July 1, 2025 • 57 mins
“I didn’t feel the van hit me. But I remember the voice. And then I was somewhere else.”
When Anne Bayford was struck by a van while crossing a London street, her body was left broken—but her spirit was transported into a realm of profound peace, radiant light, and unconditional love. In this episode of Alive Again, Anne shares the extraordinary story of her near-death experiences and the many lifetimes of insight these brought her.
But her NDE was only one chapter of a much deeper journey.
Anne’s story weaves through a childhood marked by poverty, abuse, racism, and trauma—experiences that would later shape her calling as a counselor, psychic medium, and trauma-informed healer. We talk about soul blueprints, the illusion of reality, and how near-death experiences can strip away ego and illusion to reveal something larger: empathy, purpose, and connection. Anne’s powerful wisdom—grounded in both personal survival and deep spiritual exploration—offers a reminder that even the darkest moments can become portals to transformation.
Story producer: Dan Bush.
For more about Anne and her work, you can visit her website, www.annebayford.com
Instagram:
Anne Bayford
YouTube channel
Anne Bayford
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I did not feel the van hitting me, but the
day I died in two thousand and two, that was
a day I actually woke up and realized why I
was here. By studying psychology and the brain, I'd never
believe such things as near death experiences. I always thought
it was the chemicals in the brain. When I look
back at my life and my journey, it's the violence
(00:37):
that I endured as a child and as a woman
as well. I can obviously say I don't see the
world as a dark place. I see the world as
having shadows. As a therapist, I see that everyone has
the possibility of changing. You've been given this opportunity to
experience something, and what is it I can learn from me?
(01:00):
What is it that is showing me the ego is
going to fight to the death for you to not change.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:30):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I was born in London. I was born into a
family where gosh, mother came from a very poor background.
Father his family's more academic, and my mother and father
nearly communicated. So there was already, you know, a break
in the relationship the way it was working. They were
(02:07):
unhappy from the moment I came in. When my mum
was pregnant. There was a lot of abusekin on there.
She wasn't very happy. I must have picked up on
the sensitive side of her how she was feeling, because
remember a pregnant woman, this is this catalyst, this holding space,
this baby and the research that's been done on babies
that are born into families that you're feeling it and
(02:29):
the mother. My mum was always anxious. My father had
loads of affairs and she was always wondering if he
was going to come home. I felt that that stress
growing up as a young child. He was a one
that when I was a baby used to feed me.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
We were very.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Close, so when he left. I felt abandoned, and then
my mom was on her own for a while. She
was a single parent. It was a hard time being
brought up. We'd go to bed feeling so hungry, and
my stomach would be in pain from where it was
twisting where it had no food before I went to bed.
(03:05):
The house that we lived in there was no central heating.
The wooden windows would shake with winds and there was
always a draft. And I remember going to bed there
was coats that were laying on top of our blankets
and our sheets, and I remember at one point we
had a carpet a rug that was laying on top
of the covers because it was so cold. You could
(03:25):
see your breath and you're breathing in and out. And
then she met my first stepdad and my second father,
and then we had a lot of wealth. We had
loads of houses in the countryside. We started fishing and
shooting and horse riding, and it was the other extreme,
and it was a different class. People spoke very differently,
(03:46):
they acted very differently. They were very professional, academically, very bright.
My second dad had his own business, but he was abusive,
sexually abused me as a child and trying to understand that.
As a child, you knew something didn't feel right, but
no one was going to listen. No one did listen
to what was happening. And I was about five years old.
(04:07):
Then I was running away from a very early age.
And I remember staying out one night, Ey slept on
the streets and I was saying, about seven years old,
I ran away. When I was finally found, I was
brought back and then I had said to her, you
(04:30):
knew what was going on. And then she asked me.
The adult woman asked a seven year old, do you
want me to leave him? You shouldn't be asking a child.
You should know this yourself. And then she met my
third dad, a Jamaican Rastafarian. Life changed. We lived in
a very white area and we'd walk down the road
(04:53):
with him. People were spitting our faces, call us loads
of names because you know, he's darker skin, he's JAMAI
What is he doing with these three white children and
this woman? You know? Going to a shop, he would
request to buy something and the person would ignore him
and then talk to us. We were just children and.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
It was tough.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
It was tough. He was a musician and times were hot.
Then he turned to alcohol and their relationship broke down,
and he was violent. He would beat my mom up.
He would beat me up. You know. There were periods
of times where he literally would kick me to the floor.
(05:34):
But at fifteen, I remember I could see him bashing
my mom's head against the wall and he had his
hand around her throat, and as a fifteen year old
thingling powerless, actually going to the kitchen to get the knife.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to protect my mom.
(05:55):
It was so much rage in my body and I
was just thinking he was going to kill her. So
I literally stabbed him in the army was bleeding, he
was in shock, and then I told him to leave.
Then he left. It still haunts me so leading up
(06:23):
to that day of my accident, I mean my thirties,
and it was the eleventh March two thousand and two,
and I was getting ready as usual. I have to confess,
when I look back, I always felt terribly guilty about
how I was on that morning. I'll never forget it.
You have the car, trying to get ready with two
children once five, one seven, dressing up in a suit,
(06:44):
trying to get ready, children, dogs, cats, running around the house,
against the time, thinking I needed to get into London.
I was screaming at the children. If I'd known that
was the last day of the old an maybe or
that was last time I may have seen the children,
I would have acted different. But as we know, that's
not how the world reworks. You know, they might be
(07:07):
looking at a flower and you go, no, come on,
you're pulling them and I've got time for this. You've
got to be late because of all the rules and
regulations we put in our head. School starts at this time.
You've got to be doing this. And you know, as
a mom, I'm trying to fit in. Didn't feel accepted
as a mom that was going to work. Other moms
we weren't working. I knew their judgment on me, and
I remember that the children wanted to be hugged and
(07:30):
my daughter need liked school she hates.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And I looking back the mom would I mean, ideally,
if the mum I had reached down and gave her
a cuddle and kids harry short of her, But of
course my mind was somewhere else. Again, I have to run,
and I have to get to work to earn some money,
and then just kissing her on the forehead and sort
of pushing her away, sort of no, you've got to
(07:55):
go in, You've got to do this.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
And my son also, he was only fun. There's little
shorts and pushing it and saying one, you've got to go,
little stick legs and seeing it and go. And you
don't realize at the time as a parent that those
are the special moments. Actually that's what they need to
for most. I was a volunteer coordinate for a charity.
(08:23):
So I helped sell a charity in London that looked
after the elderly. So and I loved the job. I
felt I was I did. I made a difference. I
set the charity up, we got it up and go
in and it seemed like a regular day at work
and I was happy being there. And I remember that
day before I left the office, I was thinking, right,
I need to post this letter, but also I need
(08:43):
to get ready to run to the station to pick
the kids up. And I was running everywhere my whole life.
You know, with the children, you're multitasking like an octopus
and you're trying to be parent, a partner and everything else.
And I think it was about I don't know, just
ten past two or something like that. In the off afternoon,
I was getting ready to go, and I remember saying
goodbye to everybody, and they're saying see you tomorrow. I'm like, yep.
(09:09):
It was sunny and it was cold as March one
hundred and one. Thing's going in my mind, what the
kid's gonna eat when I pick them up from school
and everything else. Shall I cross straight across the road
to post this letter in a letter box? Or shall
I turn at an angle to my right to go
to the newspaper shop to get a newspaper to read
on the train. I was still doing all this in
my head. I started crossing. I think there was five
(09:32):
other people around us at the time, so it was
all crossing together. There was a middle island and out
of habit I was looking both ways, and then I
heard a voice. It sounded familiar. Wasn't in my head,
It wasn't my subconscious mind talking to me. It was
(09:52):
literally that's the voice I heard. And I remember as
I turned the corner and I was like, ah, I
leave it to the universe. And I didn't believe any
of that stuff at the time, and I was like, oh,
I lived to the universe, and seeing you know what
I'm going to do, And then I heard it was
to go and get a newspaper, which didn't make sense
at the time, logical sense. Someone had pressed the button
(10:15):
and I remember there was a bleeping sound to say
that you could cross the road, and the green pedestrian
man came up on the sign and I did not
feel the van hitting me. I later found out that
because I had changed directions slightly, when the van hit
(10:38):
me on my left hand side, I bounced off of it.
The police reports said that if I had gone straight
across to post this letter would have been a logical
way of doing things. My head would have been severed,
my neck I would have gone through the windscreen because
the speed of the vehicle that was traveling in But
the moment I'd changed direction, I just I was somewhere else.
(11:04):
I felt warm, I felt this white light around me.
I didn't feel pain. I just felt calm, hea'ce fall.
But I just knew I was somewhere else because it
just felt it was like black and white. It was
just so different from soa the blackness of the reality
(11:27):
of what happened, to the whiteness of pure energy. I
just remembered feeling that it's like a white, like a
dovey of color of light that was hugging me and
holding my space. And I felt my name was holding
me and I she had passed when I was fifteen,
so I was about thay seven now, so that feeling
(11:48):
that tremendous amount of love. I remember looking down at everybody,
but I was feeling into everybody in the crowd that
was there. I was looking down, so I wasn't in
my physical body at all. I was looking down at
(12:08):
the road where I was laying, but I didn't know
that was my body at the time, and I could
feel everybody's energy. And I remember hearing but not from
my physical body because my body wasn't doing anything at
the time. It was dead. But I could hear people screaming.
I could hear people, you know, saying, oh my God,
(12:32):
call the ambulance, call the police whatever. My ex partner,
his uncle was there because they worked nearby, and I
saw his face in the crowd, and I remembered feeling, Wow,
why is he feeling so upset? I could feel into
his energy. He was devastating, he was in shock, and
I remember feeling his energy. But seeing him going very
(12:57):
gray in the face, very power. I could feel from
the crowd of individuals that I could sense and feel
the they were in shock and scared and they didn't
know what to do. All traffic was being held back.
There was a mini bus that had pulled out, and
(13:19):
on the minibus was the elderly from the community center
that were being picked up to be taken home. And
they all witnessed that I was in the road, that
I was dead, and they were in shock. So the
minibus just stopped across the road and no traffic was
moving on either side of the road. There was this
truck that was at the crossing on the other side
of the road. I don't know how, but I was
in the cab of this truck. It was like Casper
(13:43):
the Ghost. I was sitting in the truck with this guy,
and I could hear him swearing shant and saying, oh,
this silly woman. And he was using blue a language,
and that he was talking to his bus on his
phone saying that some woman's he's going to hold up
My time weren't inconvenient, because obviously he had his life
going on. But I remember sitting there and thinking, what
(14:06):
am I doing here in this cab or the truck,
listening to this man? What am I doing here? And
I was like, God, he's being so rude about that
person that's in the road, not known it was me.
