Live Healthy Longer with Dr. Jim Polakof

What Happens When We Die? Where Do We Go?

• Dr. James Polakof • Season 1 • Episode 82

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In this episode, Dr. Jim Polakof will interview Tricia Barker to find out if there's any scientific proof of exactly what happens after death? The only physical evidence we are aware of, are people who have returned after death and reveal what they actually experienced. Tricia Barker is one such person. She died and came back to tell about it.

To view Tricia's website click here

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Speaker 1:

I am Dr Jim Polakoff, phd, and in this episode, we're going to explore near-death experiences which, in turn, will provide us with some insight as to what happens after we die and where do we go. My guest will lead us into an unknown realm, and her name is Tricia Barker. Now, tricia is the author of the best-selling book Angels in the OR and what dying taught me about healing, survival and transformation. Her near-death experience has been featured in television documentaries as well as magazines such as National Geographic, and she's the founder of the Online Death Experience Summit, which we're going to be discussing shortly. But first, tricia, tell us how your near-death experience began.

Speaker 2:

Certainly. I was a senior in college and I was on my way to run a race and when I had an accident a car accident I basically broke three vertebrae, completely shattered them. So I waited a long time to go into the hospital and it was during surgery that I had my full near-death experience.

Speaker 1:

I see. So it was a car accident that prompted it. And then, when the doctors were frantically working to save you in your book Angels in the Illwar, you write I noticed two of the most intelligent beings I had ever encountered. They were large, approximately eight or nine feet, with shoulder length hair and composed more of light than a solid form. And then you go on to say you didn't know whether these angels were real angels in the biblical sense. Now I know you became enlightened after your near-death experience and you've done quite a bit of research. But what are your feelings about angels now? Do they really exist? What's their purpose?

Speaker 2:

Oh, I do believe that they exist and they are intelligent. They are highly intelligent and they send messages, telepathic messages, but they also send healing energy and that's something I saw very clearly during the near-death experience and I call on them frequently. Even though I had this experience, I have to admit sometimes I forget to call on them, but every time I do, I sense that energy and it is a transformational energy that we can work with while we're here. So I believe these light beings are here to assist us and here to help us when we transition, because it can be a little jarring for some people, and had those light beings not been there in the operating room, I might have been a little confused about why I was looking at my body.

Speaker 1:

Now I'm kind of curious from a personal standpoint. You know, I've been told I have a spirit guide and an angel around me, and one is my creative, helps me creatively, creatively, shall we say. But do you ever see these angels? I've never been able to see mine yeah.

Speaker 2:

so if I tune in and and like tune into your energy right now, I can sense that you do work very closely with one angel, that there is one angel that stands very, very close to you. Most people have two, but sometimes they participate in this realm more with one than the other. And so this yeah, there is this sense of creativity and, you know, tapping you on the shoulder, reminding you how to begin something or do something. There's this sense of participation with the other side, which is kind of cool. But I haven't seen angels frequently, but there have been a couple of moments when my vision has opened up and I've literally seen the angels around people and that's an amazing experience.

Speaker 1:

So basically, I mean, you don't always see them, but you just you know they're there. That's what the bottom line is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I sense their energy and how they participate with people and the more readings I do like this, the more interesting it becomes, because when people are aware of them or they've had a different reading and they hear the same thing or they tend to get some people will get a pressure on their head or they'll get a light energy, that kind of flows through them and I see how the angels are interacting with that person and sometimes it resonates with what they already know.

Speaker 1:

That's very interesting. Now you mentioned in your near-death experience that and I'm looking at a quote from your book right now you mentioned in your book that you felt yourself being pulled into a tunnel. Then what happened?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So once that tunnel experience was very quick. It was almost as if it was instant. And then I was in the night sky, and this night sky quickly transitioned into the cosmos and there was no fear. That's one thing that I do want to stress is I felt joy, I felt freedom, I felt love for everyone I knew and then, even from far away, this message seemed to be coming from a divine guidance. Some might call God or you know the infinite knowing of the universe, but this light seemed to be comforting me on my way. So I did not feel alone, even though, kind of technically, I was alone flying through this cosmos.

