by Catherine Burton, PhD.
Though I have never had a neardeath experience (NDE), my life has been forever changed by what I have learned from those who have. In my professional practice as a psychotherapist, I have also found that the perspective of the NDE can be very effective in the healing, growth, and transformation of clients as they encounter different stages in the human life-cycle.
My first contact with the near-death experience occurred in the 1970s. In graduate school, I met a person who had been in an automobile accident, had had a classic NDE, and overnight changed his worldview, values, and beliefs. He immediately left his job in sales, and decided to become a psychologist. It was striking to witness such an instantaneous transformation. My second experience was reading Dr. Raymond Moody’s book, Life after Life, which helped me to heal my own remaining grief over my father’s death.
The NDE phenomenon also excites and inspires me personally because so many people have, in that brief moment in their lives, directly experienced what I have spent the last 25 years searching for, studying, and practicing to realize in myself. Their experiences, and the growing body of research surrounding them, are now confirming “the perennial wisdom” that the great mystics and sages have been saying all along. Over the years, I gradually began to offer this “wisdom” revealed in the near death perspective to people I work with in my private practice as a clinical psychologist. I would like to share with you the different ways I have applied this expanding knowledge to help people heal, grow, and transform their lives.
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The Adolescent’s Searchings
At the January 2003 IANDS conference in Hawaii, I asked several near-death experiencers what the view from the other side says about why we are here on Earth. They said we are here to remember who we are, to remember our divinity, to be the best we can be, and to come into the greater oneness. One of my favorite things to do with such information is to offer adolescent clients this enlarged view on life. Adolescence is the time when a person is supposed to be preparing for life. Yet in today’s world, what life are they preparing for?—a life of consuming, getting and spending, wanting to be like others and just going along with the crowd? Or the vision of life offered by the NDE, in which life is seen as a quest of awakening to who you deeply are, and challenging yourself to realize (to make real) the potentials within you. It’s about knowing that you are here because you have something special to contribute to making this world a better place. It’s about being a blessing to this world, and expanding your circle of compassion and respect continuously. After all, we, and our sons and daughters, will live either up or down to the vision we have in life. Many adolescents, when presented with this larger view of life as a quest, respond with excitement, saying “I knew there was something more to life!”