But then the other part of me felt very warm
when else, somewhere else. Now, it was only when my
(14:30):
partner came down the road because he worked in the
shop nearby, when he bent over and placed his hand
on my head. That was only then when I felt
his hand on my head and listening to his internal
thoughts that were saying, how am I going to cope
bringing up Nathan and Rebecca? These were my children, not
(14:50):
oh Anne, I'm going to miss you. And I remember
to this day it was so clear, how am I
going to bring up Rebecca and Nathan? I felt his
feelings through his hand, and I was like, oh my god,
it's me. What am I doing laying here? I remember
(15:10):
feeling as if I was being pulled away from my body,
and I was saying, what about Rebecca? What about Nathan?
I can't leave them, I can't leave them. I want
to go back, I want to go back. I knew
I was away from my physical form. I felt so
far away they felt such a big distance, but where
I was, I felt this unconditional love that it felt
(15:35):
like home. I've never felt home in my life. I
felt I was being accepted for who I was, and
I was warm, and I was safe, and I was
just being shown loads of images and knowing that I
had to remember the information they were giving me that
they were showing me, seeing it for me my images
(15:59):
of my mind. Maybe that's what he created, but it
felt as if there was like I was in a
vast arena or a books, like a large library of information,
and it wasn't information just for me, but it was
information for everyone. It was like their blueprints are their
sole blueprints, the architecture of the structure of how they
were going to live life, and not in just in
(16:20):
this one life, in other dimensions, their past lives, their
future cells, different universes. It was blowing my mind. It
was really hard to understand what was going on. The
concept of being human and having this accident now and
then being there was like all this information was flooded
(16:40):
into my system. Just it was crazy. It was hard
for me to comprehend at the time. I just I
was in that space of all that information but at
the same time physically and who was dead in the road.
There was an ambulance coming. I could see the ambulance,
I could hear the sirens. I saw the paramedical rie.
I've been parked is motorbike down the road, but I
(17:03):
wasn't in my body. I was looking down at everybody.
There is somewhere else that we're connected to on a
soul level. I felt an unconditional love, and I know
(17:28):
as a pycond medium. You know when I've worked with people,
when I've worked in a hospice for a while, those
who are passing through that we have loved ones from
the other side, or some people want to you know,
angels that come forward and to take us. We're never alone.
The minute you're ready to vacate your physical vessel, you're
(17:48):
not alone. And it's not painful. It's just the physical
presence of you leaving your physical self through illness or
whatever it is. That's the plane of separation. But it's
there is no pain. Once you separate it, you know
there's a comfort of loved one stepping forward to assist you,
to take you through. I had my man who during
(18:13):
the accident, she was with me taking me through the
whole process and helping me through transition. But where I
was standing being aware of light beings. I call them
light beings because they had no physical self of what
they were presenting to me. It was an expansion of space.
And it might sound bizarre, but everything in the universe
(18:33):
was brought to the central point, as if like a
main train station. But it's not a train station, of course,
but this was the main hub that individual beings were
brought here to access information of their sole journey of
where they have lived life, how they have lived their life,
where they had lived, how they had lived, what their
(18:55):
sole journey was, what their purpose was. And I remember
all this information being flooded through my system. But it
was plans on me, my sole journey. It was plans
on why I was here, what was the structure of
my life, And it was just layers of myself in
this and then what I was going to go on
to do, like what my mission was, what my journey was,
(19:17):
why I was here, and it just made everything makes sense.
It was like a jigsaw pustle. Everything came into place.
I just answered a lot of questions of who I
was and why I'm here, and the explanation about reality,
how we see our reality, humans on planning Earth, and
(19:39):
what they think the reality is that a lot of
is an illusion. I didn't want to come back, and
I felt very guilty for saying that statement because I
had two children that I absolutely adored and loved, but
feeling that unconditional love, I didn't want to be separate
from it ever again. And I know now where souls
(20:02):
have that thing of unconditional love, call it God or
the divine or the universe. Why would I want to
be separate from that where you feel no pain. I
knew coming back as ann in my life, I was
going to experience great pain. My thought was nearly amputated.
I was disabled for four years. I had to learn
how to walk again. I didn't want to come back
(20:24):
because of my physical ailments, and plus, why would I
want to come back into a world that hated everyone.
Everyone hated each other and there was warm violence. I
wanted to go somewhere else where I could look down
at everything and not be connected to the pain and heartache.
(20:45):
I was aware of light beings. We might call them angels, guides,
or ascended masters. But I remember individual telling me why
I came here in the first place as a soul
to experience everything that I'm experiencing. That I had to
go back, whether I liked it or not, and that
(21:06):
this was just a wake cup call. Some people call
it spiritual awakening, that maybe they're not so harsh of
other people, but maybe I wasn't listening beforehand. I wasn't
brave enough to walk out of that relationship. I wasn't
brave enough to step into who I meant to be.
So I was told, I was instructed, you have to
go back. Your place isn't here yet, you need to
(21:28):
go back. So it was very strong. I had no choice.
It was only when they paddled my heart, when they
cut open my top, that the electric shop restarted my
heart again. When I came back to my body, I
felt this poor and I didn't want to go because
(21:50):
I remember holding out my hands. It is I say,
can I stay here, and trying to reach out to
hold their hands, and I came rushing back in, almost
like at a water theme park when you had those
slides that twist and turn and you come down like
a corkscuaw effect. I came rushing back in and it
felt like a tunnel coming in. I was leading the
(22:13):
white light. The energy felt quite dense. When I landed
back into my body, it felt like a fump back
into the density of the physical body. We are sensory beings.
We are meant to be feeling emotions, all the senses.
The physical pain. My ankle had been fractured. My foot
(22:35):
had seven brakes dislocated from my ankle. It ripped all
my tendons and muscles in my ankle. I had a
fractured to my kneecap. I fractured my right hand side
of my pelvis. I had internal bleeding from my spoon
and my kidneys. I fractured my ribs on both sides.
I was in pain and I was bleeding when they
(22:57):
got me into the ambulance. I remember several times left
my body. I could see looking down the number that
you have on top of the ambulance and the siren.
I could hear the siren from outside of my body.
When I went into a and E, I remember again
I wasn't in my physical body because it felt safer
(23:18):
to come out of the body to look down at
the body. There was a crash tree that was working
on the top part of my body. There was a
neck brace that was put on because I thought I
had broken my back. There was a crash team working
on the middle part of my tours and a crash
tune working on the lower part. Teams that were putting
needles into me, drips, scans, X rays, and I could
(23:41):
feel every person's fear that I was going to die.
I was bleeding internally. There was no way they could
stop the bleeding. And then I remember coming round in
the intensive care unit where the nurse had said several
times we could see your hand was moving if you
were holding onto someone's hand. And I said to them
(24:03):
when I came round, where is my nan? And they said,
there's nobody here, but they would have been physically impossible
for my nun to be there. But in spirit, my
nan was holding my hand all the way through this
whole process. I knew I was safe. I knew I
was okay.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
She was with me.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
With the accident. It really became like a catalyst for me.
It made me start looking at life in a really
different way. My physical body was just shattered and broken
in so many places, you know, God bladder was removed
and everything. I was this woman with two children, unhappy,
and I was now disabled, coming home from a hospital,
(24:50):
not being able to go upstairs, go to the bathroom downstairs.
Everything that i'd had clour, independent strength as a woman,
as a mother was stripped back from me. I had
to rely upon, really sort of fell upon my seven
year old who had to help get me close to
the commode and empty the commode at the end of
the day. So I'd lost everything, all my independence. I
(25:14):
was reliant upon everybody, my daughter saying, she can hear you,
she's just disabled. She can't use her legs at the moment,
being discriminated because I was disabled. So I was stripped
back of everything, everything that I'd looked like beforehand, you know, suit,
immaculate hair, high heeled shoes. That was the toe opposite
(25:34):
from how I looked whoever I was before the accident.
I was never going to step back into those same
shoes ever again. I was literally a different person, so
having to discover me again, it was a long process.
I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress as not only
going through the accident once, it was repeatedly happening for years.
(25:57):
With the post traumatic stress, every time I heard a
car of the flashbacks, I was reliving there constantly for
a couple of years, learning to rewalk. You know, we
take for granted the fact or being able to put
one foot in front of the other, or even to
(26:17):
find out balance. And you know, I was told I'd
never walk again. I was told my foot was gonna
be amputated. I had to learn to work with all
my injuries, and I was becoming more aware of my
own inner strength. But it was getting back on my
feet again and learning to walk was the other near
death experiences that really opened up the fact that there
(26:39):
is more been into science myself by studying psychology and
the brain. I'd never believe such things as near death experiences.
I always thought it was the chemicals in the brain.
I went to speak to the reverend of the church
that was taking the children to on Sundays. He was
a doctor by perfect yet then he was the reverend,
(27:01):
he was the vicar. And when I said to him,
I'd had this experience that I saw these beings around me,
and he said, well, we don't believe in that. I thought, well,
where do I turn to? And I felt I was
going mad and crazy and again, and I didn't feel right.
I knew I wasn't going crazy what I witnessed. I
witnessed light beings for crown out loud, and I never
believed in it. Before we had somebody that was homeless,
(27:25):
that was living in the doorway. It was snowing, and
I said, can we not open the church so that
he can sleep here, you know, on the seats, and
he said he might steal something, and I was like,
oh my god, are you serious. That is not what
I stand for. And I really stepped away from church
and religion, even though I talk about the universe and spirituality,
(27:47):
which I hate that word in but I know there's
more than what we see before us, and it's still
that searching of connecting to what that more is. Having
other near death experiences being stopped in my track, I
started to realize that I was here for another reason,
there was another purpose, because each near death experience opened
(28:08):
up another doorway unlocked information for me that I started
realizing there was more to light than what we see,
or we took a long time to accept. I didn't
accept straight away. I was that the science mind was
like interested. I knew it'd had the first new death
experience the car twenty something years ago, I'd been to
the Colors Cycic Studies because I couldn't find any information
(28:30):
at the church had turned me away and said you're crazy,
you can't be believe in this and this doesn't really happen.
So I was like, well, I need to see coup
more information. So I started googling. When on the web
founder close Circuic Studies in South Kensington and I remember
going to the first course. I was looking at different courses.
I was like, no, I don't like taro that's not
(28:50):
my thing, don't I don't want to use in tarot cards.
I don't really interest in crystals. What's that all about?
That doesn't that doesn't do anything for me. I don't
want to be a psychic reading. What the hell's that?
I'd only talked to dead people and I was like,
I didn't believe it in the first place. But I
felt at home. There are other light minded people that
were coming together, you know. It was that community of
(29:11):
other people also looking for there is more to life
than what we're aware of. It wasn't religious. It was
outside of the church and they had the same opinion
that they had spoken to, you know, their religious sectors
or wherever they were brought up and it didn't fit
for them anymore. They had had incidents that happened, and
they believed there must be something Kulsk. I remember the
(29:32):
very first time I was in the audience watching a
very famous medium and there was eighty people in this room.
