What is a shared death experience and what does it mean to your afterlife and that of your loved ones? We discuss that subject end of life therapist William J. Peters. You can find his new book on the subject at Amazon: At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

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Paranormal Podcast Announcer
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

Jim Harold
Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I’m Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again. And when people ask me, “What is your favorite topic in all the different things you’ve covered over the last almost 17 years now doing the shows?” The thing that I gravitate always to is the idea of the afterlife. Because I have a little joke, a little standard line, we might not all see Bigfoot, we might not all see a UFO. But I hate to be the one to tell you, everybody listening to me on this show, at least physically, will die. And I think we all wonder whether you’re a believer, or a hardcore skeptic, at two or three in the morning, when we can’t sleep, what really happens, and we’re gonna have someone who can talk to us about that. And he has a new book out and I’m very, very interested to hear his wisdom. I’m talking about William J. Peters. And he is the author of At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. And he is the founder of the Shared Crossing project and director of its research initiative, recognized as a global leader in the field of shared death studies. He has spent decades studying end of life experiences. And previously, he worked as a hospice volunteer with the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco. And as a teacher and social worker in Central and South America. We’re so glad to have him with us, William, welcome to the program today.

William Peters
Jim, thanks so much for having me. It’s truly a pleasure.

Jim Harold
Now, I want to talk a little bit about your hospice work because I really think that is kind of–not to get too religious, but God’s work. I think that people who work in hospice are definitely special kind of people. How did that happen for you? And can you talk a little bit about your experience?

William Peters
Well, I, I got into hospice works entirely because I was fascinated with what happens around death and dying. I had two near death experiences prior, earlier when I was 17 years old and when I was 30 years old, and I really didn’t know how to make sense of them. My culture just didn’t give me the, the background to those experiences. And, and then I have, I should say, I have–cancer, unfortunately, is something that occurs quite a bit in my family. So I have a lot of relatives who have either died from cancer or are in, you know, have experienced what we call cancer journeys. So a lot of end of life experiences there. And then I had an experience when my grandmother died on my paternal side, where I walked into her room a few days before she died. And I saw what looked like–I’ll call her Nano, having a conversation. A vehement, gesticulating conversation, as she was peering out into the distance. It was clear that she was looking at–engaging with some beings or some something that was–that looked like they were in the room, but her gaze was far beyond that. And I couldn’t even break into this conversation. I didn’t really try very hard, but I did walk in, I sat down. And I started taking notes on the conversation and found out later that she was dialoguing with people that were in her life 50, you know, years ago, then my uncle, the elder in the family helped me figure this out. And we were both quite moved by this because I said it felt as real as the conversation we’re having right here. Well, that–I share that experience because it was at that point, after a number of experiences, I said, I really want to be with the dying. And, and it wasn’t just the I said it was a fascination with death. It was. I’m also you know, a psychotherapist by training. And so I really wanted to learn more about what is the experience of people, what are they asking themselves? What are the questions that are arising and what do they need from us in terms of, you know, not just physical support, but spiritual, emotional support? So I joined the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco. It was–that facility was at Laguna Honda Hospital, a public San Francisco hospital. And that meant that there were a lot of indigent people on this 24 bed, open ward, very old hospital and this was perfect for somebody who wanted to be around people who were dying because there was a lot of death and dying happening all the time. And, and since they didn’t have–a lot of them were indigent, maybe homeless or estranged from family or, you know, just didn’t have a lot of family. So that gave opportunities for us as volunteers to get close in a certain way. Appropriately so,` but you know, just be with them, because they often were alone. So, when I got into hospice, one of the experiences I actually mentioned in the book was that I really considered a formative experience I was working with an individual we’ll call Ron. He’d been a merchant marine in his life. So he traveled all over the world. And he loved me to read, not me, anybody actually, read these stories, these Jack London stories he loves.

Jim Harold
Oh yeah.

