The Astralis Story: From Near-Death Experience to Spiritual Awakening

There are moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after. For me, that moment came at 25.

Before my near-death experience, my understanding of healing was largely rooted in the physical and psychological. I had studied biology on a pre-medical track alongside psychology, fascinated by the human body, the brain, behavior, and the experiences that shape us. I believed deeply in science, medicine, and psychology. I still do. I wasn’t a healer or a spiritual practitioner. I worked a corporate job.

But in 2018, I experienced something that completely shattered the boundaries of what I thought I understood about life, death, consciousness, and healing.

The Experience That Changed Everything

In 2018, I suffered a grand mal seizure that caused me to fall, striking my temple on the corner of a window ledge before repeatedly hitting my head against the floor. The resulting traumatic brain injury affected approximately 75% of my brain, and somewhere within the chaos of what was happening to my physical body, I left it.

During my near-death experience, I found myself on what I can only describe as the other side. I was met by divine beings, light bodies, and religious figures, and I was given a choice: I could cross over, or I could turn back.

I was told that my journey on Earth was not finished. There was still work I was meant to do here, and part of that work involved gifts I had experienced when I was younger but had intentionally turned off over time. I was shown and told about the gifts that would be reactivated if I returned: the gift of hearing Spirit, the gift of healing, the gift of seeing beyond the physical, and the gift of knowing.

These weren’t entirely foreign concepts to me. As a child, I had experiences I didn’t understand and eventually learned to suppress. But on the other side, I was being told that those parts of myself were not meant to remain closed. They were part of what I was being sent back to explore, develop, and eventually use in service to others.

So I chose to come back.

Coming back did not mean simply opening my eyes and returning to the life I had left. When I returned to my body, I was blind and deaf for approximately eight hours. Three days later, paralysis began slowly progressing through the right side of my body. Within roughly a month, I was paralyzed, and I remained that way for over a year.

The years that followed brought seizures, specialists, testing, medications, treatments, diagnoses, and eventually misdiagnoses. At different points, I was told that I had multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. I underwent immunotherapy and was eventually told that I might have only eight to ten years left to live. I wasn’t simply trying to heal; I was learning how to exist inside a body and brain that had changed almost overnight while my perception of reality seemed to be changing alongside them.

When the World Became Bigger

While my physical world had become dramatically smaller, my awareness of everything around me had become much larger.

The gifts I had been told would return began returning, but they did not return in a way that felt peaceful or easy to understand. I began seeing energy and spirits. I could hear Spirit. I experienced visions, intuitive knowing, and information that seemed to arrive without any logical way for me to know it.

Some experiences felt loving, familiar, and deeply comforting. Others frightened me. I didn’t always know what I was seeing, hearing, or what was trying to connect with me. I didn’t understand spiritual boundaries, how to open and close my awareness intentionally, or how to discern what I was experiencing.

Complicating everything was the fact that my brain had been severely damaged. I didn’t feel as though I had much control over what was being channeled, perceived, or coming through my consciousness. I wasn’t intentionally deciding to connect with Spirit or open myself psychically. It was happening whether I wanted it to or not.

In many ways, I felt more like a witness to my own consciousness than an active participant in it. It was as though the injury had disrupted many of the filters and boundaries I had previously relied upon while simultaneously giving my consciousness renewed access to everything I had shut down years before.

That loss of control was frightening. At a time when I was already struggling to regain control of my physical body, I was also navigating a consciousness that suddenly seemed to have access to far more than it had before.

I existed for a while somewhere between curiosity and fear. I was fascinated by experiences that felt loving and expansive, confused by those that didn’t, and unsure how I was supposed to know what was safe to interact with.

I didn’t immediately embrace any of this as a spiritual calling. I simply lived it, questioned it, and allowed the experience to unfold.

Trying to Understand the Unexplainable

I had spent years studying biology and psychology, and I understood that an injured brain could produce extraordinary changes in perception. I wasn’t interested in labeling every unusual experience as supernatural simply because I couldn’t explain it. One question remained quietly in the background: Is this actually real, or is this my damaged brain?

