Journey from Despair to Bliss

I remember myself in my mother's womb. -- Sahl ibn Abd Allah al-Tostari

Katarina

A portentous vision prepared me for what was about to happen in my life. I was approaching forty years. Death personified came to me. It was just a Being. He told me that He was going to be with me. It was not a horrific, dramatic fear like you have in a horror movie. Rather, it was a deep, ominous, unpleasant feeling that would not go away.

One week later, my oldest child, a daughter in her twenties, was struck by a car driven by an intoxicated foreign diplomat. He refused to take a breathalizer test and claimed diplomatic immunity. The disaster was headline news in Australia for two months. Riots sprung up in some embassies. The whole country was rocked by it. People prayed for me in churches all over the country. I received words of sympathy from different religious people.

On the morning following the accident, Vikki's body was rushed to a hospital. Her body was totally smashed. The doctor told me, "there Is no hope. The whole brain has been finished." I said, "Well, it would be better if she died then." Right at that moment, everyone rushed into the intensive unit because all the machines started to go nuts. She started leaving the body.

I felt guilty about Vikki's death because Vikki had experienced extreme strain following my second marriage. After my second marriage and giving birth to a new baby nine months later, Vikki ended up in her natural father's camp. She was nearly twenty-one. I had always protected Vikki, kept my energy for her, and fed her a lot of invincibility. Now she was on her own and did not have the support to stay in the world. She was extremely delicate and began to carry all her father's stress -- the whole family were alcoholics and Vikki was trying to live in the middle of that. Vikki did not take drugs or alcohol. She had always been morally and spiritually inclined due to our loving relationship. Now everyone around her was into taking drugs and alcohol. It was too much.

Vikki did not realize it was too stressful. But it was obvious. For several years, I had known that she was slipping away. She could not take it. There was not a life for her anymore. It was time to go.

I experienced subtle experiences in Vikki's hospital room. Vikki came back to me. She was free from the shackles of being in bondage in the body. The room was filled with peace, light and beauty. Vikki desired my presence while she oriented herself to that delicate state on having no boundaries -- just like I'd always eased her through different experiences of life. It was a shock for her to go through this transition. She was not expecting it. I sat with her for a long, long time. My daughter was in light and in bliss. She looked extremely tranquil. It was incredible.

Vikki's presence began to heal my heart. Vikki was with my daughter Krystal and I on our way home from the hospital. Half the time Vikki was with me and half the time with Krystal. Vikki was floating around in an unbounded, free state. She could do what she wanted and simultaneously be in different places. We were all still in shock, including Vikki.

The funeral seemed like an impossible thing to face. However, my daughter Krystal and I looked radiant. We were lit up and riding high. We were in this divine state, not our normal state of consciousness.

Death touches deep levels of life. The presence of the divine is in that event. Angels came to be with us and guided every second of the day. There was someone helping everything fall into place. The entire family felt that.

The funeral was intense. I lived it in an unbounded, wonderful, blissful, holy state. I had prepared for it by expanding my consciousness through years of deep meditation. Death's cramping effect did not touch me. I was open to it's wonderful side. The whole event brought tremendous energy to further evolution. People used that divine energy to evolve. The same thing happens at childbirth. Although people tend to be more positive about the births than the deaths, it's just the same.

While I experienced the presence of the divine in the midst of a sorrowful event, the energy created an opportunity for emotional cleansing for others. Some people came to the funeral and unburdened their stresses as soon as they walked in and saw my family. They used the funeral to release negative feelings and thoughts. That is where they dumped it. Many cried on our shoulders. I felt that it was their own stuff that they were getting rid of, that it had little to do with Vikki's death. Most of them did not know her that well. Her death was a trigger to work on that deepest level on themselves. As the ceremony progressed, I felt big knots and blocks and the stress and strain and shock of it being released. I felt this tremendous purifying influence.

The loss brought dramatic evolution for me and my entire family. Childbirth, death, and marriage are the big ones. They touch the deepest level of our conscious being, our inner reality of the levels of life we are aware of.

Whether we want to or not, evolution pushes us on. When we go through a major event, it is a opportunity for growth. Death is a huge step in evolution not just for the person moving on, but for the family. Some people cramp up and get stuck. Others go with the tide, open up, transcend boundaries, and grow.

My whole family went through dramatic positive changes. Vikki's death created a huge push forward and a lifting upward. My daughter's death was one of the high points of my life, other than the births of my children. Different streams of creativity and energy propelled us on to new possibilities. In my case, I ended up going to America and starting a whole new life. My brother started a new business.

When I saw Vikki's body at the funeral home, my daughter was freaking out. She had entered this death stupor where she did not experience anything at all. Vikki was not there with me. It was not a pleasant place. She was in this stupor and I was guiding the whole thing through somehow. I don't think God brings all these things unless we are strong enough to bear them. People do go through overloads of experience and get cramped up by it, but fundamentally, we don't ever get more than we can handle.

I realized that the funeral had cleared Vikki's release from the death stupor when I took a quiet walk along the beach following the funeral dinner. The whole city reflected what had happened. The city is normally windy, but there was not a ripple on the sea. The whole place was completely still. There was a fog hanging over the sea, still, calm, and beautiful.

I felt her then. Vikki was in an angelic realm, an area of intense light and love. She was like a newborn baby -- completely washed clean, all white and pure, beautiful, and without stresses. The experience totally stretched me. I felt tremendous relief. That's why Vikki came. Vikki said, "Everything is okay now."

