Some years ago a sweet man in his early thirties came to me for healings for a brain tumor. He and his young bride wanted to go on a vacation to get away from hospitals, doctors, chemotherapy, and the worried relatives who had consumed their life for months. He was having problems with vision, walking, and speech, and his energy levels were like a roller-coaster ride. The first time I channeled healing to him, his soul looked very concerned, and I asked him what was the matter. He said he didn’t want to talk about anything that was going on or to think about death. He wanted to get healed and get on with his life with the woman he loved.
The healing session produced excellent results. His energy returned, his vision improved, and he was walking stably enough to go on a well-deserved vacation with his wife. A couple of months passed before he called for another healing. All his symptoms had come back and he was bedridden, so I started going to their house for weekly visits.
The tumors had multiplied, but he was holding on to the hope that he would beat the cancer and live to be one hundred. He told me that he was afraid of death and didn’t want to die. He was determined to prolong his life as much as possible. When I questioned him about his fear of death, he told me that he was afraid he was going to “do it wrong.” He was afraid of taking that last breath and many times asked me to tell him what it was going to feel like.
This fear was coming directly from his soul, which told me that he had probably had a bad death experience in a former life. He may have been like the skydiver who held on until his body hit the ground. He may have been buried alive or had some other kind of traumatic death that his soul hadn’t released the emotional memories of yet. If our soul has unresolved emotions from something that happened to us in a past life, those feelings will continue to affect us until we heal them. (I’ll talk about healing this kind of fear in a moment.)
When his family called a week or two later to tell me he had passed away, I checked in on his soul to see how it had gone for him. He was so relieved that it was over and that he had finally let go. He told me that if he had known it was going to be as easy as it was, he would have done it a lot sooner and saved himself and his family all that suffering.
I fondly remember a picture that his wife took of him before he died. The room was filled with deceased loved ones and an angel or two. Hazes of human figures appeared all over the picture, making it quite obvious that this young man had not died alone.
Common Fears about Death
The topic of being afraid to die got me thinking, so I went on my Facebook page and asked people if they would share their fears about death with me. Bless their hearts, many people responded, and I want to share the results with you and comment about the most common fears.
Many people said they do not fear death, which is great, but many others did express a variety of fears. The number one fear was leaving their children and never being able to communicate with them again. The second most common was dying a painful death such as in a car crash, and the third highest concern was dying alone. Others’ responses included not being able to breathe, not being able to say good-bye to everyone they loved, getting lost in darkness, not finishing what they came here to do, dying young, going to hell, being buried alive, and the unknown. Another big one was people’s fear that their faith and beliefs were all wrong and that there was nothing after death. This certainly wasn’t a scientific poll, but my guess is that many people besides my Facebook friends share these fears, so I’d like to address the most prevalent ones.
Regarding leaving our children, yes, it can be very difficult to die and leave children behind, but if this happens to you, your soul will still be able to communicate with their souls when they are out of their bodies at night. And you’ll still be able to see them live their lives; you’ll simply be viewing it from the other side. If you die when you have children, there are reasons why this happens, and you may not know these reasons until much later, but you need to trust in the divine timing and order. I checked in on Princess Diana’s soul shortly after her death, and she said that her death was necessary because her sons needed to be raised by the monarchy. She was very sad about it and wished things were different, but she had agreed to it when she and the Elders wrote up her life plan. She did as much as she could with the boys before her death, and my hat’s off to her for being brave about it and moving on with grace when she died. Prince William commented that he wished his mum could have seen his wedding, and I wished he could have known that she was there in attendance — with the rest of the parents, looking extremely proud.
The second-highest concern about death is how painful it will be, and a few people specifically mentioned not wanting to experience the pain of a car crash. Whenever a news reporter interviews someone who survived a crash, the accident victim always says they have no memory of what happened. As I’ve already noted, if an accident is coming that will cause the body pain, most souls leave before the impact of the accident. Also, keep in mind that most people who die in hospitals are medicated to the max when they are dying, and that the soul is usually out of the body at the time of death anyway; both of these circumstances result in less pain.
Third on the list was dying alone. The young man with the brain tumor had this fear, which is why someone from his family was always with him. If this is one of your fears about death, keep in mind the picture that his wife took of all the deceased loved ones and angels standing around his bed. Of course, it is possible that you will be physically alone when you die. Your loved ones may step out of the room, or perhaps you won’t have any living relatives to sit with you, but I guarantee you, no one ever dies alone. You will be surrounded by deceased loved ones, just waiting to take you home to heaven.
