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May 24, 2025 17 mins

Guest host Ryan Wrecker and author Sandra Champlain explore her research into near death experiences and life after death, the life changing stories of people who returned from death and became more compassionate, and her belief that our spirits stay connected to our loved ones beyond this earthly realm.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And I'm your host, Ryan Record filling in for George Norria.
Coast to Coast AM. Joining us this hour and next
is author and researcher Santra Champlain. She has a book.
You may have read it. It's an international bestseller, We
Don't Die, a skeptics discovery of life after Death. Do
I say good morning to you, Sandra? Do I say

(00:26):
happy nighttime hours with you? What's the best way to
address past?

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Now? All of the absove it is one eleven am
for me on the East coast in Ryan, I have
to say congratulations. I'm so excited for you and I'm
so thrilled to be part of this tonight.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Can I tell you a little behind the scenes of
what's going on. I've been in radio for I don't
know twenty years now, and I thought I'm never going
to get nervous. I've done so many different, weird and
wild things in radio that your nerves go away. But
as soon as the music kicked in at the top
of the show, instantly I felt the butterflies. Because Coast

(01:07):
to Coast AM is a nighttime institution. You think about
all the memories you have with our Bell and George Nori,
and all of it just floods right into the forefront
and all of a sudden, and that's you. The show
you listen to, you are on that show, and it
was just an amazing feeling. So thank you for the

(01:27):
kind word, Sandra. I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
You're welcome and keep it real. I'm gonna be up
for that. You're up for that. And people say that
nerves feel the same way as excitement, so I've got
the butterflies too, So we will just put it all
together as a ton of excitement.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
And this is one of my flaws as a broadcaster.
Sometimes my questions are a little blunt. But I'm just
gonna ask him anyway, because Okay, I'm curious, and I
think when it comes to the afterlife and the impressions
of it, a lot of people understand how Hollywood portrays it,
and a lot of people understand how fairy tales portray it.

(02:06):
And sometimes people have their own impressions without having their
own experience. And you're someone that has a before and
after experience, someone that has an understanding of it without
having an experience. Then you're someone that has an experience
and has a different understanding of it. So I want
to talk to you about the before. What was the
afterlife like to you, your impression of it prior to

(02:31):
having in experience, prior to now.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
I haven't had a near death experience, but I've had
a bunch of different things, And of course all the
research I've done well over twenty five years was beforehand.
I was raised Roman Catholic. We went to church every Sunday,
but personally I never found my own spirituality, so it
was just something good Catholics do, right, And I developed

(02:58):
a huge fear of dying that made me really start
questioning it. So I had a hope that the afterlife
was real and that there was a place called Heaven
and that we'd see our loved ones again. But I
had absolutely no evidence of that. And I don't know why, Ryan,

(03:23):
but it was somewhere in the mid nineties where all
of a sudden it hit me, you know, who am I?
What is my life about? What happens when we die?
Do we go on? And now I'm understanding it is
that ego mind that we all have that doesn't want
to die, but at the time, it was an incredible
fear of dying that my before story that got me

(03:47):
on this search. I couldn't even go to bed at
night without thinking what would happen if I died. You know,
anyone who's experienced fear, it's brutal, especially fear of dying.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Well, you searched and you wanted to learn more. It
was on your mind. Do you feel, as a Catholic
and someone that was searching that it could have been
a little divine intervention. You were praying in you wanted
to have this revealed to you, and then one day
you started to see some of it reveal to you.

(04:19):
You have your own personal experience.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
I don't think I ever prayed about it, I hope
because I didn't have that faith. I wish I did,
But growing up into a religion, it was just like,
you believe what you're told, and I think every human
being will have a time in their life and this
is good where we start looking for the truth. For me,

(04:47):
right now, looking back, I see absolutely it was divine
intervention because take someone who was a skeptic. Now, I
didn't believe in any of this world. Really, you know,
I wanted to believe. Like I said, I was raised Catholic,
but I didn't have that real belief. My parents both

(05:08):
great people, but we were raised you have to see
it to believe it. So now here I am, all
these years later. You pick somebody and we'll say this
was divine invention. You pick somebody who'd never really bought
into all this. You give her a huge fear of dying,