People who report NDEs describe travelling through a tunnel of light, and then expanding out and becoming universal. I literally felt that. Vikki had utterly expanded beyond everything and everywhere.I sat on the beach with her for several hours. It was a fulfilling, beautiful time.

I composed a poem shortly afterward.

Two weeks following the funeral, a vision of Vikki's soul counterbalanced my grief. It uplifted my spirits. It was not any great shakes -- not like lightning flashes and all that drama. It was innocent. Vikki was just there with me for awhile. It was wonderful to be in her presence.It was just my girl and she had come to visit. You know, when your daughter comes to visit, it's wonderful.

Vikki came to teach something way beyond my ability to perceive and experience. Since I had last seen her, she had been experiencing, growing, and evolving through eons of time. She gave me the benefit of what she had gone through in fourteen earthly days. The transformations were mind-boggling, not in a dramatic way, just in a deep kind of way. Vikki was an eternal being, completely transformed, and unrecognizable as my little twenty-year-old daughter. She gave me an insight into evolution and the infinite magnitude of the cosmos and the growth that takes place within it. Months later, I was still digesting that experience because it was so profound. And, it took even longer to verbalize. It was incredible.

Death touches the deepest level of creation and our own being. Like peeling off the delicate layers of an onion, sometimes numerous layers must be removed before the deepest healing is complete. I had been a witness to the eternal nature of my daughter's soul and had come a long way on the path to the healing, yet deep scars lingered on.

I focused on inner work attempting to lessen the grief. Moments of bliss coexisted with emotional vulnerability. For the several months, I was infused with tremendous bliss, light, and life along with wave after wave of energy purifying my body and this crying and sobbing coming up with it. On a superficial level, it was business as usual. No one knew what was going on deep inside. I just carried on. I continued my teaching career. In a sense, that was great. It helped me through. On the other hand, I deferred quite a lot. I blocked it off. I shut it up.

I took an extended absence from teaching six months after Vikki's passing. Without the pressures of a career, my defense mechanisms were gone and I came face-to-face with what was inside. Besides the loss of Vikki, layers of fatigue had built up after giving birth to my third child and raising her during the past five years.

It had to start coming out. I felt totally devastated and did not desire to go on living. I think it is quite common for mothers to die when their children die. I did not have any cause for grief except that I chose to. I missed her so much. I could not bear it. She was the closest person in my life.

I received advice at that time from an Indian saint. The message was: "Do not grieve. It's not necessary. She has moved on. Everything is fine. The mother does not need to be concerned." But, of course, I got into my feelings of loss, my attachments, and into the shock.

Another intuitive message came from a European woman with remarkable inner vision. I met Gabrielle one evening at Ellen's home. As we were getting to know each other, Gabrielle who knew nothing of my loss, closed her eyes, and stated she had a message from Vikki. She said: "Your daughter is not here. She's in the light. You can find her everywhere."

She was right. My experience of Vikki had been that she no longer had any form. My daughter was absorbed in the light. I had the inner experience of sitting in front of her picture on the anniversary of her birthday and feeling that she was just light. That's all I felt was light. And, now Gabrielle was confirming that she is in the light.

Then, Gabrielle spoke as if she were Vikki, "You have to know that it was my choice. It was nothing to do with you." She repeated that message over and over.

In the process of dropping my barriers to being skeptical about Gabrielle, I started to cry. I released a burden of tremendous guilt. I had been feeling that it had been my fault -- that Vikki's life had been messed up because I had gotten married, had another baby, and there was no place for Vikki anymore.

Something more powerful peeled off the remaining trauma. Nine months following my daughter's death, I still grieved for her. I was also encountering intense marital stress. My friend Ellen called me a wreck. She could hardly bear to be with me because I was in so much pain. Ellen recommended that I enroll in the Fascinating Womanhood Course.

I was willing to try almost anything. The Course taught me that the first key to marriage is acceptance of one's husband as he is. So I diligently cultured that inner attitude all the time. I was open, surrendered, and accepting.

I am convinced that my transformed attitude resulted in the conception of a fourth child. After my husband and I made love one night, I immediately knew, "This is it." The conception of a child opened the flood gates for positivity and light. Amazingly transformations sprang from that awesome event. Depression and anxiety vanished overnight.

Dramatic psychological and physiological changes confirmed the pregnancy within days. Once again, there was a desire to live, a purpose, and a joy inside. The anticipated role of motherhood created a deep sense of inner contentment and fulfillment just as there was five years earlier during the pregnancy of my third child.

Yes, I remember the bliss -- it was expansive and thick. It followed conception into the next few months and especially after the soul came in around the third month. It was invincible bliss. As soon as I conceived Peter, there was that joy and that feeling of being reborn inside myself and that growth of life again.

Normally, I tend to be a workaholic, flitting around, but not during the pregnancy. I was settled and royal. My personality had the royal pace of the elephant which you see in East Indian women so much.

I felt a saintly soul enter my belly at the end of the first trimester. No longer was pregnancy just a cosmic event that I surrendered to. At a precise moment, the awareness dawned, "Oh, someone has come and someone is with me." I sensed who he was and I felt utterly secure -- like I'd been missing some part before and now fullness was complete.

This feeling did not diminish after Peter's birth. There were waves of joy. This child is so special. We all knew it. He was a clear, powerful, special kind of intelligence who had not incarnated for eons of time -- a great blessing for the family.