February 3, 2026 • 37 mins
At 26, Taylor Maxson was searching for purpose while working with at-risk youth in Kentucky. After months of exhaustion and stress, he and two friends set out on the Cumberland River for what was meant to be a healing trip into nature. But when their canoe flipped above Angel Falls—a class V rapid known for its deadly currents—Taylor was pulled under, battered against rocks, and certain she would not survive. In this episode of Alive Again, Taylor recounts the terrifying minutes when he nearly drowned and resurfaced, and how the experience led him toward connection, healing, and a new way of living.
Story Producer: Kate Sweeney
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Taylor Maxon and when I was in
my late twenties, I almost died on the Cumberland River.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
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
(00:51):
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 3 (01:12):
I was twenty six years old when I took a
job at a place called Buckhorn Wilderness.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I had spent a number of years just going from
job to job and think to thing, and then along
the way I found I really had a gift for
relating to and mentoring these troubled kids. We used to
call them at risk kids, and I guess that on
some level, part of that spoke to me personally. I
grew up in the Northeast until I was probably eight
(01:37):
or nine, and then we moved to Kentucky, which.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Was a bit of a brutal switch.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
My siblings and I weren't super close. The age spread
is like a sibling who was nearly ten years older
when he's five years older, and one he was a
year and a half older, and he and I were
probably the closest. My parents divorced when I was I
guess twelve, and I went from being a child of
like a pretty big household to like essentially me and
(02:03):
my mother when I was twelve or thirteen, my mom.
Actually I saw my mom recily and she said, I've
got this report card I have to show you in
as like report cards. She's like, yeah, from sixth grade.
And I looked at it and like I saw my grades,
which are actually pretty good. But then all of the
marks for my behavior were like talk successively, doesn't listen
to the teacher, not inattentive in class, moves around too much,
(02:26):
da da da da da da dah. Like I was
that kind of kid. I was sort of like the
lost child. That's like a framework that describes the roles
that different people take in families, like the clown and
the rescuer, the scapegoat, it sort of falls into that
interpretation of roles. You experience safety as getting away from
(02:48):
a relationship the lost child. You may not be a
personality wise introvert, but you move towards introversion because it's
protective in a family where it may not feel safe
to express your emotions. Spend a lot of time on
my own and spent a lot of time in my
inner world basically, so as I said, I took on
(03:08):
this job at Buckcorn Wilderness and I was twenty six
years old. It was part of the field of interventions
with like teens who are struggling with like social emotional challenges,
parents will send them to these programs, and young adults
like me were staffed and we were just sort of
helping be mentors and guides, and like I could imagine
(03:31):
myself with only a slightly altered set of details in
my life story ending up where these kids were. In
this case, it was cancer around probation. So it's like
not just like worried well kids or you know, just struggling,
but they were.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
These kids had committed crimes and were in.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
The juvenile justice system. And the way it works is
like there's a month of base camp in a month
of wilderness like on the trail. It was a startup, right,
So there it was pretty much like a let's just
do a lot of trial and error and see what works,
you know, and what sticks right. The staff were we
worked three weeks on and one week off, which is insane.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
It was just crazy intense heard on the.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Body with a group of kids who were how do
I put it politely, right, like challenging behaviorally Thanksgiving nineteen
ninety nine and pouring rain. A kid picked up a
burning lug and wielded it toward another kid and I
had to physically intervene and.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Stop it from happening.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
That was one of many what felt like very out
of control incidents, Like I definitely had a couple of
like I would just say, like straight up panic attacks,
or I'd walk off into the woods and just like
my heart was racing, you know, like I don't know
that we're gonna be able to keep these kids safe
and keep ourselves safe. It was only there for maybe
nine months. We did the program through the winter. It
(05:05):
was a really cold winter. It was really harsh, like, yeah,
we were living outside and it was like it would
be like three degrees.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
So This was April of two thousand. We had a
really particularly.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Stressful group when it sort of then became almost stressful
and dangerous, like we may end up getting hurt, and
we all decided to quit and we did it as
a group, and I was with my two friends and
coworkers from the Wilderness Program. The most appealing thing at
(05:40):
that time was like, oh my god, let's just like
I want to experience nature again without all the stress.
We decided to do a multi night canoe trip on
a star, know the Cumberland River that has some significant
(06:02):
white water, and we were just super excited about like
going to these kind of decentralized spots on the river
to camp and drink whiskey, you know, and like sit
under the stars. Right. It was just like after nine
months or so of intense stress and we were like
it was just going to be such a like release.
(06:22):
We're all really thrilled about it. Our very first night,
we got there in the evening and you know, camped
I think kind of like at a campground and like
drank some bourbon and smoked a lot of cigarettes and
sat by a fire and probably played a guitar, you know,
sat around talking and just really enjoying our freedom.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I doubt we slept a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I would say maybe hours, a few hours, And we
planned that first morning to get close to this falls
called Angel Falls, a massive mousetroom of like boulders and
torrents of water and like a class four and I
think five rabbits, so as high as it gets, I
think in terms of technical ability to move to navigate
(07:08):
with a watercraft, and we were not intending to run that,
by the way. We were intending to portage the rabbits,
so to take the canoe eddy out of the river
ahead of the whitewater and then walk the canoes and
gear you know, down a path right beyond the falls
back into the river. So we wake up the next
(07:33):
morning it was like a misty mooring, pretty hungover with
very little sleep, and we pack up the canoe and
set out. We are traveling down this fairly full Cumberland River,
not wearing our floatation devices because like a bunch of
(07:55):
twenty somethings, we got hot and just didn't really think
we needed them and weren't intending to go into any
kind of white.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Water that day.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
And we're just chatting and hanging out and talking and
doing what we did. And we rounded a bend at
some point after not a long time, hour or two,
and we could hear rushing, you know, the thrum of
rushing water, a thunderous roar and boom. There was a
giant boulder in the middle of the river, maybe one
(08:26):
hundred yards ahead of us, and there was water coursing
around it, white torrent of water, and then just ahead
like the sound of like roaring.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
It's holy shit, this is the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
We just rounded this bend in this quickly moving river
and we are now face to face with a classified
rapid that really only the most skilled whitewater people would
run with helmets and flotation.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
We were in one.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Canoe, so I was in the front of the canoe,
a friend of mine who was not very experienced, was
in the back, and then my buddy was in the middle.