Then things began happening that became increasingly difficult for me—and eventually for the people around me—to explain that way.

I began having what I experienced as premonitions. In one instance, I saw a fire consuming a neighbor’s property; days later, their entire backyard caught fire. Other times, I found myself communicating with deceased family members I had never met. I would describe grandparents to my mother whom I had never known in life and watch her expression change as she recognized the people I was describing.

My family eventually began testing the experiences themselves. They would hand me photographs of homes and properties I had never visited and ask what I perceived. I would describe interiors, surrounding land, or impressions I associated with the history of a location. At times, those impressions seemed connected to things such as former battlegrounds or routes associated with the Underground Railroad, details my family could then compare with what they knew or researched about the property.

Sometimes the experiences felt like mediumship. Sometimes they felt psychic or intuitive. Sometimes imagery arrived before an event occurred. Often, several forms of perception seemed to overlap.

These experiences gave me more confidence that there might be something happening beyond the effects of my injury, particularly when other people could recognize or independently verify details I described. But confidence and certainty were not the same thing.

What came next happened less because I was determined to find an answer and more because of the life my brain injury had forced me to live.

I couldn’t tolerate music or much sound, and television was difficult because of the damage to my brain and eyes after temporarily losing my sight. Even food became extremely limited. For periods of time, much of what I could tolerate consisted of things like ramen noodles, Gatorade, and water.

So I spent an enormous amount of time in solitude and silence. I couldn’t distract myself from what was happening inside of me in many of the ways we normally do. I meditated because silence was one of the few things my brain could tolerate. I observed my thoughts and consciousness, read what I could, and followed whatever captured my curiosity.

Spirituality unfolded inside that silence.

At some point, I picked up a tarot deck and began reading about tarot. There wasn’t a grand plan behind it. I was curious, so I followed the curiosity. Tarot led deeper into intuition, energy, consciousness, and eventually Reiki.

When Healing Opened Another Door

By this point, I had been living with paralysis for more than a year and was being treated for what doctors believed at the time was multiple sclerosis. Part of that treatment involved immunosuppressive therapy that, in my case, was a form of mild chemotherapy.

My aunt, who was an acupuncturist, suggested that I see a Reiki practitioner.

Reiki was one of the first things that seemed to help my body shift in a way I could actually feel. It became part of the period in which I began regaining the ability to sit upright and moving beyond the paralysis that had defined my life for more than a year.

I didn’t experience this as a rejection of medicine. My curiosity simply expanded. Whatever language I used for what I was experiencing—energy, the energetic body, consciousness, the quantum field—I became interested in ways of understanding healing that existed outside the framework I had originally been taught.

The Reiki practitioner also noticed something about the way I experienced our sessions. I would tell her afterward what I had seen, felt, heard, or perceived, and she eventually told me that what I was describing wasn’t typical of what most of her clients reported. She believed I was extremely gifted and encouraged me to take those experiences seriously.

She eventually introduced me to a shaman. A few years into my recovery, once I was physically capable of driving again, I began what became approximately a year-long apprenticeship.

The woman I apprenticed under barely wanted anything to do with electronics. She didn’t even own a toaster. In hindsight, it was almost comically fitting: I was recovering from a brain injury that had made screens, noise, and stimulation incredibly difficult, and I somehow found myself learning spirituality from someone who had intentionally removed much of that from her own life.

That apprenticeship gave language and context to experiences I had been having for years. I learned more about energy, journeying, Spirit, intuition, ritual, the natural world, and ways of relating to consciousness that were very different from the psychological and biological frameworks I had originally been taught.

And somewhere along those rabbit holes, I began recognizing something important.

Different Language, Similar Truths

Psychology and spirituality weren’t always describing entirely different things. Sometimes they seemed to be looking at similar human experiences through different lenses.

Psychology might describe dissociation or a dissociated part of the self created through trauma. Within certain shamanic traditions, someone might speak about fragmentation and soul retrieval—calling back a part of the self that became separated through overwhelming experience. The frameworks and worldviews are different, but I recognized a similar underlying theme: something happened that caused part of the person to disconnect, and healing involved safely reconnecting with what had been separated.

