I felt a presence come up over my left shoulder and I could not identify him as being human he wasn't necessarily an alien or an angel or a deity I couldn't identify him at all but I could identify that it was definitely a male presence and as he approached me he sent to me you're not going to be here forever hey everyone we've got something extra special for you thanks to our sponsor hellofresh if you're like us you probably struggled with deciding what to cook every day that's where hellofresh comes in making meal planning easy
and delicious with hellofresh you get fresh prep portioned ingredients delivered right to your door saving you time and cutting down on food waste they offer over 50 meal options every week so you'll never get bored of your dinners and the best part is that they're giving you free breakfast for life you heard that right one free breakfast item with every box while your subscription is active we've personally been using hellofresh for a few weeks now and we love How It's Made cooking fun again we've been trying out their quick and easy recipes and it couldn't
be easier the meals are so good and we've saved a ton of time on week nights you get 10 free meals and a delicious breakfast item in every box while your subscription is active click the link in the description or using our code other side se10 and meet your new meal time routine with America's number one meal kit hi my name is Mindy totfest and I'm the author of dying to meet them in 2016 on November 8th I died of a type of a brain aneurysm known as a vertebral Artery Dissection my story starts in
November it was election day between Hillary and Trump and I woke up that day much like any other day like you hear so many other people say and I saw my husband and kids off to school at the time my husband was working as a teacher and a coach and driving the school bus and our kids were Elementary age so we would just load them up with him in the morning and they would take off to school and I was a stay-at-home mom and a pastor's wife prior to this my husband had worked as a
southern baptist Minister and we had traveled all over the state of Oklahoma preaching the gospel and he at the time when we moved out to the farm was filling in just from time to time still preaching we were a very deeply religious family and we were always at church every Sunday every Sunday evening Wednesdays we held Bible studies and so we were very ingrained in our beliefs so on the morning of November 8th got up saw them all and noticed a little bit of swelling on the right side of my face and it wasn't super
concerning I thought maybe I was having a slight allergic reaction that was related to a genetic condition I have called Ellers danow syndrome and so I decided to take a picture and send it to my husband and said hey I've got a little bit of swelling here not too concerning it wasn't hurting or anything and he said well why don't you try taking a benad drill take a shower just kind of relax today and I'll be by after school and we can go vote so that's exactly what I did I just kind of took it
easy during the day and by early afternoon I went ahead and jumped in the shower and when I got out I noticed that I still had the swelling nothing had gone down and so I went and sat on the couch and I started checking for early exit poles cuz it was getting to be maybe 4:00 or so in the afternoon and I was expecting them home any time so as I'm sitting and looking at my phone all of a sudden I hear a loud pop in my head and my first instinct was that I had
been shot because living out on a 300 acre wheat farm in the middle of Oklahoma there had been coyotes Hunters out in the days prior and I thought man they have shot through this house and shot me in the head and I tried to focus my attention to the back of my head to try to locate exactly maybe where I had been shot I knew instantly that it was catastrophic but I was trying to assess just how bad the damage was going to be I had been an ICU nurse prior to this and so I
started kind of checking my ABCs the airway breathing and circulation I couldn't feel any blood going down the back of my head so my next thought was this has to be a brain aneurysm with my genetic condition it causes aneurysms and I knew that on my father's side almost everybody had died of aneurysms but being 36 I was pretty young for something like that to happen and I had been monitored pretty closely up to that point so I had no reason to believe that I was at any risk really for any immediate problem like that
so whenever I realized that this had to be a brain aneurysm the next sensation I had was a peeling away and I describe it best as an electrical Avalanche because it started at the top of my head and just kind of peeled away in layers it was extremely painful and it rolled all down my body down to my feet and once that happened I felt my head starting to Bob that was kind of the turning point for me when my head started dropping I knew I was very very close to death and so I turned
to my religious teachings and started praying because I'm sitting there with the front door open I'm waiting for my husband and kids to run in and give me hugs and kisses and tell me about their day and all the wonderful things that I expect every day whenever they come in the front door and it immediately turned to Terror and sorrow because I knew that they would be running in and they would be finding my dead body so I turned to my prayer and I said God please do not let my children find me I don't