I was chewing gum, I had my white shirt on.
I was with one of my best friends. I was
sitting there listening to this conversation, and then all of
a sudden, he then says you, and I said, I
(29:57):
didn't know who was pointing to. He was pointing to me.
I was in the audience a people and terror said, yeah,
you one day you're going to work here. And I
was laughing and I was like, you can't be talking
to me. And I turned around to the side to
the left behind me said you the one that's turning
around blowing bubbles and chewing chewing gum. And I stopped chewing.
Two girls. That's how I was at school, you see,
being dyslexic. I was, you know, I was the clown
(30:19):
of the class. And I was like, yeah, I was
very creative, daydream and stuff. And I was like, yeah,
this is a load of rubbish. Actually, I went to
the college to disprove this, if anything, and then he
turned and said, one day you're going to work here
and I was like, yeah, right, I am and he said, no,
you're going to play an important part here. Yeah, of
course I am. And then the first workshop I did,
a well known medium came up to me and he
(30:40):
said to me the workshop, I said, oh, you need
to go into my advance class. And I went, what,
I don't believe in this stuff. I'm just getting this information.
I don't know where it's coming from. And he said, no,
you're a medium. You're a natural medium. And I was like,
I want to be a medium, and he knew, but
I didn't, and I was judging myself and I was like,
I don't want to be a medium one medium. I'm
(31:00):
a counselor. I like my job. I'm working now doing this.
I'm happy, Thank you very much. Why do I give
up my job? You know, I'm respected. I had let
us after my name. So it was that journey of
disproving it that I actually believed in it now. And
it went through that and then the work that I
do now. When I had my stroke two years ago,
(31:23):
my seizure, my brain bleed. I fell down the stairs.
I collapsed, I broke my neck. Took fourteen weeks to
learn to talk, to walk, to speak, to know that
I was hungry, to know that I needed to go
to the bathroom. The scan showed up I had a
massive a brain blead that should have killed me, but
instead it took me out. In a sense of all
(31:45):
my professional experience, I knew to get back to being me,
I needed to find all my inner strength. Having your
adult children they were twenty six and twenty eight at
the time, telling you, Mum, it's time to eat now. Mum,
you've got a swallow. Mum, you're dribbling. Mum, No that's
my name. No, you've got the wrong name, and stuttering,
(32:09):
couldn't draw a sentence together, learning to rewalk because I
was dragging my foot, I couldn't find my balance, my
daughter pulling down my pants so I can go to toilet,
professional saying I wasn't going to get back to normality,
And then I knew I needed to get back to
normality of some sort. So I learned Italian because I
knew it's going to stimulate one part of the brain.
(32:30):
I went roller skating. I didn't remember. I knew how
to skate until that day, had gotten the skates, but
I was on these skates and I was with this person.
They said, I thought you didn't know how to skate.
But when the music took over from the eighties, I'm
a fifty five year old woman. The eighties music played.
I think it was Duranda Ran or something, and I
stayed then singing to the tune. There was a live DJ.
(32:53):
Next minute, I know, I'm skating backwards, doing jumps, skating
very fast, doing turns. I mean, I remembered because obviously
parts of my brain had gone the memory, but I
remember I used to play roller hockey when I was
a kid, back in the day, when I was about sixteen.
So yeah, I discovered skills with the experience of going
(33:14):
through that seizure. You know, my neck fixed, my vertebrain fixed.
I mean, come on, broken back broken note yeh, Spike's
all good. It fixed itself. The body is amazing. It
can heal itself, and so she can hear from today,
my voice is back. I then started seeing the world
slightly different, and this is when it goes a little
(33:36):
bit woo woo for being a counselor to then be
in a psychic medium through the whole journey, and then
this last experience of me having the seizure and the
brain bleeds and trying to recover from that. I noticed them,
but through my madative state, I don't need drugs that
some people would use, mushrooms or whatever, these psychodics, whatever
(33:58):
they would have used. But yeah, yes, I can go
to the other side come back. My media ship skills
is very different now understanding the sole energy because the
information I had downloaded. So now it's like when I
sit in trance, it feels as if there's a tiny
little funnel at the top of my head that's receiving
all the energies of all those in like counselor, like
(34:18):
hundreds of individuals of you know, ascended masters and those
who have been on the planet before. But yeah, I
know it sounds a bit strange. Obviously everything it's confidential.
But I have doctor's psychiatrists, I have the police. I
have different governments that come to me for the information
I can give them because it's no this is written
(34:40):
down anywhere, but I will bring it back from them.
All I'm doing. It's like an aerial is tapping into
that energy. That's all I'm doing. And from everything that's
happened to me, from all the you know, accidents, the
need of experiences, it's just shown me, actually, we all
can do this, and that's the idea. This is what
I want to show people. You all can connect to it.
It's just the dogma of your mind or what you
(35:03):
think you can't connect to, the ego, not wanting to
lose the ego. The ego is going to fight to
the death for you to not change. That was me.
I had to change. I couldn't live life the way
i'd lived life before. And each new death experience will
show me actually, each time you're transforming, you're changing. You're
shifting out of who you thought you were. Every day
(35:25):
when I died, and I never felt unconditional love at all.
If you think about unconditional love, being a good daughter,
being a good mother, being a good partner, being a
good teacher, being a good student. We're always told that
we have to be something else that which we may
not be, and never had unconditional love. That is what's
there on the other side. Because the unconditional love, that's
(35:46):
what's there in the universe is the unconditional love doesn't
judge you, doesn't see your color of your skin, doesn't
see your gender. It feels into your soul and your
heart accepts you for who you are. I feel that
from the moment we're born, we're putting to boxes our backgrounds,
our class, our color, our religion, everything education. From the
(36:09):
moment we're born, the day that's collected on us, the
what we go through, how people might perceive us, and
if anything, it's about bringing people together and not to
judge you. If we could actually see each other, it
doesn't matter about your race, religion, the money, nothing at all.
If you should see you as an individual person and
stop living up to what you think you should be
(36:31):
and just actually focusing on what the skills you have
as an individual person, I think that would help. If
you look at the walls and everything we go through,
why they are created is to segregate us. Actually we
should be looking at bringing us all together. Me as
a child, you know, brought up by my dad who
studies Buddhism, brought up by my second dad, he's a Catholic,
(36:54):
brother by my third dad is Rastafarian. I ended up
being with a partner who is Jewish. His mother's are quake.
I just sent my children to a Christian school. I
lived in a very Islamic area and then lived in
a Hindu area. At the end of the day, and
I looked at it, the segregation that I had at church.
When I said to my vicary in my church, a
Christian Church of England school, that said to me, you
(37:15):
shouldn't have had that experience. We don't believe that you
had that out of body experience. And I'm like, what
explains to me what I experience. I had to go
searching myself to find out what happened during my near
death experience.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Why actually happened.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It's like, at the end of the day, if you
fall over when someone comes to pickyo, it doesn't matter
what race, religion, gender, whatever it is, it shouldn't come
from that. That's where the segregation is. We have to
learn to be ourselves and found the empowerment within ourselves.
When I look back at my life and my journey,
(37:51):
there is so much more. There's so much more of
the violence that I endured as a child and as
a woman as well. I can obviously say I don't
see the world as a dark place I see the
world as having shadows, as in individuals having problems, and
that's why I became a counselor. I know from many
(38:12):
of my experiences what I've gone through as a therapist,
I see that everyone has the possibility of changing and learning.
Some people just don't have an understanding of who they are.
And you know, even today as a therapist the work
that I do, and believe me, I work on murder
cases with the police, and I see that darker side
(38:32):
of life, but I also have an understanding of what
may have brought that individual to have committed that crime,
which is not forgiving them or justifying it at all,
but it's I think in a world that we live in,
my honest belief is like having an understanding of each
other and to give each other some space. You've been
(38:53):
given this opportunity to experience something, and what is it
I can learn from it? What is it that is
showing me now? Like when I look back everything I've
gone through, I know where I'd been, I know my journey.
But then it helps me to connect to others they
walked on that pathway. I can sit here and talk
(39:15):
to a mother and help her hold that space that
comes to me that's had a miscarriage. I can speak
to that woman's got postingal depression, that can't place that
baby on her breast because she'd been sexually abused. Because
of my journey for me, I know why I'm here.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I know that I had to.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Endure all that sexual abuse. I had to endure that
being aware of drugs as a child growing up, and
alcoholics and dysfunctional backgrounds. I knew that I needed to
go through that so that I have an understanding for others,
but not only that. In my clients, help them to
see that what happened to them actually is making them
stronger or having a greater understanding of themselves or how
(39:55):
strong they can be when I look back now, my
superpower is the fact that I got through all of
that and humanity. Whatever you go through, the walls, the rape,
the mergers, whatever it is in each of us, when
you know yourself better that you can actually get through it,
don't give your power away to others that for whatever reason, political,
(40:17):
whatever religious or whatever, you can have connection to you.
And of course I'm going to talk about energy because
that's the work I do through my accident of dying
several times, and everything has happened to me. It's giving
me a great understanding there is unconditional love out there.
When I connect the universe, that unconditional love connects you.
(40:37):
It connects you to your high self, and you understand
that you have your superpower. Look at it from a
three hundred or sixty degree perspective. Feel into the emotions
of how you're feeling about when something's happened. Also to
be reflective and to look at how it's changed our
life and what power it is that you've got it,
Not to see as a defect or from a negative perspective,
(41:00):
like actually teaching you. What did it show you? It's
made me stronger. When you see a child fall over,
if you keep picking that child up, my child will
never learn to stand on its own tooth thie. It
won't realize actually the strength and its muscles. It'll fall
to the left, it fall to the right. It has
to find its own strength. And I would not change
(41:20):
a single thing. I can tell you very clearly hand
on my heart. I would not go back. I needed
to go for everything I went to so that I
can do what I do now.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Welcome back. This is alive. Again joining me for a
conversation about today's story are my other Alive against story
producers Keith Sweeney, Nicholas Tukowski, Brent Dye, and I'm your
host Dan Bush. And Bayford refirst to herself as a
reluctant medium. But in the end, she after all of
these horrific things, and not just the near death experiences,
(42:13):
she had all these traumatic experiences growing up. And I
think that's really the heart of what I gleaned from hers.
She came out of it, all of these traumatic experiences,
sexual abuse, you know, violence, extreme poverty, and she came
out of the other side of that with an optimism
(42:34):
and a sense of compassion. And she says, you know,
I don't think the world is a bad place. I
think like you do. She says, I don't think the
world's a bad place. I think there are shadows. And
so she through three different near death experiences and through
(42:57):
her having to completely rehabilitate, rehability herself not only physically,
but also rebuild her mind and her neuro connections on
multiple occasions throughout her life, and having survived all of
this trauma early in her childhood, she walks away with
this idea that she wouldn't trade it for the world.
