Most of us have heard stories of near-death experiences, also known as NDE. Maybe you’ve listened to someone on Oprah, read it in a book, or witnessed a close friend or relative walk through it. Hell, maybe you’ve had one of your own. My point is that when you read or listen to these stories, you hear many common threads.

Here’s a few… The highest purpose is unconditional love. Sacred service, or social justice activities and being in service to humanity become even more important. You aren’t just reminded or have a realization that we are all one, but you EXPERIENCE the interconnectedness of all life – like nothing you have ever known.

You discover you pretty much had a cognitive understanding of this oneness, and maybe even caught nanosecond glimpses in meditation, but I think it takes NDE to KNOW it. I digress… (also a lesson of NDE, squirrel moments are more common than linear thoughts).

Of course there are other common threads I have heard, read about and certainly found as I integrate my own NDE – threads around the nature of God, forgiveness and our place in the world. But even with all that commonality, I feel compelled to add to the list. I’ve discovered a few things I have yet to read anywhere. And maybe that’s because these are particular to just me… but I doubt it.

Keep in mind as you read, that these lessons are a little outside the box. These aren’t what you may hear in the “usual conversations” you’re accustomed to when talking about the meatier issues of life, death, the hereafter, oneness and ultimate reality.

Lesson #1: “I” don’t make sense anymore
Lesson #2: Profanity is no longer profane
Lesson #3: If your mother doesn’t know you have tattoos – she will find out
Lesson #4: “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is no longer true
Lesson #5: Silliness is necessary for life, it is a spiritual practice

A couple warnings/suggestions/codicils:

 If you are offended by profanity you should probably stop reading now.
 This is my experience – you may or may not relate. That’s ok, I don’t need you to.
 If you know anyone who has experienced a NDE, share this with them.
 If you didn’t smile or chuckle at least once, you may have missed the point or need some internal adjustment.

Lesson #1: “I” don’t make sense anymore

Every time I meet with someone who hasn’t seen me since being gravely ill, they naturally want to ask questions or comment. They say something akin to “I’m so glad to see you’re all recovered!” Or, “So, are you all better?” or “You’re all healed!” And my personal favorite, “So how are you doing?”

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the intentions and I am not dogging on anyone – TRULY. I just think you should know that I have absolutely no response to these – unless you are willing and have the time to sit down with a pot of coffee, or in some cases a fifth of Jack Daniels, for an existential conversation about what all those statements and questions actually invoke.

For starters, when you ask me “How are you doing?” just know I will look at you blankly because I have absolutely no idea. The question itself doesn’t even make sense. And the reason the question makes no sense is because “I” don’t make sense. Let me explain.

Something I have discovered in my research during my “coming back to life” phase, as I call it, is that there is often a general loss of “self” after a NDE. And it’s almost impossible to put into words for someone. Suffice it say, the “I” that once was, is gone, and maybe a new one emerges, maybe not.

What was once foreign becomes familiar, what was once familiar becomes foreign. Rationale of any kind tends to lose its logic, which is why metaphors don’t work, so don’t try to help my “understanding” by offering any. Making plans and dreams seems irrelevant, even though a few months ago it was quite normal, even exciting.

Each day I discover something that was once a passion or a belief, and now it’s not. And this isn’t like, “I remember when…” and the mind goes back years. I am talking days or weeks. It is mind blowing, and highly unsettling. It’s like waking up one day, and overnight a switch has been flipped. Even if you could find the switch, you can never “flip it back.” Not that you’d want to anyway, but you wonder if maybe you should “want to” even though there is no energy or desire for taking that route. By now I’m guessing you may be getting a micro idea of why “‘I’ don’t make sense” is so alive.

You can see your VERY RECENT self, and know she’s not here, and likely never to return. Yet, there are definitely elements of her that are unchanged, always present. The pure essence remains untouched, pure and intact. BUT, you realize that her relationship to that essence is changed. The challenge is discovering what’s real and what’s memorex. This takes time, patience, curiosity and courage.

Living in the present moment is really all there is – unlike anything you have ever experienced. Remember when you would stand at the edge of a canyon and shout into the wind? Hoping to hear the echo of your own message circle back to greet you like a wonderful stranger visiting your home? Well that space in between – that place where your own words have left you and your echo has yet to find it’s way to your door – is where you now live.

I would be happy to further explain this phenomenon, but since I barely understand it, I feel confident I probably won’t get you to understand it either. As you read this, you may think, “I get it,” or “I know what you mean.” Trust me, you don’t. Go with it. This is my new normal – very few will understand me and that’s ok cause I don’t understand me. Let’s do this together.

Lesson #2: Profanity is no longer profane

This is the part where you should stop reading because from here on out, profanity will show up.

[dramatic pause while you go to another page]

Fuck is a perfectly good verb, noun, adjective, and when ‘ing’ is added, a fucking awesome infinitive. And if for some reason you get to the end of this section and still get incensed by these words, take your ego to therapy. Sometimes in life “fuck” is the only word that works.

