This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on I Heart Radio. And welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Norrie with you on our paranormal podcast network, one of the great programs we've had going on there for some time now is Shades of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain. That deals with, of course, the afterlife, something all of us are gonna have to face at one time. Sandra, welcome back. Oh, thanks so much, George. What kind of response are you getting to the Shades of the Afterlife? Oh, I get so many beautiful emails from people. And as you know, there's lots and lots of listeners. There's beautiful reviews that are showing up on the different podcasts, you know, Spotify and Apple Podcasts and things like that. It is our biggest fear, I think, as human beings is what happens next. The ego, we don't wanna die. We don't know what's next. And so I get to uncover from science and medicine and spirituality all these wonderful conversations about what happens next, how we can work through grief and how do we have a powerful life while we're here? I was on YouTube a couple of days ago, Sandra, and I popped a clip from Tiny Tim. Remember him? Yes, I do. Tiptoe through the two loops, that guy. And the clip was him collapsing and dying on stage singing that song. Wow. And it was just bizarre, but it struck me really strangely that, you know, the older we get, we're all gonna face that moment of death. We are. In your opinion, at the dying moment, what's it like? Well, for our loved ones, not so pleasant for us, it's like falling asleep, but not just falling asleep, but opening our eyes and our loved ones that have passed, even our pets are there with us. And there's so much research. One of my favorite people is Dr. Christopher Kerr who wrote the book, Death is But a Dream. He's a hospice, palliative care doctor who studied over 1600 people. And before we pass those weeks, and some people it's months, but days, weeks, maybe months before we pass, we start seeing our loved ones, even our pets, like I said, as clear as if you and I were in the room together. And it's not based on medications, they're having real conversations, our loved ones, they look young, they look healthy. Oftentimes people show up that they didn't even know we're dead, sometimes when they're close to passing, someone dies, the last thing they wanna do is say, hey, your brother died, something like that. But these people are seeing verifiable information that they couldn't have known. So it just shows that nobody goes alone, these loved ones tell us, get ready, you're going on a trip, hack your bag. And so you hear stories of people passing with smiles on their faces. And I just interviewed yesterday a critical care doctor George, Dr. Adam Rizvi, who he'll be on Shades of the Afterlife in a couple of weeks, but he has had had had had about 500 people pass in the ICU. And he decided to keep a journal for each one, just a little reverence for the person as he knew them. But not only that is what happened in the room. So besides things like them opening their eyes and calling out for their deceased loved ones, there was a terminal lucidity where very often people can spring back to life, even if their brain dead. But not only that weird things like the lights flickering on and off or dimming or that feeling, he described, when you're in a crowd of people, you just feel like it's crowded. He said, the other doctors can feel it, the room becomes crowded. So he says, it just feels like it's the loved ones that are coming to help the person across. So coming from a physician, I love hearing these stories because it just lets people know that science is active when involved in the afterlife. What is it that got you interested in the afterlife, Sandra? Was there an episode? It was my fear, George. I woke up one day out of the blue looking at the stars at night and like, what happens when we die? For whatever reason, it came over me as a fear. I didn't want to die, obviously, but not knowing what happens next. It was a fear that, gosh, I just couldn't let go of. And my mom speculates it's because I volunteered in nursing homes when I was young and the nice people would die. So she thinks maybe that was in my subconscious. I don't know. I kind of believe now it's, gosh, it's well over 25 years later since I started this investigation that if they say we each have a purpose, you know, if I didn't go through that fear in the beginning, I wouldn't be talking to you here today. So maybe it was something I signed up for, but I had to put a rest to that fear, George. And so I started just studying everything I could about the afterlife. And then at one point I knew so much and I knew it would help people that are experiencing grief that I opened my mouth and I wrote my book, We Don't Die, a Skeptics Discovery of Life After Death. And here's so many years later and 274 episodes later of Shades of the Afterlife. I'm here with you today. When you put together the program, Shades of the Afterlife and people started getting interested, were you always spiritual at that time? No, I don't even think I was spiritual at all. I know that it sounds terrible, but I grew up Catholic. We had to go to Catholic church. We had to go to Sunday school. We had to go to the school, the church, everything. We had to wear the uniforms, but being forced into that didn't give me any kind of faith. So when I started researching the afterlife, it's like there's gotta be something. There's gotta be something more. And especially with people who have near-death experiences and there's a correlation between, I think all the major world religions, how the message is love and forgiveness and being kind and being of service. And research has been shown that people who have had near-death experiences, they feel this incredible light and love and they come back, most of them giving up whatever religion they believed in and feeling that the message is being of service, loving, forgiving and being kind. It really is as simple as that living life. So that's my common denominator. That's my New Year's resolution instead of all the other things we make. It's just looking through the eyes of kindness. So that's become my spirituality. And every time I look out the window or I just spoke about the birds, you know, I think it's all divinely planned. There's so much magic in nature that it's not just up to chance. So I'm finding my spirituality day by day, but I do believe. It's like the chicken and the egg because what came first in your opinion, the afterlife or the birth? I think the afterlife, it said, this might sound silly, but if you waved your