William Peters
So I was reading him Call of the Wild. And as I was reading it, like I did, you know, every other day, in the midst of reading this, I popped out of my body. And there I was, above my body, looking down, looking down on my body, I could even see like the words in the book. And I see his body to laying prone. Now, Ron had been completely unresponsive for the few last few days. But here he was, I look to my right. And I can still see the image right now. He was pleasant. He had a smile. He, he almost had this smug look as if to say, “Check this out. This is where I’ve been hanging out.” And I feel like, you know, my interpretation is it’s, I think he’s somehow invited me there. I don’t know how that happened. But here I am, suspended. Now I’m actually quite comfortable, a little stunned, but comfortable. And my response afterwards, as I reflected on this was, oh, yeah, that was just like, or similar to my previous two NDEs, especially the second one, where I had a blood imbalance. And I was in the ICU. And I was hovering above my own body, looking–listening to you know, healthcare practitioners discuss my case and other cases, and I was just hanging out, it was identical. So that was my–that was my gateway experience for the SDE in a certain way. At Zen Hospice, I had a lot of other experiences, but that was my first one.

Jim Harold
Now, you use the term SDE. Many people are familiar with NDE, can you explain an SDE?

William Peters
Oh, yeah, thank you. So the shared death experience is referred to–the acronym is SDE. And the shared death experience occurs when somebody dies, and a caregiver, a loved one, or in some cases, a bystander report that they shared in this transition. In other words, they feel like they were given some sort of glimpse or insights or sensory experience of the person dying. And in many cases, they report or they–in our research, we’ll hear them say, “I feel like I went into the afterlife with my loved one. And I was shown where he or she was, what it was like. And it was invariably–it was pleasant. In fact, more than pleasant, it was hyper alive and very much like the near death experience.” And this is important because Raymond Moody, who I’m sure your viewers are aware of–

Jim Harold
Sure.

William Peters
–he wrote the seminal book on the NDE in the mid 70s. He also wrote the seminal book on the SDE in 2010. It is called Glimpses of Eternity. And when I met Raymond in 2009, he was talking about the shared death experience. And when he–I’d never heard of it before. And when I heard him speak of it, I went to him immediately and said, “Not only do I know about this experience, I actually know that–I think like I know the terrain pretty well around this. And I think I may be able to help people have it.” And I just said that to him when I was speaking to him and he was–was and has remained very supportive of my work and our now, you know, research project, which is the leading institute in the world studying the shared death experience. And so, that began this journey of studying the SDE. Now, the comparison between the NDE and the SDE is quite compelling. In fact, you know when Raymond and others and I talk about this, we’re pretty clear that it’s the same phenomenon. And every one of these experiences is unique. But the capacity of phenomena that’s possible is the same. And the reason why we say that is because it sounds like we’re in the same dimension. So like the NDE and SDE are taking place in the same dimensions, if you will.

Jim Harold
Mhmm.

William Peters
So there are some key differences. More because, you know, in a shared death experience, of course, you’re not having a brush with death, and you have a different vantage point to a certain extent. So the number one characteristic or feature of the shared death experience is that the experiencer will see the dying. In 51% of our cases, they will see the dying. And that–that is quite compelling, to say the least, because that lets them know that their dying, their dying loved one, or their now deceased loved one is indeed alive and well, in a beautiful place. And there’s other features worth noting, which is they often see them with pre deceased relatives who form a type of greeting party, a welcoming party. And there’s often elevated beings there that aren’t seen, whether they call them beings of light, or angels, there’s different, they describe them differently. But these are guides or helpers, who, in many cases are, you know, described as being beautiful and radiant and loving, and, you know, beyond what they’ve ever experienced in the human realm. So those are some of the features I can say a bit more about the SDE, in fact, I will, right now, just because there is a dominant feature–

Jim Harold
Sure.

