away in the grips of HIV. They often hid their disease and lived out their last days in isolation and alienation with a sense of the shame, guilt, and confusion that accompanied an HIV diagnosis then.
I was blessed to be let into their world because they needed support and I offered food and a listening ear. These men, dozens of them, became my teachers about how brutal, messy, and unfair death can be. There was no happy ending. Their deaths were often ugly and painfully premature. I learned then how powerless we are in the face of death. These men also taught me about courage, dignity, humility, and inner strength as they valiantly fought against and sometimes peacefully surrendered to death.
Floating Above the ICU: My Second Near Death Experience
In February 1993 I experienced my second Near Death Experience. I had contracted a rare blood disease: idiopathic thrombocytopenia, a type of hemophiliac condition with no known cause. I remember checking myself into the emergency room and the next thing I knew I was floating above the intensive care unit at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland for what seemed to be about four hours. I remember looking down from the ceiling and listening to the nurses talk about the four patients, me included, in the ICU. I was struck by how they shared the intimate detail of their private lives in the wee hours of the morning.
As they talked about the different patients, I would move my attention over to the patient and observe the patient. This all seemed so normal to me. At the end of my out-of-body experience, I remember my doctor, a hematologist, approaching my body in the hospital bed. He gently called out my name, and I remember thinking as I peered down on the scene from above, “Do I really want to go back into that body?” As I pondered the question, I decided at least to try to answer the good doctor. As I did, I found myself refilling my physical body almost like sand filling the bottom part of an hourglass, just like I had experienced in my first NDE 14 years earlier. As I answered, simply saying, “Yes, doctor,” the sensations in my physical body returned. I felt totally exhausted, like I’d been run over by a Mack truck, but my consciousness was back in my body.
Like my first NDE, I did not share this experience with anyone, but I do remember realizing at a deep level within me that I am not my physical body. It was abundantly clear that whatever I referred to as “me” had an existence independent of my physical body. I realized that I had a consciousness that felt like me, and it was wise, intelligent, peaceful, and not bound by time or space.
My Grandmother’s Conversations with Spirit Beings
In 1998, my paternal grandmother’s death influenced me greatly as she deteriorated gradually over about five years in a nursing home. During the latter stages, she mostly slept and was somewhat demented. However, on a visit with her during the last week of her life, she was suddenly alert, coherent, and clear of mind as she spoke with her eyes lit up and fixated on a space just below the ceiling in her room.
As I walked into Nano’s room, I felt like I was barging into a conversation between my grandmother and some other people. She did not notice that I had entered her room as she spoke in an animated way that I had not seen in her for years. She was deeply engaged in dialog and she appeared to be staring right at them. I looked around but could not see anyone else present in the room. I did not interrupt as I noticed how intent she was. As I listened (and this become more obvious when I reflected later) I realized she was speaking with her deceased relatives and friends. She was so happy and it seemed to me that she was working some things out with these visitors that involved preparing her for what lay ahead. At the time, I didn’t know if she was reviewing memories of her current life with these people or if she was imagining these lovely visitors who seemed to be her guides for the journey after this life. I learned later, and would observe frequently in my later work in hospice, that these experiences are commonly referred to as “pre-death visions” and routinely discounted by Western medical institutions as hallucinations.
Meditating to Save My Sanity
A few months after my grandmother’s death in Fall 1998, I suffered a fluke foot injury that eerily would not heal and rendered me unable to walk for 15 months. I consulted with numerous foot specialist medical doctors in California and was demoralized after receiving very different diagnoses, each requiring its own highly invasive surgery. At 36, my life had stopped. I was a lonely single man, unable to work and experiencing intense physical and emotional pain. I fell into a deep depression.
Fortunately, I committed myself to a daily Buddhist meditation practice as a way of coping with my overwhelming suffering. I visited numerous Buddhist monasteries and residential retreat centers throughout California. I felt relief, even if temporarily, when hearing the Buddhist teachings on the nature of the human mind as it relates to pain and suffering. These Buddhist teachings rang true for me and inspired me to strengthen my meditation practice. The Buddhist teachings, my meditation practice, and my new Buddhist community became a refuge from my world of physical pain and mental and emotional suffering. I felt gratitude for having stumbled upon this spiritual path, for the many Buddhist teachers, and eventually for my pained foot that introduced me to this great tradition of wisdom. My meditation practice has become the bedrock of my mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
In January 2000 after 15 months of immobility, I begrudgingly had my right foot surgically reconstructed and after 6 months of intense physical therapy, I was walking again. During this painfully slow rehabilitation period, I continued to be drawn to the pain and suffering that I experienced personally and that I intuitively felt in the lives of others. Furthermore, my grandmother’s painful death lingered in my mind as I reflected on how I was both drawn to be with her as she suffered, but I also felt intensely uncomfortable in seeing her withering body and hearing her groan with pain. I felt guilty about the relief I felt when I departed her rest home and escaped the putrid smells and unsightly decaying bodies of the numerous dying residents. Something about this experience with my dying grandmother had left me feeling incomplete. I felt a growing desire to learn how to be fully present around death and dying.