Speaker 1:

Did you meet anyone at the other end of the tunnel? You come out of it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So after receiving a few important messages like love is all that we take with us, and going through a life review, I transitioned into this heavenly landscape. The grass was so deeply beautifully alive and green and magnificent, and my grandfather was there. He was the only person who was dead at that time, and this is an interesting fact about near-death experiencers they generally see people who they know have died. They don't see someone who's alive.

Speaker 2:

Occasionally, there have been a few stories where someone has connected with the spirit of someone who is either very ill or is compromised in some way, mentally disabled, and they get to see from that spirit on the other side what is going on. But my grandfather was the only one there and he was a very loving man and he was so much younger and so much different than how I'd watched him die, because I'd been with him the day he died and he died of leukemia. But there in heaven his eyes just shone with the same light that the angels had. This seems to be a way that people communicate, through telepathy and through energy, and that seems to be what our souls are learning from these experiences energy, and that seems to be what our souls are learning from these experiences.

Speaker 1:

So, rather than him being a form of light, you actually saw his form. You recognized him immediately. So some say that you get used to colors later and to begin with you actually see their human form, you know, since obviously you don't recognize them without that to begin with.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was interesting with him. He looked about 35, and I hadn't seen a lot of pictures of him at that age, and so at first I didn't recognize him. But he had this square jaw and he also just showed me some symbols from my childhood and who he was. That made me understand that this was my grandfather. And then it all clicked. But yeah, he chose to look much younger in that realm, but he did have this glow. So you know, when you see someone's physical form, it's not as solid as it is here. So he was just.

Speaker 1:

He was also like a light being, but his form looked like himself from life now you mentioned the grass was greener than what you would normally see in life and on Earth, so to speak. Did you see anything else in the afterlife? Did you get any feeling of what your surroundings were, what souls exist in?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a really good question, you know there's. It's hard put into words because it seems like we're learning at such accelerated rates in that realm so you're taking in a lot of things all at once and it seems as if we are actually participating with that realm. So my grandfather's consciousness was participating with it, I was participating with it. We helped create a scene that made sense to us.

Speaker 2:

We had, you know, spent many afternoons in East Texas, where I grew up, and he had taken me through pastures in this truck, and so that's what we actually did in heaven was we rode in this truck that he had willed to our family, which was made new in heaven, so much like the grass being green, I think everything you can think of everything that dies or passes away or is no longer here with us can be made anew there, you know, just through the creation of the mind. So that seemed to be part of what we were learning on that other side.

Speaker 1:

That's very interesting. Now I think, getting back to your book you wrote, I found this interesting reentering. My physical body felt like being swallowed by a painful, narrowing darkness. When I awoke, I realized that I felt more alive when dead dead.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I love how people describe the brain as a filter to consciousness, because that's really the way I see it now.

Speaker 2:

Before I was agnostic and a college student and I thought my neurosurgeons were so brilliant, but after the near-death experience I saw they were being assisted by light beings and that they have a limited consciousness, and I definitely felt that my own brain was a limiter to consciousness and being in this body was a limiter to all that knowing out there, because we operate through time here and we don't operate through time there. We operate through instant knowing and experience and this expanded way of being, and so it is limiting and tough, especially after a major accident like that. To come back to a body that is full of morphine. You know it's just coming out of surgery is an incredible amounts of pain and I'm trying to make sense of what just happened. But but, yeah, that that first moment of being kind of shoved back in my body did not feel as wonderful as being near the consciousness of that loving God, which is eventually where the near death experience took me.

Speaker 1:

You probably felt like you wanted to go back. You wanted to return to where you were.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and a lot of people get depressed after a near death experience and I don't think that I ever felt depressed after the near-death experience. I felt depressed going through some of those situations here in life and feeling burdened by them, but I felt like I got a glimpse of the best love imaginable and I was so grateful for that. You know, like that's. All I could think about was wow, aren't I blessed to have seen that and been that close to it and to know that love deep within me and to know that that's where we're going.

