Cracked Open - Two Years After My Near Death Experience

Two years ago yesterday, I faced one of the more significant forks in the road of my lifetime. Whenever one reaches a fork in the road, they have no choice but to take one of the paths that appear on the palette of options in front of them. Some of those life altering choices are made consciously and at other times, those choices are made when we are unconscious or perhaps even semi-conscious. This week's reflection is a story about my choice to stay in my body after my skating accident two years ago and the many doors of healing that appeared for me when I was quite literally cracked open. 

For those of you who are newer to my life story or need a refresher, on January 30th, 2022 I had a freak accident at the Warren Park ice rink near our home on the north side of the city of Chicago. It all happened in an instant. I had been taking a break standing along the boards chatting with a nice woman named Trish who I had met at the rink a few times prior. As we both pushed off from the boards to go back out onto the ice surface, I lost my footing, fell over backwards and hit my head on the ice with full impact.

I’m a fairly proficient skater. I played hockey all through my youth and while it had taken me a few weeks to get my legs back in early 2022 after 10 years off, I had been in a nice groove skating regularly by the day of the accident. There was nothing about my fall that came as a result of risk taking or being careless. I had no desire to fly around the rink impressing people with how I look on skates. I was just enjoy being in motion outdoors experiencing life as a moving meditation and something completely unexpected happened. 

Over the past couple of days I have been thinking a lot about what happened two years ago. Earlier this morning I took a look back at my writings in the days after the accident to see how I described it back at the time and here is what I had to say about the immediate moments after my fall: 

The rest of the story got a little foggy for me for a while. I know I lost consciousness, but I'm not sure for how long. I could tell I was bleeding out of the back of my head and there were many people around me telling me to stay still. Surprisingly, I was remarkably calm. I asked if they had found my AirPods and if they knew where my phone was. I knew that I’d be leaving in an ambulance, so I inquired about how my car would get home and whether or not somebody could help me with that. In one way things were flying by me at the speed of light in another way everything was in slow motion.

I started to feel like I was a little bit cold, but I was lying on ice so that didn’t seem that unusual. Some nice man noticed I didn’t have gloves on and he skated by and handed me his gloves. It was just somebody who was skating around who stopped and said, “Take these for your hands, you’re shivering…I don’t even need them back.”

Then I started to get scared. I didn’t realize I was shivering. I had no idea how much I was bleeding because I couldn’t turn my head to look at the ice around me. Was I bleeding so much that I was bleeding out? Was I going into shock? I still don’t know at this point what the ice looked like and I don’t think I want to know. I can’t imagine what it was like for my wife Christiana to get a phone call from my phone number with somebody else on the line telling her that they had called an ambulance for me. I heard Emma’s voice in the background and I thought to myself, I’m going to be okay. I have to be okay. I’ve got a whole team of Angels and ancestors out there helping me to be okay and I have lots of unfinished business here to take care of. 

But I was still scared…

It wasn't until many months later that I came to realize just how close I came to not being here anymore. I won't go into ALL the details of my hospital visits and the physical aspects of my recovery. I am not interested in examining the severity of my injury versus the probability of not surviving. That is a different story for a different day. This story is the story about those moments I spent in that liminal space between our 3D human world and the other realms that exist out there in time and space, as well as what it means to me now to have unfinished business. 

In the months that followed my accident, the world as I previously knew it was temporarily gone. My ability to multi-task at a high level and move quickly through the Universe was reduced to moving slower than I ever had before in my life and doing not more than one thing at a time. My default tendency to try to go out and about and absorb the energy and frequency of the masses turned into hours spent alone in my bedroom in the dark, avoiding nearly all sensory input as I healed from a severe concussion. It was in that void of external distraction that I slowly began to get a clearer picture of what happened in the immediate moments following my fall. In short, what happened in those moments is that I was shown a potential exit door. 

Regardless of which spiritual tradition you happen to embrace, there is a large degree of universality to the belief that there is something beyond our mere human existence. For the sake of giving that thing that is beyond a label that we can use for this story, I will simply refer to it as Source for right now. While I was in that liminal space between my fall and regaining consciousness, at some point I began perceive a message that sounded something like, "If it's all too much, you can just stay here... there is no shame in deciding that it is time to rest." It was not a verbal message. There were no words spoken. I just felt the invitation and I let it permeate the many layers of me that exist - the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual layers of Jim. 

Now let me be perfectly clear that I did not have the text book, near death, out of body experience that you sometimes hear described by those who actually have crossed over and come back, but it was 100% clear to me that I was in control of making a choice to stay or go. Everything seemed so peaceful in the void. As I look back on what I wrote in the days that followed the accident, I think one of the reasons that I was initially so calm as I lay on the ice shivering and bleeding out the back of my head was because I had just come from a place immediately next to Source/God frequency. I was in a state of bliss despite my severe physical injuries and fear. In some ways it felt comparable to me to the first night in the hospital when Emma was born, as she came in wrapped the essence of God and taught me more about unconditional love in an instant than I had learned in the entire 53 years prior. 

I have no idea how long I remained in that state of contemplative unconsciousness on the night of my skating accident. It might have been as little as a few seconds or it could have been as many as several minutes, but at some point I could feel myself falling. I wasn't sure if I was falling away from my human form or falling back towards it, but eventually I got a jolt of energy that came with the message, "I have unfinished business!!!" The next thing I remember was looking up at the screen of my iPhone to see the faces of my wife Christiana and my daughter Emma, who was soon to be four years old. In fact if I had left on January 30th, 2022, I would have missed Emma's 4th birthday by less than I week. What a sobering thought! 

At first I thought that the unfinished business was clearly a reminder that I am a husband and father, not to mention a friend to many special people in my life. Over time, I have come to realize that the unfinished business piece was and is much larger than I ever could have dreamed of. My fall and traumatic brain injury had not only given me a chance to make the choice to continue my life as Jim Herbert, father, husband and friend. It also gave me a chance to crack open pieces and parts of my brain that had been blocked out and buried for decades. 

Over the last 18 months, I have been going into the recesses of my heart and mind to quite literally mine for the wisdom that can be distilled from the story of my life and what it all means. I have done extensive life review in the Family Constellation field based on the work of Dr. Bert Hellinger. I have done deep dives into getting to know all the parts of me through Internal Family Systems therapy. More recently I have engaged in a process called Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing to tap into unprocessed trauma and distressing memories, not only from my accident, but also from life events that date back to my early childhood. Along he way I have re-discovered chapters of my life story that I didn't even remember existed, some of them rather pleasant and joyful, and others that are excruciating and painful. It's brave work and I am proud of myself. While I would never wish my skating accident on anyone, there are parts of me that accept that in order to become the person that I came here to be in this lifetime, that I literally needed something to crack me open. 

It is this healing journey that I have been on and sharing the story of that healing journey that is a big part of my unfinished business. There is more story to tell here eventually, but for now I will leave it at that. Between the mental and emotional work I have been doing in combination with my long term candida cleanse I have been writing about, I feel like I am in the process of building the optimal version of Jim, just in time for my 60th birthday later this year. Your ongoing support means everything to me. I am truly grateful. 

Well that's it for this time. Until the next story, Peace and blessings...