Blissfully Dead

Life Lessons from the Other Side

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Afterlife according to Janelle

The gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life. – Lucan

The first thing I became aware of was an intense wind, not passing around my body but going through it. I literally felt as though I was dissolving. I felt free; this was the best I'd felt in weeks, maybe even months. I noticed a deafening stillness and colours that, just for a moment, seemed to pass through me. I became aware of the lack of temperature: I was neither cold nor warm, I just was. I sensed I was being lifted up, but did not know by what. The first moment without a body was unbelievable, going from desperation to freedom in an instant. I knew that I was dead or at least in a coma by the lack of senses as I knew them.

I wasn't scared, not for a second, but I was apprehensive of what would come. The people-pleaser in me still wanted to get it right, even after death.

I had felt alone during life. That wasn't anybody's fault; most people had gone out of their way to make me feel at ease. I felt alone because I felt different. During the last months and maybe even years of my life I felt isolated in my own (sometimes quite horrible) world. And in one moment all these feelings were gone and I was overwhelmed by a sense of belonging. It wasn't so much that someone was waiting for me; it was more that the veil of separation had lifted and I had become one with all.

This blessed nothingness was not just the opposite of feeling lonely, detached and isolated; it was also the opposite of feeling haunted. During my life I had put stress on myself to get 'it' right. I would fret over my looks, my weight, my school marks, my achievements at work, and I'd worry what other people thought of me. All of that fell away in an instant. What remained was peace, pure and blissful peace. The closest I can get to describe the feeling is being in a warm bed on a cold rainy morning with absolutely no duties or appointments waiting. I felt full and fulfilled. I felt surrounded by love, love that was coming from others like me. I felt like I was back in the womb, completely taken care of. I felt nothing and therefore I felt everything. I had become a weightless sponge, a love magnet, soaking up the surrounding love so fast that I was totally replete. I didn't feel I was 'going somewhere', yet I did feel I was in motion.

Later I learned that everything in our universe is movement: all existing particles travel, and everything is energy. I wish that energies had colours visible to the human eye. If that were the case I would probably still be alive, because people would have noticed how black my energy field (representing my thoughts and feelings) was. Confronting me with my darkness could have forced me to stop pretending I was OK.

The energies I became aware of after my passing were neither threatening nor invasive. They seemed to exert no influence on me at all; I simply knew they were there. What made it so peaceful was the lack of pressure: there was no time; no day or night, tomorrow or yesterday. I felt I could truly rest.

I have since understood that you can achieve this sublime state during life, that you can become free of anxiety on every level, even under torture. I had persecuted myself from childhood: my mind was full of crazy deadlines and achievements that had to be reached, otherwise ... As an adult, I had not known what it meant to be alive and free. The last time I was free was as a child, and I didn't experience that again until after I died.

After this initial state of Bliss I became aware of a frequency reaching me from life. I felt the word "NOOOO" vibrating through me with desperation and disbelief, coming from my lover. This puzzled me, because it was such a contrast to the beautiful experience I was having. This contradiction was a taste of what I, and almost all souls who have ended their own life, deal with. Would I have wanted to be saved? I was the luckiest girl in the world when it came to family and friends. I had a partner who would do anything to undo what happened. So yes, I would have liked to prevent all the pain people have suffered because of me, but no, I could never have been happy without experiencing this peace. How confusing! I concluded that I had a lot to learn.

My 'sponge being' seemed eager to connect with my lover; since then, I feel that my energy has connected permanently with his. You could say we have merged energetically. This means that part of my energy, and therefore part of me, is permanently with Peter. We spirits are comparable to light beams at a light show, where one big beam transforms into various smaller ones. We are as many beams as is necessary to stay in people's hearts. Peter, like all people whose beloved has died, has changed. The experiences of life shape our character, and certainly something as big as losing a soulmate has an impact. But it isn't just the loss that transforms our character – the fact that we live on in their heart causes changes too.