Speaker 1:

Well, and I want to mention that, what you've described, I mean Tricia, and this is to our audience of listeners and viewers on YouTube. Tricia went through quite an experience and that's all outlined in her book. So we're talking about the very beginning of her book. There's so much more to it. But again, when you look back on this, tricia, what are the greatest lessons you took away from your near-death experience?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one of the greatest lessons in the first lessons is how to love humanity. Pain or, you know, just feeling so isolated on this journey here, and I think a near-death experience just opened this door to this perception which allowed me to connect with angels, which allowed me to know God, and even when things were difficult here, there was this sense of I'm not alone. And that's really a wonderful experience that you can be totally alone in life, but not alone because you're supported by so much love over on that other side. And everyone is, everyone has angels, everyone has ancestors cheering them on. You know, if they aren't aware of their guides, they can find out more about them, they can search for them.

Speaker 2:

So that was a great gift. But also knowing and this is the third one we grew up as Americans in kind of a materialistic culture and I grew up poor, wanted to be successful and what I realized is my mission from the other side, working as a teacher was such a blessing that to help others is the greatest blessing and we can imagine so. Knowing that I've been a part of people's lives, help them on their path, it's just made such a huge difference and and I did suffer from different forms of depression, but I think a job like that, where you're in motion and you're helping others succeed, just brushes all that aside and you really live a pretty joyful life.

Speaker 1:

Well, speaking of helping others and also getting back to your angels again, I understand you do guided meditation, so do you bring the angels into the guided meditation?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sometimes I do, and it's been a lot of fun. So medical medium the medical medium wrote about unknown angels, that there's unused angels just floating around, and so I did a meditation with that, which was a ton of fun to just get people to imagine. You know, if you have something that you're trying to make a breakthrough with, why not call on lots of angels? There, might you know, at that very moment there might not be very many that are being used, so you know until this gets more popular, use them all Unused angels.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that makes sense. So let's talk about your upcoming Near-Death Summit. It happens in July. Why don't you tell us about the purpose of the summit and how people can tune into it? I mean either through their computers or, I suppose, their smartphones as well. But tell us about it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the majority of it is streamed live on my YouTube channel.

Speaker 2:

So if you look me up and it's Tricia Barker, healed by the light near death experience, but if you find my particular channel, on those dates, I have several speakers who will just be talking live on my channel, but there's some recordings beforehand and this is and this is a paid part of the material is I want to do something that I'm not going to put out on YouTube?

Speaker 2:

I have a ton of videos out there for the world to see, but I wanted to ask different motivational speakers and psychologists and spiritual teachers some really deep questions for people who are in pain whether this is grief, whether this is depression, whether this is chronic illnesses, about how to surrender to that process, how to connect, but also just how to heal, and that's a big theme of this conference. So I'm asking some personal questions, but I want an audience that really cares about this topic to be involved. But the day of the conference, I did this because I love to travel to INs and different conferences, but not everyone can afford to go to these conferences and pay for a hotel and be there for a week, so I thought, well, hey, I know a lot of these speakers now why don't I just stream them on YouTube or offer?

Speaker 1:

And we're just getting out of COVID, so some people obviously aren't excited about traveling.

Speaker 2:

I think it's a great idea. Yeah, and I started it before COVID, but the year of the pandemic it really took off. So about three years before COVID, I just did this because people couldn't afford travel and then, when everyone was stuck there, that was my best summit ever. Last year I just made it free, streamed it on my YouTube channel, and so I'm doing that again because people wanted that connection, they wanted to talk about spirituality during the pandemic, and I think it was important.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about several of your speakers. We can't get into all of them in our time, but several of them I'm interested in and some I know. Of Dr Eben Alexander, for example. You know, aside from I did read his book but I believe he is the neurosurgeon who, you know, at first doubted anything that you could have. You know afterlife and all of that and reincarnation. He had all doubts about that and then he went through, as I recall, he went through this coma and he was in this coma for weeks and apparently he discovered all of these magnificent things. So he's going to be one of your speakers and what do you think he's going to focus on?

Speaker 2:

Yes, so part of his focus is with Karen Newell, who she has a sacred acoustics, and he really wants people to have their own awakening and to have their own experience with consciousness. But there's always a ton of questions that people have for him and that's why he's one of the live speakers, because I will take some questions from audience members and some questions ahead of time. But one of the things I love about his presentations and his talk is that he addresses what it was like to be in the medical field and to have a brain that completely shut down in a way that should not have caused any type of imagining or near-death experience, and he has verifiable details of seeing a sister that he never knew existed on the other side and lots of amazing details. So certainly we'll talk about his near-death experience but also really talk about what he's doing now to help others connect with their own connection to consciousness.

