Experience description:

At age 30, I started studying with a Christian mystic order, attending daily meditation, prayer, and Communion services, with addition weekly classes in Bible study and wisdom teachings. I was ordained a Deacon after 2 years and was further initiated into teaching practices. My sensitivity to the Divine and to other people was honed so that I was able to sense what was going on with a person and feel what God wanted me to say to them. This was extremely valuable in my job as a Hospice/Palliative Nurse Practitioner, as I could be fully anchored in my connection to God while being fully present with someone suffering difficult emotions, seeing them through a challenging time. It also gave me that confidence that death is nothing to fear; while I didn't directly say that to someone, unless they expressed it first, it allowed me to provide a sense of comfort and reassurance that "everything would be OK", and that the dying person would be going to a place of unimaginable love and acceptance. The mystic order dissolved in my area in 2012, and I continued my practice independently as I was unable to move to a community in another city due to family constraints. At that time, I developed a romantic relationship with a man I'd met in the order, and over the next few years, our relationship developed such that in early 2015, we set a wedding date for later that year.

On Feb. 1, 2015, I was shoveling show in my driveway when I felt a sudden "shift" happen in my head. I felt weak and tried to sit down. The next thing I knew, I was lying prone in the snow, regaining consciousness. I never pass out, so I knew I needed medical attention. I was still weak, but managed to get into the house to my cell phone and called 911. I also had the presence of mind to make a few other phone calls to notify people of what had happened, and that I was going to the emergency room.

My memory pretty much cut out on the ambulance ride to the hospital, but I have been able to piece the story together from fragments of my memory, reports of friends/co-workers who were there (I went to the hospital I worked at), and my medical records. They found the brain bleed right away, but it took about 12 hours for them to find the source of the bleed. The aneurysm was in a location that couldn't be treated at that hospital, so I was transferred to the academic medical center, where I underwent immediate coiling of the aneurysm with titanium coils.  My memory kicks back in the morning after surgery, meaning I lost about 40 hours. Except for my fragments of memory during those 40 hours, I had no special experiences.

I had prayed while waiting for the ambulance, and continued to pray, confident that whatever condition I ended up in, God would take care of me, provide me with the basic necessities. My mind was working very slowly, so different from what I was used to. I felt very well taken-care-of in the neuro ICU, although the staff in the step-down unit were less skilled. Although I was thinking and speaking slowly, I was actively involved in my care, asking for medications and therapies that I had reason to believe would help - and they did! Likely because of this relatively high level of function, I was discharged directly to my home without any subacute rehab. My children were living with their father at that time, and my fiancé was still living 2 hours away, finishing school. I had no one to help me at home on a regular basis and felt abandoned and alone.

My mother paid for a caregiver a few hours a day for the first week, until I felt I could take care of myself at home alone. She suggested going out for a walk once or twice a day, and that helped. I remember noticing in late March that I was starting to see flowers come up, and that while I would always feel joy in that before, I couldn't feel any joy now.

I had also tried my meditation practice as my brain healed, and I found this impossible to continue. First, I was unable to visualize the prompt to induce the spiritual connection. It took too much concentration and either exhausted me or gave me a headache. Similarly, if I was able to "flip" my consciousness into the higher realm, I developed a severe headache. Even if I was able to get a hint of the higher realm, I could feel no emotional connection to it. It is like hugging someone and only feeling the warmth and pressure of their arms and body, but none of the joyful rush of love.

I went back to work after only 4 months off, but felt very limited as my previous abilities to sense people and God's message for them was now gone. My memory was impaired too, so I was so anxious I would really screw up! I begged my co-workers to let me know if they saw any issues that might compromise my patients, but they all asserted I seemed fine. My prior habits seemed to carry me through for some time. However, after 2 years, the chronic fatigue and anxiety were catching up to me. I asked to go part-time, but my request was deferred, and after another 2 years of hoping for a part-time role, I gave up and changed to a part-time (16 hr per week) job as a volunteer coordinator for a small, local non-profit.