Zen Hospice Project
In March 2000, I joined the Zen Hospice Project of San Francisco as a volunteer hospice worker. After an extraordinary training that emphasized Buddhist compassion and mindfulness around all aspects of death for the dying and their loved ones, I began working on the hospice unit at Laguna Honda, San Francisco County Hospital. This was a 24-bed ward with mostly indigent dying people. It was here that I was graced with my first Shared Death Experience.
I had been working with Ron (not his real name), who loved being read adventure stories, particularly those by Jack London. Ron was declining rapidly and was semiconscious as I read to him a chapter in Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Suddenly, I realized I was floating, indeed suspended, above my body. I realized that Ron and I were looking at each other. Ron had a kind of smug look on his face as if to say, “Check this out.” A few moments later I was back in my body and reading to Ron. His eyes were closed and he made no gesture to acknowledge this experience, and at the time I did not know how to make sense of it. I later tried to share this experience with my Buddhist supervisor and he smiled and said, “It’s all just phenomena rolling by, let it go.”
And so I did, at the conscious level, but I would have more similar experiences with the many dying and their loved ones on the hospice ward. I, like many hospice workers, cherished the time when the dying process approached that moment of transition, because of the mystical nature of this experience.
When the veil thins between this life and the next, it seems we enter into another dimension where space and time are altered. There is a presence, a kind of fullness, that evokes strong emotions, mellifluous music, or a profound silence while the light shifts and becomes brilliantly translucent. Later, when I learned more about the extraordinary experiences that can occur during death, I would remember these profound experiences with the dying that ebbed into my unconscious and etched themselves upon my memory.
The Birth of the Shared Crossing Facilitation Protocols
In October 2009 I attended a workshop at the Omega Institute titled “Soul Survival.” Raymond Moody, the man who had introduced the Western world to the Near Death Experience in decades previous, introduced his new research on the Shared Death Experience (SDE).
As he expounded on the SDE, my body began to tingle and shake. I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had had these experiences with various patients during my time as a hospice volunteer a decade earlier. Most profound was a realization that hit me like a thunderbolt and shook me to my core, “I know how to make this experience happen for the dying and their loved ones. I know how to facilitate this experience.” It was as if hearing Raymond Moody’s description of the SDE turned a lever and the universe downloaded into me the Protocols to facilitate the SDE for the dying and their loved ones.
Upon returning home, I crafted and elaborated the Shared Crossing Protocols. The structure of this model seemed clear; there are three sequential steps. Steps one and two required that I find and synthesize the appropriate resources. Step three, the Golden Protocols, came to me, in a general form, when I heard Raymond Moody first explain the SDE. In a relatively short time, I developed a user-friendly curriculum.
There are sequential three steps: 1) Educate people about what actually happens in the death and dying process; 2) Engage people in end-of-life practices that would prepare the dying and their loved ones for a “good death” and 3) Teach people the Linking Protocols, or the specific exercises that would allow for the dying and their loved ones to establish a link – or, if need be, reconnect – so that the loved one(s) could enter into the initial stages of the afterlife with the dying.
After establishing the Protocols, I began practicing them with friends and interested acquaintances. The loved ones reported a variety of SDE-type experiences: a change in the time-space continuum, witnessing the spirit in various forms leaving the body of the dying, seeing brilliant beams of light entering the room of the dying, experiencing sublime feelings of love and peace. While these experiences were profound for the loved ones, and they expressed gratitude for the Protocols, I was still unclear as to the value of the Protocols.