William Peters
–and that–that dominant motif in the shared death experience is journey. This is what we hear all the time is that, that I observed, or I experienced this journey from the human dimension into the afterlife, and that the relationships are key. So the strength of the relationship between the experiencer and the dying seems to be very important. And that doesn’t mean that you have to have a long, you know, relationship with them. What it really means is that for some reason, the relationship has a strong enough bond, that the dying, somehow–this is interpretive, but this is what we’re working with–seems to somehow be reaching out in some way to let you know that they are alive and well and continuing on. And I say this, because there’s a lot of hospice workers of which I was one, who had these experiences. And you might ask, “Well, gosh, you’re just a health care provider, or spiritual care provider, and why you out of all these other people they can reach out to?” Well, it may be that at the end of their life, if you are working with them closely, that you may be the relationship that they choose to reach out to. The next question arises, “Well, why wouldn’t they reach out to all sorts of people?” And this is a–this is a question that is a mystery for us at this point, because it seems like they can reach out to some, but not everybody, because we have a lot of cases where you know, at the bedside, you have, you know, three or four family members and one has the SDE and the others don’t, or maybe a couple do and a couple don’t, and we can’t figure that out.

Jim Harold
Right. Now, do you have to be physically present with the dying person to have an SDE? I think of twins who are separated by a continent, I think of amother and a son, or whatever the case may be, can you have an SDE with a person, a dying person, even if you are not physically present with them?

William Peters
Great question. And I am thrilled to report that 64% of our now over 225 accounts are remote. That means they are not at bedside. And this is a huge finding in our research because Raymond’s work, which was the groundbreaking work focused entirely on bedside accounts. Well, in our research, like I’ve said, two thirds are remote and that could be down the hall, that can be across town, or it can be you know, on another continent, and I should say that Dr. Peter Fenwick–

Jim Harold
Yes.

William Peters
–and his wife, Elizabeth Fenwick, in Great Britain did quite an extensive study on the experiencers that–on the experiences of carers–they call them carers, but they’re caregivers in our North American parlance–at the time of death, and are working with the dying generally. And they coined a term called deathbed coincidences. And this seems to me to be a remote SDE. And that was what they found quite a bit. And they focused a good deal their research on, and it makes sense. Because these are more common than the bedside experiences.

Jim Harold
I’m actually going to ask you about an experience my wife had, we’ll do that right after this break. Our guest is William J. Peters. We’re talking with him about his new book, At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. We’ll be back right after this.

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If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune into Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now we return to the Paranormal Podcast.

Jim Harold
Oh we’re having a fascinating conversation, today. Our guest is William J. Peters. He is the author of the brand new book called At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. And, William, I want to talk to you about something because this is something that I’ve recounted on the shows many times, it happened to my wife. And I never thought about it in the context of an SDE, a shared death experience. But now after hearing you, maybe it was. I want to–I want to get your take on it. This was back in 2001, shortly after 9/11. Before I ever did the podcast, so people don’t think, “Ah, this just came up because he was in the midst of paranormal podcasting. And itwas on the mind of him and his wife.” No, I had always had a lifelong interest in the supernatural, but never, never–podcasting didn’t exist in 2001, as it is now. So anyway, my mother-in-law was very ill. She had at home hospice, and we were kind of at the mind of, she’d been home a couple of days, but she probably had about a month left. I think that’s what we thought from what the doctors had told us and what we had thought. And I think this was the second or third night she had been home from the hospital, and the at home hospice would come and visit and so forth. And the one night my wife was over there, I believe I was at home with our daughter, who at the time was just about to turn two years old. And my wife, Dar, wanted to stay a little longer with her and talk with her and things, and she kept trying to almost shoo her away, “Go home, you need to be with your husband, and your young daughter, you need to be with them. You know, you just go home and I’ll be fine. Everything will be okay.” So it was almost like she was shutting her way. So she went home probably about 7pm, something like that, 7, 7:30pm. We went to bed, she called in and checked in with her dad every night as–was her habit. And she did that until he passed on many years later. But 11 o’clock at night, 10:30, 11 o’clock, everything was fine. As it could be under the circumstances. So about, I can’t remember the exact time, maybe two o’clock in the morning. We’re in bed, we’re both sound asleep, she wakes up and looks over my shoulder, and she sees a vision of Mother Mary. And she said she was the most beautiful person she’d ever seen, and it was glowing and very peaceful. And that lasted maybe 30 seconds, a minute, somewhere in there. And she said, “I was totally awake. This–this was not a dream.” And then she started to fall back asleep and the phone rang. And it was her dad. And her dad said, “She’s gone.” And you know, my–my wife’s like, “Who’s gone? What are you talking about?” “Your mom, she–she just passed away.” Now the thing was, what made this more of a cold quote, coincidence, was the fact that my mother in law was Catholic and deeply into Mother Mary, that was a big thing for her. Now, what are your thoughts on that experience, and does that fit the definition of an SDE?

