“You have to go back”.
And that was the end of what is commonly described these days as my near death experience (NDE). It happened during a first visit with a family friend to our local swimming pool. I don’t know why I slipped on the floor of the pool but I did – the comical thing to me about the whole thing is that I wasn’t anywhere near the deep end. By the way, that would turn out to be a metaphor for the most interesting times in my life and career, but more of that in future blogs perhaps.
It turned out that I wasn’t under water for that long, but the after effects and impact of what happened that day changed me for ever.
On the threshold of life and ‘not life’ is a pretty interesting place to be. And the assumption of ‘not life’, is interesting too when you think about it. I remember with total clarity falling into a tunnel as soon as I went under water. A tunnel of light. The brightest light I had ever seen, but the most gentle, compelling, nurturing, loving and peaceful light. I remember anticipation and excitement and confusion and curiosity. Who knew that the floor of a tunnel could be made out of light. Not nearly 10 year old me.
And then I saw three shapes. I have never ever ‘worried’ about who the shapes were. I remember feeling profoundly comforted in their presence and a desire to stay with them. But then a voice, from the shape in the middle said “You have to go back”.
Just as I was about to argue that I wanted to stay I remember being aware of something over my right shoulder and my journey down that beautiful tunnel was over. An arm under my stomach pulled me out and there followed some pretty spectacular (and probably not remotely graceful) coughing water out of my lungs.
The most compelling memories still – over 40 years later – are the profound absence of fear. The profound awareness of forces unseen. An urgent curiosity to explore. And often times a deep sense of anger and loss that I could not stay.
The remarkable John O’Donohue wrote in “To Bless the Space Between Us”:
“A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres.”
These frontiers, these territories exist in our own lives, our families, our communities and most definitely our organisations.
I’m yet to fully reconcile the ‘why’ of my entanglement with the frontier between life and not life and the purpose it is meant to serve. But it has left me with a profound sense of awareness that we are much more than a physical being, we are spiritual beings too. And it birthed an endless fascination about how we humans approach these frontiers.
It is in the approaching a frontier that we test our ideas of what we are capable of and it is in the crossing of these frontiers that we expand our lived experience of these new territories, rhythms and atmospheres. And of course we also learn much about others in the process too.
The human spirit is an extraordinary thing and my own experience is that we are limited only by our understanding of what is possible, the limits we impose on ourselves and those imposed by others. The latter are often the most powerful sadly.
It was perhaps inevitable that I would end up working in HR and OD – vacancies for Corporate Shamans were pretty few and far between as you can imagine in those days! And they still are. In my early years working in HR and OD the notion that we would consider spirit, talk about expanding frontiers beyond the physical – marked you out as different, emotional, unreliable and plenty of other unhelpful terms. Our view of human potential limited to endless recycling of talent initiatives that do little to capture our hearts, minds and spirit. Or, at least they don’t tap into the full potential of hearts, mind and spirit. Not by a long shot.
We’re a different profession now thankfully, but there are plenty more thresholds to explore. When dark humour is the order of the day, I reflect that for many of us (far too many of us) crossing the frontier of HR policy can, in itself, feel completely insurmountable. And that’s a total waste of what we are capable of. And we need to address that.
I know with certainty, that forces unseen – visible and invisible thresholds, hold potential for deep exploration. For profound transformation. For magic.
More on that in future blogs.
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Explorations:
The life and work of John O’Donohue is privilege to dive into (yup, interesting words given my experience was water based). A deeply warm embrace with love, compassion, generosity, wisdom and curiosity. If you haven’t read anything by John, Anam Cara is as good a place to start as any. A good soul taken from this life far too soon.
Unsurprisingly the whole idea of near death experiences has veered from controversial to a popular topic of discussion. It’s not new to the human species either. For philosophy geeks like me, Plato talks about the Myth of Er in ‘The Republic’. Wiki has a pretty good overview if you are interested.
And if you are moved to find out more about Near Death Experiences (NDE’s), I think you would enjoy ‘After’ by Dr Bruce Greyson. Discussions about NDE’s were in early days a conversation (sometimes argument) about mind vs. brain. But as ‘After’ describes, for those of us who have had some experience of them, they are so much more than a medical/neuroscientific debate. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond.
thefutureisquantum 