We panicked, and in attempting to eddie out, one of
us grabbed the gunwhale so like the sides of the
canoe and flipped the canoe and the canoe spun in
(09:30):
the current so that the front of the canoe sort
of in the middle of the river. In the back
of the canoe was actually jetting toward the shore in
the middle in the back.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
My friends got out and were able to swim into
the eddy. I was in the front and I went
straight into the rabbits.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And this all happened in it like in split second.
They actually had a rescue rope and tried to throw
it to me, didn't make it to me. And I'm
faced with a giant boulder in front of me, maybe
four feet out of the water, with water thundering around it.
My friend yells, don't stand up, don't stand up. I
was trying to kind of make my body upright, like
(10:15):
I was gonna kind of hit this boulder and then
sort of hold and my friend yelled yells, don't stand up,
don't stand up, and I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
I'm just supped right around it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
And suddenly I'm just spun about and I'm just being
pulled in, pulled under.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
My body is spinning around, I'm hanging up on rocks.
I'm scraping my head.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I'm in the light and I'm kind of in the
filtered light, and I'm in the green of the water
looking up at the surface, and I'm struggling for the surface,
you know, all the time doing everything I can out
of instinct to like get up right. I'm just trying
to get back into the air. At one point I
(11:00):
get sucked down and I realize I'm in a shoot
where water has bore a tunnel under rock and was
actually pulled into it. Suddenly I just realized, like, holy shit,
I'm under the rock and I'm in a shoot and
if it narrows, I will just jam up in it, right,
(11:20):
And I just was like suddenly fighting for my life,
you know, like hey, morning, where you're just having fun
and there was this was supposed to be this release
and this freedom, and like.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Suddenly you're drowning.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And my head is being scraped along the top of
it and I can taste blood in my mouth, and
I realized this is it, this.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Is the end, and pop.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Out of it, back into the light, and I'm back
up in the air. And it's a funny. It's a
strange thing, like.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
What is drowning?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Right? It's like I didn't actually drown, obviously I'm here
to tell the tale, but like I did, because I
inhaled water, I know what it's like to feel water
in my lungs and to be breathing water and to
be coughing it up underwater, and I would pop up
once in a while and sort of get a breath
and sort of choke water, you know, vomit water up,
(12:32):
and then get pulled back down and be back in
the torrent again. And later I learned my friends were
actually sort of like they didn't see me much. They
were able to see me at first, but they just
saw me disappear, so they just believed I was dead.
They were sure, I mean, because I don't know how
(12:54):
many people you tossed into a rabbit like that and
survive it. I don't know that I could have been
in there for more than two minutes, maybe three. I
sort of ended up falling out of consciousness and waking
up on the edge of the river, on the other
(13:14):
side of the river from where my friends were, And
I lay there for a spell with my heart racing
and still coughing up water, and I start to hear
voices over the roar of the water. I hear my
friends yelling tailor. Eventually I saw my friends and they
were both just bawling, like they were sure that I
(13:38):
was dead, and I realized I lived. Then we have
this problem solved, which is how do they get to me?
And one of them goes and grabs the canoe and
(14:00):
brings it all the way down past the rapids into
calmer water, crosses the river and then walks up a
real choked, entangled bank to get to me. So the
whole thing was maybe thirty minutes. But I fell out
of time, right, It was just like totally out of time,
(14:22):
and you know, I realized, like wow, that that at
that time, I was then well aware that like I
really just about died. And I don't know what the
like what the margins were, but like it was pretty close,
very easily could have just been in been a story
in the paper, like yep, another person drowned at Angel Falls.
I was in shock, and I was for a few hours.
(14:44):
I went off by myself and chain smoked cigarette after
cigarette after cigarette for probably an hour or two and
just had to be on my own, and I sort
of kind of popped out of it.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Sort of that state of shock, like I'm alive. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I was able then to realize what had happened and
actually reflect on it, and it was scary. And then
I think it set me on a journey, like what
does it mean, like, what did that mean for me?
What am I supposed to take away from that experience? Right,
But I'm bandaged up and I'm banged up. It makes
(15:28):
the most sense after some discussion, to just finish the
trip easier, just to take the follow the river down
to our endpoint where we had a vehicle. So I
did two more nights and like had to be in
the canoe for two more days, which sounds insane saying
it as a fifty year old, Oh my god, but
we did it. I was very weakened and I slept
(15:57):
poorly and I was still sort of in shock, I think,
and I went and went to my mother's. It was
just like a convenient harbor in Lexington. I went and
I sort of idled for a couple of weeks. I
didn't have a job because we'd left our jobs, kind
(16:18):
of got physically recuperated. I had saved some money working
a buckhorn. So I decided I need to get in motion,
like my body was telling me, mobilize, don't just sit here, like.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
I need to go.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
So, I mean, I think, like I knew metaphorically at
the time that like, oh, go to the driest place
in the US, right, like that seems like a noe
brainer in some ways, like you already did the Malstrom,
you know, like, so go to the desert and see
the burning bush.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I don't know. And so, somewhat of a spur of.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
The moment, made plans to do a two month trip
by myself into the Western States. Don't stop, don't pause
too much, don't I don't, don't think about it too much,
don't you know, like go to some degree, the poignancy
(17:16):
was nature. It was like I knew I wanted to
just go and be in nature, and be in nature
in a way.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It wasn't.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Deadly, that wasn't like nature had total control of me.