Then a breakthrough occurred when a woman, who we will call Sandy, nearing her own end of life, contacted me to learn about the Protocols. Sandy said that her loved ones were not interested in spiritual matters and so they would not practice the Protocols. I taught Sandy the Protocols over two, hour-long phone conversations. Two weeks after Sandy’s death, her daughter called me and said, “I know you were working with my mom on some spiritual things. I wanted to share with you what happened to me on the night of my mother’s death. In the middle of the night I was pulled from my bed. At first I resisted because I did not want to die, but in the distance I saw a child with blonde hair who I thought was my own, so I went to see my child. As I approached, she turned to me and I realized it was my mother. She looked radiant and smiled at me saying, "'You see, I’m fine. I will be with you always. I love you. Now go back and care for your children.’"
This experience confirmed to me the value in the Protocols.
Since then I have taught the Protocols to individuals and families in both private sessions as well as in small-group formats. Participants reported that the Protocols have deepened their relationships with loved ones, opened their understanding to the meaningful experiences available during the dying process, and awakened them a commitment to live their lives more fully in the here and now.
One participant who finished the SDE Facilitation Protocols training with his father said, “The experience (Protocols Training) was so profound and meaningful for my relationship with my father that I don’t even need to have the SDE… Of course, I want to have the SDE, but the training itself was incredibly valuable on its own.”
Now, with the assistance of many wonderful and wise supporters, the Shared Crossing Project and the Family Therapy Institute are collaborating on the Shared Crossing Research Initiative (SCRI) to study and verify the efficacy of these and other Shared Crossing Protocols. The best is yet to come as we now apply scholarly methodologies to assess the veracity of these protocols.
On December 29,1979, when I was 17 years old, I had a high-speed skiing accident that changed my life. This was my first near death experience (NDE).
Upon slamming into the ski slope, I catapulted out of my body and soared away from the earth. I was enamored, enthralled, exhilarated as I moved rapidly away from planet Earth. I saw the ski area and the parking lot of Squaw Valley, Lake Tahoe, and then I could see Reno. As I soared higher, I saw the San Francisco Bay, the Colorado Rockies, and then the Continental United States, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and then the continents themselves – Europe, South America, Africa. As this was going on, I noticed that my life was being shown to me in vivid, intricate emotional detail. (This is the past-life review commonly reported by people who experience NDEs.) I could see how every interaction mattered. This was a lesson on karma because I realized that every thought, every action, every spoken word had had an impact on me and those with whom I engaged.
Suddenly, a brilliant, luminous golden white light appeared. It was so beautiful, so awe-inspiring. I was moving towards this light very quickly when I realized to my utter horror that I was dying. I knew this place as the space after human lives. I’d been here hundreds, if not thousands of times. In that moment I realized I had wasted a human life. I had not completed my mission or my purpose--one that I had contemplated and committed myself to before birthing into this life.
I pleaded with the Light, which I called God (I was raised Catholic and the Light felt like God), “Please don’t let me die – you know I have not finished my work in this lifetime! Please let me go back!” My body started to slow down and I was now fully embraced by this warm, loving, all-knowing Light. I stopped in the midst of this great Light….held in the arms of God, if you will. Then I received a message from the Light: “Make something of your life.”
Then I received a huge energetic push and I began spinning back to Earth and everything I had seen as I approached the Light was now in reverse moving through the solar system. All the beauty of this heavenly space in my life-review played backwards and then I saw Earth in the distance. I wondered how I would ever get back to my body, let alone find it. But I seemed to be pulled back under some amazing guidance that I felt but could not see.
Then I felt myself being pulled to North America and then to California, and then I saw Lake Tahoe, and then the parking lot of the Squaw Valley ski area, and then Siberia ski slope, where I had fallen, and finally – BAM! Back in my body.
At first, I had no feeling in my body and was terrified. I pleaded with God one last time, “Please do not let me be paralyzed,” and I felt the energy, like warm water out of the shower head, moving across my body and giving me feeling again in my limbs.
For a long time after this injury, I lost much of my ability to be physically active. I could no longer run or throw, as this caused me a great deal of pain in my back. I had lost my identity as an athletic, healthy, free-spirited young man. I was frustrated, angry, and confused about this sudden turn of events. I was grieving but no one knew, because I looked normal. The physical and emotional pain were increasing and I felt trapped in my body, feeling isolated and alienated from my free-spirited college friends.
I continued on my culturally programmed path as a college student and fraternity member at U.C. Berkeley. But something happened in the summer of 1984 at 22 years of age during a summer trip to Europe that changed my life’s direction.