When Melita had difficulty relating to this on a practical level, I asked her what had changed within her after her mother's death. To her surprise she found she had become more patient. Melita's mother had not been a particularly patient person, but during her life she had to wait years and sometimes even a decade for each of her heart's desires to be fulfilled. Through this she learned that dreams do come true, just not always in the way and at the time you want. Since she and her mother have merged, this wisdom has now become part of Melita.

Although Peter is subconsciously aware of our merging (his heart is open for it, but his mind rejects the theory), it does not give him any joy or relief. He is too angry with life to acknowledge it. Throughout this book I will talk more about our relationships with loved ones.

This merging of our energies has happened gradually and I will use the concept of time to explain myself, in spite of having moved into a realm where time does not exist. Time is a way to describe a sequence of events: I don't age, nothing declines here, and we have no seasons or deadlines, so time is a concept without consequence. During my life I have seen people unfazed by the pressure of time and seemingly uninfluenced by it. I have watched people grow old fearlessly. I have seen people turn 40 without panicking about whether to become a parent or not and I have watched people fail to meet deadlines without losing their calm, but I was not like that. Without the concept of time I would not have gone mad.

Like a person whose eyes slowly get used to the dark, after I died I gradually started to distinguish different energies around me. From that moment I began to learn, but not in the way we learn on earth. In the spirit realm, it's more like a metaphysical laundromat. On arrival, most of us are not yet pure love. You could see us as heart-shaped bundles of love energy, spotted with blemishes – dark smudges that represent bad memories, fears, ignorance, resistance, being stuck – anything else negative and human. If our realm is a laundromat, then we souls whitewash each other, because we form our realm, like drops of water form a rain shower. We do this by receiving and releasing, comparable to the human act of breathing: we inhale information, we exhale what we release. We learn and teach, and someone's releasing is always someone else's learning.

Whether souls are eager or even interested in learning depends on their level of awareness and on how well they connect with our realm. This is comparable to a group of people listening to the same music; each will connect with the music differently. On one end of the scale are those who dissolve in the music, and on the other end are those who just hear the music; the rest of the listeners are somewhere in between.

I learned that all of us making the transition between life and death have the opportunity to awaken, to gain awareness during and after passing. People who have lived consciously are more likely to die consciously. Being conscious means being present in the moment. This is comparable to the process of giving birth. The more conscious a woman is, the more she sees parturition as a sacred process in which she is an active participant. Instead of thinking: "I'll take as much pain relief as I can, I just want to get it over with," she will gather as much information as she can. She will choose whether to give birth at home, in a bath, in a clinic or in hospital. She will learn about pain management techniques, she will practise her breathing and she will choose her support team. Once in labour she is less likely to be overtaken by the painful and the fearful side of the process than those women who were not prepared. She is more likely to stay present.

Birth and death can both be seen as the most beautiful and the most ugly thing life has to offer. In both cases people can be entirely overtaken by fear of the unknown.

This didn't explain why I had such a beautiful awakening when I died. I didn't live consciously: I had been on antidepressants since the age of 18 and I was so in denial about my mental state that I never talked about it with anybody. Especially not with myself. When I died I was absorbed by a black cloud, lost in a thick fog of desperation and sadness. No room for dying consciously there. The only explanation I could find for my shift in awareness is that I never felt I belonged in life, and BANG, the moment I 'woke up on the other side' I belonged and dissolved in the music of this realm. I was home. I have since seen this happen to others too. Some souls seem to recognize this realm as home more than others.

Logically you would think that the more people were wanted or needed in life, the harder they would find it to accept their new form, but when a soul recognizes this realm as home, even a mother who leaves her small children orphaned will have an awakening on arrival.

Even though I had gained awareness in my new form, I still had many questions. How did a girl who had it all end up devastating her loved ones by violently ending her life, instead of enjoying her fame, marrying and becoming a mother? Why me? What was it in me that made me do that? How come everybody around me had no problem staying alive? How come people without any of my good fortune can deal with hardship and loss without considering suicide? Had I been predestined to die? Could I have saved myself? Could anybody else have saved me? And most importantly: how could I experience peace, knowing that the moment my nightmare ended the nightmare for my family began? How can they hate me being here, while I love it?