There was a lot of solitude, right, And this is
some of the darkest places in the US.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
So you're sitting under.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
These black skies with the Milky Way spread out above you, right,
And just like I did the Hila in New Mexico
for maybe a ten day loop, and I like ran
into people on the trail because of these hot springs
in the Hla.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
It's amazing. And I became sort of a.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Pod of like maybe me and two other people, and
we hiked together and then we'd sort of split up
and hiked together.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
I felt kindredness.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
With these folks and like I seeing my friends, the
poignancy in the sense of gratitude I had that I
had people who love me and who I know I
can go to and like they can be these Buoize
for me was really powerful. One of the friends that
I saw, he was like took really good care of me,
and like he took me up to the northern New
(18:25):
Mexico to like the Hamus Mountains, Hamus Pueblo cliff dwellings,
Like he just took care of me, like he saw
I needed somebody to anchor me. At the time, I
don't think I thought of it that way, but now
I see it that way as.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Like, oh yeah, I was like looking for a connection
and attunement.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
When a thing like that happens, when you have a
near death experience, it sort of lodges in and I
would have moments where I would just have a daylight
hallucination of being in it, and I would get the
image of being earned about in the water and sort
of suddenly my heart would be racing. So I continue
to play the image over, I think, the way you
(19:08):
do with an event like that, and at some point
was like, hey, I wonder if other people have gone
through that rapid and I like lived or drown. So
I probably googled it, you know, it's just like two
thousand and one, I think, or two, and I learned
that a, yeah, a young child who was nine drown
(19:28):
nearly a year to the day in that exact same
rapid under essentially the same circumstances a tipped canoe. And
it really, you know, I felt survivor's guild. I thought,
why did I survive and that child didn't? And I
(19:50):
do think I felt to some degree, like, well, I
need to live out somehow a way to deserve that
I survived and he didn't, which is a lot of
pressure to put on yourself. Gosh, I'm a therapist, and
I've never really thought about it as PTSD because I
(20:11):
just tend not to apply that to myself. But like,
the whole thing was pretty traumatic, like like from the
work I did to the experience I had in the river.
So I was coping with like a nervous system that
got really rattled, and like didn't have a lot of
great tools at that time, and at that age, right,
I was twenty seven at this point in my life
(20:32):
and the lot of the twenty seven year olds.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I knew I was measuring myself against.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Many of them were on a path like a career,
an occupational path that seemed to me from the outside
sort of mythically organized and grounded and like together. And
I felt sort of like a maybe a fuck up,
like you know, I hadn't really figured my shit out,
and maybe even to some degree like that river was
(20:57):
a punishment.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
I'm not sure I've ever.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Fought that and even said that before I said it
just now, but like, yeah, my brother saw this happening,
I think, and he offered himself and his home in
his life. He was a you know, five years older
than me and a pretty successful lawyer, and he was like, dude,
(21:21):
come here. I sort of resisted it, and then I
was like, why am I resisting this? And I just
went and I moved to Atlanta and moved in with him,
and I think I lived with him for about a
year and it just gave me a safe, stable base
and like somebody to soundboard off of. And I think
I talked about the lost child. It's like the lost
child wants to be invisible. They're not seeking relational support.
(21:46):
In fact, it's just the opposite. But the imperative at
this time was if you're going to grow, you've got
to do that. In some ways, he was able to
see beyond the lost child into like the other aspects
of me, fleck those back when I could not see them,
just found myself asking questions and sort of alive, right
(22:08):
alive again. There it is, I don't have to do
everything on my own. I can be connected to things
or people in ways that do not require me to
be an island.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Safety is not inherently withdrawal.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Nature put the exclamation point on you don't have to
be invisible. Come out here and start living your life.
My life easily could have ended, and I get to
sort of be the author of the next however long
I got and I met my wife actually shortly thereafter
(22:51):
all of these things happened, like a twenty something, I
just like dated around and you know, had very short
term relationships and didn't really picture myself getting married.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
And then I met.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Susannah through mutual friends. And she was a searcher, super smart,
really cool person, really interesting and really interested in a
lot of things curious.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
So it was validating to have.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Somebody kind of reflect back that it's okay to like
be still searching, like I secured pretty quickly, like relationship,
like the thing that I didn't think I was going
to be good at the right in place, and I've
been together now for like what is that two twenty
three years? There certainly were things that remained out of place.
(23:38):
I was going from job to job every year or
two and restless. Definitely these tendencies toward impulsivity and in
attention or sometimes too much attention. I would have a
really hard time persisting toward a thing and staying with
an intention, remembering to do things that I said I
(24:00):
do being really agonized by boredom, like just like tortured
by it when I felt bored, you know, things like that,
and like a fairly low frustration tolerance. Like these are
things that were true about me, and I just took
it to be like features of.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Like my personality. And I think I.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Started to realize this is not a moral failing, or
at least some part of me started to get this
is not a moral failing, This is not a character problem.
And this is when I started to realize, like, oh shit,
like I think I actually have ADHD nowadays, we'd call
that neurodivergence.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
That's one term that tends to wrap it all up.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
And so in my thirties, after all this stuff happened,
I started to have this realization like, oh, that's what
I'm going to need to do, is like understand that
and like embrace it. There was a lot of shame
it was going to have to work through, and ultimately did.
And that's when I actually went and got a diagnosis
and like started to actually work on it.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Within the five years after my river experience.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I suppose I've never really thought of it this way,
but like I've run the rehearsal down the chute towards
the fucking light, I have actually been near death.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So okay, there's a little comfort in that.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Strangely, there is a clock ticking in my life and
like it just about stopped ticking.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Oh it's ticking again.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So let's make something of that.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or am my other alive in story?
Producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush. So what struck me about this
story was well, for one, I had a canoeing accident
when I was when I was young, a young fellow
(26:17):
that was similar to his. I don't know I was.
I was underwater and caught in a in a rapid.
It didn't pop me out for about an account of
one thousand and one, one thousand and two, so all
the way up to almost a oneenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Who So I was down there for a while.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Just I literally had a panic attack listening to you.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
So oddly in my experience when it happened to me,
I was on outward bound and the canoe flipped and
it was, you know, a class four rapid or something.
And what you explained netward bound, Oh yeah, it's one
of it's outward bound. It's like an outdoor leadership school
from the nineties, from.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
The nineties, A lot of things that's true.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, you do things like you go on a solo
camping trip for three days in the woods with nothing
but an orange and the block of cheese, and you
do ropes courses and then you know, you learn orientation,
how to use a compass and a map to go
off trail.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
Maybe we should do a sponsorship deal with them because
I bet they have a lot of stories.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
You could tip it.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
They do.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
How many of your clients?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
But I have almost died?