The increase in non-work time gave me the freedom to rest my brain and try again to rehab my spiritual life. A weekend retreat about 18 months after the aneurysm involved a meditation in which I saw part of my brain taped off as though it were a construction site - it had been demolished and cleared, but no reconstruction was happening or allowed at that time. Now, with more time, I wanted to see if I could rebuild. I started with a basic mindfulness practice of observing the breath. As time went on, I included meditations with occasional verbal prompts for a mantra. I also bought a Heartmath device, which I have used faithfully for the last two years. The biofeedback has been helpful in my getting to an entrained state, even if I still lack the spiritual connection. I have also been doing a lot of work around the content of my thoughts, turning away from self-pity and feeling exhausted and frustrated, and trying instead to find the blessing I can bring in each moment/hour of each day. This has borne fruit, but it is still a work in progress.

What is really interesting is that, even though I can't choose to consciously connect with the Divine, I can still receive important messages. For instance, when I was making the decision to leave my full-time job - at that time as the breadwinner of my family - I had several moments in which I felt an utter sense of well-being, that I would be taken care of no matter what. It gave me the courage to go forward with that job change, even though we faced some financial challenges that first year. Perhaps most important have been my prayers and attempts to discern why this change happened to me. It's most common on the Earth plane to believe that "bad" things happen because we've been "bad". I asked this time and again, and always felt a subtle but unmistakable reassurance that I had done nothing wrong, but that "God needs me this way."  I've discerned a few interconnected reasons for why this might be, and it has helped me continue to try again each new day, when I feel so nostalgic for the love and bliss are awaiting me at the end of this life.

I have always loved science, having earned a Bachelor's in chemistry from Princeton University before earning my Master's in Nursing in Milwaukee. I strongly feel that I am a sort of "missing link" between the spiritual and the scientific. I have the spiritual background impaired by a physiologic disability that may be visible by testing, which may guide researchers to a better understanding of how our consciousness and connection with Source happens in the physical brain. I also have scientific training and background to be able to communicate what is happening as far as my spiritual experiences. I really want to get involved in research in consciousness, as it will give some more meaning to the loss I have suffered.

To give more detail of my post-aneurysm brain experience:  I feel like my brain has been split in two. It may be similar to a severed corpus callosum, except that my split is not right/left, but upper/lower. I can feel a sort of ring around my head, just above my eyebrows, and the part of my brain above that, I have almost no connection to. I can sense that it's sort of there, and if it has a lot of activity going on, I can sense that as discomfort, anxiety, pain, and disorientation as it interferes with my more consciously controlled "lower" brain (below my eyebrows). When the upper part is active, it's kind of like having a radio tuned to two different stations at the same time. Whatever thoughts, emotions, or experiences happen there, I can't access them enough to understand what they're saying, but they interfere with what I'm consciously trying to do with my "lower" brain. I believe that "upper" part is the part of my brain involved in connecting with the Divine. My "lower" brain retains a great deal of my intelligence, but is somewhat slower, and my memory isn't so great, especially when I'm under stress. I can feel sad, angry, and scared, but happiness is rare. I compare it to the corona of a solar eclipse - I can feel the edges of joy, but the full burst of it remains hidden from me. I saw an energy healer for the first time about this almost a year ago. I told him a bit about my symptoms, but didn't tell him what I thought it was - I wanted to see what he sensed without my planting ideas. He told me that in almost 40 years of energy work, he had never felt anything like what was going on around my head. It was very tight, and with some "very gentle, very reverent" energy, he was able to get a little bit to flow. The change was not permanent, although the words he used because an addition to my personal meditation practice to avoid pain.

One of the most difficult parts of all this has been feeling like I don't fit in anywhere. Medical science doesn't acknowledge mystical experience, so doesn't think I have any impairment since I still test well cognitively. The spiritual community always focuses on the joy of growth and connection - I've never met anyone who lost connection, so there's no support community for people like me. My husband has been wonderfully supportive in so many ways, but it's hard to talk to him about nostalgia for the end of my life since that would mean leaving him, and we love each other very much.

I am here until God calls me home, doing the work of loving those God sends me each day. I was given 10 wonderful years of joyful connection, and I now face the challenge of doing the work based on my memory of God's love, rather than the easy way I used to feel it. God sent me this change for a reason (perhaps several reasons!), and I trust that they are for the best for myself and the universe. But, it is very hard.