Hello,
Dear ones,
This midweek miracle episode is brought to you courtesy of my guest,
Amy Lynn Carroll.
Now,
Amy Lynn talks a few miracles in this episode,
And specifically,
We talk about her NDE experience,
Her near-death experience.
But as you'll hear,
Amy Lynn does not refer to it as an NDE.
And you'll hear her explanation for just why she's changed the words around her experience a little bit later in the episode.
Now,
Amy Lynn has an incredible TED Talk online,
So there will be a link to that in the episode show notes.
But as well,
Let me give you a little bit more detail about who this human being is.
It is really hard to kind of encapsulate someone with just a few words.
You know,
You can label them and say they're this,
They're that,
But that's so reductive in this world.
Everyone is so complicated and so wonderfully complex,
And Amy Lynn is no exception.
She is a spiritual and life coach,
And so she helps people navigate this world and connect to it with more authenticity and more integrity.
On her website,
She talks about early 2007 found her not only unhappy,
But broken and fighting for her life.
She had been diagnosed with stage four cancer,
And the prognosis was not good.
We talk a little bit about the stroke that she's had.
She's a quadriplegic,
But that doesn't stop her.
She did that TED Talk.
She's working with people every day to help them make their lives better.
She is a powerful,
Powerful human being,
And our conversation was gorgeous.
It was such a pleasure to meet her and connect with her,
And I hope you enjoy the interview.
All right,
Here's the very next episode of the Bite Size Blessings Podcast.
Imagine for just a moment as six or seven year old coming home from Sunday school,
Learning about the rapture,
And your father,
Your parents are deacons in the church.
So you're driving home,
And this is back in the 80s,
So you're in the back of the station wagon,
No seat belts.
And you're imagining this story about the rapture,
Where Jesus is going to come back and take home the chosen to his father in heaven.
Well,
My mom and dad were going,
And they were driving the car.
So what's it like for me as a six year old sitting in the back of that station wagon,
Wondering if the rapture is going to come before the cars in park?
Just because someone in a position of authority has said something,
It doesn't make it absolute truth.
And I'll give you a very dramatic example.
In October 2022,
I had a stroke,
And I absolutely,
Without exception,
Believed that I was on the brink of death.
Oftentimes,
After an experience like that,
We come back and we have these conversations about near death and what it was like.
And what I came to realize through my healing process since then,
Is that I did not have a near death experience,
Nor do most people.
But the idea of a near death experience only kind of came into mainstream conversation in 1975,
Dr.
Moody's book.
And he's compiling stories about something that people didn't talk about,
Because it was very taboo,
Anti-religion.
There's absolutely no way that God would pull you to the brink and then take you back.
So we believe we started calling these near death experiences.
But what for me,
I realized was,
It wasn't a near death experience.
It was actually what I'm now referring to as a fuller life experience.
There was an opening to consciousness,
An experience that I didn't know how to capsulate.
I can barely put it into words,
And I still struggle now,
Almost two years later.
The experience,
Though,
Cannot be denied from someone who's been in that space.
And what I've learned since,
Is that we need not have some huge medical trauma or tragedy to inspire,
To invite,
To ignite that space of consciousness,
Which is a fuller life experience.
People talk about love,
And they talk about light.
We use these words that seem to have a universal meaning for an experience that is actually universally available to all of us.
But because we think of it as a near death experience,
Don't none of us want to go there.
None of us want to die.
Are you kidding me?
I do.
Bring it on,
Girl.
The things that I've learned,
The difference in who I get to be each day from this revelation,
And to live out of that place of fuller consciousness,
A fuller awakening,
A fuller understanding of the experience,
Ain't dead.
Ain't dying.
None of us are.
Our body may be maturing in a way that we're going to leave it behind at some point when our consciousness is ready to do that.
But death is not the end.
And death is not what we have been taught that it is.
Death is actually an opening into a broader,
Into a wider,
Into a more expansive space of living and loving and operating.
But to come back from an experience like that and be told by an expert,
Because they have X amount of years of training,
That what I experienced was X.
It's like,
No,
That's not what I experienced.
Thank you.
And I appreciate that that's your best understanding of what I experienced,
But that's not it.
What I experienced without exception,
A fuller life experience.
And I now know how,
Because I'm not afraid of that.
I now know how to tap into that while having a conversation with someone else and holding that space for them.
And absolutely every one of us has that at our availability,
At our fingertips.
It's about shifting the way we look at things,
Though.
And not relying on somebody's definition just because they have an alphabet after their name.
And I'm not denigrating the work that they've done or the knowledge or the experience that they've had.
But I'm not about to rely on someone who's never had what they refer to as a near-death experience to tell me what my experience was.
I get to decide.
And so do you.
I really,
At the end of this interview,
Wanted to be her neighbor so that I could stop by every day,
Sit at her kitchen counter and just enjoy some conversation.
Amy Lynn is a profoundly gorgeous human being.
And I'm so very grateful that the universe connected us.
I'm so grateful that through this podcast,
I'm getting to bump up against these other humans in the world that are making this world a more beautiful place.
And that in itself is payment enough for me,
Is getting to meet all these fabulous humans as far as making this podcast.
Thanks to everyone who listens to this little labor of love of mine.
And please do consider,
If you can find it in your hearts,
To leave me a rating or write a little review wherever you find the podcast.
I would be so very grateful.
Thank you for listening.
And here's my one request.
Be like Amy Lynn.
Live with your heart wide open.
Wide open.
Believing in life.
Believing in others.
Believing in the universe and its capacity for redemption,
For beauty,
For brilliance.
Live with your heart wide open,
Just knowing that there's more than enough gorgeousness,
More than enough beauty in this world,
In this universe,
To fill it 100 times over.