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Great, could you like to sponsor us and share that story.
We'll have to and we'll have.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
To fact check this, but but I do remember, like
the most outdoor fatalities happen in the waters.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Yeah, you can't you can't breathe there.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
And I think second is rock climbing or whatever, climbing
but as you can fall. Yeah, but water is the
most dangerous sort of element.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Oh like ninety five percent of the deaths. And Moby
Dick took place.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
In the ocean. I didn't even get to the shore.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
But so I can identify with the with what happened
to him.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
But that's about it.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Well, that was a big that might be the biggest
set on the podcast. And that's a lie. Thank you guys,
tune in next week.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
No, but I.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I did you know. I do think it's interesting and
Lauren had this perspective. We talked about this in the
car a little bit on the way over here. While
we were driving here, we kind of got into some
of these stories. But Lauren, you got a really cool
take on how being a therapist added to his perspective.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Can you share?
Speaker 6 (28:35):
Yeah, yeah, so if you can, tian outward Bound.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
For sponsorship brought to you by Walmart, let's leave them
out of this. I loved the number of times that
Taylor surprised himself during this interview, you know, and especially
because right he's a therapist, Like this is a human
(28:58):
who has devoted a good unk of his life to
trying to understand the way that the human mind works.
But we are always processing the stuff that happens to
us forever. And you know, every time you recall a memory,
you're reprocessing it, you're changing it, you're adding or forgetting context.
(29:21):
This is why talk therapy works. But I kind of
love hearing that surprise from someone who has clearly worked
on himself a lot, who is a therapist by trade,
who is still growing and considering and learning about himself.
It gives me that hope that maybe we're all capable
of continuing to grow. It was one of those near
(29:43):
death experiences where like it took him a minute, like
like death was not the end of his story, but
neither was merely surviving it, like there was a lot
more work to do.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Was it just the physical shock of what happened with
that or you know, in the aftermath, the physical shock
of what had happened to him dislodged this much deeper
thing that he was working through and continued to work through.
For If anything, it just put a magnifying glass on
something deeper in his soul that he's been working through
ever since.
Speaker 7 (30:13):
Yeah. And furthermore, that he turned it right, that he
turned it into a trade that he, as we talk
about in a lot of these stories, wound up wanting
to use that to see if he could help other people.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, his story isn't just a straight line. It's you know,
he struggles with shame and you know, survivor's guilt. Eventually,
adhd that survivor's guilt was the guilt of you know,
he survived the rapid where I think a year later
a child died in the exact same rapid. But underneath
all of this is this realization that safety doesn't come
(30:47):
from disappearing it. If you have any hope of safety,
it comes from connection and letting others see you in
all of your messiness, you know, and being what's that
thing that another person in our show, Nick Bradley who
was blown up on I D in Afghanistan. He said,
you know, we're strongest when we're most vulnerable.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
Mm.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
And you know, I think that that's something that maybe
I don't know, maybe Taylor came to that that on
you know himself.
Speaker 7 (31:19):
Side note here, I guess congrats like team as a whole,
and in this case to Kate in particular, who conducted
this interview for providing a space for people to work
on their shit through storytelling present Company included.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
It's been a really interesting experience talking to these hosts
because when when we all first started doing this, it
was like, I don't know what to expect. I don't
know what questions to ask. I don't even know what
I'm looking for. I don't know what this show's about.
And it's evolved into this thing where you see patterns
and you see there's a real understand there. Starts to
develop this sort of picture of the human condition in
(32:01):
a way that is revealing because of these there's these spikes,
these near death experiences in these brushes with death's that
spike awareness. But then it's really about I learned early on,
it's not about It's not about those the spectacle of
those spikes. It's about the transformational sort of liminal periods
(32:21):
that happen happen afterwards, and that's where we find all
these wonderful questions about the human brain and about the
human spirit and about life and death. And I didn't
know that it would be this revealing about how much
of it isn't heroic, and how much of it is messy,
and how much of it.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Is grasping in the dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
I think that's what really has struck me through a
lot of this is just like we learn more about
ourselves and our low moments than in our high moments.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Ah yeah, because because the great.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Moments usually come of the great deal of art office,
you know. And I think that you know, Dan to
speak to, you know, being strongest when you're most vulnerable.
I think that that comes for sort of self reflection
as well. We understand more about ourselves when we are
(33:15):
in a situation where we behave in a way that
we don't consider to be normal for us. And I
think that, yeah, I think that that's been really one
of the most interesting things for me in this is
what we and and something that is through It's a
through line in every single story. It's we surprise ourselves,
(33:39):
not necessarily with just the resilience, but also with like
learning something shitty about yourself in a low moment and
examining that is a gift that a lot of people
don't get well.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
I think even people have gone through these traumatic experiences
when we interview them on the podcast. I mean, I've
had the experience of people I never really thought of
that the way Taylor does. Like I just did a
word count it's like twenty times or something like that.
We're like, well, I didn't think of that, and I'm
a therapist. I didn't think of that. And I think,
you know, our society is so fast paced that we
(34:20):
don't allow ourselves the moments of reflection to really try
to take the lesson. I don't even know if we
value the idea that there could be a lesson in
some of these experiences.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So Taylor said this.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
He said that nature, in this case his canoeing accident,
Nature put the exclamation point on you don't have to
be invisible. And that just ties into this idea that
when we all most want to run and hide and
shelter ourselves, perhaps the safest bed is actually to to
(34:53):
find community, and maybe the show in and of itself
is part of that. I hope it is. Anyway, Yeah,
I think time and time again, these stories point at
us needing each other, and needing community, and needing safety
in numbers. Next time on A Live Again, we sit
(35:15):
down with filmmaker Jonas el Ra, whose sudden and life
changing awakening open m divisions, voices and realities beyond the ordinary.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
It was beautiful and wild and also terrifying. Is a
lightment real. I have no idea, I don't care.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
I'm just trying to be trump, be present, grateful, more loving.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Hopefully I can make a difference while I'm still down here.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
In this episode of A Live Again, Jonas recounts his
extraordinary awakening, the challenges of integrating mystical experiences into everyday life,
and why storytelling remains his truest path to healing and connection.
