"Now I felt God's love, this love was holding me. It felt incredible. There are no words in the English language, or maybe in this reality, to explain the kind of love God emanates. God was totally accepting of everything we-- God and I, reviewed in my life........

"In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything everyone else felt as a consequence of my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned-- oh, how I learned! ..........

"The information was flowing at an incredible breakneck speed that probably would have burned me up if it weren't for the extraordinary Energy holding me. The information came in, and then love neutralized my judgments against myself. In other words, information about every scene-- my perceptions and feelings-- and anyone else's perceptions and feelings that were in the scene came to me... No matter how I judged myself in each interaction, being held by God was the bigger interaction. God interjected love into everything, every feeling, every bit of information about absolutely everything that went on, so that everything was all right. There was no good and no bad. There was only me and my loved ones from this life trying to be, or just trying to survive.

"I realize now that without God holding me, I wouldn't have had the strength to experience what I did.

"When it started, God and I were merging, we became one-- so that I could see through God's eyes and feel through God's heart. We, together, witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I made in my life of thirty-two years, was that I never learned to love myself.....

"I also realized that we don't end at our skin. We are all in this big churning mass of consciousness. We are each a part of this consciousness we call God. We're not just human. We are Spirit. We were Spirit before we came into this lifetime. We are all struggling Spirits now, trying to get "being human" right. And when we leave here, we will be pure Spirit again.

'God held me and let me into God's experience of all this. I felt God's memories of these scenes through God's eyes. I could sense God's divine intelligence and it was astonishing. God loves us and wants us to learn and wake up to our real selves-- to what is important. I realized that God wants us to know that we only experience real pain if we die without living first. And the way to live is to give love to ourselves and to others.   'From my experience, and from what I heard from Laura's experience, it seems that we are here to learn to give and receive love. But only when we heal enough to be real can we understand and give and receive love the way love was meant to be.

'When God held Laura and God held me in our life reviews and we merged into One, we remember this feeling as being limitless. God is limitless. God's capacity to love is never-ending. God's love for us never changes no matter how we are. God doesn't judge us either. During our life review, we judge ourselves when we feel the pain we have created in other's lives. We also feel the love we have created in other's lives. (This may be a kind of  Cosmic Equalizer.)

"Laura and I never saw an old man with a white beard sitting in judgment of us. We only felt limitless divine love.

"God, as Laura and I experienced God, only gives. God interjected love into all the scenes of our lives to show us God's reality. And the most amazing part of all is that God held nothing back. We understood all that God understood. God let us in. God shared all of Godself with us-- all the qualities of gentleness and openness, and all the gifts......... including our own empowerment and peace. We never knew that much loving intelligence and freedom could exist. God held us in eternity.

"I am back here, in time, but still with God. It is just a little harder for me to realize God's presence because my body and my mind get in the way. But that's all right. I still feel It. Especially when I think of the Love Laura and I shared...

"I think of Laura and her strength and her love of life and her zest for healing and those memories bring me closer to feeling what Laura and I felt in our near-death experiences...

"I was privileged to watch Laura's healing and then soar into all kinds of spiritual growth. She knew that as we awaken to what is real- not the physical world that only teaches us to achieve and consume-- but the real world where our spirits grow and learn about healing and love ---we awaken to our own soul."

About Barbara Harris Whitfield

Barbara H. Whitfield, R.T., C.M.T., is the author of many published articles and five books:

Full Circle: The Near-Death Experience and Beyond (Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster New York, 1990);

Spiritual Awakenings: Insights of the Near-Death Experience and Other Doorways to Our Soul (Health Communications, Inc. Deerfield Beach, FL 1995),

Final Passage: Sharing the Journey as This Life Ends (Health Communications, Inc. Deerfield Beach, FL 1998), co-author with Charles Whitfield and Jyoti and
Russell Park of

The Power of Humility: Choosing Peace over Conflict in Relationships (Health Communications, Inc. Deerfield Beach, FL 2006) and,

The Natural Soul (Coming soon).

Barbara is a thanatologist. (thanatology is the study of death and dying.) She is also a workshop presenter, Near-Death Experiencer and respiratory and massage therapist. She was on the faculty of Rutgers University's Institute for Alcohol and Drug Studies for 12 years. Barbara was research assistant to psychiatry professor Bruce Greyson, the director of research for the International Association for Near-Death Studies (I.A.N.D.S.) at the University of Connecticut Medical School, studying the Spiritual, psychological, physical and energetic after-effects of the Near-Death Experience.

She is past president and a member of the board of the Kundalini Research Network and has sat on the executive board of the I.A.N.D.S. She is a consulting editor and contributor for the Journal of Near-Death Studies. She is on the faculty of The Center for Sacred Studies where she teaches a course with Charles Whitfield called Unity in Practice. Barbara was a key subject in Kenneth Ring's groundbreaking book on the Near-Death Experience, Heading Toward Omega. He writes about her again in his latest book Lessons From the Light.

Barbara has been a guest on major television talk shows, including Larry King Live, The Today Show, Man Alive, Donahue, Unsolved Mysteries, PM Magazine, Good Morning America, Oprah, Joan Rivers, Sonya Freeman, and CNN Medical News. Her story and her research have appeared in documentaries in the US, Canada, Japan, France, Belgium and Italy and in magazines such as Redbook, McCalls, Woman's World, McClean's, Utne Reader, Common Boundary, Psychology Today and many others. She presented talks on the Near-Death Experience to a group in the Capital in Washington, D.C. and also the United Nations in New York.

Barbara lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, author and physician Charles Whitfield, MD. They share a private practice, helping adults that were repeatedly abused and traumatized as children.