She would never go back. And Adam says that too.
(43:18):
Adam Tapp says that, and Peter Panagor says that, and
Eric Larson says that, and so many of these stories
that we hear. You ask them if they would trade it,
and they say no, absolutely not be.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
Away after hearing what her childhood had been like right.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
Yea, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Right, but she walks away and she says, no, I
wouln't trade it at all because from her perspective, the
near death experiences taught her that the point of all
this living that we do is adversity that you can't grow.
And so she's doesn't see any victim hood like she
(44:01):
doesn't look around and see victim She sees people with
opportunities to grow.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
And I thought that that was.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
That was my takeaway from her story that I thought
was very moving and also in concert with a lot
of these other stories we're hearing.
Speaker 6 (44:13):
And I completely agree with that. I mean, I do
believe that nobody is beyond hope completely, and I also
don't believe that the world is truly terrible. I believe
that like humanity wants to be good and is frequently
led astray by our basest instincts. I do want to
make that clear, but I think that, like I think
(44:34):
that what did touch me about her story was kind
of cutting through that and like this understanding that there
is basic decency in humanity and that everybody has an
opportunity to fulfill that fulfill their purpose, which I believe.
I just think that we're not inclined to most of
the time. What is the last line in a good
(44:58):
man is hard to find as at it.
Speaker 7 (45:00):
There's a cheerful one that she's she's a bright outlook on.
Speaker 6 (45:04):
Yeah, but if somebody was there to shoot her in
the head every day of her life, yeah.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
Which is why we need the trauma.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
I think that, like I think that if we experience
something that is humbling and terrifying, we are more likely
to follow the good.
Speaker 8 (45:24):
I think.
Speaker 6 (45:26):
Because we we sort of understand what it is to
be to be like laid low, so when we see
other people in similar circumstances, we feel more inclined to help.
And I think that, like I think it's just a
matter of basic empathy. I think that some people like.
Speaker 5 (45:40):
Having a crappy job, like having when you're younger, and
then you understand we don't treat people like this, right.
Speaker 6 (45:45):
Everybody should wait table, so we're nice to waiters exactly.
Like that's that's just you know, the way of it.
And I just think that unfortunately, a lot of humanity
requires that experience in order to fully understand, and a
lot of people just don't ever get that. A lot
of people don't ever have to experience hardship, so they're
kind of crappy people.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Or not growing in some way, not evolving. So there's
two two elements to her thing. One is the actual
physical rehabilitation that she had to do, which she could
not have done unless she found some strength. So there's
the actual physical, you know, thing of having to dig down,
as another guest on our shows says, you know, for
(46:29):
some people, making breakfast in the morning is like climbing
Mount Everest, you know. But beyond that, she also looked
around and had and sort of gleaned this insight from
her experience of her near death experience and her out
of body experiences, where she realized the sort of the
(46:49):
function of trauma for the soul, whether you want to
go there, you know, in that belief or not. You know,
believe the same thing that she believes. It doesn't matter
because again she walked away with this understanding of like,
instead of looking at somebody who's been through horrible stuff
and thinking, oh, you're a victim, I feel so sorry
(47:10):
for you. It's not that she doesn't. She doesn't feel sympathy.
She may feel tremendous empathy, but she sees the potential
for strength and growth. And I think that that's extremely powerful.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
You know.
Speaker 5 (47:22):
I'll say that what stuck out for me, And I
always want to take care from going too far far
down the road of saying everybody should pick themselves up
by their bootstraps, because.
Speaker 7 (47:31):
Sometimes not everybody can do that.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
But would really, you know, stuck out for me with
her story or one thing that did is this idea
of unconditional love.
Speaker 7 (47:42):
You know, we've seen so many stories of folks who
had just really.
Speaker 5 (47:46):
Difficult experiences coming up and she's no exception here, right,
just never experienced unconditional love ever. And then when she's
having this near death experience, she says that, you know,
she could feel different people's thoughts as she saw herself
lying there in the street, and one of those people
was her Then partner who she realizes that he's just
(48:10):
really thinking, oh my god, I have to raise these
children by myself. But he is absolutely not concerned with
her apparent demise, and so he doesn't feel love for her,
and they end up, you know, not staying together after that.
Speaker 7 (48:25):
But and then later in the story she says.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
How she experienced that the fact that this unconditional love
doesn't see identity, this theme of how our it's our
identities that end up dividing us. And we see other
people talking about that as well in their stories. Just
this idea that it's like in identity is ego, and
(48:51):
that's where we get into trouble as humans again and
again and again.
Speaker 7 (48:55):
And when we can realize our.
Speaker 5 (48:58):
Commonness commonness that's or commonality, thank you, uh, that's when
we can move forward in a productive way.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
And that's why she's though she's a medium and though
she's extremely spiritual, she's not religious like at all, because
she sees religion as one of the main components of
that of that divis divisiveness to define yourself.
Speaker 5 (49:25):
Yeah, like, why are we getting caught up and arguing
in all these different things?
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Yeah, way we have to identify with this this one dogma. Yeah, yeah,
at the cost of you know, at the segregation of
something that where she sees a truly interconnected structure of
reality where everything sort of has there. There's there's a
there's a method to the madness of our trauma that
she sees. Whether you believe that or not, it does
(49:52):
ring true that without adversity, we don't grow right and
without that, we don't see it's harder to see compassion.
You have to find compassion. Yeah, So it's in with
my kids. It's like I'm you know that, I see
that so much every day of like I've got to
let them fall. I've got to let them you know,
(50:13):
Roman comes home from soccer camp and I can see
that he's got something going on. He's got a love
in the throat. I don't know if they teased him.
I don't know exactly what he was dealing with. Maybe
he was in a league that outside of his league,
and I just want to protect him, and I want to,
you know, go beat up the other kids, you know,
like knock their heads together like coconuts. And I told
I even told Roman, I was like, so the kids
laughed at you and fill down. He's like all of
(50:34):
them did, and I said, that's so strange, you know,
and they're all a little bit older than him, and
I said, you watch those this is probably all I
might not put this in the show, but he's like,
you watch those kids, the ones that were laughing at
you watch them have a complete meltdown the minute something
goes wrong, and you can just say, you know, just
stand up, roam and just say, you know, dude, bro,
you okay, yeah, like somebody had sault to you. Roman's
(50:56):
gotten to where he's like, dude, you're right. That's because
it just takes the wind out of their whole Absolutely well,
I am with you for to help you. But anyway,
he's I can't, you know, I want to just I
want to give him so much and I want to
arm him with everything he needs to to not have
that experience. But he has to have the experience to
have experience, and it hurts.
Speaker 7 (51:17):
It is so hard to watch.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Well.
Speaker 4 (51:19):
Kind of with that whole thing of identity separating us,
it also separates itself because, as she says, you know,
every day you're shifting and transforming who you are. And
I think it's important, I mean, it's important to have
your beliefs, and those beliefs are based on your life experiences,
and you've got to be true to what you're experiencing.
But you also have to have the freedom to just
(51:40):
your soul adjust yourself as you go through life and
acquire different experiences. And I think that's something I got
from her story. Every day she said, you're shifting and
transforming who you are.
Speaker 7 (51:49):
Oh my god, I love that. And because it's and
it's so difficult not to do that, not to cling
to what was?
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I think about that all the time, you know, as
I've had, you know, shifting career, shifting careers, and you know,
you read a lot of I'm at this point in
life where I'm reading a lot of articles about women
my age and we're sort of grappling with with getting.
Speaker 7 (52:12):
Older and and what the hell does that mean?
Speaker 5 (52:16):
And it's very difficult not to cling to a self
that that's gone now and to move forward.
Speaker 4 (52:23):
And yeah, well even when when good things are coming forward.
I remember when I was about to get married, mourning
the loss of my single self, when our first child
was being born, mourning the little time my wife and
I had together, just the two of us. When our
third child, our second child was born mourning the little
(52:45):
home that the three of us, and then you're given
this gift is pushing you forward. You're you're you're experiencing
new things. You forget about that. You know, you're almost
happy that that part of your life has moved on,
because there's but it's a it's a painful death that
you go through whenever you enter a new phase of
your life or encounter a new idea or have your
(53:07):
world shook up a bit.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
And it reminds me of the Hindu god Klli, you know,
who's depicted with a black face and a red tongue
and heads of all these you know, heads dangling from
her from chains, and she's depicted as this horrific, terrifying force.
But she's really a compared like the most compassionate, most
(53:32):
compassionate goddess, because she's freeing you of your ego. She's
she's just she's not taking your she's not just killing you.
She's killing your ego and freeing you from previous versions
of yourself so that you can continue to expand and grow.
Speaker 6 (53:44):
Yeah, blessed peace.
Speaker 5 (53:49):
Yeah, yeah, we see these ideas all over the place
in spirituality.
Speaker 7 (53:53):
That's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (53:56):
But again and again, another thing with Anne is you know,
she would not take back this experience, you know, and
as Adam Tapp said, everything has a cost, and if
the cost of this experience is some you know, some
new consciousness or sense of compassion, then hell yeah.
Speaker 4 (54:17):
Well yeah, your story with Menuel where he said he
had the best moment of his life in the midst
of his horrific near death experience.
Speaker 5 (54:25):
I found myself this. You know, this is a fairly
serious story. But there's that moment in which she's sort
of describing her searching period. She's trying to figure out
what's up, and she's looking things up online and she's
looking at near death experiences and she's like, crystals.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
No, what do we need, taro for?
Speaker 3 (54:43):
What do we need?
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Like? I love that.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, liked her skeptical sort of you know, she she
was reluctant and skeptical, and.
Speaker 6 (54:52):
She was like, what the hell you just you don't
made a lot of skeptical mediums.
Speaker 2 (54:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Next time on Alive again, we hear from Delaney tar,
a Parkland school shooting survivor. In the days following the shooting,
she and her friends founded the largest student run movement
in a generation and began the arduous task of growing
up quickly in the public eye.
Speaker 8 (55:18):
So it was February fourteenth, It was Valentine's Day. I
remember putting on my cute little romper that my mom
had bought me from Target. I had made bouquets for
all my friends. Towards the end of the school day,
we heard an alarm go off, and we had been
told in the months prior that there would be some
school shooter drills that we're going to be super realistic.
So we walked down this little stairwell. Halfway down the stairwell,
(55:42):
I started hearing screams.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren vogelbah music by Ben Lovett, Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Executive producers are Matthew Frederick and
Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.
Our studio engineers are Rima L. K Ali and Nomes Griffin.
