Podcast 79: My Near-Death Experience Shaped My Life : A Conversation with Christina Walker

Christina Walker, RN, MA, joins Linda, Betty, and Sally to discuss the near-death experience she had at nineteen and the decades-long journey that followed. She shares her experience of survivor’s guilt, her study of forgiveness and spiritual psychology, her work with meditation and energy medicine, and her effort to reconnect her spiritual life with her physical body.

Christina also discusses her forty-year nursing career, her interest in genetics and precision medicine, and the private practice she is beginning.

This conversation reflects Christina’s personal spiritual experiences and beliefs and is not medical or mental-health advice.

#TwoCronesAndAMicrophone #NearDeathExperience #NDE #ChristinaWalker #SelfForgiveness #SpiritualPsychology #EnergyMedicine #Meditation #SelfLove #HealingJourney #SurvivorsGuilt #MindBodySpirit #PersonalTransformation #Nursing #SpiritualGrowth

Transcript

Linda

Hello, and welcome to Two Crones and a Microphone. I’m Linda.

Betty

I’m Betty.

Sally

I’m Sally.

Linda

Today, we’re delighted to have Christina here with us. We’re going to do a little bit of an introduction. Christina Walker is a longtime friend and a really accomplished individual. We’re thrilled to have her here. Sally, I think you were going to lead off with a few things.

Sally

There are many, many things we could say about Christina. She has been a nurse administrator for forty years, working with collaborative teams across disciplines and departments, and with systems throughout hospitals, clinics, and companies. She has a Green Belt in Six Sigma, giving her expertise in project and change management, with competency in many fields related to nursing and health care.

Her clinical knowledge includes work in the ER, perioperative nursing, workers’ compensation case management, infection control, primary care, alternative medicine, and, more recently, precision medicine and genetics. She has a master’s degree in nursing administration and a master’s in spiritual psychology, along with her RN license.

One of the exciting things we hope Christina will talk about today is that she is a frequent speaker on energy medicine, with a focus on self-improvement. Her work incorporates forgiveness, meditation, and looking at belief patterns: how they affect our health and our ability to navigate the world. How she came to all of that is a story in itself.

I have known Christina for about thirty-five years, and we’ve been through quite a few adventures together. We were fairly young when we met, and I have watched her through many incarnations. I think you’ll come to this conclusion, too: she is one of the more courageous people I have known. Chrissy has been through a lot, so I’m going to let her tell you about herself.

Christina

Thank you, everyone, for the kind introduction and for the opportunity to speak about how I got where I am today.

When I was nineteen, I was in a car accident and had a near-death experience. I remember leaving my body, going before God, and hearing a voice say, “You can come with us now.” I said, “No, I’m too young to die. I want to go back to Earth. I want to get married. I want to have kids. I want to experience life.”

The voice said, “Okay, you can go back, but you’re going to have a contract.” I said, “What’s the contract?” The answer was, “To bring heaven on Earth.” I said, “Okay.” Two angels walked me back to my body. I looked at my body and said, “No, no, no. I can’t go back into that body. There’s too much pain in that body.” They said, “It’s your choice. You go back in, or you don’t go back in.”

After that, I hovered around, not fully integrated in myself, until I was about thirty-five years old. This was 1974. No one was talking about energy. No one was talking about spirituality. I felt very alone. My mother wanted to send me to a psychiatrist, but I knew that wasn’t the answer for me. I went to bookstores and started looking up different traditions that worked with energy and spirit, and I began guiding myself through the process.

Then one day, a friend here in Honesdale said to me, “There’s a school that teaches forgiveness.” I said, “Oh, yes.” A lot had happened to me from childhood until I was thirty-five. That was also when I met my husband, who was into alternative medicine, so that started our journey together as a couple. We made a spiritual contract together to bring this work forward into the world.

My journey began at the University of Santa Monica, where they focused on forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and Christ consciousness. I spent four years there. I graduated when my teacher said to me, “Christina, you now have the Christ consciousness.”

It was a lot to have to forgive myself and other people in my life. My girlfriend died in the car accident. My other girlfriend lost an eye, broke all the bones in her face, and broke her pelvis. There was a lot of survivor’s guilt. We were all nineteen. Your brain is still forming and isn’t fully formed yet. There were head injuries and just a lot to deal with on my own.

It’s funny, because there was a part of me that forgot a little bit of the contract. When I came back, I experienced hell. I went through hell. I know what hell is, and I believe we can put it upon ourselves through anger, guilt, self-loathing, and all the negative things. I created my own hell. I did a lot of self-destruction. I didn’t want to live. Slowly, I began forgiving myself.

After I graduated, I was able to counsel people, and I was working with my husband in his practice. I had a client who completely knocked me off my center. I’m an empath. I was crying, and I went to pick up the laundry at the cleaners.