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Duakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
(35:58):
music by Alexander rodrig As. Our 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 Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka,
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Alive Again is
(36:25):
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 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):
My name is Taylor Maxon and when I was in
my late twenties, I almost died on the Cumberland River.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
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
(00:51):
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 3 (01:12):
I was twenty six years old when I took a
job at a place called Buckhorn Wilderness.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I had spent a number of years just going from
job to job and think to thing, and then along
the way I found I really had a gift for
relating to and mentoring these troubled kids. We used to
call them at risk kids, and I guess that on
some level, part of that spoke to me personally. I
grew up in the Northeast until I was probably eight
(01:37):
or nine, and then we moved to Kentucky, which.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Was a bit of a brutal switch.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
My siblings and I weren't super close. The age spread
is like a sibling who was nearly ten years older
when he's five years older, and one he was a
year and a half older, and he and I were
probably the closest. My parents divorced when I was I
guess twelve, and I went from being a child of
like a pretty big household to like essentially me and
(02:03):
my mother when I was twelve or thirteen, my mom.
Actually I saw my mom recily and she said, I've
got this report card I have to show you in
as like report cards. She's like, yeah, from sixth grade.
And I looked at it and like I saw my grades,
which are actually pretty good. But then all of the
marks for my behavior were like talk successively, doesn't listen
to the teacher, not inattentive in class, moves around too much,
(02:26):
da da da da da da dah. Like I was
that kind of kid. I was sort of like the
lost child. That's like a framework that describes the roles
that different people take in families, like the clown and
the rescuer, the scapegoat, it sort of falls into that
interpretation of roles. You experience safety as getting away from
(02:48):
a relationship the lost child. You may not be a
personality wise introvert, but you move towards introversion because it's
protective in a family where it may not feel safe
to express your emotions. Spend a lot of time on
my own and spent a lot of time in my
inner world basically, so as I said, I took on
(03:08):
this job at Buckcorn Wilderness and I was twenty six
years old. It was part of the field of interventions
with like teens who are struggling with like social emotional challenges,
parents will send them to these programs, and young adults
like me were staffed and we were just sort of
helping be mentors and guides, and like I could imagine
(03:31):
myself with only a slightly altered set of details in
my life story ending up where these kids were. In
this case, it was cancer around probation. So it's like
not just like worried well kids or you know, just struggling,
but they were.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
These kids had committed crimes and were in.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
The juvenile justice system. And the way it works is
like there's a month of base camp in a month
of wilderness like on the trail. It was a startup, right,
So there it was pretty much like a let's just
do a lot of trial and error and see what works,
you know, and what sticks right. The staff were we
worked three weeks on and one week off, which is insane.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
It was just crazy intense heard on the.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Body with a group of kids who were how do
I put it politely, right, like challenging behaviorally Thanksgiving nineteen
ninety nine and pouring rain. A kid picked up a
burning lug and wielded it toward another kid and I
had to physically intervene and.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Stop it from happening.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
That was one of many what felt like very out
of control incidents, Like I definitely had a couple of
like I would just say, like straight up panic attacks,
or I'd walk off into the woods and just like
my heart was racing, you know, like I don't know
that we're gonna be able to keep these kids safe
and keep ourselves safe. It was only there for maybe
nine months. We did the program through the winter. It
(05:05):
was a really cold winter. It was really harsh, like, yeah,
we were living outside and it was like it would
be like three degrees.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
So This was April of two thousand. We had a
really particularly.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Stressful group when it sort of then became almost stressful
and dangerous, like we may end up getting hurt, and
we all decided to quit and we did it as
a group, and I was with my two friends and
coworkers from the Wilderness Program. The most appealing thing at
(05:40):
that time was like, oh my god, let's just like
I want to experience nature again without all the stress.
We decided to do a multi night canoe trip on
a star, know the Cumberland River that has some significant
(06:02):
white water, and we were just super excited about like
going to these kind of decentralized spots on the river
to camp and drink whiskey, you know, and like sit
under the stars. Right. It was just like after nine
months or so of intense stress and we were like
it was just going to be such a like release.
(06:22):
We're all really thrilled about it. Our very first night,
we got there in the evening and you know, camped
I think kind of like at a campground and like
drank some bourbon and smoked a lot of cigarettes and
sat by a fire and probably played a guitar, you know,
sat around talking and just really enjoying our freedom.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
I doubt we slept a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I would say maybe hours, a few hours, And we
planned that first morning to get close to this falls
called Angel Falls, a massive mousetroom of like boulders and
torrents of water and like a class four and I
think five rabbits, so as high as it gets, I
think in terms of technical ability to move to navigate
(07:08):
with a watercraft, and we were not intending to run that,
by the way. We were intending to portage the rabbits,
so to take the canoe eddy out of the river
ahead of the whitewater and then walk the canoes and
gear you know, down a path right beyond the falls
back into the river. So we wake up the next
(07:33):
morning it was like a misty mooring, pretty hungover with
very little sleep, and we pack up the canoe and
set out. We are traveling down this fairly full Cumberland River,
not wearing our floatation devices because like a bunch of
(07:55):
twenty somethings, we got hot and just didn't really think
we needed them and weren't intending to go into any
kind of white.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Water that day.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
And we're just chatting and hanging out and talking and
doing what we did. And we rounded a bend at
some point after not a long time, hour or two,
and we could hear rushing, you know, the thrum of
rushing water, a thunderous roar and boom. There was a
giant boulder in the middle of the river, maybe one
(08:26):
hundred yards ahead of us, and there was water coursing
around it, white torrent of water, and then just ahead
like the sound of like roaring.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
It's holy shit, this is the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
We just rounded this bend in this quickly moving river
and we are now face to face with a classified
rapid that really only the most skilled whitewater people would
run with helmets and flotation.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
We were in one.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Canoe, so I was in the front of the canoe,
a friend of mine who was not very experienced, was
in the back, and then my buddy was in the middle.
We panicked, and in attempting to eddie out, one of
us grabbed the gunwhale so like the sides of the
canoe and flipped the canoe and the canoe spun in
(09:30):
the current so that the front of the canoe sort
of in the middle of the river. In the back
of the canoe was actually jetting toward the shore in
the middle in the back.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
My friends got out and were able to swim into
the eddy. I was in the front and I went
straight into the rabbits.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
And this all happened in it like in split second.
