She Died and Visited Heaven? Doctor's Near-Death Experience Sheds Light on Life After Death

Dr Mary Neil you went through an incredible experience a near-death experience that you have written on you have spoken on you're part of a new movie it is called after death and I want to just start for those who don't know your story um really this happened on a South American river you almost lost your life you essentially did did lose my life you did lose your life exactly and and and which I know is so strange because here we are talking now right but you lost your life you experience something incredible talk first before

we get into the heaven experience talk about the accident and what happened well in a nutshell I mean obviously we don't have enough time to really go into it but my husband and I are Avid kayakers we've Ked for decades all around the country internationally and so we're this is something we do this isn't a crazy kind of thing uh but friends of ours are professional boers and run trips to Chile every year during our winter and their summer and so when my youngest son was finally old enough to let us leave for without our

kids um we decided to go down there for my husband's birthday and we had a wonderful time we paddled all these beautiful rivers and had a great time and what was going to be our final day of paddling anyway we decided to paddle a river that's well known for its waterfalls or its drops and I you know not talking about niagar Falls uh but 10 to 15 feet which are exhilarating and challenging but certainly well within our skill set and that day actually my husband uh did not go on the river with us he woke

up for the first and only time in his life with back pain so he dropped us off and then we he was going to pick us up at the end and so I went on the river with again these friends of ours that are professional uh boers and and a few other American clients and when we came to the first uh more significant drop another one of the client sort of bobbled her way past me and kind of blocked the entrance to the channel we had selected to go over and so my only option was

to Veer over and go over the main part of the waterfall which is what I did and when I crested it I could see the bottom and see tremendous turbulence and flow and you know I knew it it wasn't going to be pretty but what I assumed would happen would be that I would hit the bottom and flip upside down and have to come out of my boat and kind of get tumbled around a little bit and then sort of spit out Downstream which um is not a fun experience but you know it is part

of boating occasionally and that's fine but what happened instead is something I could never have dreamed up I have to tell you that I had never actually thought about death before in my medical practice and in my surgical training I had certainly dealt with death meaning death of you know patients that sort of a thing but at that point in my life I had not personally lost anyone I had not lost a grandparent or a parent or a sibling or a friend I I mean I didn't know anything about death and so like most people

I think I never thought about death until I had to I had never thought about what would happen when I died if someone had asked me I'm sure I would have said well I I think there's something more I hope there's something more I don't know it's sort of this abstract concept that you say well you know I'll think about that someday not this day but yeah but I hit the bottom and the front of my boat became pinned or stuck in the rocks and the underwater features and the boat and I were immediately submerged

under 8 to 10 feet of water and I am a spine surgeon so I am very calm in high stress situations and I didn't Panic people always ask oh my gosh you know did you panic and no I didn't panic I set about trying to free me or F free the boat one of the two but the weight of the water and the force of the current was too great for me to do anything and I thought about my options um which of course were very few and uh I realized that I would probably die

and it would be very easy for you or anyone who's listening to assume that oh a piece came over me and oh I gave in I don't have the words to explain this so that you would actually understand it but I made a very active choice and asked that God's will be done regardless of what that meant and it seems like it would be a really passive thing but it was a really active choice and it I really did have a choice I could either choose God's will or fight it and either way I was

going to die it didn't I guess it didn't really matter matter but the moment I asked that I was immediately overcome with this very physical sensation of being held and comforted and reassured that everything would be fine my husband even as you're underwater even as you're underwater droning I was underwater for sure this all happened underwater wow and I was being held by Christ which you know it took me a long time to actually say that out loud because like probably everyone I I mean even though we talk about not having to earn God's love

or work for it in our hearts we still believe that oh we're not good enough like oh I'm you know why me I mean I'm I'm nobody and that's really one of the first really beautiful things I think about my experience because it really is true I mean we are individually so completely known and so purely loved we don't have to earn that I mean it's hard to accept that for us I mean but it's true and So you you're in this moment you you know you know in that moment I'm going to die there's

no way out of this and you feel that that that Sensation that overtakes you what then once once your eyes go black once it happens right I never black they never went black so you never had there was no transition moment it just flowed right for me personally I never felt alive and then dead conscious and then unconscious I felt conscious and then more conscious wow alive and then more alive no I never I never felt uh I I never felt dead you yeah there was no Gap moment I tell you no not for me

and I will tell you that I'm very pregnant atic and sort of concrete thinking and God's time is different the spiritual world's time is different and there was definitely a shift in time Dimension I'm not quite sure what the metaphysical words would be but I could experience all of eternity in every moment and so I could be held by Christ and be reassured and taken through this Life review and all these things but at the same time I was still me I mean perhaps my best me but I was still me and I had this

little thought balloon off to the side thinking wow this is really strange wow did you know it was the afterlife I mean did you know in those moments at this point I was thinking like this must be a hallucination you know I must be hypoxic and so I would do self- assessment exams I'd say okay wait a minute now I must have an air pocket because I'm very good with time I knew I'd been underw water too long to still be alive so I thought okay I have an air pocket so I would think about

okay take a breath do you feel air and I'd say no I like I feel like a Manor you know I feel like an ocean creature I felt glorious actually and it was water but I could still feel the plastic of my boat I could feel the weight of the water I could feel the current slowly pulling my boat out my uh body out of the boat I could feel my legs breaking as that happened I mean I could feel feel all these things with no pain on might dad but at the same time I