Speaker 1:

Well, and another speaker I noticed that was somewhat interesting is a woman by the name of Lisa Romano, and, from what I can gather, she was voted number one most influential person by Digital Journal, and Yahoo Finance named her the most inspirational woman of 2021. What's her focus going to be?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so what I talked about with her she actually had a near-death experience, but that's not what she talks about. A lot we did talk briefly about when you have that expansiveness and that consciousness opening, you're full of love, you come back just full of love for other people and yet you still have to integrate and protect yourself in this world and get through some situations which can be really challenging. And her focus is on healing from narcissistic abuse and codependency. And it was a really challenging conversation and intimate in many ways. But we talked about the mother wound for those who have parental wounds with a mother or father and what that does to the psyche and psychology of the things.

Speaker 2:

That people often ask me is hey, I give so much love and I don't receive love. You know that they misinterpret really the meaning of love from near-death experiences. And so we talked a lot about healing the self, loving the self, healing wounds and really boundaries and protection, because it's wonderful to be wide open and full of love, but we do have to love ourselves and and work our way through this, this world well, and she sounds like she's going to be very interesting.

Speaker 1:

Um, also, there's a speaker, I believe his name is michael tamura and he's the author of you are the Answer, discovering and Fulfilling your Soul's Purpose. Has he actually truly had five near-death experiences?

Speaker 2:

He has and he is one of the most wide-open people and his wife is, I think, a living angel. They're really just wonderful people, and every time I've talked with either her or Michael I was on their podcast I honestly feel like just the topic of angels the three of us could talk for decades, you know, like weeks definitely, but I'm so glad that I have them for an hour on this podcast just to talk about connecting with angels and talk about a real new paradigm of not living in so much competition but really living in support, spiritual community. We can be supportive of one another. You know we can all create this realm where everyone succeeds, or at least has the opportunity to succeed, and so I love his talks about that. So there's a lot of things we'll cover.

Speaker 1:

Well, that sounds good as well. So, by my count, Tricia, your summit and I'm just looking at this right now your summit will feature 14 live experts I'll call them experts for practical purposes and another pre-recorded speakers actually tuning in. I mean, do they go out to their computer, Do they pick up their smartphone? How do they do it? Once? I mean, we're going to provide the information on how to get to it, but you know basically how do they connect.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, first, if you find my website, tricia Barker, t-r-i-c-i-a Barker, b-a-r-k-e-r-n-d-ecom, I will keep updating information about how to join. You can certainly follow my YouTube channel and there'll be plenty of links for how to join and, like I said, you can see the free version of the speakers who will be on YouTube on those dates. But the Lisa Romano video and others are already pre-recorded and ready to go, and so if you want to access those more intimate videos talking about narcissistic abuse and grief and pain and really how to bring more joy into your life, no matter where you are on this journey, then that's also available.

Speaker 1:

Okay Now, I mean it sounds like an outstanding event. I mean I can't imagine somebody who's interested in the subject matter would not want to tune in. Also, I want to remind our audience that, aside from going to Tricia's website, they also can go to our website, which is bodymindsoulpodcastnet, and we're going to have the information about how you get a hold of Tricia. If you're interested in things like guided imagery, where her book can be sold, et cetera, we're going to have that on our website, again, bodymindsoulpodcastnet, and we'll have all of that. So, tricia, I want to thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1:

I'd also like to recommend to our audience that they read your excellent book Angels in the Yor, and that's available in paperback, and also there's an audio version, which I happen to have listened to. The audio version that you narrated. I did no, I guess someone else did it, but it was very good. I was very impressed by it. Anyway, the book is available through Amazon, so is, I believe, your audio version of it, and Barnes and Noble. So, tricia, I hope you're going to join us again, perhaps after the conference is the online summit is done and you can sort of do a recap and we can join each other again. Would that work for you?

Speaker 2:

It certainly would Well. Thank you so much. This has been a great interview. I've enjoyed it.

Speaker 1:

Well, we've enjoyed it as well and we really appreciate you being part of it. Please join me next week, Thank you.

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James Polakof

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