William Peters
Oh, that is a great case. I’d have to say, I have to learn a little bit more about it. But I would–knowing that the key piece here is that your mother-in-law was a devout Catholic. And Mother Mary meant something to her.

Jim Harold
Yeah, a lot. It was like she–at her wedding, she brought roses for the statue of Mary. I mean, it was like a recurring theme, was like a big deal with capital B and capital D.

William Peters
Yeah, I got it. So I would say yes, it’s a shared death experience. But I’ll tell you why. Because it seems to me both the timing of it–it coincides with her time of death and the significance of Mother Mary. If she–if your mother-in-law knew that, in presenting the Mother Mary or–or some force, I can’t be that declarative about your mother-in-law doing this.

Jim Harold
Sure.

William Peters
But in some way, there was some force that put this image of Mother Mary, this vision of Mother Mary into your wife’s experience in such a clear and believable way. It seems to me that one could easily interpret this as a message from your mother-in-law, stating essentially, you see, here’s Mother Mary happening right at the time of death. Everything is okay. Now I’m going to ask you the next piece about this, which is and we always do this, because there’s more going on than just this vision that we’re–that you’ve just described. The real question is, what did your wife make of this? What was her interpretation? Because remember, I said in the beginning–

Jim Harold
Right.

William Peters
–this relationship piece is really key. Because if they had put up, you know, the Buddha that wouldn’t mean anything.

Jim Harold
Right.

William Peters
So there’s this huge relationship that–in which the SDE always fits in contextually. So what does this mean to your wife?

Jim Harold
I think it meant almost exactly what you just stated. That “I’m okay.” That things are okay. That’s the way she interpreted it. And I can’t stress this enough because again, people will say that, “Oh, you’re a paranormal podcaster, of course, you’re gonna think that.” Again, I was not a paranormal podcast, I was just someone with a interest in supernatural and the paranormal. I was in advertising at the time. So (laughs) so it just seemed like one of those outstanding cases where it–it was, and I have a phrase I use, and I know sometimes people consider it a cop out, but I call it too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.

William Peters
Well, and I think that’s a good way to look at it. Because, you know, I, when I got into this work, I was open minded, but this is not the way, you know, I was a psychotherapist. I’m highly trained, you know, I’m, you know, Ivy League trained, I don’t need to be doing this. But the fact of the matter is, in my end of life practice that focused on people who are terminally ill, and then working with family members in grief and bereavement. I heard so many of these experiences. Of course, I started hearing more when the word got out that here’s a psychotherapist in town who, or a mental health practitioner, who is quite receptive, he can help you make sense of this experience, like basically making sense of it sounds something like the person asking, “Am I crazy? Did I have this? Do I have a hallucination, am I losing my mind?” And I found these people come into my office. And I would start by saying, you know, “These experiences happen, you’re normal, don’t doubt yourself, let’s talk about it and see what it was see what it means to you.” So the–what I’m bringing this back now to your wife is, your wife has this experience. She has a filled sense, her meaning making process around it is really clear. That came from my mother, obviously was around the time of her death. And she was letting me know that she was alive and well in an afterlife. You know, I’m not crazy about the term afterlife because I think there’s just life. There’s no afterlife. Things, life just continues.

Jim Harold
Mhmm.