could feel this intensity and purity of love and Christ's holding me and taking me through this Life review and learning everything he taught me there and then my spirit left my body and and I mean it's truly a spirit we leave I mean you know we all have these bodies here because that's part of this experience but no the the real me the essence the spirit the soul you know whatever you want to call it I don't care I rose up and out of the river and um just felt glorious is just not even the

right word but Felt So Glorious and this incredible lightness of being and wow once I was above the river it was like Jesus kind of like I don't know this sounds corny to say but you just kind of released me to the heavens and and then I was greeted by this group again of I don't know what people Spirits beings again those words mean different things to different people so I I don't know what to call them but I knew that they were people who had known me and loved me as long as I have

existed I knew that they were all people who were important in my life story I didn't personally recognize them because as I said I didn't know anyone who had died but let's say maybe it was a you know a great-grandparent who died before I was born who knew me knew of my existence but I didn't know them someone tied to you but you didn't know right so that's that's really interesting yeah no and I'm I absolutely know that the next time unfortunately there are plenty of people who will be there to greet me that I

will recognize and I will know and the beautiful thing is that you know when people sometimes people say well you know I don't I don't want to be reconnected with my whatever my father because he was a jerk and I hate him and I never want to see him again but one of the incredible things is that when we are reunited with people it is with an absolute uh understanding of the history the backstory what the purpose of it all was and we're reunited with an absolute purity of love and so even people who you

didn't like here on Earth I mean it's still it's it's purity of love I'm convinced that that where love is present and specifically where God's love is present there's just no room for any of those destructive emotions it's sort of like you know like and darkness I mean all you have to have is a little tiny bit of light and darkness can't exist because Darkness isn't actually real we talk about it but it's not real it's just the absence of light and I'm convinced that all the destructive emotions that we feel it's just an absence

of love Yeah well and and you know you you think about this experience that you have and you you've died in the water you've gone to heaven you're experiencing this and you obviously come back because here we are doing this interview right now you got what what was it like for you to wake up from this right and I know I'm oversimplifying the journey you were on but to wake up from this and realize that was not a hallucination that was something you really experienced yeah well it was very difficult and most people who come

back from a near-death or after death experience uh have a period of time some people it's short some people it's longer but a period of time uh of really a couple things first of all disbelief that they're back and really depression and then you sort of struggle with okay well what does it all mean because having a near-death or afterdeath experience or even any other really profound spiritual experience is definitely a mixed bag you know it's beautiful and wonderful and awesome but it brings with it a real heaviness and weight of responsibility and okay now

what do you do with it and it definitely sets you apart it's a very isolating sort of experience well especially for somebody like you I mean you're a doctor you're a person of science right and you know you were you were somebody who hadn't thought a lot about these things before and suddenly H how did how did that part of this CH like how did how did this experience change your faith walk let's go there because you have a very different view now than you did then yeah I mean I I would have claimed ahead

of time to be a Christian but really you know now when I look at it it's like most people in this country and perhaps worldwide I don't know it's you know it's kind of a cultural Christian okay that's just kind of what I was I happened to be born in the Midwest and we went to church but but that's not really being a Christian that's a cultural Christian you can be a cultural anything right but I would say that currently without any doubt first of all my number one identity is that I am a beloved

child of God period every everything is secondary to that I mean believe me I love being a wife I love being a mother all those two jobs are critically important to me but the only thing that truly truly matters is that I am a beloved child of God and so my experience radically transformed my understanding of life and of death it radically changed my understanding what it means to be here I mean being on Earth being life is this incredible opportunity an incredible adventure and we're not meant to be here and just waste it away

or be here and just talk all the time about oh I can hardly wait to get back to Heaven I mean that's like you know that's like going to Europe and sitting in your hotel room wishing that you are back in your hotel room in your hometown you know nobody would do that I mean if you go go on a vacation you go out and you experience it because you learn things differently you experience even if it's doing the same thing you do it differently and you have different things that force you to grow because

it forces you out of your comfort zone but for me you know I had the um other issue of coming back because when I was sent back you I was told I was given basically a laundry list of things I still had to do and you may or may not remember I mean I was told about the coming and Unexpected death of my oldest son and at the time he was only nine and he was healthy as a clam I mean actually I don't know if clams are healthy but he was healthy I do I

do remember that about your story and so for me I came back and not only because I'm a scientist but because of that I spent many many months trying very hard to come up with an alter alternative explanation I didn't want this experience I didn't want it to be real I didn't want anything to do with it actually um so for me it was sort of this even more intense experience of just thinking like come on like why am I what's the deal here why why am I stuck with this and nothing on this list

was anything that I wanted to do or felt qualified to do I mean you know everything and and that's kind of the way God calls us right you're never asked to do something that you feel like oh nice that would be great you're called to do something that pushes you out of your comfort zone because it's only then that you truly identify and discover your gifts your talents your um ability to glorify God and serve god well you know we have just under two minutes here and I could talk to I could talk to you

for four hours because your story is so fascina so we're condensing it down here but but I want to ask because you're you're in afterdeath now which is a new film that hits on October 27th and you get to tell your story um once again and it's it's very interesting and compelling the way this film is put together what are you hoping people take away from after death I am so hoping that people see the film and bring their friends even friends who are not faith-based because we're all going to die and this film does

a really really good job of making you think I hope that people leave this film feeling challenged feeling challenged in their own assumptions about what death means and what happens afterward because I'm absolutely convinced that if you get to the point where you accept that there really is life after death then all of a sudden it propels you down this pathway of discovering meaning purpose and joy which is the life I believe we're meant to live Dr Mary Neil I so appreciate that that is a great place for us to close the film is after

death and it hits theaters on October 27 thanks for your time today oh thank you so much it's a privilege