Life Reimagined
Lessons from a near-death experience about the meaning of life, love, and the true nature of reality.
Several years ago, I received a final message from one of my mentors and friends, Berenice Andrews. She was a regular contributor to Transformation Coaching Magazine, where I served as editorial and design director from 2011-2025. Berenice was an accomplished teacher, scholar and shaman in her 80s, and just before her death she shared her last and most important life lesson.
Berenice asked a friend sitting hospice to write it down: “My whole life I felt like I was supposed to do something—something big. Lying here on my deathbed, I had it wrong all along. I didn’t come here to do or accomplish something. I came here to BE something. The vibration of BEING ripples out through the realms. It makes a much larger impact than what we can do in accomplishment mode. The greatest thing we can do is just BE.”
These words resonated strongly in my heart because I came to the same conclusion following my own near-death experience (NDE) in 2002: Just being here on Earth is meaningful beyond measure.
Having stood at the crossroads of life and death, I know insights like this are profound gifts. It was psychically impressed upon me that this precious life, as Buddhists often call it, is a rare opportunity to grow in consciousness. Everything I realize and learn has an impact on what I experience after I leave this life and my body behind. We do not cease to exist or die; we evolve, or in some cases devolve, just as we do in physical reality.
“As above, so below.”—Hermes Trismegistus
Moreover, I have found that just being does not mean inertia; rather, it means becoming an objective third-party observer operating in the now—the present moment—by learning the lessons of my experiences and releasing my fears about the future. It’s a process…not an event. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one back.
During the second half of my life, I have focused on rebuilding my truth; rewriting my story, or personal myth; integrating a new belief system; and expanding my conception of reality. I engage in the life review process daily and believe that this is the best way to prepare for my own physical death, whenever that comes.
My NDE was the dark night of my soul. At the time, I was depressed, disillusioned with life, and drinking alcoholically to console my emotional pain. I had everything that Western society believes makes you happy—the big job, the expensive house, the successful fiancé. Yet I was completely empty inside—a black hole—and I attempted suicide one month before my wedding.
What ensued was a 48-hour trip to Hell, Heaven and back. It was terrifying, liberating and profound. What I ultimately came away with is a deep, personal understanding that what I do every single day—no matter how mundane—is important to the totality of being in this world and beyond.
I want to emphasize the words personal understanding here. This is my experience, strength and hope—my way of explaining and understanding my own NDE and the vast insights I received. My framework of reference today is rooted in more than 15 years of exploring Jungian psychology, practicing a spiritual path that resonates for me, participating in 12-step recovery programs, and studying quantum physics.
However, during this NDE I dove into the deep end of the pool and then learned how to swim. I almost drowned—yet some profound things occurred:
I crossed the threshold of physical death and was given the choice to come back and finish what I came to Earth to learn or “do it all over again” in another life—not as a punishment but as a quest for personal growth.
I received an incredible energy healing throughout my entire body by what appeared to me as an angel.
I spontaneously received knowledge (like a big download of information from the cosmic network), and I learned that everything is energy vibrating at different levels.
I experienced what I can only describe as the state of true unconditional love and the profound peace that comes with it.
I had archetypal interactions with what I would call guardian angels, the Apostle Paul, Lucifer and other things I can only describe as predatory entities.
I knew at the core of my being that what happened to me was not a hallucination. I didn’t want to explain it away or live in fear and embarrassment wondering, “What’s the matter with me?” I knew that this was a doorway to find a more meaningful existence, one that could help me anchor my own truth and stretch the limits of what conventional society recognizes and accepts. I wanted to get closer to my own understanding of what our shared reality actually is.
I went on a five-year rollercoaster ride to reconcile my new reality with my old world, and I almost self-destructed in the process. I decided to leave my career as an editor-in-chief. I suffered a clinical depression after my dog and cat died. I left my marriage. I was overmedicated by psychiatrists, and I self-medicated into full-blown alcoholism.
I am living proof that the apocalypse journey ends with rebirth—and that traumas and challenges serve as catalysts for spiritual growth.
Finding Meaning in Life
In sharing my personal silver linings, I leave you with the top three impressions I received during my NDE. It is my hope that these insights help you find meaning, purpose and joy in your own life:
1. We are in the life learning lab: I came to understand that we are all here to learn—but we are not all here to learn the same things. That is our quest, or the hero’s journey, as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell called it.
During my NDE, I was told by non-physical beings that I am here to learn how to love. I’ve have been processing this message for the past two decades. I spiral around the meaning, and it changes over time. I now understand that unconditional love is an overriding state of consciousness—not an emotion. It exists from a place of non-judgement, acceptance, gratitude, and service to the greater good. The road to this perspective has been paved with a lot of hard inner work, therapy, prayer and meditation.
2. Heaven and Hell are states of consciousness, realities of my own creation—whether I am in my body or existing as a non-physical being or soul: Through my own direct experience, I found we all have a unique energetic signature or resonance, which is the culmination of all our experiences, attitudes and emotions, and it attracts manifestations (creations, realities, etc.) of similar resonance.
Being fully present in the now is an opportunity to experience heaven—and I cannot be in the now until I carry forward my learned lessons while leaving the emotional and mental garbage in the trash. “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” is one of my favorite sayings. If you are familiar with any 12-step program, you probably know it well.
What I achieve in this lifetime—NOT what I accumulate (my physical stuff)—is what I take forward, and it influences reality in the “next realm” or the “afterlife” or however you reference it. I do believe we have other incarnations because I was told that I would “do this again” in another life if I didn’t finish all the lessons in this one. It wasn’t judgement; I was on a journey of progress…progress not perfection.
3. Reality is energy: Quantum physics has expanded our understanding of the unseen world, showing that everything is energy and we exist within a field that only appears solid. The ancients called this field the fifth element, or aether, a material that behaves like a substrate or matrix pervading what we perceive as empty space. During my NDE, I was shown that all solid matter is energy vibrating at different levels.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”—Nikola Tesla
It’s all out there in the quantum field of possibility. I now see time and space as the stage upon which we co-create a shared reality. The five senses, as amazing as they are, have been found to detect less than 1 percent of what’s “out there.” They are merely constructs that form a common framework of reference—not walls that form a prison.
Lisa Cedrone served as the editorial and design director of Transformation Coaching Magazine from 2011 to 2025 and was the executive director of the C. G. Jung Society of Sarasota from 2016 until 2022. She is a mentor and teacher with a passion for sharing the experience, strength and hope from her own life-changing near-death experience and recovery journey. Lisa also spent 15 years as an editor and editor-in-chief for two of the largest business-to-business publishers in the United States. Her universal worldview changed following a profound near-death experience in 2002, during which she was given the opportunity to come back to our world and finish her learning journey in this life.