On the way, I told God, “Listen, if you want me to do this work, you need to send me the person who can help me do this. There’s more to this. I don’t know what it is, but I need someone to teach me.”

A woman came up to me and said, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.” I asked her name. She said, “Hildegard. That’s all you need to know.” I walked into the cleaners and asked, “Have you ever seen that woman before?” We live in a small town. Everybody knows everybody. They said they had never seen her. When I turned around, she was gone in a flash. I said, “Okay, God. Thank you for the angel. I hear you.”

Then I was sent my other teacher, Christine Schenk, who taught me energy medicine and the energy grid. She taught me how to bring my energy body back into my physical body, because they were separated. When you have trauma, you get knocked out. You can come back in, or you can stay out, which is what I did. Over the years, I’ve come back into my body. Now we’re together.

The next piece was stress. I said, “My cortisol from being a nurse is off the charts. I need help with this.” Then I was introduced to Dr. Joe Dispenza, who teaches meditation for the brain and decreasing stress.

What I’ve discovered through that work is that I’m learning to love myself. I went through forgiveness. Then I went through understanding the energetics and bringing myself back. Now it’s about loving myself.

Energetically and spiritually, I believe everyone is connected to God and everybody is loved by God. Then you have the physical world, the physical brain, and the physical body, where beliefs and negativity come in. There is the spiritual, loving God, and then the physical body saying, “This is reality.” Now I’m working on bringing them together in a state of love. I want to feel divine love in every cell of my physical body. That has been my journey. That’s where I am today.

Host

What a marvelous journey. Betty, you’re on mute.

Betty

I have a dog, Luna, who is barking every once in a while, so forgive me. I’ve watched Chrissy go through all of these changes, at times taking me with her. She introduced me to some of these principles. I introduced her to some of Oh’ Shinnah’s work and our other teachers. We’ve been sharing information back and forth, which is amazing.

It’s interesting to me how everything is connected. Oh’ Shinnah used to say that all paths lead to the top of the mountain, and when we get there, we’re all together. I really believe that to be true. A lot of what Chrissy studied at the university connects with what we have learned through other teachers.

Christine, the teacher you mentioned, is German, isn’t she? I meant to ask you that.

Christina

Her school is in Germany. Hildegard is German.

Betty

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, whom we’ve done a podcast on, by the way. I’m German, too, so I’m not surprised that she became your guiding light.

Chrissy and I have gone on this journey together for about thirty-five years. It has been exciting for me. The information we’ve shared has been extraordinary, and Chrissy has always given me a lot of good advice. I’m not surprised she is counseling people. Helping people is your path.

Christina

Yes.

Host

How do you integrate the energy work with the self-forgiveness and love piece? It sounds as though there are three main stages in the way you outlined it. If I come in and you begin to counsel me, do we start with my story and what I want to get at? How do you work with that?

Christina

In psychology school, they taught us to be the counselor, the patient, and the neutral observer. We called it a triad, and we would all take those roles. In the beginning, I listen to where the client is. I listen physically, energetically, and emotionally.

It’s where the client is. People have to be willing to hear you. You have to be deeply honest and truthful with yourself. I hope to be a neutral mirror for people, where they can talk and hear themselves. I have clients say, “Where did that come from?” If you create the space for them to talk, the mind and the feelings unwind like a beautiful tapestry.

There is the spiritual self, the emotional self, and the physical self. Each time you are working with the tapestry, one of those comes out and you say, “Okay, I need to focus on this for a while.” Right now, I’m focusing on my physical body, and this is where I’m working with genetics.

DNA is your blueprint. How do you work with your blueprint to heal? I believe we are energy in a physical body that is here to help us manifest in the physical world. You still have to take care of your physical body. I call it your partner in life. My client may have physical needs, so I work with them there. It’s the whole person.

Host

That’s lovely. It’s easy to become dissociated from the physical body or to think that there is something wrong or ill-advised about walking around in our physicality. I love that you’re bringing that back together. I think it’s important to honor that.

Christina

Otherwise, how do we learn here? We need our brain.

Host

Go ahead, Betty.

Betty

The DNA piece is something relatively new that people are beginning to work on. Christina, you’re on the cutting edge of doing that. For us as energy workers, questions such as whether a gene is switched on and what is in your DNA are a new level.

Christina

Yes. We said we would do a podcast on that.

Host

I hope you’ll come back and focus on genetics and precision medicine because that is huge when you’re working with people. It’s also important for us to understand it about ourselves and our physical makeup. Every day, we’re discovering more.

Some people have dabbled with 23andMe or other genetic services that link them to genealogy. You run the tests and discover people in parts of the world you had no idea were related to you. That can be the fun part, but there is also the serious medical, emotional, and physical part. I know that’s what you’re focusing on now, and I hope you’ll come back and talk about it.

It’s also valuable that you’re a nurse. You bring that nursing perspective into the work.