It is a magical word, and may be one of the most versatile in our language. Just by its sound it can describe pain, pleasure, love, and hate. In language, “fuck” falls into many grammatical categories. It can be used as a verb both transitive and intransitive, active or passive. We can us it as an adverb, noun, interjection (which is most popular) and as a conjunction. Finally, my favorite lately, using it “anatomically,” such as “This fucking asshole hospital was so negligent they nearly killed me! They can pay the fucking bill!”

I bet you had no idea this would be a fucking grammar lesson!

I can’t tell you how surprised ministers and sometimes congregants are to find out I swear. I’ve even been known to say “holy crap” from the pulpit. I’m guessing people think clergy must have a mystical access to the higher realms and therefore we shouldn’t “dirty” ourselves with anything as profane as swearing. Apparently we are supposed to use only the most “clean, fluffy, and spiritual” language. If that’s your belief, it may fucking suck to be you. ???? And see lesson #4.

If you’re still not convinced, let me offer you this. The word “profane” means “to desecrate, render unholy, violate.” When you have been deathly ill, and are forced to surrender your ENTIRE life by letting go of the last thing you have any measure of control over – YOUR BREATH – then swearing is anything BUT unholy.

Out of sheer exhaustion I stopped fighting what I never wanted to do, but needed to if I wanted to live. I looked at the heartless, beastly machine made of metal, plastic and tubing as if to say, “You win! Breathe in me you bastard!” And with that, I collapsed into peace, sleep, and somewhere else. The soft underbelly of life had revealed herself as soon as I learned to hold on to nothing, and hold nothing back.

When you can no longer feel the life force of breath moving through you of your own volition, screaming the word “FUCK” consecrates the most holy second you may ever experience – death and life in a single moment.

Lesson #3: If your mother doesn’t know you have tattoos – she will find out

With any extended illness, and especially in hospitals, you will become intimately involved with your body. As will strangers, friends and family members. Hopefully not all your friends and family, if you and they are lucky. But certainly enough to support you in relinquishing any notion that your body is private.

Our culture is so shame based, that even at death’s doorstep we sometimes try to maintain some weird sense of modesty. Don’t misunderstand me, I have done enough hospice work to know that modesty is often the only thing someone has to hold onto in order to maintain a basic sense of human dignity. And then, there are times when you no longer get much of a say in who sees what.

Trust me, get over yourself. Your body is no worse or better than anyone else’s. It just is. Yes we need to take care of it, yes it requires our devoted attention and exquisite care to nurture it, heal it and love it – and I am not being coy or sappy. You learn to listen more intimately to your own body, inside and out. You learn to talk to your body, and if you’ve talked to it previously, you will now chat with it in new ways. Something I have taught my students in healing and wholeness classes for many years.

You learn to not care who sees what – for the most part. By the way, others are every bit as uncomfortable as you are about them seeing your nakedness, as you are of them seeing you exposed. I couldn’t get to a toilet by myself, I couldn’t brush my teeth without help, I couldn’t sit myself up, so seeing me in all my glory kinda paled by comparison.

Every nook and cranny becomes a point of fascination for someone. Get over it. Again, if you have secret tattoos, scars or piercings? Not any more. Don’t want someone to see your love handles, rolls of fat or breasts that now look like sausage rolls hanging to your belly button? Tough. Make peace with it. Quickly! Or you will waste your time trying to crawl back into a shell that no longer exists. See lesson #1 above.

When you are so ill that you can’t stand up or wipe your own butt, people will see your body. When you lie in a hospital bed for days, everyone under the sun will ask you if you have pain and will need a number for their “on a scale of 1 to 10” method of discerning your comfort. In this process of caring for you and meeting your needs, they will of course poke and prod your earthly suit for signs of fluid retention, blood pooling and god knows what else. Let them check, it makes them happy.

And when you are unconscious? You really don’t know what has gone on, and must trust that you were loved and cared for in very tender ways. You realize that your fragile body was carefully nurtured without your awareness and in so doing, someone probably saw something you never really wanted anyone to see. Like tattoos, piercings and scars.

In my case, I was being helped to the bathroom, with the ever so fashionable hospital gown open in the back, mooning whomever was in the room. And as I shuffled into the bathroom, I heard my mother say, “Hey, you have a tattoo! I didn’t know that.” Well, now you do. I knew tattoos weren’t my mother’s favorite thing, and I also knew she ultimately wouldn’t care, so for several years I had even forgotten she didn’t know. But I did know I never told her on purpose. Next tattoo I get I will let her know, and I’ll give her a heads up about the nipple piercings I am also considering – kidding mom.

