Sometimes we have experiences of such intensity that they strongly affect one’s life, including ones that brings us into contact with death. How do we cope with these, and what do they teach us about how to proceed through life?
I touch briefly on several Spiritually Transformative Experiences, including a Near Death Experience at age 3 from falling out of a car going 60 miles per hour, a unitive experience initiated by an evening with Baba Ram Dass and Swami Muktananda, which led to a spiritual emergency and psychiatric hospitalization in 1970, and a shared death experience with my wife of 25 years.
Some of these experiences were not integrated until years later, and some of the details were unclear at the time. I will talk about the process of uncovering these details, arriving at understandings, and ultimately how they were assimilated. Hopefully this will benefit others who have had similar partially obscured spiritual experiences, or experiences that contain the unconsciousness’s that traumas can produce.
One of the things I’ve learned from the life-long journey to understand and process these transformative experiences, is how the transcendent part of our Self can work with the human parts of self to bring healing and integration. I describe some steps of going from the human side into closer connection with the divine side and then how both sides can non-dually work to cope with and navigate through life’s sufferings and challenges.
Dr. Brian Sackett