They actually had a rescue rope and tried to throw
it to me, didn't make it to me. And I'm
faced with a giant boulder in front of me, maybe
four feet out of the water, with water thundering around it.
My friend yells, don't stand up, don't stand up. I
was trying to kind of make my body upright, like
(10:15):
I was gonna kind of hit this boulder and then
sort of hold and my friend yelled yells, don't stand up,
don't stand up, and I'm gone.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
I'm just supped right around it.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
And suddenly I'm just spun about and I'm just being
pulled in, pulled under.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
My body is spinning around, I'm hanging up on rocks.
I'm scraping my head.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I'm in the light and I'm kind of in the
filtered light, and I'm in the green of the water
looking up at the surface, and I'm struggling for the surface,
you know, all the time doing everything I can out
of instinct to like get up right. I'm just trying
to get back into the air. At one point I
(11:00):
get sucked down and I realize I'm in a shoot
where water has bore a tunnel under rock and was
actually pulled into it. Suddenly I just realized, like, holy shit,
I'm under the rock and I'm in a shoot and
if it narrows, I will just jam up in it, right,
(11:20):
And I just was like suddenly fighting for my life,
you know, like hey, morning, where you're just having fun
and there was this was supposed to be this release
and this freedom, and like.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Suddenly you're drowning.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And my head is being scraped along the top of
it and I can taste blood in my mouth, and
I realized this is it, this.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Is the end, and pop.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Out of it, back into the light, and I'm back
up in the air. And it's a funny. It's a
strange thing, like.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
What is drowning?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Right? It's like I didn't actually drown, obviously I'm here
to tell the tale, but like I did, because I
inhaled water, I know what it's like to feel water
in my lungs and to be breathing water and to
be coughing it up underwater, and I would pop up
once in a while and sort of get a breath
and sort of choke water, you know, vomit water up,
(12:32):
and then get pulled back down and be back in
the torrent again. And later I learned my friends were
actually sort of like they didn't see me much. They
were able to see me at first, but they just
saw me disappear, so they just believed I was dead.
They were sure, I mean, because I don't know how
(12:54):
many people you tossed into a rabbit like that and
survive it. I don't know that I could have been
in there for more than two minutes, maybe three. I
sort of ended up falling out of consciousness and waking
up on the edge of the river, on the other
(13:14):
side of the river from where my friends were, And
I lay there for a spell with my heart racing
and still coughing up water, and I start to hear
voices over the roar of the water. I hear my
friends yelling tailor. Eventually I saw my friends and they
were both just bawling, like they were sure that I
(13:38):
was dead, and I realized I lived. Then we have
this problem solved, which is how do they get to me?
And one of them goes and grabs the canoe and
(14:00):
brings it all the way down past the rapids into
calmer water, crosses the river and then walks up a
real choked, entangled bank to get to me. So the
whole thing was maybe thirty minutes. But I fell out
of time, right, It was just like totally out of time,
(14:22):
and you know, I realized, like wow, that that at
that time, I was then well aware that like I
really just about died. And I don't know what the
like what the margins were, but like it was pretty close,
very easily could have just been in been a story
in the paper, like yep, another person drowned at Angel Falls.
I was in shock, and I was for a few hours.
(14:44):
I went off by myself and chain smoked cigarette after
cigarette after cigarette for probably an hour or two and
just had to be on my own, and I sort
of kind of popped out of it.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
Sort of that state of shock, like I'm alive. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
I was able then to realize what had happened and
actually reflect on it, and it was scary. And then
I think it set me on a journey, like what
does it mean, like, what did that mean for me?
What am I supposed to take away from that experience? Right,
But I'm bandaged up and I'm banged up. It makes
(15:28):
the most sense after some discussion, to just finish the
trip easier, just to take the follow the river down
to our endpoint where we had a vehicle. So I
did two more nights and like had to be in
the canoe for two more days, which sounds insane saying
it as a fifty year old, Oh my god, but
we did it. I was very weakened and I slept
(15:57):
poorly and I was still sort of in shock, I think,
and I went and went to my mother's. It was
just like a convenient harbor in Lexington. I went and
I sort of idled for a couple of weeks. I
didn't have a job because we'd left our jobs, kind
(16:18):
of got physically recuperated. I had saved some money working
a buckhorn. So I decided I need to get in motion,
like my body was telling me, mobilize, don't just sit here, like.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
I need to go.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
So, I mean, I think, like I knew metaphorically at
the time that like, oh, go to the driest place
in the US, right, like that seems like a noe
brainer in some ways, like you already did the Malstrom,
you know, like, so go to the desert and see
the burning bush.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I don't know. And so, somewhat of a spur of.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
The moment, made plans to do a two month trip
by myself into the Western States. Don't stop, don't pause
too much, don't I don't, don't think about it too much,
don't you know, like go to some degree, the poignancy
(17:16):
was nature. It was like I knew I wanted to
just go and be in nature, and be in nature
in a way.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
It wasn't.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Deadly, that wasn't like nature had total control of me.