(56:10):
Our editors are Dan Bush, gerharts Loovichka, Brent Die, and
Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm
your host, Dan Bush. Thanks to Anne Bafer for sharing
her story. For more about Ann and her work, you
can visit her website, Ann Bayford dot co dot uk.
That's a n N E b A y f o
(56:32):
r D dot co dot uk. Alive Again is a
production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you
have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love
to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again
project at gmail dot com. That's a l I V
(56:52):
e A g A I N P R O j
e c t at gmail dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I did not feel the van hitting me, but the
day I died in two thousand and two, that was
a day I actually woke up and realized why I
was here. By studying psychology and the brain, I'd never
believe such things as near death experiences. I always thought
it was the chemicals in the brain. When I look
back at my life and my journey, it's the violence
(00:37):
that I endured as a child and as a woman
as well. I can obviously say I don't see the
world as a dark place. I see the world as
having shadows. As a therapist, I see that everyone has
the possibility of changing. You've been given this opportunity to
experience something, and what is it I can learn from me?
(01:00):
What is it that is showing me the ego is
going to fight to the death for you to not change.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
(01:30):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I was born in London. I was born into a
family where gosh, mother came from a very poor background.
Father his family's more academic, and my mother and father
nearly communicated. So there was already, you know, a break
in the relationship the way it was working. They were
(02:07):
unhappy from the moment I came in. When my mum
was pregnant. There was a lot of abusekin on there.
She wasn't very happy. I must have picked up on
the sensitive side of her how she was feeling, because
remember a pregnant woman, this is this catalyst, this holding space,
this baby and the research that's been done on babies
that are born into families that you're feeling it and
(02:29):
the mother. My mum was always anxious. My father had
loads of affairs and she was always wondering if he
was going to come home. I felt that that stress
growing up as a young child. He was a one
that when I was a baby used to feed me.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
We were very.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Close, so when he left. I felt abandoned, and then
my mom was on her own for a while. She
was a single parent. It was a hard time being
brought up. We'd go to bed feeling so hungry, and
my stomach would be in pain from where it was
twisting where it had no food before I went to bed.
(03:05):
The house that we lived in there was no central heating.
The wooden windows would shake with winds and there was
always a draft. And I remember going to bed there
was coats that were laying on top of our blankets
and our sheets, and I remember at one point we
had a carpet a rug that was laying on top
of the covers because it was so cold. You could
(03:25):
see your breath and you're breathing in and out. And
then she met my first stepdad and my second father,
and then we had a lot of wealth. We had
loads of houses in the countryside. We started fishing and
shooting and horse riding, and it was the other extreme,
and it was a different class. People spoke very differently,
(03:46):
they acted very differently. They were very professional, academically, very bright.
My second dad had his own business, but he was abusive,
sexually abused me as a child and trying to understand that.
As a child, you knew something didn't feel right, but
no one was going to listen. No one did listen
to what was happening. And I was about five years old.
(04:07):
Then I was running away from a very early age.
And I remember staying out one night, Ey slept on
the streets and I was saying, about seven years old,
I ran away. When I was finally found, I was
brought back and then I had said to her, you
(04:30):
knew what was going on. And then she asked me.
The adult woman asked a seven year old, do you
want me to leave him? You shouldn't be asking a child.
You should know this yourself. And then she met my
third dad, a Jamaican Rastafarian. Life changed. We lived in
a very white area and we'd walk down the road
(04:53):
with him. People were spitting our faces, call us loads
of names because you know, he's darker skin, he's JAMAI
What is he doing with these three white children and
this woman? You know? Going to a shop, he would
request to buy something and the person would ignore him
and then talk to us. We were just children and.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
It was tough.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
It was tough. He was a musician and times were hot.
Then he turned to alcohol and their relationship broke down,
and he was violent. He would beat my mom up.
He would beat me up. You know. There were periods
of times where he literally would kick me to the floor.
(05:34):
But at fifteen, I remember I could see him bashing
my mom's head against the wall and he had his
hand around her throat, and as a fifteen year old
thingling powerless, actually going to the kitchen to get the knife.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to protect my mom.
(05:55):
It was so much rage in my body and I
was just thinking he was going to kill her. So
I literally stabbed him in the army was bleeding, he
was in shock, and then I told him to leave.
Then he left. It still haunts me so leading up
(06:23):
to that day of my accident, I mean my thirties,
and it was the eleventh March two thousand and two,
and I was getting ready as usual. I have to confess,
when I look back, I always felt terribly guilty about
how I was on that morning. I'll never forget it.
You have the car, trying to get ready with two
children once five, one seven, dressing up in a suit,
(06:44):
trying to get ready, children, dogs, cats, running around the house,
against the time, thinking I needed to get into London.
I was screaming at the children. If I'd known that
was the last day of the old an maybe or
that was last time I may have seen the children,
I would have acted different. But as we know, that's
not how the world reworks. You know, they might be
(07:07):
looking at a flower and you go, no, come on,
you're pulling them and I've got time for this. You've
got to be late because of all the rules and
regulations we put in our head. School starts at this time.
You've got to be doing this. And you know, as
a mom, I'm trying to fit in. Didn't feel accepted
as a mom that was going to work. Other moms
we weren't working. I knew their judgment on me, and
I remember that the children wanted to be hugged and
(07:30):
my daughter need liked school she hates.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And I looking back the mom would I mean, ideally,
if the mum I had reached down and gave her
a cuddle and kids harry short of her, But of
course my mind was somewhere else. Again, I have to run,
and I have to get to work to earn some money,
and then just kissing her on the forehead and sort
of pushing her away, sort of no, you've got to
(07:55):
go in, You've got to do this.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
And my son also, he was only fun. There's little
shorts and pushing it and saying one, you've got to go,
little stick legs and seeing it and go. And you
don't realize at the time as a parent that those
are the special moments. Actually that's what they need to
for most. I was a volunteer coordinate for a charity.
(08:23):
So I helped sell a charity in London that looked
after the elderly. So and I loved the job. I
felt I was I did. I made a difference. I
set the charity up, we got it up and go
in and it seemed like a regular day at work
and I was happy being there. And I remember that
day before I left the office, I was thinking, right,
I need to post this letter, but also I need
(08:43):
to get ready to run to the station to pick
the kids up. And I was running everywhere my whole life.
You know, with the children, you're multitasking like an octopus
and you're trying to be parent, a partner and everything else.
And I think it was about I don't know, just
ten past two or something like that. In the off afternoon,
I was getting ready to go, and I remember saying
goodbye to everybody, and they're saying see you tomorrow. I'm like, yep.
(09:09):
It was sunny and it was cold as March one
hundred and one. Thing's going in my mind, what the
kid's gonna eat when I pick them up from school
and everything else. Shall I cross straight across the road
to post this letter in a letter box? Or shall
I turn at an angle to my right to go
to the newspaper shop to get a newspaper to read
on the train. I was still doing all this in
my head. I started crossing. I think there was five
(09:32):
other people around us at the time, so it was
all crossing together. There was a middle island and out
of habit I was looking both ways, and then I
heard a voice. It sounded familiar. Wasn't in my head,
It wasn't my subconscious mind talking to me. It was
(09:52):
literally that's the voice I heard. And I remember as
I turned the corner and I was like, ah, I
leave it to the universe. And I didn't believe any
of that stuff at the time, and I was like, oh,
I lived to the universe, and seeing you know what
I'm going to do, And then I heard it was
to go and get a newspaper, which didn't make sense
at the time, logical sense. Someone had pressed the button
(10:15):
and I remember there was a bleeping sound to say
that you could cross the road, and the green pedestrian
man came up on the sign and I did not
feel the van hitting me. I later found out that
because I had changed directions slightly, when the van hit
(10:38):
me on my left hand side, I bounced off of it.
The police reports said that if I had gone straight
across to post this letter would have been a logical
way of doing things. My head would have been severed,
my neck I would have gone through the windscreen because
the speed of the vehicle that was traveling in But
the moment I'd changed direction, I just I was somewhere else.
(11:04):
I felt warm, I felt this white light around me.
I didn't feel pain. I just felt calm, hea'ce fall.
But I just knew I was somewhere else because it
just felt it was like black and white. It was
just so different from soa the blackness of the reality
(11:27):
of what happened, to the whiteness of pure energy. I
just remembered feeling that it's like a white, like a
dovey of color of light that was hugging me and
holding my space. And I felt my name was holding
me and I she had passed when I was fifteen,
so I was about thay seven now, so that feeling
(11:48):
that tremendous amount of love. I remember looking down at everybody,
but I was feeling into everybody in the crowd that
was there. I was looking down, so I wasn't in
my physical body at all. I was looking down at
(12:08):
the road where I was laying, but I didn't know
that was my body at the time, and I could
feel everybody's energy. And I remember hearing but not from
my physical body because my body wasn't doing anything at
the time. It was dead. But I could hear people screaming.
I could hear people, you know, saying, oh my God,
(12:32):
call the ambulance, call the police whatever. My ex partner,
his uncle was there because they worked nearby, and I
saw his face in the crowd, and I remembered feeling, Wow,
why is he feeling so upset? I could feel into
his energy. He was devastating, he was in shock, and
I remember feeling his energy. But seeing him going very
(12:57):
gray in the face, very power. I could feel from
the crowd of individuals that I could sense and feel
the they were in shock and scared and they didn't
know what to do. All traffic was being held back.
There was a mini bus that had pulled out, and
(13:19):
on the minibus was the elderly from the community center
that were being picked up to be taken home. And
they all witnessed that I was in the road, that
I was dead, and they were in shock. So the
minibus just stopped across the road and no traffic was
moving on either side of the road. There was this
truck that was at the crossing on the other side
of the road. I don't know how, but I was
in the cab of this truck. It was like Casper
(13:43):
the Ghost. I was sitting in the truck with this guy,
and I could hear him swearing shant and saying, oh,
this silly woman. And he was using blue a language,
and that he was talking to his bus on his
phone saying that some woman's he's going to hold up
My time weren't inconvenient, because obviously he had his life
going on. But I remember sitting there and thinking, what
(14:06):
am I doing here in this cab or the truck,
listening to this man? What am I doing here? And
I was like, God, he's being so rude about that
person that's in the road, not known it was me.
But then the other part of me felt very warm
when else, somewhere else. Now, it was only when my
(14:30):
partner came down the road because he worked in the
shop nearby, when he bent over and placed his hand
on my head. That was only then when I felt
his hand on my head and listening to his internal
thoughts that were saying, how am I going to cope
bringing up Nathan and Rebecca? These were my children, not
(14:50):
oh Anne, I'm going to miss you. And I remember
to this day it was so clear, how am I
going to bring up Rebecca and Nathan? I felt his
feelings through his hand, and I was like, oh my god,
it's me. What am I doing laying here? I remember
(15:10):
feeling as if I was being pulled away from my body,
and I was saying, what about Rebecca? What about Nathan?