I could see that all my problems had existed only in my mind. Nobody else thought I was a failure; nobody felt let down by me. I was the only one who thought my performances were so bad I should kill myself out of shame. The human mind is like a knife – it's neither good nor bad; it completely depends on how you use it. A knife can both save a life, and end it. My mind had become destructive, and I was lost as to why.

As a spirit, I don't have to go looking for answers. My intent attracts the right energies necessary on my path to discovery. I sense the presence of surrounding souls, but in order to exchange with them I have to be attracted to them. In order to be attracted we need to have enough in common, and in this realm this means having the same intent to learn, understand and whitewash. In the beginning stages, though, I didn't exchange one-on-one; instead I gained information about souls in general.

I saw that the way a deceased person experiences our realm depends a lot on how they visualised it to be. Those who firmly believe that they will go to heaven to be with God expect this realm to be beautiful and peaceful. After projecting this for a lifetime, they will be attracted to the peaceful and divine energy of our dimension, and consequently experience our realm that way. It's like looking forward to an event to the point where nothing can go wrong. For that person, the event has already become beautiful and is very unlikely to disappoint.

On the other hand, those who are scared of our realm have built up a negative projection during life. They normally struggle hard before they surrender to death and when they arrive here they will not automatically connect to the divine energy; instead they will exchange with other souls until they are at peace. It doesn't mean that the issues from life don't come up for every soul, no matter how beautiful their projection was, but it did show me that just like every person experiences life differently, so every soul perceives our realm in their own unique way. Only those who reached enlightenment during life have clear and objective vision, having succeeded in lifting the veil between the two realms completely. Therefore my journey will not be every soul's journey, but "the Afterlife according to Janelle".

Those who experience death solely as an ending and a loss have desperation, sadness and confusion in their energy. During life, I did not see death this way, and it has been confirmed to me since my passing that every thought, every word spoken about us, every gesture made, be it as simple as lovingly dusting our picture, allows spirits and humans to connect and the love beam between the living and the dead is reinforced or established.

Those who don't know that we remain connected to each other often transition into death trying to hold on to what they love in life. That's like giving birth without the mind allowing the body to let go of the baby. There are many factors in how people surrender to death, and one of them is their reason for passing.

Causes of death

The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live.

– Norman Cousins

People who die at an old age have often left most of their 'dark marks' behind before passing. Officially they died after their last breath was taken, but unofficially they died a bit with every health scare; with every near-death experience; with every death of a loved one or contemporary; with the death of their old neighbourhood or family home; and with the death of their independence. When they cross that final bridge, they reconnect very quickly with loved ones who have gone before, as if ticking off a list: connect here (tick), that one's here too (tick) – and then they rest in peace. I love the energies of old people, especially when they've passed in their sleep. With no trauma or fight before their passing and no shock over the loss of their life, their energy wears a permanent smile. It makes me think they looked forward to being in this realm.

What happens to those with dementia? The chances of developing some form of dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease, increases as you age. Depending on the severity of the dementia, sufferers often die unaware of their transition. They have already been living in an unknown world, unable to understand or control their emotions; dying is just moving into yet another unknown space. They may stay unaware for quite a while, but once they start exchanging with other souls, they progress rapidly to their pre-dementia awareness. I am happy to say that the dementia episode becomes like a dream to them, and no matter how much they have suffered, their memory of it is vague and weak. People who have had a severe form of dementia have already partly died before physical death occurs. The person they had become was not who they truly were and is therefore not part of their energy.

Those who die after having been in coma for a while hardly change frequency either. Like those with severe forms of dementia, they had already made their shift from life to death before the physical body died. The comatose state contains different levels and, depending on the degree of coma, the senses such as hearing, touch and smell can still be active. This can sometimes happen to coma patients who are in a deep coma and close to death. They will experience a sense of relief on passing over, especially if they were treated in hospital, as hearing mostly alien and metallic noises is stressful to them. The comatose state can be compared to a dream state, and they too return to the awareness they had before, as soon as they start receiving and exchanging with other souls.