William Peters
There’s human death. But that doesn’t mean that our life as our consciousness, or soul spirits doesn’t continue. So–but we’ll use afterlife, because that’s the term that is–that people report in our research. So I like what your wife said there, Jim, that she, she got a real clear message in it sounds like it was unequivocal. And our role, you know, and I think when I say our role in mental health, in spiritual care, just as we talk to our friends and family is that these experiences happen, they happen more than we know for sure. Because our culture is not open to them at this time. If you have an experience in our current healthcare system, you may get lucky to have somebody who would honor your experience. But more often than not, you’re gonna, you know, be greeted with some sort of a blank stare–

Jim Harold
Sure,

William Peters
–and kind of an–a look that’s letting you know that they’re wondering, you know, “Are you healthy,” you know.

Jim Harold
Right.

William Peters
So that rolls into the what we call the discounted, dismissed or disparaged assessment. Yes. So I hope that’s helpful.

Jim Harold
Oh yeah, I just thought as an example, it might be useful, and it’s just something that’s always stuck with us. And I’m sure it always will. Now, you mentioned something interesting there about maybe medical professionals and people who doubt these things. On the other hand, I would think maybe there’s a stratification where people who are really at the frontlines have a different point of view. Let me ask you this because there’s the old saying, “There’s no atheists in foxholes,” right? The people who work on the frontlines, hospice workers, maybe nurses, people who see death every day, and I know this has been reported for healthcare givers–caregivers over decades, this happens to many people. Do those people–do they tend to dismiss it as, “Oh, this is a hallucination,” or, after a while do they come to the realization, there’s more there?

William Peters
Great question. And my response to that, having been in these, as a hospice worker and working in mental health, and now worked a lot with people who are interfacing with the medical community, you are absolutely correct. In is those, primarily those who work with people who are confronting death and dying. So that would be certainly hospice workers, certainly those in the ICU, also on cancer wards, if you will, these people hear these experiences, their response to them depends entirely on their own relationship with these experiences, maybe they did some study, maybe they had their own experiences, they maybe have particular religious spiritual orientation. It also depends on the character and views of the particular medical facility. So some are more scientific materialist. And they don’t have any space for interpretation, other than the dominant view of consciousness, which is, you know, in medical sciences, brain creates consciousness. And once the body dies, the brain dies, there’s nothing left. So there, you’re not going to want to bring up these experiences–or I’ll say it differently. The frontline workers aren’t going to bring these experiences up to that hierarchy, if they realize they’re going to get that response. However, there are other facilities where these are known and recognized, they’re looked at more like mysteries, there’s not a whole lot of attention given to them other than perhaps by the social workers and hospice workers, who will, you know, who have the relationship to spend a good deal of time with the with the family members, and encourage them to–in a way that’s like, “I’ve seen this before, you know, this does happen.” But the, you know, we just, I say we–the Shared Crossing Research Initiative, which I direct, just published the first really rigorous academic article in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Came out in the December 2021 edition, it is the first research that really breaks down both qualitatively and quantitatively, the SDE. And the initial response has been profound, in that some people–or a lot of the feedback we’re getting is gratitude for having done the research, because as one reviewer said to us, we all know these experiences happen, we’ve just never been able to gather up enough of them and study them to to create a credible research study, but you know, you’ve done it, you’ve done it, this is the–this is the foundational piece that will hopefully change this field. And at a, at a minimum, we can’t doubt these experiences as being, you know, hallucinations or, you know, psychotic episodes or worse. So, the I–I see, and I know my colleagues in the field feel that we are on a precipice, and what we need is more people to speak out. And I think, you know, in the same way that Dr. Eben Alexander with his near death experience really changed not just our cultural but the healthcare field because now you have a really well respected and good person that Eben is, sharing his experience. And it’s pretty, you know, it changed things. There’s no one in any reputable facility now, who’s not honoring the near death experience for an experience that happens and then–and they can’t be dismissed and pushed away. I mean, there’s some remote places to do but by and large, no, and I think we’re getting–we’re getting close to that with the SDE. I think we need a few more years, but what we really need is some people of stature, either in the public realm or in the medical sciences to claim they’ve had these or seen these, and that we need to change our relationship and health care around them.

