Announcer (00:00:04) - This is Dream Power Radio, the place where your dreams turn into reality. Here is your host, Debbie Spector Weisman.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:00:13) - Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Certified Dream-Life Coach Debbie Spector Weisman. This is the place that we talk about dreams, both daytime and nighttime dreams, and how you can use them to make the internal shift to a life you love and rediscover the truth of who you really are. Where does the brain end and consciousness begin? Or are they the same thing? Where does the soul reside? These are questions that have baffled philosophers and curious people for eternity, especially since there is no scientific way to come up with answers. But then people started paying attention to a phenomenon that seemingly had no explanation. Near-Death Experiences. In recent years more people have come forward to talk about what happened when they “died” and came back to life. For many, it's a life altering event. Even so, and these are still remain a mystery and a source of fascination for anyone interested in the concept of life after death.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:19) - My guest today, Transformational Coach Lion Goodman, had a near-death experience and it had a profound effect on his life. Ryan is now the CEO of the Clear Beliefs Institute, which is dedicated to awakening, healing, and enlightening humanity in order to get on with the job of seeing of being fully human. And he's the creator of the Clear Beliefs Method of trauma informed therapeutic coaching. Lion is also the author of five books and teaches workshops around the world. Welcome to Dream Power Radio, Lion.
Lion Goodman (00:01:54) - Thank you so much, Debbie. It's a great pleasure to be here.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:01:57) - Oh, it is my pleasure lying but Lion, tell me, who was Lion Goodman, before your NDE?
Lion Goodman (00:02:05) - What an interesting question. It's sort of like Alice in Wonderland. I've changed so many times. Today, it's hard to remember who I am, you know? And that's true. In my lifetime, I was kind of a lonely kid who grew up into a curious young man who wanted to understand, who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here, and what the hell is going on? So I was very fortunate in college to meet a great teacher, a man named Ted Lingo, and he taught a natural consciousness expansion focused on the brain.
Lion Goodman (00:02:43) - So he had 250 acres of beautiful mountain property west of Denver. And we sat outside and studied the brain and talked about consciousness and played with our consciousness. And that really set me off on a lifetime quest for understanding those questions. The big questions of life, especially what is consciousness? So I graduated from college with a degree in consciousness studies. It was probably one of the first degrees granted in that field. It was in 1975. And today there's many master’s and PhD programs in that topic. I got my Bachelor's way back then in that field. But nobody was hiring people with degrees in consciousness studies because I invented it as far as I knew. And so I needed a job, and I took one, just took the best job I could, which was selling material objects on the road. So I became a traveling salesman, and I did that for about a year and a half, two years, and I was really bored. I was traveling around having a good time. I was kind of a hippie salesman, and but I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Lion Goodman (00:03:55) - I knew I thought maybe I'd go back to school and get a PhD in psychology or get an MD, which was the original idea, but I was just kind of a lost hippie salesman, so that's who I was at that time.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:04:09) - But you already were interested in consciousness before you had your NDE. So tell me, what happened to cause the near-death experience?
Lion Goodman (00:04:19) - I was being a really nice guy. That's what caused it. While I was on the road, I would stop and help people. I just had this kind of ethic of be nice to people and help when you can. And so if somebody's tire is blown out, I helped them change the tire or I'd give them a ride to the gas station if they needed gas. It was just my ethic of being on the road. And on this particular day I had been in Las Vegas selling my jewelry gift items to stores, and I was heading into L.A. And in between LA and Las Vegas is the Mojave Desert. And so I was driving through the Mojave Desert, and I saw a guy whose car had broken down and his hood was up, and he was staring into it.
Lion Goodman (00:05:04) - So I stopped, and I said, can I help you in any way? And he said, I just put $200 into her, and now she won't start, and I don't know what to do. And I said, well, I'm heading into L.A. Do you want to ride? And he looked at me and went, yeah, okay. And he got in the van, and he brought all his stuff, duffel bags and suitcases and stuff, and it was already a crowded van. It was an RV that was made from a van. And so we he ended up traveling with me for three days. He didn't have anything to do. I kind of took him under my wing. I was giving him clothes to wear and talking about things with him. And the third night out, he pulled out a gun and shot me four times in the head.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:05:51) - So what happened?