There was a lot of solitude, right, And this is
some of the darkest places in the US.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
So you're sitting under.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
These black skies with the Milky Way spread out above you, right,
And just like I did the Hila in New Mexico
for maybe a ten day loop, and I like ran
into people on the trail because of these hot springs
in the Hla.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
It's amazing. And I became sort of a.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Pod of like maybe me and two other people, and
we hiked together and then we'd sort of split up
and hiked together.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
I felt kindredness.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
With these folks and like I seeing my friends, the
poignancy in the sense of gratitude I had that I
had people who love me and who I know I
can go to and like they can be these Buoize
for me was really powerful. One of the friends that
I saw, he was like took really good care of me,
and like he took me up to the northern New
(18:25):
Mexico to like the Hamus Mountains, Hamus Pueblo cliff dwellings,
Like he just took care of me, like he saw
I needed somebody to anchor me. At the time, I
don't think I thought of it that way, but now
I see it that way as.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Like, oh yeah, I was like looking for a connection
and attunement.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
When a thing like that happens, when you have a
near death experience, it sort of lodges in and I
would have moments where I would just have a daylight
hallucination of being in it, and I would get the
image of being earned about in the water and sort
of suddenly my heart would be racing. So I continue
to play the image over, I think, the way you
(19:08):
do with an event like that, and at some point
was like, hey, I wonder if other people have gone
through that rapid and I like lived or drown. So
I probably googled it, you know, it's just like two
thousand and one, I think, or two, and I learned
that a, yeah, a young child who was nine drown
(19:28):
nearly a year to the day in that exact same
rapid under essentially the same circumstances a tipped canoe. And
it really, you know, I felt survivor's guild. I thought,
why did I survive and that child didn't? And I
(19:50):
do think I felt to some degree, like, well, I
need to live out somehow a way to deserve that
I survived and he didn't, which is a lot of
pressure to put on yourself. Gosh, I'm a therapist, and
I've never really thought about it as PTSD because I
(20:11):
just tend not to apply that to myself. But like,
the whole thing was pretty traumatic, like like from the
work I did to the experience I had in the river.
So I was coping with like a nervous system that
got really rattled, and like didn't have a lot of
great tools at that time, and at that age, right,
I was twenty seven at this point in my life
(20:32):
and the lot of the twenty seven year olds.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I knew I was measuring myself against.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Many of them were on a path like a career,
an occupational path that seemed to me from the outside
sort of mythically organized and grounded and like together. And
I felt sort of like a maybe a fuck up,
like you know, I hadn't really figured my shit out,
and maybe even to some degree like that river was
(20:57):
a punishment.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
I'm not sure I've ever.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Fought that and even said that before I said it
just now, but like, yeah, my brother saw this happening,
I think, and he offered himself and his home in
his life. He was a you know, five years older
than me and a pretty successful lawyer, and he was like, dude,
(21:21):
come here. I sort of resisted it, and then I
was like, why am I resisting this? And I just
went and I moved to Atlanta and moved in with him,
and I think I lived with him for about a
year and it just gave me a safe, stable base
and like somebody to soundboard off of. And I think
I talked about the lost child. It's like the lost
child wants to be invisible. They're not seeking relational support.
(21:46):
In fact, it's just the opposite. But the imperative at
this time was if you're going to grow, you've got
to do that. In some ways, he was able to
see beyond the lost child into like the other aspects
of me, fleck those back when I could not see them,
just found myself asking questions and sort of alive, right
(22:08):
alive again. There it is, I don't have to do
everything on my own. I can be connected to things
or people in ways that do not require me to
be an island.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Safety is not inherently withdrawal.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Nature put the exclamation point on you don't have to
be invisible. Come out here and start living your life.
My life easily could have ended, and I get to
sort of be the author of the next however long
I got and I met my wife actually shortly thereafter
(22:51):
all of these things happened, like a twenty something, I
just like dated around and you know, had very short
term relationships and didn't really picture myself getting married.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
And then I met.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Susannah through mutual friends. And she was a searcher, super smart,
really cool person, really interesting and really interested in a
lot of things curious.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
So it was validating to have.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Somebody kind of reflect back that it's okay to like
be still searching, like I secured pretty quickly, like relationship,
like the thing that I didn't think I was going
to be good at the right in place, and I've
been together now for like what is that two twenty
three years? There certainly were things that remained out of place.
(23:38):
I was going from job to job every year or
two and restless. Definitely these tendencies toward impulsivity and in
attention or sometimes too much attention. I would have a
really hard time persisting toward a thing and staying with
an intention, remembering to do things that I said I
(24:00):
do being really agonized by boredom, like just like tortured
by it when I felt bored, you know, things like that,
and like a fairly low frustration tolerance. Like these are
things that were true about me, and I just took
it to be like features of.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Like my personality. And I think I.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Started to realize this is not a moral failing, or
at least some part of me started to get this
is not a moral failing, This is not a character problem.
And this is when I started to realize, like, oh shit,
like I think I actually have ADHD nowadays, we'd call
that neurodivergence.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
That's one term that tends to wrap it all up.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
And so in my thirties, after all this stuff happened,
I started to have this realization like, oh, that's what
I'm going to need to do, is like understand that
and like embrace it. There was a lot of shame
it was going to have to work through, and ultimately did.
And that's when I actually went and got a diagnosis
and like started to actually work on it.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Within the five years after my river experience.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I suppose I've never really thought of it this way,
but like I've run the rehearsal down the chute towards
the fucking light, I have actually been near death.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So okay, there's a little comfort in that.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Strangely, there is a clock ticking in my life and
like it just about stopped ticking.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Oh it's ticking again.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
M hm.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
So let's make something of that.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story or am my other alive in story?
Producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Dye, and I'm
your host, Dan Bush. So what struck me about this
story was well, for one, I had a canoeing accident
when I was when I was young, a young fellow
(26:17):
that was similar to his. I don't know I was.
I was underwater and caught in a in a rapid.
It didn't pop me out for about an account of
one thousand and one, one thousand and two, so all
the way up to almost a oneenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Who So I was down there for a while.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Just I literally had a panic attack listening to you.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
So oddly in my experience when it happened to me,
I was on outward bound and the canoe flipped and
it was, you know, a class four rapid or something.
And what you explained netward bound, Oh yeah, it's one
of it's outward bound. It's like an outdoor leadership school
from the nineties, from.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
The nineties, A lot of things that's true.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, you do things like you go on a solo
camping trip for three days in the woods with nothing
but an orange and the block of cheese, and you
do ropes courses and then you know, you learn orientation,
how to use a compass and a map to go
off trail.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
Maybe we should do a sponsorship deal with them because
I bet they have a lot of stories.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
You could tip it.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
They do.
Speaker 6 (27:20):
How many of your clients?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
But I have almost died?
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Great, could you like to sponsor us and share that story.
We'll have to and we'll have.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
To fact check this, but but I do remember, like
the most outdoor fatalities happen in the waters.
Speaker 7 (27:37):
Yeah, you can't you can't breathe there.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
And I think second is rock climbing or whatever, climbing
but as you can fall. Yeah, but water is the
most dangerous sort of element.