Jim Harold
Now, when we get back from the break, I want to talk to you, something you cover in the book is the idea of trauma and SDEs, and we’ll do that right after this. Our guest is William J. Peters. The book is At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. We’ll be back right after this.

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Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram @thejimharold and join our virtual campfire Facebook group at virtualcampfiregroup.com. Now back to the Paranormal Podcast.

Jim Harold
We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is William J. Peters. The book is At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. And we had a really great time talking to him about this subject. And in the book, well, you mentioned this idea of trauma and SDEs? Is that something that makes an SDE more likely, trauma? What–what did you find about these two subjects in combination?

William Peters
You know, the question of trauma is really being studied a great deal in mental health right now. And we are finding that people who have trauma in their life, especially you know, you know, I’m a perfect example this. I had, you know, a traumatic skiing accident as well as a blood imbalance that threatened my livelihood. And I think that made me more susceptible to having SDEs. And so I do think there is a correlation there. And we actually gave a talk International Association of Near Death Studies suggesting the relationship between near death experiencers and their probability of having a shared death experience. We don’t have enough literature on it, but I think that it’s a safe hypothesis, needs to be studied more. But certainly I think if you have trauma for whatever reason, there’s a whole lot of neurological reasons and perhaps reasons about how that affects your consciousness that would lend oneself to have an SDE. It’s not a direct correlate, of course, but I do think it increases one’s possibility. And once again, I want to be really clear, we need more research on there, but that’s a good avenue to pursue. I will say this, the relationship between the person dying when they have trauma. So what we have–so we have this experience called the sympathetic SDE.

Jim Harold
Mhmm.

William Peters
So, in our in our book, there we refer to a number of them, but one in particular, I’ll cite quickly, and that’s Sarah. Sarah wakes up one morning, and she’s sweating, and she’s nauseous. And she’s, you know, vomiting and her family says, “We’re taking you to the hospital,” she goes, “Okay, okay.” They’re getting ready to go to the hospital. And she starts feeling better. She said, “Well, I think I’m getting better.” So they slow that process down. Then she receives a call from her sister. And her sister says, “I have some very sad news. My daughter, your favorite niece died of a drug overdose.”

Jim Harold
Aw.

William Peters
And so we call this–so Sarah then takes a step back, and she goes, “Wait a minute, duh da da.” And she believes that she was somehow participating and sharing in the death experience of her beloved niece, Leila. And so we have a number of these cases, we they come up frequently, you know, sadly, they come up with drug overdoses, they also come up with cardiac arrests and death, and also some stroke type stuff. That’s the–that’s what we’ve seen. So there seems to be some really remarkable connection between the dying and a significant loved one.

Jim Harold
I hate to do what–what a lot of people do with science, when you know, I’m a lay person, when it comes to science, I don’t want to misatribute something but I think about if you think about Einstein, and things like colocation, and so forth, that makes you, you know, same thing can be in two places at one time. And then I think about stories of twins, you know, one gets stabbed and the other one feels the pain clear across the country, or those kinds of things. That seems to make sense to me.

William Peters
Yeah, and it’s in the–it’s in the data. I mean, you’re right, we had the twin–twin literature is, is stunning, about how their connection to each other. And the example you gave about feeling another’s pain is really profound.

Jim Harold
Now, part of the the subtitle of the book, you know, it’s At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach us about Dying Well and Living Better. I guess, first of all, I would ask you, and it seems in our society, the way death is treated, and we were kind of brought up to think about it that there is no good dying. But how does one die well, and how can the concept of SDEs, whether you experience them or not, help you to die well, when that time comes, hopefully many years from now?