The Sensation of Dying
I have a couple of simple suggestions that will give you a sense of how death feels. Go to a local costume shop and ask them which of their costumes is heaviest. Put it on and walk around with it. Sit down and lie down in it if they’ll let you. Feel what it’s like
to walk around in it, and observe how encumbered you feel. As you are walking around, getting a full sense of what it feels like, imagine wearing this for fifty, sixty, eighty years. Then take it off and notice how much lighter you feel — that’s what the soul feels like when it’s released from the body. Some scientists believe the soul weighs two ounces. If this is true, imagine how good it will feel not to be“wearing” your heavy body!
You can also try this: sit back, close your eyes, and take a couple of nice, relaxing breaths. Think of a tree nearby and imagine yourself floating up to one of the branches and sitting down. Imagine the leaves gently blowing and a soft breeze touching your face. Watch the birds and notice how everything seems easy for them. When they want to go somewhere, they just spread their wings and fly. Try to feel how light you are, sitting there on that branch.
Now imagine yourself coming back down to your chair and into your body. Feel the heaviness of your body. The lightness you felt when sitting in the tree is how your soul feels when it leaves the body in death. Because we are still tethered to the body, we aren’t able to feel that sense of freedom. In chapter 1, I mentioned that the soul is attached to the body by a silver cord, similar to the umbilical cord. When death occurs, that cord is severed and you don’t have to go back to the heaviness of your earth life.
Remember that your soul leaves your body almost every night of your life, so this is not something that the soul is going to get “wrong” — as my client feared. When we are ready to accept our death, our soul simply floats out of our body for the last time.
Healing Your Fears about Death
If you have a pronounced fear of the act of dying, I want you to have an out-loud conversation with your soul, telling him or her to release this fear. Remind your soul that your dread is coming from something in your past and that the tumultuous experience at the root has already happened; it will never happen again. If your soul still struggles with this, I recommend seeing a reputable healer who can help your soul get free from this old trauma. If you don’t know of any healers in your area, go to my website, www.echobodine.com/healingpenpals, and sign up for the free Healing Pen Pals program. We will assign you a healer who will send healing to your soul every day for fifteen days. This wonderful service has helped thousands of people.
In closing, I would like to share one of the stories that I got from my Facebook poll. Brenda wrote:
Fear of dying? Nope! Probably because I’ve already been pronounced dead three times. I was born medically dead, and it took the team of doctors and nurses a few tries before I responded. When I was five, I had my tonsils out and, unbeknownst to him, the doctor nicked something. I was bleeding internally, which stopped my heart. As they were wheeling me by the nurses’ station, one of them looked down and saw that my face was turning dark blue. They saved me by injecting Adrenalin and pulling me upside down.
The memory of feeling as though I was swimming through thick, gooey mud, trying to get to a clearing, is as clear to me today as it was fifty-three years ago. I suddenly burst out into a space that was warm and inviting. When I woke up later I wanted to go back to the “field,” where it was so warm.
Then when I was seven I became very ill with rheumatic fever and was hospitalized on and off for three and a half years. When I was eight (still in the hospital) I had an operation they called an exploratory surgery. They were hoping that if they really got a good look inside me, they might be able to figure out a few of the mysteries they were facing. Once again my heart stopped during the procedure, but this time, for some reason, I had way more control over what I was doing. I had an out-of-body experience that was awesome! It seemed almost as though I were sitting on top of the huge set of lights in the operating room watching everything going on below.
Here’s the thing about why I have no fear: they were saying I was dead as I watched them do everything humanly possible to save me. A couple of the nurses were visibly nervous, and one even cried, but I loved what was happening to me up above it all. I could hear everything, and I mean everything — not just what was being said and going on in the operating room. It was like I could hear raindrops in Ireland, the drums of Africa, the wind, birds, people humming from everywhere, horns beeping, babies cooing, and even things you don’t think of as having sounds — like rainbows, stars, and pebbles on the ocean floor. The most amazing thing about all I could hear was that nothing was muddled — it all made sense. And I wasn’t just hearing everything: all my senses were in overdrive to the complete max. I could also feel everything, smell everything, etc.
Brenda also told me that when she told the doctors and nurses all that she had witnessed while floating above her body in the operating room, they were stunned at her accuracy about what had been said about her and done for her. I hope that reading about Brenda’s experiences will help convince you that death is nothing to fear.