Speaker 4 (27:46):
Oh like ninety five percent of the deaths. And Moby
Dick took place.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
In the ocean. I didn't even get to the shore.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
But so I can identify with the with what happened
to him.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
But that's about it.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
Well, that was a big that might be the biggest
set on the podcast. And that's a lie. Thank you guys,
tune in next week.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
No, but I.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
I did you know. I do think it's interesting and
Lauren had this perspective. We talked about this in the
car a little bit on the way over here. While
we were driving here, we kind of got into some
of these stories. But Lauren, you got a really cool
take on how being a therapist added to his perspective.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Can you share?
Speaker 6 (28:35):
Yeah, yeah, so if you can, tian outward Bound.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
For sponsorship brought to you by Walmart, let's leave them
out of this. I loved the number of times that
Taylor surprised himself during this interview, you know, and especially
because right he's a therapist, Like this is a human
(28:58):
who has devoted a good unk of his life to
trying to understand the way that the human mind works.
But we are always processing the stuff that happens to
us forever. And you know, every time you recall a memory,
you're reprocessing it, you're changing it, you're adding or forgetting context.
(29:21):
This is why talk therapy works. But I kind of
love hearing that surprise from someone who has clearly worked
on himself a lot, who is a therapist by trade,
who is still growing and considering and learning about himself.
It gives me that hope that maybe we're all capable
of continuing to grow. It was one of those near
(29:43):
death experiences where like it took him a minute, like
like death was not the end of his story, but
neither was merely surviving it, like there was a lot
more work to do.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Was it just the physical shock of what happened with
that or you know, in the aftermath, the physical shock
of what had happened to him dislodged this much deeper
thing that he was working through and continued to work through.
For If anything, it just put a magnifying glass on
something deeper in his soul that he's been working through
ever since.
Speaker 7 (30:13):
Yeah. And furthermore, that he turned it right, that he
turned it into a trade that he, as we talk
about in a lot of these stories, wound up wanting
to use that to see if he could help other people.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Yeah, his story isn't just a straight line. It's you know,
he struggles with shame and you know, survivor's guilt. Eventually,
adhd that survivor's guilt was the guilt of you know,
he survived the rapid where I think a year later
a child died in the exact same rapid. But underneath
all of this is this realization that safety doesn't come
(30:47):
from disappearing it. If you have any hope of safety,
it comes from connection and letting others see you in
all of your messiness, you know, and being what's that
thing that another person in our show, Nick Bradley who
was blown up on I D in Afghanistan. He said,
you know, we're strongest when we're most vulnerable.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
Mm.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
And you know, I think that that's something that maybe
I don't know, maybe Taylor came to that that on
you know himself.
Speaker 7 (31:19):
Side note here, I guess congrats like team as a whole,
and in this case to Kate in particular, who conducted
this interview for providing a space for people to work
on their shit through storytelling present Company included.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
It's been a really interesting experience talking to these hosts
because when when we all first started doing this, it
was like, I don't know what to expect. I don't
know what questions to ask. I don't even know what
I'm looking for. I don't know what this show's about.
And it's evolved into this thing where you see patterns
and you see there's a real understand there. Starts to
develop this sort of picture of the human condition in
(32:01):
a way that is revealing because of these there's these spikes,
these near death experiences in these brushes with death's that
spike awareness. But then it's really about I learned early on,
it's not about It's not about those the spectacle of
those spikes. It's about the transformational sort of liminal periods
(32:21):
that happen happen afterwards, and that's where we find all
these wonderful questions about the human brain and about the
human spirit and about life and death. And I didn't
know that it would be this revealing about how much
of it isn't heroic, and how much of it is messy,
and how much of it.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Is grasping in the dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that.
Speaker 4 (32:42):
I think that's what really has struck me through a
lot of this is just like we learn more about
ourselves and our low moments than in our high moments.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Ah yeah, because because the great.
Speaker 4 (32:54):
Moments usually come of the great deal of art office,
you know. And I think that you know, Dan to
speak to, you know, being strongest when you're most vulnerable.
I think that that comes for sort of self reflection
as well. We understand more about ourselves when we are
(33:15):
in a situation where we behave in a way that
we don't consider to be normal for us. And I
think that, yeah, I think that that's been really one
of the most interesting things for me in this is
what we and and something that is through It's a
through line in every single story. It's we surprise ourselves,
(33:39):
not necessarily with just the resilience, but also with like
learning something shitty about yourself in a low moment and
examining that is a gift that a lot of people
don't get well.
Speaker 5 (33:58):
I think even people have gone through these traumatic experiences
when we interview them on the podcast. I mean, I've
had the experience of people I never really thought of
that the way Taylor does. Like I just did a
word count it's like twenty times or something like that.
We're like, well, I didn't think of that, and I'm
a therapist. I didn't think of that. And I think,
you know, our society is so fast paced that we
(34:20):
don't allow ourselves the moments of reflection to really try
to take the lesson. I don't even know if we
value the idea that there could be a lesson in
some of these experiences.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So Taylor said this.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
He said that nature, in this case his canoeing accident,
Nature put the exclamation point on you don't have to
be invisible. And that just ties into this idea that
when we all most want to run and hide and
shelter ourselves, perhaps the safest bed is actually to to
(34:53):
find community, and maybe the show in and of itself
is part of that. I hope it is. Anyway, Yeah,
I think time and time again, these stories point at
us needing each other, and needing community, and needing safety
in numbers. Next time on A Live Again, we sit
(35:15):
down with filmmaker Jonas el Ra, whose sudden and life
changing awakening open m divisions, voices and realities beyond the ordinary.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
It was beautiful and wild and also terrifying. Is a
lightment real. I have no idea, I don't care.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
I'm just trying to be trump, be present, grateful, more loving.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Hopefully I can make a difference while I'm still down here.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
In this episode of A Live Again, Jonas recounts his
extraordinary awakening, the challenges of integrating mystical experiences into everyday life,
and why storytelling remains his truest path to healing and connection.
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Duakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
(35:58):
music by Alexander rodrig As. Our 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 Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka,
Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush. Alive Again is
(36:25):
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 e A g A I N p R O
j E c T at gmail dot com.
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