(05:29):
which forces her to go on a search for evidence
of the afterlife, and she tears through everything she can
find and has every personal experience she can find, and
then at one day it hits her through things I'll
tell you about tonight. And then I'm left with, Okay,
do I keep this to myself or do I share

(05:51):
it with other people? But the fear in me thought,
I'm going to lose friends and family members if they
find out I'm researching the paranormal in the afterlife, And
so I kept it quiet. And then divine intervention. Maybe
my dad gets sick with cancer and he dies and
the grief ripped apart the relationships with my siblings. We

(06:14):
hear about that often when a parent dies. I go
on a quest to understand what grief is, Why does
it have to hurt so bad? Why would good people
turn into such crazies and fight? And then I get
an understanding of what grief is. I find out our
biology changes and we have a loss of neurotransmitters and

(06:35):
all kinds of things. So I get answers for myself,
and then all of a sudden, I feel that I
have a moral responsibility to share these words. And looking back,
people came into my life at just the right time,
even meeting a publisher me pitching the story for my book.

(06:56):
I'd never written anything before talk about fear. Where I
am today not only having shades of the afterlife, but
my first podcast is still out there on YouTube called
We Don't Die, interviewing people about reasons to believe in
the afterlife. And so while I'm speaking with you right now, Ryan,

(07:19):
I have combined seven hundred and thirty one unique episodes
of reasons to believe in the afterlife, each with a
foundation of how to survive grief and that we are
so much more than our bodies, and how to live
a powerful life. So back then, if you were going

(07:40):
to ask me if it was divine intervention, I would
say no. Now, one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, it's such a strange thing that sometimes the right
thing happens at the right time, and that happens in
so many different people's lives. And then sometimes something can
change in you that you never thought would change, and
you realize that changes for the better. And there's other

(08:07):
things moving in this world that makes that happen, that
makes it more than a coincidence. And one of the
interesting things you said there, you see some of the
common trends when a loved one dies, a family member,
a parent, whatever it may be, that sometimes people grab
on to things like this as a coping mechanism, and

(08:27):
it's looked at in the way Hollywood looks at it.
So you're someone that wanted to hear stories and find evidence,
look at common trends, look at this in a scientific way.
Your approach to it's a little bit different, but it
also had some of the same byproducts of coping mechanisms
to try to help you get through some of these

(08:48):
tough times. That's what it sounds like.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yeah, absolutely true, and nothing against Hollywood, but they're trying
to sell movies right exactly good things there as well.
And I did approach it very you know, I was
a skeptic for sure. So I wanted the more credible evidence,
the verifiable evidence, But I also wanted my own experiences

(09:13):
because there's a lot of people that talk some great things,
but I think us human beings, when we can have
an experience of our own, we can't deny it.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
When you've interviewed a lot of people for your podcast,
but just in general, I know you've talked to a
lot of different people. What are some of the common
things that you start to hear some of the common
experiences that independently happen with different people, But as soon
as you hear someone mention it, you say, oh, yeah,
that's common. They don't know what's common. But what are

(09:48):
some of the things that you've noticed as common threads?

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Sure, well, we'll talk about near death experiences because that
is always a listener's favorite. A firm believer that our
consciousness survives death, and there's ways we can know that
and get into that, things like remote viewing and other things.
The commonalities that I hear, and it might be somebody's

(10:14):
first time sharing their near death experience, but there's things
like feeling a light, feeling a tunnel, this feeling often
of floating above the body, looking down, realizing, hey, I'm
that meat sack down there, going to the light, feeling

(10:39):
what they called the brightest light they've ever experienced, but
it doesn't burn the eyes, having three hundred and sixty
degree awareness, being greeted by the most incredible feeling of love,
unconditional love. They cannot even put it into words. Many

(10:59):
people experience Jesus. Some people describe someone who might look
like among children describe just this very bright sun with
a smile. No things like that. There have been atheists
who never believed who either will see a religious figure
or have that like a guide show up, something like that.