Lion Goodman (00:05:54) - Good question. What happened? So the first one, the first bullet hit me in the explosion was I was way in the back of the van in this crouched position, moving things around in the cupboards.
Lion Goodman (00:06:04) - He was in the front seat, listening to music. That's all I knew I was. Everything was peaceful and suddenly there was an explosion. Something hit me in the head, and I thought maybe the gas stove had exploded, which was just up to my left. I looked up and that was intact, and I looked further to my left. And there he was with a gun pointed at me from the front seat, and I realized he had shot me. And I was, of course in shock. And I think I said, are you shooting at me? It's like it was just so unbelievable out of nowhere. And he said, shut up. Just shut up. And then he shot again. And at first, I thought he was warning me like he wanted to steal my stuff and leave me outside naked and take everything. Well, at that moment, it's like, nothing matters except your life. But when he shot the second time, I realized, oh, he's not warning me.
Lion Goodman (00:07:00) - He's going to kill me. I was 26 years old. I had this background in consciousness and spirituality and science, the sciences and all that. But now I'm just a sitting duck, ready to die. And I had studied death and dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, you know, in college. So I knew what to expect. Wasn't a big surprise. It was surprising that I was going to die at the age of 26. And at one point I had the thought, oh, this is why I didn't know what my future was, because I don't have one, right? But at that point, the second bullet missed me by a fraction of an inch. And I realized, okay, if I'm going to die, I don't want to die angry. I don't want to die upset. I want to die in peace. So I sort of made myself peaceful and started reaching up to God and saying, okay, I'm coming home. And I also realized I didn't want to die with any unfinished business.
Lion Goodman (00:07:55) - And so I did a fast reverse movie reel of my life, and I asked forgiveness from anyone I had to hurt, and I forgave everyone that had hurt me.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:08:06) - If you would like to do that, when he's got a gun pointed you and there was enough time to think that?
Lion Goodman (00:08:14) - I was out of time. I mean, I was out, out of time. There was no time. I was in this very expanded state, reaching up to God and doing these processes. And I didn't know how much time I had left, whether it was seconds or minutes. And I don't know how long this process took, actually, because I was completely out of that zone. And so he shot a third time. And the third bullet also missed me by a fraction of an inch. But I couldn't move. I couldn't defend myself. This was inevitable. And so after I cleared the past, I started rising up and welcoming to God, light coming in. And at one point I was out of my body, looking down at this van with these two people doing this little drama.
Lion Goodman (00:09:01) - And it found that kind of amusing if like, oh, look at the little human drama going down. Going back down there, isn't that isn't that fascinating? And then the fourth bullet rang out and my head was suddenly pushed to the side and blood was rushing down and I was back in my body, which I thought was strange because I'm supposed to be out of my body. I knew that much like I was already partly out just waiting for the rest to catch up. And but I'm back in my body. And I had also studied anatomy, physiology, dance, mime. So I was very familiar with my body and also my mind. So I was just checking I was kind of doing this scan of like, if the bullet went through my brain, I ought to be missing something. But I wasn't missing anything that I could tell. And so after a few seconds of kind of doing an internal check, I said, well, I don't I don't want to die without looking my assassin in the eyes.
Lion Goodman (00:09:58) - And so I lifted up my head and I turned and looked at him. And he freaked out. And he jumped up and he said, why aren't you dead, man? You're supposed to be dead. And I didn't have a good answer for that question. So I just said, here I am. I'm still filled with this God light, and golden honey color white just radiating out of me. And he said, that's too weird, man. It's too weird. It's just like my dream this morning. Since you're a dream expert. And I said, what dream? And he said, I dreamt that I was shooting at this guy, but he wouldn't die. But it wasn't you. It was somebody else in the dream. And at this point, I said, okay, this is weird. It's very weird. How did I get into this movie? I don't remember signing a contract and am I going to get paid at the end? It was like sick.