want to become the worst thing that ever happened to them and then I'm thinking of my husband my husband's not going to be able to handle it either with his tender heart he will never get over this so I start praying Jesus if I can make it through this without being a horrible burden on my family please let me survive this and as I'm in this deep sorrowful prayer I stopped and I started to look around and I realized I was in complete darkness and I wasn't in any pain so I started trying to figure
out where I was and my first instinct was to put my hand in front of my face to see if that I could see it I was trying to determine if it was dark there or if there was just nothing to see and when I couldn't see my hand my next thought was to start clapping to see if I had hands and I wasn't able to and that's when the realization hit me I've really died I've already crossed over I never had any of the recollection of leaving my body and seeing the Earth fading beneath
me I was just I think I was in such a deep sorrow that I didn't even notice that I had crossed over so as I'm sitting there in the darkness I start trying to accept what has happened to me and that I have died and I'm still thinking about my husband and children as I'm waiting I'm praying for them Lord if they've found my body please comfort them and I'm waiting expectantly I'm waiting for Jesus to arrive I'm waiting for that tunnel of light I'm waiting for my loved ones to show up and greet me
looking forward to seeing my grandma and grandpa again and just having wonderful reunion and as I sat and waited the longer and longer that time passed the more concerned I started becoming because nothing was happening and no one was coming for me and so that happy expectation started turning to anxiety and concern as I waited and I didn't understand why I wasn't immediately in heaven I started worrying that I was about to go to judgment so I was trying to prepare to you know this is the moment I'm either going to go to heaven or
I'm going to go to hell and Jesus be my righteousness I can't get into heaven without you obviously there's something that has separated me from being able to be there and I'm trying to process why I am stuck in this Darkness alone and what I have done that could have separated me from having that wonderful homecoming that you hear so many other people speak about who have had near-death experiences and have had a radiant encounter I was fully expecting that Heavenly you know acceptance and homecoming but it never came so while I'm sitting there I
became very aware of God or what I call The Source all around me and it felt Eternal it was everything that ever has been is and will be in existence it was almost like the primordial state of it being there where it could come into existence at any time and it encompassed the beginning and the end it was everything that ever has been and what was so Soul crushing for me was that I almost felt like I was in an invisible box where I was separated from everything in existence and I was at the time
still trying to Grapple with being separated from my family from my children and my husband that I would never see them again at this point and I was now separated from everything ever in existence and that's very hard to take I couldn't understand it and so I had not a Life review but a deep soul searching a self-reflection time where I was trying to determine what has separated me why am I so horrible I don't understand and I started looking at my life and how I've treated others and I didn't find myself lacking I found
that I had always been kind and loved people to my best best ability but whenever I looked at loving myself I saw that I had failed terribly in that regard I failed to love myself enough to think myself even worthy and it had held me back from so many things that I was supposed to be doing in this life and I understood that at that point once that happened immediately I felt a presence come up over my left shoulder and I could not identify him as being human he wasn't necessarily an alien or an angel
or a deity I couldn't identify him at all but I could identify that it was definitely a male presence and as he approached me he sent to me in my mind you're not going to be here forever and instantly it calmed me and it almost felt like he was hesitant like he wasn't supposed to be intervening but he was showing me almost a sterile kindness because he saw the level of my distress and once he did speak to me like I said it was instant calmness because I knew I wasn't alone that someone else was
there and if I were to trust him then I'm not going to be here by myself forever which was such a terrifying thought when I was over there stuck in that situation as soon as he did that we started sailing off to the left and as we did I started seeing a faint purple glow off in the distance and as we got closer I could see these pink intersecting lines in between it and where they came together it glowed bright yellow and it just gave off immense love and it resembled really a map of brain
neurons is how I would describe it whenever I first returned and first started speaking about it since then I've seen pictures of the cosmic web and it echoes what a map of brain neurons looks like so either one of these would be a good representation of what I saw but as we got closer and closer to it I could just feel that love radiating off and my interpretation of it was that it was this Congregation of Souls and of all of the goodness from Humanity from beginning to end was just in there within that nebula
and he told me that's the fabric of humanity and when he did I just sat there because I felt like something so amazing had been revealed to me one of the Mysteries that most people don't ever get to see for some reason he took me by that and let me see that and revealed that to me and I wanted so much to go to it but he kind of indicated no it's not for you and I didn't even have time to process that before we were sailing off again to the left and as we did