The Eyes that Saw Me
I awoke early one morning on an overnight bus ride in southern Yugoslavia. I opened the bus curtains and as I peered out, I saw before me hundreds of eyes staring at me and the others on the bus. These Muslim women had their faces wrapped in scarves so that I could see only their desperate, begging eyes. Their arms were outstretched, pleading for any type of food or money. Something about these women and their sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency about their desperate state touched my heart. As I stared at them, I began to weep, and I realized that these women had something to teach me. I made a commitment in that moment to find a way to live with people who were poor and disenfranchised. In my small mind, I thought I wanted to help them in their desperate state, but the deeper truth was that I needed to be helped by them. I needed to learn something from them about my own pain and suffering, my own vulnerability. That’s all I knew.
Working in War Torn Countries
After graduating from college in 1985 I made good on my promise to myself to work with the poor, disenfranchised, or marginalized. I went to work in Belize, Guatemala, and Peru as a member of the Jesuit International Volunteers. Belize was a gentle immersion into the developing world. But Guatemala and Peru were experiencing civil wars; once again, I empathically felt the volatility, terror, confusion, vulnerability, and desperation of these people.
In Peru, I worked as a teacher and assisted in directing a center for working children. The children were Amayra Indians from the Andes Highlands. They had fled the violence and famine of their homeland and arrived as refugees in the southern town of Tacna. Displaced from their homes, many arrived from broken families, with children as young as four years old forced to work to support themselves and their families.
As I worked with these children I saw where they lived in the shantytowns. I witnessed the poverty, disease, illness, injury, and trauma that accompanied them. I learned how cheap life is sometimes considered, especially for an indigenous, dark-skinned little person. I saw how precarious and fragile life was in these circumstances. These children and their family members worked extremely hard yet usually maintained gentle smiles on their faces. Most of these children had seen a lot of violence and their families and communities had been ripped apart by the civil war. No one spoke of death, but the fear, terror, and trauma from the reality that death was ever present – and indeed stalking them – was in the air.
I, too, experienced a type of vicarious trauma through my work with these children and their families. I was confused, overwhelmed, in excruciating physical pain, and angry – actually enraged – by their pain and suffering as well as my own. I especially witnessed the apparent indifference to these people as lowly “have-nots,” by the “haves” as well as by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
In 1989 when I came home to the San Francisco Bay Area, I enrolled at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I studied systematic theology and philosophy to try and figure out the mess I had witnessed and experienced in Guatemala and Peru, believing I’d find my answers.
The Aids Epidemic in San Francisco
While in graduate school I worked as a social worker at St. Anthony’s Foundation in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco from 1989 to 1992. I found my social work to be a welcome balance to my lofty academic study in philosophy and theology. I was hired because my fluency in Spanish allowed me to work with the many immigrants arriving from Mexico and Central and South America. However, the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco was raging and claiming the lives of thousands of gay men. These previously healthy men had led normal, successful lives and were now ravaged by the plague of HIV. Their deaths were often horrific, with grotesque Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on their bodies, which were withering and wasting away in the grips of HIV. They often hid their disease and lived out their last days in isolation and alienation with a sense of the shame, guilt, and confusion that accompanied an HIV diagnosis then.
I was blessed to be let into their world because they needed support and I offered food and a listening ear. These men, dozens of them, became my teachers about how brutal, messy, and unfair death can be. There was no happy ending. Their deaths were often ugly and painfully premature. I learned then how powerless we are in the face of death. These men also taught me about courage, dignity, humility, and inner strength as they valiantly fought against and sometimes peacefully surrendered to death.
Floating Above the ICU: My Second Near Death Experience
In February 1993 I experienced my second Near Death Experience. I had contracted a rare blood disease: idiopathic thrombocytopenia, a type of hemophiliac condition with no known cause. I remember checking myself into the emergency room and the next thing I knew I was floating above the intensive care unit at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland for what seemed to be about four hours. I remember looking down from the ceiling and listening to the nurses talk about the four patients, me included, in the ICU. I was struck by how they shared the intimate detail of their private lives in the wee hours of the morning.
As they talked about the different patients, I would move my attention over to the patient and observe the patient. This all seemed so normal to me. At the end of my out-of-body experience, I remember my doctor, a hematologist, approaching my body in the hospital bed. He gently called out my name, and I remember thinking as I peered down on the scene from above, “Do I really want to go back into that body?” As I pondered the question, I decided at least to try to answer the good doctor. As I did, I found myself refilling my physical body almost like sand filling the bottom part of an hourglass, just like I had experienced in my first NDE 14 years earlier. As I answered, simply saying, “Yes, doctor,” the sensations in my physical body returned. I felt totally exhausted, like I’d been run over by a Mack truck, but my consciousness was back in my body.