Lion Goodman (00:10:51) - Just like, this is just so strange. And he was jumping around with a gun in his hand, looking out the windows. We were out in the middle of nowhere, camped out. So there was nobody nearby. And he said, why aren't you dead, man? Why aren't you dead? I shot you four times, man. And I said, Maybe I'm not supposed to die. He said, yeah, but I shot you. I shot you four times. And so he's all adrenaline. And at one point he kind of came up and looked at my head with a gun in his hand standing right here. And he said, does it hurt? And at that moment I knew. That something had shifted in him. He was now caring about me. He went from wanting to kill me to caning. And I said, you know, yeah, it hurts, but I think I'm okay. It was like being hit on the head with a bat a couple of times, and there was lots of blood, so I didn't know where the bullet had gone, and I was still trying to figure it out.
Lion Goodman (00:11:51) - It's like, if I touched it, it was like, all matted with blood, and blood was dripping down everywhere. So there were some more exchanges. And then and then he said, okay, man, I'm going to take you to a hospital. I know, but I'm going to put some stuff around you so you can't get up, okay. I went, yeah, that's fine. Thought that was a really good idea. Let's go to the hospital. Wonderful. So he took some boxes and things and he sort of put it around me. And then he got in the front of the van and turned on the engine and started driving. And at that point I had some time, maybe half an hour, to just contemplate what had just happened to me. It was so out of the out of nowhere that that I couldn't figure it out. I just couldn't fathom what had just happened. Except I'd been shot four times. Two bullets hit me, and I was out of body.
Lion Goodman (00:12:46) - Now I'm back and bought and back, you know. And so he drove for a while, and then finally he pulled the van over. And stop that and turn off the engine. And it was very quiet, and I knew we weren't near a hospital. Because there were no bright lights. It was dark. And so I just waited. And after a minute or two, he came over and sat next to me on the bed, the right next to where I was squatted down. And he, with a gun in his hand, he said, I can't take you to the hospital, man. I have to kill you. And I said, oh, why is that? I find that it's good to be curious in the situations. And he said, because if I take you back to the hospital that put me back in jail, I can't go back to jail, man. And I realized, oh, and not only is it a crazy person with a gun, it's an ex-con with a gun.
Lion Goodman (00:13:37) - Kind of elevated the seriousness of the situation. And so that began an eight-hour conversation. We talked for eight hours, and during that time the sky lightened up. I heard birds singing. It was the most beautiful sound I've ever heard in my life.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:13:54) - God, you were in such pain that you could actually have a conversation.
Lion Goodman (00:14:01) - Yeah. And we got him to talk about his background at one point. I've been in this crouch position for hours, and one point I said, I'd like to get out and stretch because I'm really cramped. And he said, okay, but don't do anything funny. Oh, I won't do anything funny. Yeah. Promise. And so I got out and stretched, and then he pointed down this slope to a pond that was there and kind of motioned I should go down there. And so I walked down, and I realized he could shoot me in the back and pushed me into the water. But I also felt invincible.
Lion Goodman (00:14:35) - You know, I was filled with this God light and love and appreciation, and he was included in it. There was no… there was no separation between us. So I bent down, washed off some of the blood, and stood up and looked at him, and he kind of held the gun out like this. And he said, what would you do if I handed you this gun? I said I'd throw it into the water there. He said you wouldn't. You wouldn't shoot me. You wouldn't try to kill me. I said, no, why would I do that? You've got your life. I've got mine. We're okay. And then he looked at me really strangely and he said, man, you are the weirdest person I've ever met. Yeah. Probably the weirdest person you'll ever meet.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:15:17) - It's the wrong person, to the point.
Lion Goodman (00:15:21) - Well, interestingly, you know, he told me that when his car broke down, he was so desperate, he decided to kill whoever stopped to help him, and I volunteered.
Lion Goodman (00:15:32) - So at some level, I take responsibility for my decisions and actions, right? So I put myself in that position. And so ultimately, we're trying to figure out how to get out of the situation. He didn't want to go back to jail. I didn't want to die. So we negotiated. Negotiated.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:15:53) - So like on that note of suspense, we are going to take a short break now.