Psychology gave me one vocabulary for understanding the mind, behavior, trauma, and the subconscious. Spiritual traditions offered another for exploring energy, consciousness, fragmentation, intuition, and healing. I didn’t feel compelled to decide that one language was right and the other was wrong. I became interested in what happened when I allowed them to sit beside each other.

The spiritual lens also offered something I hadn’t always found within a purely clinical understanding of my experience: flexibility, grace, compassion, and a sense of participation in my own healing.

Science gave me invaluable ways of understanding what had happened to my brain and body, and I remain grateful for the medical care that helped carry me through some of the most vulnerable years of my life. But eventually, I began feeling a conflict between what I was being told to do and what my own body seemed to be telling me.

For nearly two years, I had a persistent internal message telling me that something needed to change. I ignored it because the people treating me were the experts and I had been given diagnoses serious enough to make going against medical advice terrifying. Meanwhile, I kept getting sicker.

After approximately four years of treatment, including mild chemotherapy through immunosuppressive therapy, I made a decision based on my own free will that went against my doctors’ recommendations. I stopped my medications—including my chemotherapy, antiseizure medication, mood stabilizers, and antidepressants—and stayed with my mother for approximately three months while my body adjusted through what I experienced as a detoxification process.

It was not a decision I made casually, and it is not one I would tell another person to make simply because it was part of my story. Abruptly discontinuing medications—particularly antiseizure and psychiatric medications—can carry serious risks.

At that point, however, I had already lived approximately four years inside a prognosis that estimated I might have only eight to ten years left. Somewhere in me, the question became: What if I finally listen to my body?

Over the months that followed, the symptoms that had dominated my life began disappearing. The paralysis was gone. The brain fog lifted. The overwhelming exhaustion changed. The seemingly endless cycle of becoming sick with one illness after another stopped. I began feeling healthy again in a way I hadn’t experienced in years.

I cannot take my individual experience and use it to determine exactly why those changes occurred, nor would I use it to tell someone else what they should do with their medical treatment. But I know what the experience meant to me: for the first time in years, I felt as though I had listened to my body instead of continually overriding it.

I don’t view the medicine I received as an enemy or believe accepting treatment had been a mistake. I believe it supported me during a period when I needed it. But the years of silence created by my brain injury had also taught me to recognize the rhythms and signals of my own body.

Doctors could examine my brain, interpret scans, prescribe medications, monitor symptoms, and offer expertise I could never provide for myself. I valued that expertise then, and I value it now. But they were not living inside my body.

I was.

Learning to respect that internal information became part of learning to trust myself again. Spirituality didn’t teach me to reject science. It taught me to include myself in the conversation.

Healing While Still Healing

My brain injury wasn’t a chapter that ended and was followed by a spiritual awakening. The two unfolded alongside one another for years.

I was learning Reiki while healing. I was exploring mediumship and spirituality while healing. I was mourning people I loved, grieving relationships, repairing relationships, moving, building a practice, learning how to live inside my body again, and trying to make sense of spiritual gifts that could activate at any time and around seemingly anyone I encountered.

Beneath all of that was another kind of grief: I had lost approximately 15 years of my memory.

There were people who approached me and told me they were my best friends. They had photographs of us together and stories about things we’d done, places we’d been, and years of history we apparently shared. To them, I was someone they knew intimately. To me, they could feel like strangers.

Imagine someone knowing pieces of your history, personality, relationships, and experiences that you cannot access yourself. They remember you, but you don’t remember them. There was grief in that which I didn’t yet have language for.

I was also mourning the end of a seven-year relationship that I couldn’t fully remember ending. I knew I had ended it and that the ending had been traumatic, but I couldn’t access years of the relationship in the way someone normally would when processing such a significant loss. How do you grieve years of your life when parts of those years are simply gone?

My relationships with my family were changing too. With such a severe brain injury, my ability to regulate my emotions had been profoundly affected. There were times when I could be reactive, angry, or cruel and later have little or no memory of what had happened. Meanwhile, the people around me were trying desperately to care for me and help me survive something none of us fully understood.