Like my first NDE, I did not share this experience with anyone, but I do remember realizing at a deep level within me that I am not my physical body. It was abundantly clear that whatever I referred to as “me” had an existence independent of my physical body. I realized that I had a consciousness that felt like me, and it was wise, intelligent, peaceful, and not bound by time or space.
My Grandmother’s Conversations with Spirit Beings
In 1998, my paternal grandmother’s death influenced me greatly as she deteriorated gradually over about five years in a nursing home. During the latter stages, she mostly slept and was somewhat demented. However, on a visit with her during the last week of her life, she was suddenly alert, coherent, and clear of mind as she spoke with her eyes lit up and fixated on a space just below the ceiling in her room.
As I walked into Nano’s room, I felt like I was barging into a conversation between my grandmother and some other people. She did not notice that I had entered her room as she spoke in an animated way that I had not seen in her for years. She was deeply engaged in dialog and she appeared to be staring right at them. I looked around but could not see anyone else present in the room. I did not interrupt as I noticed how intent she was. As I listened (and this become more obvious when I reflected later) I realized she was speaking with her deceased relatives and friends. She was so happy and it seemed to me that she was working some things out with these visitors that involved preparing her for what lay ahead. At the time, I didn’t know if she was reviewing memories of her current life with these people or if she was imagining these lovely visitors who seemed to be her guides for the journey after this life. I learned later, and would observe frequently in my later work in hospice, that these experiences are commonly referred to as “pre-death visions” and routinely discounted by Western medical institutions as hallucinations.
Meditating to Save My Sanity
A few months after my grandmother’s death in Fall 1998, I suffered a fluke foot injury that eerily would not heal and rendered me unable to walk for 15 months. I consulted with numerous foot specialist medical doctors in California and was demoralized after receiving very different diagnoses, each requiring its own highly invasive surgery. At 36, my life had stopped. I was a lonely single man, unable to work and experiencing intense physical and emotional pain. I fell into a deep depression.
Fortunately, I committed myself to a daily Buddhist meditation practice as a way of coping with my overwhelming suffering. I visited numerous Buddhist monasteries and residential retreat centers throughout California. I felt relief, even if temporarily, when hearing the Buddhist teachings on the nature of the human mind as it relates to pain and suffering. These Buddhist teachings rang true for me and inspired me to strengthen my meditation practice. The Buddhist teachings, my meditation practice, and my new Buddhist community became a refuge from my world of physical pain and mental and emotional suffering. I felt gratitude for having stumbled upon this spiritual path, for the many Buddhist teachers, and eventually for my pained foot that introduced me to this great tradition of wisdom. My meditation practice has become the bedrock of my mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
In January 2000 after 15 months of immobility, I begrudgingly had my right foot surgically reconstructed and after 6 months of intense physical therapy, I was walking again. During this painfully slow rehabilitation period, I continued to be drawn to the pain and suffering that I experienced personally and that I intuitively felt in the lives of others. Furthermore, my grandmother’s painful death lingered in my mind as I reflected on how I was both drawn to be with her as she suffered, but I also felt intensely uncomfortable in seeing her withering body and hearing her groan with pain. I felt guilty about the relief I felt when I departed her rest home and escaped the putrid smells and unsightly decaying bodies of the numerous dying residents. Something about this experience with my dying grandmother had left me feeling incomplete. I felt a growing desire to learn how to be fully present around death and dying.
Zen Hospice Project
In March 2000, I joined the Zen Hospice Project of San Francisco as a volunteer hospice worker. After an extraordinary training that emphasized Buddhist compassion and mindfulness around all aspects of death for the dying and their loved ones, I began working on the hospice unit at Laguna Honda, San Francisco County Hospital. This was a 24-bed ward with mostly indigent dying people. It was here that I was graced with my first Shared Death Experience.
I had been working with Ron (not his real name), who loved being read adventure stories, particularly those by Jack London. Ron was declining rapidly and was semiconscious as I read to him a chapter in Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Suddenly, I realized I was floating, indeed suspended, above my body. I realized that Ron and I were looking at each other. Ron had a kind of smug look on his face as if to say, “Check this out.” A few moments later I was back in my body and reading to Ron. His eyes were closed and he made no gesture to acknowledge this experience, and at the time I did not know how to make sense of it. I later tried to share this experience with my Buddhist supervisor and he smiled and said, “It’s all just phenomena rolling by, let it go.”