(11:21):
There's a life review. People get to experience in different ways.
I've heard different stories for this, segments of their life
and looking at their life not from an outsider's point
of view, but from an insider's point of view, but
not from your point of view. Ryan, It's from the
point of view of the people you impacted throughout your life.

(11:44):
It's not a make wrong situation. There's no judgment here,
but you look to see how your actions impacted other people.
So if you hurt someone's feelings, you'll feel that. So
one thing they do is they go through this rather
like the negative things are the things they could have
done better. And then they go through the life review

(12:08):
the ripple effect of their good actions, so they get
to see how far their words and their actions spread. Also,
they experience being with their loved ones very often after
meeting that guide or Jesus, whoever that might be, that light,

(12:29):
their pets, their relatives, they're all there to meet them.
You know, it's like crossing a finish line, and the
applause is there. Some people even say that there's a
parade for them. Everyone's looking healthy and well, there's a
beautiful reunion. And more often than not, obviously because people

(12:51):
come back it's a near death experience, they come back,
they feel hold to come back here too. My job
prior to COVID was I was a chef for race
car teams. That was my employment for over thirty years.
My mom and I owned a catering business, and one
of the race car drivers that I spoke with had

(13:13):
never shared his near death experience with anyone, but because
I had published the book, he thought he would tell
me that. He said he witnessed his mom and dad
and brother praying by his bedside. He had been in
a coma, and he also was with his grandparents who
were deceased in this most beautiful world, and he had

(13:35):
the choice go with Grandma and grandpa or stay on earth,
and he just saw the suffering of his family. He
decided to come back. But when he did, of course,
he awoke and his body was in a lot of
pain after being in a car crash. But having that experience,
he realized that we go on that if we don't

(13:55):
fear dying, we don't have to fear living. So I
won't mention his name, but he went on to be
a very successful, famous race car driver, and he told
me that he could put his foot on the pedal
as far as could be and race and you take
those corners real quickly, et cetera. Because he said it,

(14:16):
without the fear of dying, there is no fear of living.
And so my hope is through all these commonalities that
we don't have to have a near death experience because
ninety nine percent of the time they're very painful, but
we can learn these lessons about life and the afterlife
and how to live life and make a difference with others.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Well, Sandra, you mentioned the term meat sack. I don't
know if that's a technical term, but I think that
perhaps we should bring that into the medical world. I
like the way you said that is the opposite true
and near death experiences. Have you ever heard from people
who said, Okay, it wasn't light, it was something a
lot worse and I got to change my life.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yes, there are times where people And then there was
a doctor. I can't remember his name off the top
of my head. I know he's been on coast to coast,
but he said he was living all for money. He
had ten cars, a big mansion. He was an anesthesiologist,
and he said when he put people under, he said

(15:20):
he didn't care they were just yeah, neat sex. I
don't know where that came from. I just invented that tonight.
But anyways, when he had his near death experience, he
was I believe Hindu by faith, and his near death
experience was one of fear and terror. And he said

(15:41):
he'd really never found faith or really believed, but he
saw a pinprick of light and he decided to pray,
and he prayed and prayed, and the light bigger and bigger.
Jesus was there. Imagine that surprise, right, And he went
through his life life review and he had a total

(16:03):
one to eighty change of view of life. He came
back and instead of putting people to sleep as an anesthesiologist,
he chose to wake people up as to who we
really are. So these are transformative experiences that make people
have their life about being of service, about spreading the truth.

(16:25):
These people have no fear of death anymore. So there
are those stories even people who some people who have
tried to take their own lives that I've spoken to,
it was almost like a wake up call, having that
scary experience of it's not your time. You know, you
have a life to live. I don't personally believe or
buy into that there's a hell that we go to

(16:49):
and that we're judged if people believe in that, I
don't take away anybody's values or beliefs. This is just
for me personally. I believe the hardest place we're ever
going to have to live and deal with is right
here on earth. And as witness to what's going on
on this planet, you know this is hell, but there
can be those moments of heaven, and one hundred percent

(17:11):
I believe we close our eyes, we open them again,
and our loved ones are there, and we go on
and we see a bigger picture.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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dot com for more

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