Later, I found myself repairing relationships around events I couldn’t remember. I had to reconcile the fact that someone else’s experience of my behavior was real even when I had no memory of creating it, taking responsibility for my impact while also having compassion for the fact that my brain had been profoundly injured.

In many ways, it felt as though the person I had been before the injury had died even though my body survived. The memories connecting me to that person were fractured. Relationships that had belonged to her were suddenly mine to navigate, and I was trying to understand who I was becoming while people around me were still relating to who I had been.

So much of my life fell apart at once, and then I had to rebuild it.

I was building a practice while rebuilding myself. I was offering healing to others while actively healing. I was developing spiritual gifts while learning how to function inside an injured brain. There was no reliable filter yet and not always an off switch.

My neurological recovery continued for years. It wasn’t until the end of 2024 that my doctors finally cleared me in terms of the physical healing of my brain. Once my brain was cleared, the seizures that had been part of my life during those years stopped.

But physical healing didn’t mean that everything I had survived disappeared with it.

After my brain was cleared, I began experiencing something my doctors had told me could eventually happen: profound waves of post-traumatic stress. For years, so much of my energy had been devoted to physical survival that, as that chapter settled, it felt as though my nervous system finally had more space to process what my body and mind had actually lived through.

Throughout 2025 and into 2026, that processing came in waves, sometimes lasting months at a time. I was carrying an enormous amount internally while continuing to show up externally. I was holding space for clients while learning how to hold space for myself. I put myself in therapy and sought out my own sacred circle of healers and practitioners to support me through the layers I didn’t need to navigate alone.

Now, in 2026, I am back in therapy and exploring EMDR for the third time. As my brain and nervous system have continued to heal, I’ve found additional layers of my experience available for me to process. What I was capable of processing while severely brain injured is different from what I could process several years later, and what I am capable of exploring now is different again.

I’ve come to understand healing less as repeatedly returning to the same wound and more as meeting different layers of an experience as I develop the capacity to meet them.

My relationship with my body has evolved alongside that process. I still experience significant migraines at times, and occasionally sensations arise that my nervous system seems to associate with what a seizure once felt like. But I don’t live in fear of seizures today.

Within my spiritual practice, I’ve noticed those sensations can coincide with periods when I feel something significant shifting internally or when I haven’t made enough space for stillness and spiritual connection. Rather than immediately fearing them, I sit down, meditate, listen, and allow whatever needs my attention to come forward. Often, once I make that space and receive whatever I feel Spirit has been trying to bring to my awareness, the sensation settles.

Whether someone understands an experience like that through the language of the nervous system, meditation, intuition, Spirit, or some combination of them, for me it reflects something I spent years learning: my body is no longer something I automatically fear. It is something I listen to.

There has also been something humbling about becoming a practitioner, teacher, and space holder while continuing to need support myself. Those roles don’t make me exempt from being human. If anything, my experience has deepened my belief that those of us who hold space for others also need places where we are allowed to put everything down.

Being medically healed and feeling healed are not necessarily the same thing. The physical body can survive something before the nervous system has fully processed it. The brain can heal while grief remains. We can support others without having completed every layer of our own healing, and needing support ourselves does not diminish our ability to support them.

My life didn’t stop while I healed. My life became the place where I healed.

The Beginning of Astralis

Before all of this, I worked a corporate job. After my near-death experience and brain injury, I left that career. The life I had been living before the injury no longer fit the reality I was living afterward, but I didn’t have a carefully mapped-out plan to replace it with a spiritual practice.

That came later.

As I recovered, followed my curiosity, experienced Reiki for myself, and explored my intuitive abilities, the direction of my life began changing naturally. Approximately a year after my near-death experience, I started what would eventually become my healing practice.

I did not start my practice because I had finished healing. I started it while I was still healing.

My brain was still injured. My body was still recovering. My memories were fractured. My relationships were being rebuilt. My spiritual awareness was developing, and I was still learning how to navigate gifts that had reopened without my permission or control.