hand in front of your face really, really, really fast, if we could, it would disappear. It's just vibrating in a quicker energy, quicker speed. So many people say that the afterlife or the before life is the reality and our life is just like the dream. You know, we're just here temporarily and then we go home. So instead of heaven being past the cloud somewhere, we are actually part of it right now. And so I think why mediums can tap into the presence of our loved ones is because they're able to slow down their mind enough and get into that zone. I think our loved ones are able to lower their vibration just enough to connect, but it's a world within a world happening all right now. And even you and I connecting, which is miraculous, isn't it? But around us, we've got the wireless internet, we've got radio waves, we've got television waves. There's all kinds of things. You know, you think about all those satellites around planet Earth, there can be two or many more forms of energy existing in the same place at the exact same time. So this afterlife or before life for the greater reality, we are part of it. It's just vibrating so fast that we can't catch it. Well, with Sandra Sanplain, we'll take calls next hour with Sandra as we talk about the afterlife. If you've lost somebody in your family, why don't you share that experience with us? I was looking at some old photos of some buddies of mine that have passed on Sandra over the last six, seven years. Then it really is kind of sad. I gotta tell you. George, it's heartbreaking. I think grief is more painful than getting any physical injury. You know, when we love someone, we are connected. And when that bond breaks, like they're no longer on the planet, we go through a withdrawal. And I hate to compare it to somebody who is addicted to some kind of a substance, but when you think of somebody who's addicted and you know what withdrawal looks like, it's ugly, it's painful, our brains have to re-energize themselves. We lose a whole bunch of these neurotransmitters they're called like dopamine and serotonin and things like that. We lose them, we deplete them when we're grieving. And so it takes time to build them up and that's why it hurts so bad and that's why we cry so much. And sometimes our memory is faulty or we just wanna sleep all the time. Grief is painful and gosh, I wish so much that there was a magic wand to just get rid of it. But I can tell you one thing, George, there are definitely things we can do to help feel better, you know, but our body has to reprocess to get to the other side of it. Yeah, I do everything I can to help people ease the pain but knowing that the loved ones are around, still talking to them, all those kinds of things really do help. With San Jacen playing as we talk about the afterlife right here on coast to coast, her book is called We Don't Die, a Skeptics Discovery of Life After Death. It's just an incredible possibility. Why does the human body die at a relatively early age and we know 70, 60, 90, that's early to me. Why can't it go on to 500 like the old days? I don't know, George. I think maybe we'll get there with all this technology and AI and things. I'm happy though that we're living a lot longer than we did years ago because it gives us more time to love and to explore and being here on earth, I think the purpose for our soul really is to have new experiences to love, to share, really get our money's worth out of life. All those times we push the envelope and we do something that we were afraid to do or we do something new. It's like we're carrying this bag of experiences and we're just tucking more and more in for our soul and someday we'll get home and we'll compare notes and like, look at all these things I did when I was in life, look at all these things I did. But as human beings, we forget who we really are. I think we signed up to come here to learn but we come here, George, and we forget and we think life is happening to us and we're a victim of terrible things but in reality, what if every opportunity is an opportunity to learn and to grow and then make a difference for someone else? Have a friend who just lost somebody in a car accident a couple days ago, Sandra, and I have to believe that kind of a death is instant, isn't it, without pain or do you feel something for that moment? Instant without pain. I have spoken to mediums. I've practiced mediumship just a little bit in classrooms. Also talked to trans mediums, physical mediums, the whole world of it and those in the afterlife can take our soul, if you will, and bring it to the spirit world before we experience that pain. And even when someone's dying of cancer, say, I witnessed my poor father die a very, very painful death and I hang on to those words that his soul left his body before his physical body passed. But when they come back through a medium, a good medium, with verifiable information, the message is clear, I did not suffer. I was here and then I was there and I was greeted by mom or dad or spot the dog so they didn't suffer. They don't have any memory of any pain from this earth. They can just remember the facts, but the pain and painful memories do not carry on. They just arrested a low life here in St. Louis, who's been robbing cemeteries of the bronze urns that the remains of people had been burned and buried in, cremated. That's terrible. How low can you get? Well, I like to believe that, I don't wanna call it karma, but it may be, but we all have this life review. Whether we like it or not, it's coming for us. There's nobody judging us saying, you're going up, you're going down, but it's more our soul taking a look at our life and we get to experience our actions as they impacted other people. Some people call it like an Omni Max theater with all these screens playing at the same time, but it's virtual. And so you feel your actions from the other person's perspective. So that grave robber is gonna feel the pain and the suffering of all those people and gets to judge for themselves, was that the best use of their life on earth? Now, the flip side of that is after we go through the negative stuff, we get to look at the positive things. We get to look at all those little actions that we did that are long forgotten and see the ripple effect in other people's lives because of those kind things that we did. So it all goes back to kindness, George, and no grave robbing. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern and go to coast2coastam.com for more. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. For a son who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachyoh on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire.