Lion Goodman (00:15:57) - Oh, good. Okay, great.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:15:59) - We are talking with Lion Goodman all about his near-death experience. And we'll be right back.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:16:49) - Yes. Welcome back to Dream Power Radio. I'm your host, Debbie Spector Weisman, and we're talking about near-death experiences with Lion Goodman. So, Lion, you are there with a person who shot at you, wanting to kill you, but you are still alive. What happened?
Lion Goodman (00:17:07) - As I was saying, we began a very long conversation of eight hours, and we were trying to figure out how to not kill each other. We'll put each other in jail. So we--I came up with lots of ideas and he kept saying, no, that won't work. If I let you go, they'll come after me. I even said, you can take the van. And he said, no, they'll come after me, they'll find me, and I'll go back to jail. Can't go back to jail. He was very certain about that. Eventually I said, look. I'll let you go, and I won't turn you in.
Lion Goodman (00:17:47) - And you let me go. And that'll be the deal. And he thought about it for a minute, and he said, okay. And we shook on it. And so that was how we agreed to let each other go, basically. And he drove to a place that he knew, took his bags and suitcases and duffel bags out of the out of the band and walked him to the bus stop and shook his hand. And he just kept looking at me like, you are so weird. And I went back, and I drove myself to the hospital where the doctor said, you two bullets bounced off your skull. And he was sewing up my scalp and he said, you're a lucky man. And I said, no, I'm a blessed man. So that led me to change my life. First of all, it made me interested, even more interested in consciousness. So I started taking workshops and trainings. I took over 100 workshops and trainings in the intervening years, and I also wanted to get a job away from being on the road.
Lion Goodman (00:19:00) - So I became a headhunter, which is kind of ironic given that I just had my head hunted. But that was the profession that I went into, and I had a wonderful 25-year career there before becoming a coach and a trainer.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:19:13) - You know, as you were telling the story that something popped into my head. I'd like to ask you about it. Do you think that your ability to unconditionally forgive him saved your life?
Lion Goodman (00:19:27) - Yes. And there was another factor also that I figured out later, which is that I was so relaxed in that golden God light that when the fourth bullet hit me, it actually pushed my head over, allowing the bullet to glance off. Had I had any tension, anger, upset fear in a stiff neck? It probably would have blown the top of my head off. So part of it was love and including him in that love light. So it was transforming him. And part of it was just the sheer physics of being relaxed and accepting what was happening. Because the one thing I learned before that which I now teach is that when we resist our experiences or we resist or we don't feel our feelings, they get stuck in us in some way, and that we can reverse that by actually experiencing what we haven't experienced.
Lion Goodman (00:20:26) - So, for example, in trauma, any trauma, we can go back and experience it fully and then it can resolve. It's just like food that's undigested in the gut. It needs to be digested and worked out. So all experiences from the past that we've resisted, and we've resisted, a lot of experiences are stuck somewhere in the body mind, spirit arena.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:20:51) - But it's like when you can expose whatever isn't working for you out to the light of day. It clears it. Exactly, sir. Please help. Yeah. Well, I’d like to go back to the incident itself for a minute. You said you were bathed in this golden light. Is that kind of like you hear stories that people say they see the white light. Was that sort of the same kind of thing or as a little bit different for you?
Lion Goodman (00:21:18) - It's different, I think, primarily because I knew I was going to die and I knew how I wanted to die, and so I was reaching up to God. But clearly it wasn't my time to die, and I didn't actually die, so I didn't actually come.
Lion Goodman (00:21:36) - My heart didn't stop. My brain didn't stop. I was fully conscious and aware of everything that was happening. And so I was in a conscious near-death state, but it wasn't near death where I was going to be dead. I could have been dead, but it was different than the classic NDE, where somebody dies on the operating table and comes back.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:21:58) - Right. So at the time, did you tell anybody about it, or did you keep it a secret back then?
Lion Goodman (00:22:04) - Well, the first thing I did when I got to LA and got myself patched up, as I called a girl friend of mine who came and sort of hung out with me for a couple of weeks while I was putting my mind back together. And then I got my first job, and I started writing down the experience, and I eventually had a 26-page detailed tome about the experience. And I tried to get it published and people were going, now it's too long. It's, you know, we don't we don't know what to do with this.