I can't leave them, I can't leave them. I want
to go back, I want to go back. I knew
I was away from my physical form. I felt so
far away they felt such a big distance, but where
I was, I felt this unconditional love that it felt
(15:35):
like home. I've never felt home in my life. I
felt I was being accepted for who I was, and
I was warm, and I was safe, and I was
just being shown loads of images and knowing that I
had to remember the information they were giving me that
they were showing me, seeing it for me my images
(15:59):
of my mind. Maybe that's what he created, but it
felt as if there was like I was in a
vast arena or a books, like a large library of information,
and it wasn't information just for me, but it was
information for everyone. It was like their blueprints are their
sole blueprints, the architecture of the structure of how they
were going to live life, and not in just in
(16:20):
this one life, in other dimensions, their past lives, their
future cells, different universes. It was blowing my mind. It
was really hard to understand what was going on. The
concept of being human and having this accident now and
then being there was like all this information was flooded
(16:40):
into my system. Just it was crazy. It was hard
for me to comprehend at the time. I just I
was in that space of all that information but at
the same time physically and who was dead in the road.
There was an ambulance coming. I could see the ambulance,
I could hear the sirens. I saw the paramedical rie.
I've been parked is motorbike down the road, but I
(17:03):
wasn't in my body. I was looking down at everybody.
There is somewhere else that we're connected to on a
soul level. I felt an unconditional love, and I know
(17:28):
as a pycond medium. You know when I've worked with people,
when I've worked in a hospice for a while, those
who are passing through that we have loved ones from
the other side, or some people want to you know,
angels that come forward and to take us. We're never alone.
The minute you're ready to vacate your physical vessel, you're
(17:48):
not alone. And it's not painful. It's just the physical
presence of you leaving your physical self through illness or
whatever it is. That's the plane of separation. But it's
there is no pain. Once you separate it, you know
there's a comfort of loved one stepping forward to assist you,
to take you through. I had my man who during
(18:13):
the accident, she was with me taking me through the
whole process and helping me through transition. But where I
was standing being aware of light beings. I call them
light beings because they had no physical self of what
they were presenting to me. It was an expansion of space.
And it might sound bizarre, but everything in the universe
(18:33):
was brought to the central point, as if like a
main train station. But it's not a train station, of course,
but this was the main hub that individual beings were
brought here to access information of their sole journey of
where they have lived life, how they have lived their life,
where they had lived, how they had lived, what their
(18:55):
sole journey was, what their purpose was. And I remember
all this information being flooded through my system. But it
was plans on me, my sole journey. It was plans
on why I was here, what was the structure of
my life, And it was just layers of myself in
this and then what I was going to go on
to do, like what my mission was, what my journey was,
(19:17):
why I was here, and it just made everything makes sense.
It was like a jigsaw pustle. Everything came into place.
I just answered a lot of questions of who I
was and why I'm here, and the explanation about reality,
how we see our reality, humans on planning Earth, and
(19:39):
what they think the reality is that a lot of
is an illusion. I didn't want to come back, and
I felt very guilty for saying that statement because I
had two children that I absolutely adored and loved, but
feeling that unconditional love, I didn't want to be separate
from it ever again. And I know now where souls
(20:02):
have that thing of unconditional love, call it God or
the divine or the universe. Why would I want to
be separate from that where you feel no pain. I
knew coming back as ann in my life, I was
going to experience great pain. My thought was nearly amputated.
I was disabled for four years. I had to learn
how to walk again. I didn't want to come back
(20:24):
because of my physical ailments, and plus, why would I
want to come back into a world that hated everyone.
Everyone hated each other and there was warm violence. I
wanted to go somewhere else where I could look down
at everything and not be connected to the pain and heartache.
(20:45):
I was aware of light beings. We might call them angels, guides,
or ascended masters. But I remember individual telling me why
I came here in the first place as a soul
to experience everything that I'm experiencing. That I had to
go back, whether I liked it or not, and that
(21:06):
this was just a wake cup call. Some people call
it spiritual awakening, that maybe they're not so harsh of
other people, but maybe I wasn't listening beforehand. I wasn't
brave enough to walk out of that relationship. I wasn't
brave enough to step into who I meant to be.
So I was told, I was instructed, you have to
go back. Your place isn't here yet, you need to
(21:28):
go back. So it was very strong. I had no choice.
It was only when they paddled my heart, when they
cut open my top, that the electric shop restarted my
heart again. When I came back to my body, I
felt this poor and I didn't want to go because
(21:50):
I remember holding out my hands. It is I say,
can I stay here, and trying to reach out to
hold their hands, and I came rushing back in, almost
like at a water theme park when you had those
slides that twist and turn and you come down like
a corkscuaw effect. I came rushing back in and it
felt like a tunnel coming in. I was leading the
(22:13):
white light. The energy felt quite dense. When I landed
back into my body, it felt like a fump back
into the density of the physical body. We are sensory beings.
We are meant to be feeling emotions, all the senses.
The physical pain. My ankle had been fractured. My foot
(22:35):
had seven brakes dislocated from my ankle. It ripped all
my tendons and muscles in my ankle. I had a
fractured to my kneecap. I fractured my right hand side
of my pelvis. I had internal bleeding from my spoon
and my kidneys. I fractured my ribs on both sides.
I was in pain and I was bleeding when they
(22:57):
got me into the ambulance. I remember several times left
my body. I could see looking down the number that
you have on top of the ambulance and the siren.
I could hear the siren from outside of my body.
When I went into a and E, I remember again
I wasn't in my physical body because it felt safer
(23:18):
to come out of the body to look down at
the body. There was a crash tree that was working
on the top part of my body. There was a
neck brace that was put on because I thought I
had broken my back. There was a crash team working
on the middle part of my tours and a crash
tune working on the lower part. Teams that were putting
needles into me, drips, scans, X rays, and I could
(23:41):
feel every person's fear that I was going to die.
I was bleeding internally. There was no way they could
stop the bleeding. And then I remember coming round in
the intensive care unit where the nurse had said several
times we could see your hand was moving if you
were holding onto someone's hand. And I said to them
(24:03):
when I came round, where is my nan? And they said,
there's nobody here, but they would have been physically impossible
for my nun to be there. But in spirit, my
nan was holding my hand all the way through this
whole process. I knew I was safe. I knew I
was okay.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
She was with me.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
With the accident. It really became like a catalyst for me.
It made me start looking at life in a really
different way. My physical body was just shattered and broken
in so many places, you know, God bladder was removed
and everything. I was this woman with two children, unhappy,
and I was now disabled, coming home from a hospital,
(24:50):
not being able to go upstairs, go to the bathroom downstairs.
Everything that i'd had clour, independent strength as a woman,
as a mother was stripped back from me. I had
to rely upon, really sort of fell upon my seven
year old who had to help get me close to
the commode and empty the commode at the end of
the day. So I'd lost everything, all my independence. I
(25:14):
was reliant upon everybody, my daughter saying, she can hear you,
she's just disabled. She can't use her legs at the moment,
being discriminated because I was disabled. So I was stripped
back of everything, everything that I'd looked like beforehand, you know, suit,
immaculate hair, high heeled shoes. That was the toe opposite
(25:34):
from how I looked whoever I was before the accident.
I was never going to step back into those same
shoes ever again. I was literally a different person, so
having to discover me again, it was a long process.
I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress as not only
going through the accident once, it was repeatedly happening for years.
(25:57):
With the post traumatic stress, every time I heard a
car of the flashbacks, I was reliving there constantly for
a couple of years, learning to rewalk. You know, we
take for granted the fact or being able to put
one foot in front of the other, or even to
(26:17):
find out balance. And you know, I was told I'd
never walk again. I was told my foot was gonna
be amputated. I had to learn to work with all
my injuries, and I was becoming more aware of my
own inner strength. But it was getting back on my
feet again and learning to walk was the other near
death experiences that really opened up the fact that there
(26:39):
is more been into science myself by studying psychology and
the brain. I'd never believe such things as near death experiences.
I always thought it was the chemicals in the brain.
I went to speak to the reverend of the church
that was taking the children to on Sundays. He was
a doctor by perfect yet then he was the reverend,
(27:01):
he was the vicar. And when I said to him,
I'd had this experience that I saw these beings around me,
and he said, well, we don't believe in that. I thought, well,
where do I turn to? And I felt I was
going mad and crazy and again, and I didn't feel right.
I knew I wasn't going crazy what I witnessed. I
witnessed light beings for crown out loud, and I never
believed in it. Before we had somebody that was homeless,
(27:25):
that was living in the doorway. It was snowing, and
I said, can we not open the church so that
he can sleep here, you know, on the seats, and
he said he might steal something, and I was like,
oh my god, are you serious. That is not what
I stand for. And I really stepped away from church
and religion, even though I talk about the universe and spirituality,
(27:47):
which I hate that word in but I know there's
more than what we see before us, and it's still
that searching of connecting to what that more is. Having
other near death experiences being stopped in my track, I
started to realize that I was here for another reason,
there was another purpose, because each near death experience opened
(28:08):
up another doorway unlocked information for me that I started
realizing there was more to light than what we see,
or we took a long time to accept. I didn't
accept straight away. I was that the science mind was
like interested. I knew it'd had the first new death
experience the car twenty something years ago, I'd been to
the Colors Cycic Studies because I couldn't find any information
(28:30):
at the church had turned me away and said you're crazy,
you can't be believe in this and this doesn't really happen.
So I was like, well, I need to see coup
more information. So I started googling. When on the web
founder close Circuic Studies in South Kensington and I remember
going to the first course. I was looking at different courses.
I was like, no, I don't like taro that's not
(28:50):
my thing, don't I don't want to use in tarot cards.
I don't really interest in crystals. What's that all about?
That doesn't that doesn't do anything for me. I don't
want to be a psychic reading. What the hell's that?
I'd only talked to dead people and I was like,
I didn't believe it in the first place. But I
felt at home. There are other light minded people that
were coming together, you know. It was that community of
(29:11):
other people also looking for there is more to life
than what we're aware of. It wasn't religious. It was
outside of the church and they had the same opinion
that they had spoken to, you know, their religious sectors
or wherever they were brought up and it didn't fit
for them anymore. They had had incidents that happened, and
they believed there must be something Kulsk. I remember the
(29:32):
very first time I was in the audience watching a
very famous medium and there was eighty people in this room.
I was chewing gum, I had my white shirt on.
I was with one of my best friends. I was
sitting there listening to this conversation, and then all of
a sudden, he then says you, and I said, I
(29:57):
didn't know who was pointing to. He was pointing to me.
I was in the audience a people and terror said, yeah,
you one day you're going to work here. And I
was laughing and I was like, you can't be talking
to me. And I turned around to the side to
the left behind me said you the one that's turning
around blowing bubbles and chewing chewing gum. And I stopped chewing.