Nurses are amazing. I can say that because I’m one. It’s amazing that you’ve brought all of this together and reached this point. You have been a huge help to me and to those of us who know you.

Christina

I have to give gratitude to God and Jesus for that, because they’re the ones who keep bringing me my next steps. I say, “All right, I’m ready to work on this,” and then the person appears.

Once I’m done with the physical and DNA part of my own work, I hope that, as I begin a private practice, God will bring forward the people who are ready to work on loving themselves, forgiving themselves, healing themselves, gratitude, joy, and creating the life they want.

That’s where beliefs come in. If you keep having a negative belief about yourself, it’s hard to create what you want. We start examining the different beliefs in your brain. One of mine for a long time was, “I’m not good enough.”

Host

That’s a lot of people’s belief.

Christina

Yes. That belief came from childhood. If I’m trying to create a life of healing myself and helping other people, “I’m not enough” is going to get in the way. It did, until I had a meditation experience at one of Dr. Joe’s events.

During the meditation, Jesus came to me and spoke to me about not being enough. He said, “Do you know that I was with you when you had your car accident? I held you in my arms.”

A firefighter held me in his arms and prayed because I had twenty-four hours to live. Later, God brought me back to that firefighter at a party so that I could thank him.

Host

Wow.

Christina

Then I ended up working in the ER with the nurses who saved my life that night.

Host

Wow.

Christina

I guess the main thing I would say is that, when you feel things very deeply in your heart, God hears you. The mind is one thing, but if everybody could go in and really feel, we would have less war and less anger. We could create a world of peace.

It starts in the heart, and opening your heart takes courage. In that meditation, Jesus said, “I was with you. I held you in my arms, and I’ve been with you. Your name is Christina Walker. I gave you that name because you walk with Christ.”

Host

Wow.

Christina

I said, “Okay, I got the message. I’m ready to flip it around in my brain.”

Host

What a great story.

Christina

I felt I could fulfill my contract then. The contract was peace on Earth.

I had a reading with someone who said, “What you do is create a space of peace for people.” I said, “Okay, that’s it. I’m on my way.” Now I just have to heal myself so I have the energy to do this. You need energy when you’re in this world, and you don’t want to burn out. The physical body has to be a willing partner.

Host

What a wonderful story. Thank you for tying that together with your name. That is profound.

You brought up some important points. We could spin off from any of them and have an incredible discussion. From the beginning, you said that first you had to engage in self-forgiveness.

That is a challenge for a lot of people: forgiving ourselves for whatever fills in the blank. On a daily basis, we could probably fill in the blank. For our wisdom practice, would you give us a few tips about where someone starts?

When we’re angry at ourselves and holding guilt or shame, it’s hard to think about forgiving ourselves. Where do you begin to unravel that tangled ball of yarn? We’re not even talking about forgiving others. Where do we start with self-forgiveness?

Christina

You go deep, deep, deep into your heart. You start there. You feel it. Emotions are energy in motion, so you start with the emotion: “I feel this.”

I spent many nights in the bathroom crying. I knew God would hear me. It’s experiential. It’s not only in the mind. You have to feel it in your bones and in your heart that you forgive yourself for what you feel guilty or ashamed about. Loss is a big one, too.

Journaling helps. Write it down. You have to get it out. Trauma and guilt can feel locked in your cells, and you need a way to purge it. The way I found was through feeling it and going through the emotions. To heal it, you have to go through it.

Betty

That fits with a ceremony we do through [unclear], where Oh’ Shinnah taught us to create a sacred fire. There is journaling involved, releasing the things we need to release, allowing the tears and the process, and then symbolically burning it in the fire and letting the fire transmute it.

That’s why I love the parallels between what we learned from Oh’ Shinnah and other teachers and what you learned from your teachers and your own process. They are paths to the top of the mountain: slightly different, but right next to each other.

Host

Each of us met Oh’ Shinnah at a different point in our lives. She was teaching esoteric ideas and bringing them into reality, grounding them in practices people could do every day. It wasn’t just in our heads. It opened our hearts and helped us become who we needed and wanted to be in the world.

Christina

Yes.

Host

We are just about out of time. Christina, it has been a delight having you here. I look forward to another podcast where we can break out all of the DNA information and how that can help. Thank you for taking the time to come on, chat with us, and share your story.

For now, go find your glimmer: those micro-moments in which everything becomes clear, centered, and grounded.

Christina

Thank you so much, all three of you, for having me on and helping us spread the word of love, peace, and gratitude.

Host

Remember, we’re helping you navigate the muddy waters of our time. I think Christina just gave us a nice big paddle to get our boat through all of this.

Healing comes through love, however we define that. Remember, you are always surrounded in beauty.

And the love that goes along with seeing beauty in all living things and knowing that we’re surrounded by that beauty. Thank you for joining us. In Kadesh Day, all is made beautiful. Bye-bye.

All

Bye-bye.