In many ways, the practice grew alongside me. What started with energy healing and intuitive work gradually expanded into deeper explorations of consciousness, trauma, the subconscious, nervous-system awareness, spiritual development, and the ways our lived experiences shape our relationship with ourselves. I trained, practiced, studied, taught, questioned, experienced, and continued allowing one path to lead naturally into another.

I wasn’t teaching from the perspective of someone who had reached the other side of healing and could look backward from a safe distance. My understanding of healing was being shaped in real time by what I was living, what I was learning, and what I was witnessing in others.

Astralis grew out of that evolution.

Where Science Meets Spirit

Today, I don’t ask someone to choose between science and spirituality. I don’t believe energy work should replace appropriate medical care, and I don’t believe every physical symptom needs a spiritual explanation. I also don’t believe every intuitive, mystical, or transcendent experience needs to be dismissed simply because we don’t yet have a scientific framework capable of explaining every aspect of it.

There is room to understand the nervous system while exploring energy, to understand trauma while developing intuition, and to work with the subconscious while asking deeper questions about consciousness. There is room to honor what we can measure while remaining curious about what we cannot.

My background in psychology helps me recognize how our histories, relationships, conditioning, and protective patterns shape us. My spiritual experiences expanded the way I understood consciousness. My physical recovery taught me to respect the extraordinary intelligence and adaptability of the body. My continued healing taught me that sometimes the most compassionate approach is one spacious enough to hold all of those things at once.

My awakening also taught me that spiritual development isn’t simply about becoming “more open.” I know firsthand what it feels like to have awareness open faster than you know how to navigate it. Learning how to ground, discern, establish boundaries, close my awareness when needed, and remain connected to my body became every bit as important as learning how to access intuitive information.

Spirituality, for me, became less about escaping the human experience and more about finding a compassionate way to inhabit it.

What Astralis Healing Has Become

Astralis Healing has evolved from a one-on-one healing practice into a space for healing, education, spiritual exploration, community, and practitioner development.

Today, my work includes energy healing, intuitive guidance, astrology, QHHT and subconscious exploration, spiritual mentorship, community, and education through the Astralis Academy. Through the Reiki Mastery Path, I teach an approach to energy work shaped by many of the lessons my own journey taught me: technique matters, but so do ethics, boundaries, trauma awareness, nervous-system safety, discernment, intuition, and seeing the person in front of you as an entire human being rather than simply an energy field.

Although the modalities have expanded, the heart of the work has remained consistent. I believe the body possesses an innate intelligence. I believe there are layers of consciousness worth exploring. I believe intuition becomes clearer when we develop a deeper relationship with ourselves. I believe spirituality should bring us more deeply into our humanity rather than encourage us to escape it.

And I believe healing is often less about becoming someone new than it is about unraveling everything that disconnected us from who we already were.

Coming Full Circle

When I look back at 25-year-old me lying on the floor after that seizure, I sometimes think about how impossible it would have been for her to understand where that moment would eventually lead.

At the time, there was survival: paralysis, uncertainty, fear, doctors, diagnoses, treatments, and the enormous task of learning how to live inside my body again. At the same time, another reality was unfolding alongside it: spirits, energy, intuition, visions, consciousness, and the memory of being told that I had been sent back because there was still something here for me to do.

I didn’t map out the path that followed. I followed what unfolded.

A tarot deck led me farther into intuition. Reiki opened another door. Reiki led me to a shaman. Spirituality brought me back to psychology with a different perspective, and psychology helped me remain grounded as my spiritual world expanded.

Eventually, all of those threads began weaving themselves together. The scientist in me never disappeared when the spiritual part of me awakened. The psychologist didn’t have to disappear for the intuitive to emerge. The person healing didn’t have to disappear before the practitioner could begin to take shape.

That integration is Astralis.

It is the meeting place between what we know and what we are still discovering. Between psychology and spirituality. Between the nervous system and the energetic body. Between science and mystery. Between our human stories and the parts of consciousness that may extend far beyond them.

My journey into this work began when my life, quite literally, stopped. Everything that came afterward taught me how to live it differently.

And Astralis Healing was born somewhere in between.