And so I did, at the conscious level, but I would have more similar experiences with the many dying and their loved ones on the hospice ward. I, like many hospice workers, cherished the time when the dying process approached that moment of transition, because of the mystical nature of this experience.
When the veil thins between this life and the next, it seems we enter into another dimension where space and time are altered. There is a presence, a kind of fullness, that evokes strong emotions, mellifluous music, or a profound silence while the light shifts and becomes brilliantly translucent. Later, when I learned more about the extraordinary experiences that can occur during death, I would remember these profound experiences with the dying that ebbed into my unconscious and etched themselves upon my memory.
The Birth of the Shared Crossing Facilitation Protocols
In October 2009 I attended a workshop at the Omega Institute titled “Soul Survival.” Raymond Moody, the man who had introduced the Western world to the Near Death Experience in decades previous, introduced his new research on the Shared Death Experience (SDE).
As he expounded on the SDE, my body began to tingle and shake. I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had had these experiences with various patients during my time as a hospice volunteer a decade earlier. Most profound was a realization that hit me like a thunderbolt and shook me to my core, “I know how to make this experience happen for the dying and their loved ones. I know how to facilitate this experience.” It was as if hearing Raymond Moody’s description of the SDE turned a lever and the universe downloaded into me the Protocols to facilitate the SDE for the dying and their loved ones.
Upon returning home, I crafted and elaborated the Shared Crossing Protocols. The structure of this model seemed clear; there are three sequential steps. Steps one and two required that I find and synthesize the appropriate resources. Step three, the Golden Protocols, came to me, in a general form, when I heard Raymond Moody first explain the SDE. In a relatively short time, I developed a user-friendly curriculum.
There are sequential three steps: 1) Educate people about what actually happens in the death and dying process; 2) Engage people in end-of-life practices that would prepare the dying and their loved ones for a “good death” and 3) Teach people the Linking Protocols, or the specific exercises that would allow for the dying and their loved ones to establish a link – or, if need be, reconnect – so that the loved one(s) could enter into the initial stages of the afterlife with the dying.
After establishing the Protocols, I began practicing them with friends and interested acquaintances. The loved ones reported a variety of SDE-type experiences: a change in the time-space continuum, witnessing the spirit in various forms leaving the body of the dying, seeing brilliant beams of light entering the room of the dying, experiencing sublime feelings of love and peace. While these experiences were profound for the loved ones, and they expressed gratitude for the Protocols, I was still unclear as to the value of the Protocols.
Then a breakthrough occurred when a woman, who we will call Sandy, nearing her own end of life, contacted me to learn about the Protocols. Sandy said that her loved ones were not interested in spiritual matters and so they would not practice the Protocols. I taught Sandy the Protocols over two, hour-long phone conversations. Two weeks after Sandy’s death, her daughter called me and said, “I know you were working with my mom on some spiritual things. I wanted to share with you what happened to me on the night of my mother’s death. In the middle of the night I was pulled from my bed. At first I resisted because I did not want to die, but in the distance I saw a child with blonde hair who I thought was my own, so I went to see my child. As I approached, she turned to me and I realized it was my mother. She looked radiant and smiled at me saying, "'You see, I’m fine. I will be with you always. I love you. Now go back and care for your children.’"
This experience confirmed to me the value in the Protocols.
Since then I have taught the Protocols to individuals and families in both private sessions as well as in small-group formats. Participants reported that the Protocols have deepened their relationships with loved ones, opened their understanding to the meaningful experiences available during the dying process, and awakened them a commitment to live their lives more fully in the here and now.
One participant who finished the SDE Facilitation Protocols training with his father said, “The experience (Protocols Training) was so profound and meaningful for my relationship with my father that I don’t even need to have the SDE… Of course, I want to have the SDE, but the training itself was incredibly valuable on its own.”
Now, with the assistance of many wonderful and wise supporters, the Shared Crossing Project and the Family Therapy Institute are collaborating on the Shared Crossing Research Initiative (SCRI) to study and verify the efficacy of these and other Shared Crossing Protocols. The best is yet to come as we now apply scholarly methodologies to assess the veracity of these protocols.