instantly I was inserted back in my body now when I came to I had lost a lot of my hearing I was 90% deaf and I could hear kind of the muffled sound on the TV and I kept trying to sit up to try to find help and I kept falling over and I didn't know at the time I had had a stroke and so my right arm was hanging limp so every time I tried to sit up I kept falling over and falling over and so that's just adding to my distress my head was
burning it felt like lava flowing through my skull and I was trying to Grapple with all of this but I was able to locate my phone and call my father-in-law who was across the street in the the Wheatfield working and within 60 to 90 seconds he was standing in my living room and I knew I would be okay about 10 to 15 minutes later my husband and kids arrived thankfully I was able to sit up at that time and I was talking some my words were still pretty slurred and he went ahead and got me
loaded up in the car and we went to the nearest hospital which was 30 m away to the nearest small community hospital and once we got there they were so ill equipped to diagnose or treat someone with my level of trauma that they completely missed what had happened to me within the hours of me being there my speech had started to clear I was getting function back in my arm and so they came to the conclusion that I had had some kind of a migraine or that my neck had shifted well they had told me
we're going to send you home if you have any more problems please come back which I did several times and each time I was met with disbelief and they would send me home with not so much as a Tylenol so this went on for 2 years before we eventually moved out to Oklahoma City and it was kind of a divine intervention thing where I saw a commercial that kept coming on TV and it was about a young nurse like myself who had had an episode which sounded very much like what I had been through and
so I went online and looked it up and what she had had was a vertebral Artery Dissection so I contacted that doctor and within a couple of weeks they had me in to get the proper testing and they were able to determine that yes I had two very big rips in my vertebra artery leading up into my brain and that's what had happened to me November 8th of 2016 and I was finally able to get the proper treatment following that and since then I've gone on to reassess everything that happened to me in the void
after that two years of physical healing came mental healing I ended up going through counseling for a year for PTSD and then finding ions which is the international Association for near-death studies where they you know have sharing groups and you can get on and and speak with other near-death experiencers and that started my road to Healing spiritually and really understanding what it happened to me because I carried a lot of Shame with me being a pastor's wife and not going to heaven and instead finding myself in a place of Darkness I ended up having to
research quite a bit into other religions beginning you know origin stories of where everything came from in existence some of the beliefs from around the world with nun or chaos where things started out of a Dark Void I think that where I ended up was exactly where I needed to be to get me back on track and I believe it was a Divine appointment I believe I was supposed to go there if I had gone to heaven I think I would have come back and I would have been like hey I know where I'm going
Heaven's real it's great and I would never have pushed myself to dig deeper and to gain further understanding outside of what I had prior to my near-death experience if I had gone to hell I would have lived in a constant state of anxiety probably for the rest of my life trying to deal with that kind of an episode so I think that the void was a good neutral place and it really gave me a look behind the curtain of existence I truly believe that where I ended up was at the control center where all of
this is originating from and so I'm very thankful now for that experience and that is exactly where I went I needed that and I think that was an all Divine knowledge exactly where I needed to be I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today and for listening to my story I think it's important that we start to listen to some people that have had these distressing encounters and really look into what we can learn from these they're really starting to come to the Forefront where people are starting to feel more comfortable
coming forward with these kind of encounters that aren't so radiant but there are still so much to learn from them and like the fabric of humanity that I saw over on the other side I would hope that the main thing that people can take away from my encounter is that we are all connected and we are all in this together and really we need to learn to love each other uh if we can always remember that there is a connection between all of us and a reason for each person to be here that we can
really move forward you know as humanity and I think that's really one of the biggest takeaways from all types of near-death experiences is that we all come away understanding that connection and just know today that you're loved and that yeah you know everyone's happy that you're here if you don't hear it know that Mindy totfest likes you and that other people here at this channel they like you and thank you so much for being here we all fall in when the love in our eyes staring lost about the Skylight We All Fall when thees in
our [Music]