Two girls. That's how I was at school, you see,
being dyslexic. I was, you know, I was the clown
(30:19):
of the class. And I was like, yeah, I was
very creative, daydream and stuff. And I was like, yeah,
this is a load of rubbish. Actually, I went to
the college to disprove this, if anything, and then he
turned and said, one day you're going to work here
and I was like, yeah, right, I am and he said, no,
you're going to play an important part here. Yeah, of
course I am. And then the first workshop I did,
a well known medium came up to me and he
(30:40):
said to me the workshop, I said, oh, you need
to go into my advance class. And I went, what,
I don't believe in this stuff. I'm just getting this information.
I don't know where it's coming from. And he said, no,
you're a medium. You're a natural medium. And I was like,
I want to be a medium, and he knew, but
I didn't, and I was judging myself and I was like,
I don't want to be a medium one medium. I'm
(31:00):
a counselor. I like my job. I'm working now doing this.
I'm happy, Thank you very much. Why do I give
up my job? You know, I'm respected. I had let
us after my name. So it was that journey of
disproving it that I actually believed in it now. And
it went through that and then the work that I
do now. When I had my stroke two years ago,
(31:23):
my seizure, my brain bleed. I fell down the stairs.
I collapsed, I broke my neck. Took fourteen weeks to
learn to talk, to walk, to speak, to know that
I was hungry, to know that I needed to go
to the bathroom. The scan showed up I had a
massive a brain blead that should have killed me, but
instead it took me out. In a sense of all
(31:45):
my professional experience, I knew to get back to being me,
I needed to find all my inner strength. Having your
adult children they were twenty six and twenty eight at
the time, telling you, Mum, it's time to eat now. Mum,
you've got a swallow. Mum, you're dribbling. Mum, No that's
my name. No, you've got the wrong name, and stuttering,
(32:09):
couldn't draw a sentence together, learning to rewalk because I
was dragging my foot, I couldn't find my balance, my
daughter pulling down my pants so I can go to toilet,
professional saying I wasn't going to get back to normality,
And then I knew I needed to get back to
normality of some sort. So I learned Italian because I
knew it's going to stimulate one part of the brain.
(32:30):
I went roller skating. I didn't remember. I knew how
to skate until that day, had gotten the skates, but
I was on these skates and I was with this person.
They said, I thought you didn't know how to skate.
But when the music took over from the eighties, I'm
a fifty five year old woman. The eighties music played.
I think it was Duranda Ran or something, and I
stayed then singing to the tune. There was a live DJ.
(32:53):
Next minute, I know, I'm skating backwards, doing jumps, skating
very fast, doing turns. I mean, I remembered because obviously
parts of my brain had gone the memory, but I
remember I used to play roller hockey when I was
a kid, back in the day, when I was about sixteen.
So yeah, I discovered skills with the experience of going
(33:14):
through that seizure. You know, my neck fixed, my vertebrain fixed.
I mean, come on, broken back broken note yeh, Spike's
all good. It fixed itself. The body is amazing. It
can heal itself, and so she can hear from today,
my voice is back. I then started seeing the world
slightly different, and this is when it goes a little
(33:36):
bit woo woo for being a counselor to then be
in a psychic medium through the whole journey, and then
this last experience of me having the seizure and the
brain bleeds and trying to recover from that. I noticed them,
but through my madative state, I don't need drugs that
some people would use, mushrooms or whatever, these psychodics, whatever
(33:58):
they would have used. But yeah, yes, I can go
to the other side come back. My media ship skills
is very different now understanding the sole energy because the
information I had downloaded. So now it's like when I
sit in trance, it feels as if there's a tiny
little funnel at the top of my head that's receiving
all the energies of all those in like counselor, like
(34:18):
hundreds of individuals of you know, ascended masters and those
who have been on the planet before. But yeah, I
know it sounds a bit strange. Obviously everything it's confidential.
But I have doctor's psychiatrists, I have the police. I
have different governments that come to me for the information
I can give them because it's no this is written
(34:40):
down anywhere, but I will bring it back from them.
All I'm doing. It's like an aerial is tapping into
that energy. That's all I'm doing. And from everything that's
happened to me, from all the you know, accidents, the
need of experiences, it's just shown me, actually, we all
can do this, and that's the idea. This is what
I want to show people. You all can connect to it.
It's just the dogma of your mind or what you
(35:03):
think you can't connect to, the ego, not wanting to
lose the ego. The ego is going to fight to
the death for you to not change. That was me.
I had to change. I couldn't live life the way
i'd lived life before. And each new death experience will
show me actually, each time you're transforming, you're changing. You're
shifting out of who you thought you were. Every day
(35:25):
when I died, and I never felt unconditional love at all.
If you think about unconditional love, being a good daughter,
being a good mother, being a good partner, being a
good teacher, being a good student. We're always told that
we have to be something else that which we may
not be, and never had unconditional love. That is what's
there on the other side. Because the unconditional love, that's
(35:46):
what's there in the universe is the unconditional love doesn't
judge you, doesn't see your color of your skin, doesn't
see your gender. It feels into your soul and your
heart accepts you for who you are. I feel that
from the moment we're born, we're putting to boxes our backgrounds,
our class, our color, our religion, everything education. From the
(36:09):
moment we're born, the day that's collected on us, the
what we go through, how people might perceive us, and
if anything, it's about bringing people together and not to
judge you. If we could actually see each other, it
doesn't matter about your race, religion, the money, nothing at all.
If you should see you as an individual person and
stop living up to what you think you should be
(36:31):
and just actually focusing on what the skills you have
as an individual person, I think that would help. If
you look at the walls and everything we go through,
why they are created is to segregate us. Actually we
should be looking at bringing us all together. Me as
a child, you know, brought up by my dad who
studies Buddhism, brought up by my second dad, he's a Catholic,
(36:54):
brother by my third dad is Rastafarian. I ended up
being with a partner who is Jewish. His mother's are quake.
I just sent my children to a Christian school. I
lived in a very Islamic area and then lived in
a Hindu area. At the end of the day, and
I looked at it, the segregation that I had at church.
When I said to my vicary in my church, a
Christian Church of England school, that said to me, you
(37:15):
shouldn't have had that experience. We don't believe that you
had that out of body experience. And I'm like, what
explains to me what I experience. I had to go
searching myself to find out what happened during my near
death experience.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Why actually happened.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It's like, at the end of the day, if you
fall over when someone comes to pickyo, it doesn't matter
what race, religion, gender, whatever it is, it shouldn't come
from that. That's where the segregation is. We have to
learn to be ourselves and found the empowerment within ourselves.
When I look back at my life and my journey,
(37:51):
there is so much more. There's so much more of
the violence that I endured as a child and as
a woman as well. I can obviously say I don't
see the world as a dark place I see the
world as having shadows, as in individuals having problems, and
that's why I became a counselor. I know from many
(38:12):
of my experiences what I've gone through as a therapist,
I see that everyone has the possibility of changing and learning.
Some people just don't have an understanding of who they are.
And you know, even today as a therapist the work
that I do, and believe me, I work on murder
cases with the police, and I see that darker side
(38:32):
of life, but I also have an understanding of what
may have brought that individual to have committed that crime,
which is not forgiving them or justifying it at all,
but it's I think in a world that we live in,
my honest belief is like having an understanding of each
other and to give each other some space. You've been
(38:53):
given this opportunity to experience something, and what is it
I can learn from it? What is it that is
showing me now? Like when I look back everything I've
gone through, I know where I'd been, I know my journey.
But then it helps me to connect to others they
walked on that pathway. I can sit here and talk
(39:15):
to a mother and help her hold that space that
comes to me that's had a miscarriage. I can speak
to that woman's got postingal depression, that can't place that
baby on her breast because she'd been sexually abused. Because
of my journey for me, I know why I'm here.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
I know that I had to.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Endure all that sexual abuse. I had to endure that
being aware of drugs as a child growing up, and
alcoholics and dysfunctional backgrounds. I knew that I needed to
go through that so that I have an understanding for others,
but not only that. In my clients, help them to
see that what happened to them actually is making them
stronger or having a greater understanding of themselves or how
(39:55):
strong they can be when I look back now, my
superpower is the fact that I got through all of
that and humanity. Whatever you go through, the walls, the rape,
the mergers, whatever it is in each of us, when
you know yourself better that you can actually get through it,
don't give your power away to others that for whatever reason, political,
(40:17):
whatever religious or whatever, you can have connection to you.
And of course I'm going to talk about energy because
that's the work I do through my accident of dying
several times, and everything has happened to me. It's giving
me a great understanding there is unconditional love out there.
When I connect the universe, that unconditional love connects you.
(40:37):
It connects you to your high self, and you understand
that you have your superpower. Look at it from a
three hundred or sixty degree perspective. Feel into the emotions
of how you're feeling about when something's happened. Also to
be reflective and to look at how it's changed our
life and what power it is that you've got it,
Not to see as a defect or from a negative perspective,
(41:00):
like actually teaching you. What did it show you? It's
made me stronger. When you see a child fall over,
if you keep picking that child up, my child will
never learn to stand on its own tooth thie. It
won't realize actually the strength and its muscles. It'll fall
to the left, it fall to the right. It has
to find its own strength. And I would not change
(41:20):
a single thing. I can tell you very clearly hand
on my heart. I would not go back. I needed
to go for everything I went to so that I
can do what I do now.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Welcome back. This is alive. Again joining me for a
conversation about today's story are my other Alive against story
producers Keith Sweeney, Nicholas Tukowski, Brent Dye, and I'm your
host Dan Bush. And Bayford refirst to herself as a
reluctant medium. But in the end, she after all of
these horrific things, and not just the near death experiences,
(42:13):
she had all these traumatic experiences growing up. And I
think that's really the heart of what I gleaned from hers.
She came out of it, all of these traumatic experiences,
sexual abuse, you know, violence, extreme poverty, and she came
out of the other side of that with an optimism
(42:34):
and a sense of compassion. And she says, you know,
I don't think the world is a bad place. I
think like you do. She says, I don't think the
world's a bad place. I think there are shadows. And
so she through three different near death experiences and through
(42:57):
her having to completely rehabilitate, rehability herself not only physically,
but also rebuild her mind and her neuro connections on
multiple occasions throughout her life, and having survived all of
this trauma early in her childhood, she walks away with
this idea that she wouldn't trade it for the world.
She would never go back. And Adam says that too.
(43:18):
Adam Tapp says that, and Peter Panagor says that, and
Eric Larson says that, and so many of these stories
that we hear. You ask them if they would trade it,
and they say no, absolutely not be.
Speaker 5 (43:31):
Away after hearing what her childhood had been like right.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
Yea, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Right, but she walks away and she says, no, I
wouln't trade it at all because from her perspective, the
near death experiences taught her that the point of all
this living that we do is adversity that you can't grow.