Lion Goodman (00:22:38) - So at one point, I heard about NPR's National Story Project. And they said, if you have a true story and you can put it in two pages or less, we're interested in hearing your story. And I went, well, if I could take my 26 pages of experience and cram it down into two pages, that would be something. And so I did that. Of course, it was very tiny print and all the way out to the edges, but I sent it in, and I got a call back from the associate producer and she said, Paul Auster was the editor. And she said, Paul wants to publish your story, but he needs to know what happened next, because it sort of works. And I said, well, I could do that, but it's going to take more than two pages and I've got this 26-page version. So anyway, I sent both to her and, and Paul actually edited it together and appeared in the book called I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project, which was a bestseller internationally.
Lion Goodman (00:23:39) - So that was the first place it got published. It's been published many times since. In other magazines and blog sites, and a film was made based on my story that won best film at a film festival.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:23:52) - Oh, fantastic. Were you a religious person before your NDE and did it change your thoughts about God?
Lion Goodman (00:24:00) - I was a spiritual person. I was one of those early spiritual hippies. I grew up in Boulder, and so everything was happening spiritually was happening in Boulder, whether it was Buddhism or Sufism and everything else you could imagine. So I was steeped in all the religions and all the spiritual practices, and, and I was just right in the middle of all that. So I was already spiritual. I was raised Jewish, but I had left that behind many years before. And so it seemed like a smooth flow of being, going from religion to spirituality to near death to being more spiritual. So it feels like an arc that made sense to me.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:24:49) -. You now teach people how to clear disempowering, self-limiting beliefs. We don't have a lot of time left to devote a lot of time to this, but could you talk a little bit about this and how you do it?
Lion Goodman (00:25:05) - Sure, sure. The Clear Beliefs method is composed of many different technologies that I've brought together from my 100 plus workshops, trainings, and extensive therapy and shamanic studies. And it's based on the fact that beliefs are actually the infrastructure of the human mind, in the same way that neurons are the infrastructure of the human brain. And so when we look at beliefs, they're made of experiences. We have experiences we take on certain conclusions. Or people tell us things that are their beliefs because they want us to believe them. And we build who we are. We build a personality. We build a self out of these beliefs. And so in my methodology, we go to that core subconscious system, the patterns of belief and structure. And we work there at the subconscious mind as well as the conscious mind and the superconscious mind, the higher self.
Lion Goodman (00:26:08) - It's a multidimensional approach because we are multidimensional beings having multidimensional experiences. Right now you're seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, thinking. And so our beliefs must also be multidimensional. And most technologies that try to change beliefs are trying to change the mentally that the mental verbal level. Well, just believe something different. Just say a different thing to yourself over and over again. But that doesn't cover all the rest of the places where beliefs lay because they are the infrastructure. So that's my approach and it works incredibly well. We're able to clear things, old patterns, traumas, wounds from the past very quickly, permanently and completely.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:26:53) - It is amazing, and we will have a link to some of your information in the show notes for people to find out about it. Like how can people find out more about you and your work?
Lion Goodman (00:27:04) - There's many things, many places to do. So I say that I have multiple website disorder and so the best place to go is lion goodman.com lion Goodman. Com that's my personal website.
Lion Goodman (00:27:17) - If people are interested in my training there a coach, therapist, healer or consultant. That website is clear beliefs. And if they're interested in getting their own beliefs cleared, they can go to clear your beliefs dot come.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:32) - Wonderful Lion. Thank you so much for being on Dream Power Radio today.
Lion Goodman (00:27:37) - Thank you Debbie, it's been a pleasure.
Debbie Spector Weisman (00:27:39) - We've been speaking about near-death experiences with Lion Goodman. I hope you have enjoyed today's program. If so, please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future episodes. Until next time, this is Debbie Spector Weisman saying sweet dreams, everybody.
Announcer (00:27:55) - You've been listening to Dream Power Radio with your host, Debbie Spector Weisman. For more information on Debbie or to sign up for her newsletter, go to Dream Power Radio.com. This has been Dream Power Radio.