William Peters
Yes, so first of all, knowing about the shared death experience, and the fact that this is, as far as I can tell, the best death possible for us. And the reason I say that is because the benefits, the after effects of–from having a shared death experience, are the following: experiencers report that they believe their loved ones are alive and well in a benevolent afterlife, they believe they’ll see them again, their relationship to death and dying is much improved, they no longer have any anxiety or fear of death. And the experience leads them to, in a certain way, reevaluate and see the purpose and meaning in their life in a new way. So they have a renewed sense of purpose in their life. So those are the real primary benefits. There’s also some, some more intuitive, psychic abilities that come from it as well. So there in and of itself, in terms of preparing for your death, if you have ways that you can, in a certain sense, get prepared for–what we call, we encourage people to get prepared for a conscious, connected, and loving end of life experience and then we help people in our trainings, you know, learn methods to enable a shared death experience or another type of shared crossing or, you know, an end of life experience whether that’s pre-death dreams, visions or after-death communication. We have all this identified in our, in our spectrum of end of life experience, which is another topic that we study. So the point being is, knowing about the SDE should encourage people to get curious about it, to learn more about it, and to take steps to have them. And what we found is there are steps that can help people have the SDE. We see this in our, in our literature, that experiencers tend–a lot of them tend to have mindfulness practices. And, and that can be a prayer, that can be meditation, that can be yoga. And the piece that I’ve identified in this is that those practices cultivate a receptivity to our experience, it invites a tuning to our experience, sensing and feeling and getting aware of our experience. And it also allows us to develop an attention mindset so that we can place our attention in a certain direction, and relate to it. And that’s the piece that’s necessary at the end of life. When you’re with someone who’s dying, you got a lot of energy, a lot of emotion running through you, it’s important to have that capacity to attune to what the dying is experiencing, what they’re needing, and what is going around in the room. So those are the characteristics, I think that are–that we teach, for those who want to learn how to have this experience. And the other piece about it is that–if you want to have this, really addressing your unfinished business, that helps. And this is the living better, if you know that the SDE is possible, and you know that the way that you have it is by having a good relationship with your loved ones, you’ll want to work on your relationships. And so there’s the invitation to live more consciously, to be more caring, to reconcile any unfinished business, and to develop these practices that we all benefit from of, you know, being more loving to ourselves and being kind to our, our, the people in our lives. And it’s the basic practices that the great spiritual traditions have echoed through the ages, you know, be the–be the best version of yourself in whatever that way that can be. These are all the teachings and motivations, and indeed the inspirations that come from the people in our research. They tell us this is what they’ve learned. And this is what they are inviting everyone they know to practice.

Jim Harold
Very interesting. Indeed, I think after this, anybody interested, and I know you said it’s not your favorite term, but in what comes beyond our physical death, I guess I would say rather than afterlife, would be very interested in your book, and also your website where I understand people can actually watch videos of people’s personal stories of these SDEs. So if you could fill us in where we can find both the website and the book?

William Peters
Yeah, great. I’ll start with the easy one. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful publisher, Simon and Schuster. And so they have made this book available pretty much anywhere the books are sold. I would, you know, make a personal invitation, if you will, to support our local booksellers, because we need them, and they’ve suffered a good deal during this pandemic. So if that’s possible, and there’s actually a button on all the, you know, the Simon Schuster websites, and if you go to my website, you’ll see it there too, where you can go to your local indie bookseller, and they can actually mail it to you in a certain way. So that’s that first piece. And then our website is really a good–it’s sharedcrossing.com. We have a lot of resources, definitions, terms, you’ll see–you’ll get a real sense for our research and what it reveals about end of life experiences and non ordinary experiences at the end of life, as well as specifics about the shared death experience. And we recently started this story library. And the story library is video accounts–they’ve been edited down to three to five minutes–of our research participants sharing their shared death experiences and other experiences as well. So that’s a real good way to get to see people like you and I talking candidly about their experience and the impact on them. And you know, we also have, if you go to the website you’ll see we have, you know, our programs and workshops, and there’ll be some good workshops. I’ll be doing one with Raymond Moody, and yeah, other introductory and more comprehensive print trainings as well. So a lot of resources for you there because I know there’s not a lot out there in the field on this. So we’re really trying to be a source of quality information for people.

Jim Harold
Really just a great discussion, a great topic and one that really pertains to each and every one of us. William J. Peters, thank you for joining us today to talk about At Heaven’s Door and shared death experiences.

William Peters
Thanks so much for having me, Jim.

Jim Harold
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