And so she's doesn't see any victim hood like she
(44:01):
doesn't look around and see victim She sees people with
opportunities to grow.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
And I thought that that was.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
That was my takeaway from her story that I thought
was very moving and also in concert with a lot
of these other stories we're hearing.
Speaker 6 (44:13):
And I completely agree with that. I mean, I do
believe that nobody is beyond hope completely, and I also
don't believe that the world is truly terrible. I believe
that like humanity wants to be good and is frequently
led astray by our basest instincts. I do want to
make that clear, but I think that, like I think
(44:34):
that what did touch me about her story was kind
of cutting through that and like this understanding that there
is basic decency in humanity and that everybody has an
opportunity to fulfill that fulfill their purpose, which I believe.
I just think that we're not inclined to most of
the time. What is the last line in a good
(44:58):
man is hard to find as at it.
Speaker 7 (45:00):
There's a cheerful one that she's she's a bright outlook on.
Speaker 6 (45:04):
Yeah, but if somebody was there to shoot her in
the head every day of her life, yeah.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
Which is why we need the trauma.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
I think that, like I think that if we experience
something that is humbling and terrifying, we are more likely
to follow the good.
Speaker 8 (45:24):
I think.
Speaker 6 (45:26):
Because we we sort of understand what it is to
be to be like laid low, so when we see
other people in similar circumstances, we feel more inclined to help.
And I think that, like I think it's just a
matter of basic empathy. I think that some people like.
Speaker 5 (45:40):
Having a crappy job, like having when you're younger, and
then you understand we don't treat people like this, right.
Speaker 6 (45:45):
Everybody should wait table, so we're nice to waiters exactly.
Like that's that's just you know, the way of it.
And I just think that unfortunately, a lot of humanity
requires that experience in order to fully understand, and a
lot of people just don't ever get that. A lot
of people don't ever have to experience hardship, so they're
kind of crappy people.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Or not growing in some way, not evolving. So there's
two two elements to her thing. One is the actual
physical rehabilitation that she had to do, which she could
not have done unless she found some strength. So there's
the actual physical, you know, thing of having to dig down,
as another guest on our shows says, you know, for
(46:29):
some people, making breakfast in the morning is like climbing
Mount Everest, you know. But beyond that, she also looked
around and had and sort of gleaned this insight from
her experience of her near death experience and her out
of body experiences, where she realized the sort of the
(46:49):
function of trauma for the soul, whether you want to
go there, you know, in that belief or not. You know,
believe the same thing that she believes. It doesn't matter
because again she walked away with this understanding of like,
instead of looking at somebody who's been through horrible stuff
and thinking, oh, you're a victim, I feel so sorry
(47:10):
for you. It's not that she doesn't. She doesn't feel sympathy.
She may feel tremendous empathy, but she sees the potential
for strength and growth. And I think that that's extremely powerful.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
You know.
Speaker 5 (47:22):
I'll say that what stuck out for me, And I
always want to take care from going too far far
down the road of saying everybody should pick themselves up
by their bootstraps, because.
Speaker 7 (47:31):
Sometimes not everybody can do that.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
But would really, you know, stuck out for me with
her story or one thing that did is this idea
of unconditional love.
Speaker 7 (47:42):
You know, we've seen so many stories of folks who
had just really.
Speaker 5 (47:46):
Difficult experiences coming up and she's no exception here, right,
just never experienced unconditional love ever. And then when she's
having this near death experience, she says that, you know,
she could feel different people's thoughts as she saw herself
lying there in the street, and one of those people
was her Then partner who she realizes that he's just
(48:10):
really thinking, oh my god, I have to raise these
children by myself. But he is absolutely not concerned with
her apparent demise, and so he doesn't feel love for her,
and they end up, you know, not staying together after that.
Speaker 7 (48:25):
But and then later in the story she says.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
How she experienced that the fact that this unconditional love
doesn't see identity, this theme of how our it's our
identities that end up dividing us. And we see other
people talking about that as well in their stories. Just
this idea that it's like in identity is ego, and
(48:51):
that's where we get into trouble as humans again and
again and again.
Speaker 7 (48:55):
And when we can realize our.
Speaker 5 (48:58):
Commonness commonness that's or commonality, thank you, uh, that's when
we can move forward in a productive way.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
And that's why she's though she's a medium and though
she's extremely spiritual, she's not religious like at all, because
she sees religion as one of the main components of
that of that divis divisiveness to define yourself.
Speaker 5 (49:25):
Yeah, like, why are we getting caught up and arguing
in all these different things?
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Yeah, way we have to identify with this this one dogma. Yeah, yeah,
at the cost of you know, at the segregation of
something that where she sees a truly interconnected structure of
reality where everything sort of has there. There's there's a
there's a method to the madness of our trauma that
she sees. Whether you believe that or not, it does
(49:52):
ring true that without adversity, we don't grow right and
without that, we don't see it's harder to see compassion.
You have to find compassion. Yeah, So it's in with
my kids. It's like I'm you know that, I see
that so much every day of like I've got to
let them fall. I've got to let them you know,
(50:13):
Roman comes home from soccer camp and I can see
that he's got something going on. He's got a love
in the throat. I don't know if they teased him.
I don't know exactly what he was dealing with. Maybe
he was in a league that outside of his league,
and I just want to protect him, and I want to,
you know, go beat up the other kids, you know,
like knock their heads together like coconuts. And I told
I even told Roman, I was like, so the kids
laughed at you and fill down. He's like all of
(50:34):
them did, and I said, that's so strange, you know,
and they're all a little bit older than him, and
I said, you watch those this is probably all I
might not put this in the show, but he's like,
you watch those kids, the ones that were laughing at
you watch them have a complete meltdown the minute something
goes wrong, and you can just say, you know, just
stand up, roam and just say, you know, dude, bro,
you okay, yeah, like somebody had sault to you. Roman's
(50:56):
gotten to where he's like, dude, you're right. That's because
it just takes the wind out of their whole Absolutely well,
I am with you for to help you. But anyway,
he's I can't, you know, I want to just I
want to give him so much and I want to
arm him with everything he needs to to not have
that experience. But he has to have the experience to
have experience, and it hurts.
Speaker 7 (51:17):
It is so hard to watch.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Well.
Speaker 4 (51:19):
Kind of with that whole thing of identity separating us,
it also separates itself because, as she says, you know,
every day you're shifting and transforming who you are. And
I think it's important, I mean, it's important to have
your beliefs, and those beliefs are based on your life experiences,
and you've got to be true to what you're experiencing.
But you also have to have the freedom to just
(51:40):
your soul adjust yourself as you go through life and
acquire different experiences. And I think that's something I got
from her story. Every day she said, you're shifting and
transforming who you are.
Speaker 7 (51:49):
Oh my god, I love that. And because it's and
it's so difficult not to do that, not to cling
to what was?
Speaker 5 (51:55):
I think about that all the time, you know, as
I've had, you know, shifting career, shifting careers, and you know,
you read a lot of I'm at this point in
life where I'm reading a lot of articles about women
my age and we're sort of grappling with with getting.
Speaker 7 (52:12):
Older and and what the hell does that mean?
Speaker 5 (52:16):
And it's very difficult not to cling to a self
that that's gone now and to move forward.
Speaker 4 (52:23):
And yeah, well even when when good things are coming forward.
I remember when I was about to get married, mourning
the loss of my single self, when our first child
was being born, mourning the little time my wife and
I had together, just the two of us. When our
third child, our second child was born mourning the little
(52:45):
home that the three of us, and then you're given
this gift is pushing you forward. You're you're you're experiencing
new things. You forget about that. You know, you're almost
happy that that part of your life has moved on,
because there's but it's a it's a painful death that
you go through whenever you enter a new phase of
your life or encounter a new idea or have your
(53:07):
world shook up a bit.
Speaker 1 (53:10):
And it reminds me of the Hindu god Klli, you know,
who's depicted with a black face and a red tongue
and heads of all these you know, heads dangling from
her from chains, and she's depicted as this horrific, terrifying force.
But she's really a compared like the most compassionate, most
(53:32):
compassionate goddess, because she's freeing you of your ego. She's
she's just she's not taking your she's not just killing you.
She's killing your ego and freeing you from previous versions
of yourself so that you can continue to expand and grow.
Speaker 6 (53:44):
Yeah, blessed peace.
Speaker 5 (53:49):
Yeah, yeah, we see these ideas all over the place
in spirituality.
Speaker 7 (53:53):
That's fascinating.
Speaker 1 (53:56):
But again and again, another thing with Anne is you know,
she would not take back this experience, you know, and
as Adam Tapp said, everything has a cost, and if
the cost of this experience is some you know, some
new consciousness or sense of compassion, then hell yeah.
Speaker 4 (54:17):
Well yeah, your story with Menuel where he said he
had the best moment of his life in the midst
of his horrific near death experience.
Speaker 5 (54:25):
I found myself this. You know, this is a fairly
serious story. But there's that moment in which she's sort
of describing her searching period. She's trying to figure out
what's up, and she's looking things up online and she's
looking at near death experiences and she's like, crystals.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
No, what do we need, taro for?
Speaker 3 (54:43):
What do we need?
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Like? I love that.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
Yeah, liked her skeptical sort of you know, she she
was reluctant and skeptical, and.
Speaker 6 (54:52):
She was like, what the hell you just you don't
made a lot of skeptical mediums.
Speaker 2 (54:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
Next time on Alive again, we hear from Delaney tar,
a Parkland school shooting survivor. In the days following the shooting,
she and her friends founded the largest student run movement
in a generation and began the arduous task of growing
up quickly in the public eye.
Speaker 8 (55:18):
So it was February fourteenth, It was Valentine's Day. I
remember putting on my cute little romper that my mom
had bought me from Target. I had made bouquets for
all my friends. Towards the end of the school day,
we heard an alarm go off, and we had been
told in the months prior that there would be some
school shooter drills that we're going to be super realistic.
So we walked down this little stairwell. Halfway down the stairwell,
(55:42):
I started hearing screams.
Speaker 1 (55:49):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren vogelbah music by Ben Lovett, Additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Executive producers are Matthew Frederick and
Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.
Our studio engineers are Rima L. K Ali and Nomes Griffin.
(56:10):
Our editors are Dan Bush, gerharts Loovichka, Brent Die, and
Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm
your host, Dan Bush. Thanks to Anne Bafer for sharing
her story. For more about Ann and her work, you
can visit her website, Ann Bayford dot co dot uk.
That's a n N E b A y f o
(56:32):
r D dot co dot uk. Alive Again is a
production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you
have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love
to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again
project at gmail dot com. That's a l I V
(56:52):
e A g A I N P R O j
e c t at gmail dot com.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.