Lesson #4: “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is no longer true

For some time now, I have believed that the small stuff is where life is. Now, this belief has become cellular. Don’t waste your time pining for some kind of spiritually transformative experience. Instead, do the daily, challenging, unglamorous work of becoming a better, healthier, more kind, loving, and connected person. And let the spiritual experiences take care of themselves.

This doesn’t mean to ignore the desire for spiritually meaningful experiences, but honestly, it’s where life is – in the small stuff. How often have we gotten irritated or annoyed by something “small” only to hear ourselves or someone else say, “Life is short, don’t sweat the small stuff!”

It’s these ordinary, mundane activities that fill our day: balancing the checkbook, getting cut off by an erratic driver, waking at 3am again because you don’t have the rent, remembering AFTER you’ve climbed into bed that the garbage wasn’t put out for the early morning pickup, cleaning the vegetables of chemicals, vacuuming up the never-ending supply of dog hair, spilling coffee on your neatly pressed pants as you pull into the office parking lot… All ordinary, small, sweaty things.

In the scheme of life, these things often have the same resonance as that summer mosquito “song” that whines so wonderfully and incessantly in your ear. It’s in these ordinary moments that are often sweaty, annoying, desolate and unsettling where we find our relatedness to all life. Can I open my exhausted mind, my hardened heart to the beauty in the most unsuspecting and mundane moments, rather than continually demanding a cosmic drama or a regular dose of extraordinary?

My friend Mark Nepo says, “I have come to understand that the same qualities of honesty, compassion, and expression that are required to face death and to survive illness are the very same qualities required to live our ordinary days. From here, we are given many chances to learn how to love and how to face things, both of which seem so frightening and monumental at first, but which become inevitable teachers and friends, when we can admit them.”

So go ahead and sweat the small stuff, it’s where the juice of life is. It’s the ever-present exquisite risk that invites us into living. It’s the honey that life drips on our soul and slowly seeps into the cracks in our heart, making even the most difficult or boring moments, the sweet nectar that will feed us making the ordinary life our most precious life.

Lesson #5: Silliness is necessary for life, it is a spiritual practice

This lesson you probably already knew, but maybe have forgotten. Do you do silly really well or are you experiencing a silliness drought? The word silly evolved from the old English word “saelig,” which means lucky or blessed. When you allow your silly side to come out you are affirming a sense of blessedness and allow those feelings to emerge playfully, joyfully. Silly can soothe, silly can restore, silly can uplift, silly can transform.

This is particularly useful when it comes to medical jargon. As I continue my healing journey, which isn’t really a journey because no one is taking me on a cruise, I have acquired a medical record about 3” thick. Now I know for some that’s nothing, and for others, it’s staggering. I imagine you could take my whole life of medical records and they wouldn’t stack up as high as this one episode. So I needed to add some silliness to make sense of the medical world, and frankly to survive.

For instance, those “bugs” that continued to hang out in my lungs long after I was out of the hospital and months after returning home, are called “bilateral infiltrates.” I decided it sounded like a military operation, which is much more exciting, and even puts a smile on my face. Every single person I have mentioned this to agrees with me, and also smiles and giggles right along with me. Silliness brings us closer to each other, reminds us of our common humanity.

How about this one? “Splenomegaly!” Wanna take a guess? Sounds like a medium-sized, chiefly terrestrial omnivorous reptile which emerged in the fossil record during the Late Jurassic Period, surviving through the Cretaceous Period, and finally became extinct mid-Mesozoic Era. Much more exciting than saying “an enlarged spleen.” I bet you’re smiling.

Isn’t life about seeing beyond what’s there? The word “busy” seems to pop up a lot these days. I think I’d rather be hearing the word “play” or “silly” come out of my mouth. Playing is a spiritual practice to disengage the brain, to abandon what we think we know and just roll around in the grass like we did when we were little – well hopefully you did, with your stuffed Splenomegaly won at the county fair.

The spiritual practice of silliness is reading the Sunday comics and finding the essence of yourself. This was a practice in my home growing up, my mother would ask us on Sunday afternoons where we found ourselves in the comics that day. Was it in Beetle Bailey, the Peanuts, Family Circle, or maybe the Wizard of Id? The ordinary is depicted as the extraordinary, the banal becomes comical, and the secular becomes sacred.

St. Francis, Zen masters, Taoist sages, Hasidic storytellers, Hopi clowns and performance artists are all prophets who have encouraged me to play because honestly what I know isn’t worth knowing, and what’s worth knowing can’t be known through the usual ways, or through the usual lens.

Silliness and play are the joyful expression of my being. It is at the heart of my creativity, my sexuality, and my most carefree and compassionate moments of devotion. It helps me live with absurdity, paradox, sadness, death, awe and mystery. It feeds my joy and wonder. It keeps me down to earth rolling around in the grass.

I’m sure there are more fucking lessons to come. It’s only been a few months since my NDE. In the meantime remember these words of Stanley Kuntz from his poem “The Layers:”

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

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