An hour before the accident that almost ended my life, I was watching a whale.

My interview with Crossing Over NDE about my near-death experience and how it completely changed my life.

I’m Not Fearless. I Just Stopped Being Afraid of the Wrong Thing.

One hour before the accident in the middle of the Baja, Mexico desert, we’d been whale watching. A gray whale mother and her baby swam up to our boat to look at us. I felt an awe and a oneness with gray whales that’s unlike anything else.

They have an extra lobe of brain — the paralimbic lobe — that we don’t have, more elaborate than anything in the human brain, thought to process emotion in ways we’re only beginning to understand. And they make one of the longest migrations of any mammal on earth: roughly 10,000 miles, from the icy Arctic down to these warm Baja lagoons to give birth, and back again.

When I talk with the whales, it’s a love language, not unlike cooing with a newborn. It’s an awe-inspiring experience that’s exhilarating, and unmatched in my life.

For a decade, my husband and I traveled to Baja each winter. Every year we’d cross the desert of the Baja peninsula to the Pacific side to spend time with the mother and baby whales in the birthing lagoons.

When I’m looking into an eye the size of a grapefruit, the eye communicates so much to me. It’s a communion of curiosity and love. My energy moves to a higher state of consciousness.

An hour later, I was lying next to our van on a road in the middle of the Baja desert, bleeding internally.

I sat down with the Crossing Over NDE channel and told it all out loud, on camera, for the first time: the accident, the darkness, and what came after. My story is focused on how I changed as a result of my NDE. If you want the whole story, it’s here - scroll down to “Collaborations” on my YouTube channel.

For a long time after the accident, people called me fearless and resilient. I understood why. I’d come back from the edge. I didn’t seem rattled by the things that rattle most of us. But it was never quite true — and I want to be honest with you, because the honest version is the one that might actually be useful.

I’m not fearless. I do fear life sometimes. I just don’t fear death.

Those turned out to be two very different things. The fear of death went away after my near-death experience. Once you’ve been to the edge of death, it stops being the monster under the bed. It becomes almost ordinary. That fear simply left, and it has never come back.

The fear of life was harder. It’s the one I’m still working with.

Because death comes for all of us whether we’re afraid of it or not — there’s nothing to consent to.

Life is the earth school. You have to say yes to live. Yes to being seen. Yes to wanting something and risking that you won’t get it. Yes to choosing, knowing you might choose wrong.

The fear that quietly runs people is not the fear of dying. It’s the fear of fully living.

What changed isn’t that the fear of life disappeared. It’s that I stopped letting it drive.

The accident handed me a gift I never asked for: it took away the fear of the thing I couldn’t control. And somewhere in the long recovery, I decided to set down the fear of the thing I could.

I don’t have this tied up in a bow. I still get anxious and fearful. But I no longer arrange my life around not dying trying to stay safe. More and more, I’m learning not to arrange it around not living, either.

The NDE changed my whole life in an instant. The life before it was full of fear and insecurity.

My life now is full of gratitude for the NDE. The suffering and the recovery were worth it, because of what I know now and who I’ve become. The small moments — talking with my grandson, petting my dog, gardening, writing, camping with my husband and hiking in nature.

My life is now meaningful.

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I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment and let me know what you take from this interview.

XO, Sherold

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