Neuroscience Expert Dr. Tara Swart on Evidence We Can Communicate After Death and Her Experience Speaking to the Dead!
Guests: Dr. Tara Swart
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If what you're saying is true, then this is a revelation.
Yeah. And I couldn’t speak about it until now, that it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away. And I'm saying it from the point of view of being a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist. And it's taboo because we are afraid that people will think we're going insane. I mean, I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying that's not that dissimilar to things I’ve experienced.
So you wanted to find as much science as you could to try to back it up. Do you think you found the answer?
Yeah.
How sure are you?
100%. And the things I’ve found out are going to shock you.
The floor is yours.
Okay. So I'm Dr. Tara Swart. I'm a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry. And I lost my beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago, two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. And everything I believed in had gone wrong. I was just totally lost and broken. But then I started getting signs from my husband. In my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums. But not being impressed by them, I ended up thinking if it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away, and I am all about optimizing my brain, then I should be able to do it myself.
So I went down a rabbit hole, and what I’ve uncovered in this research is going to have a really beneficial effect on a lot of people. Because it means that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of.
So listen, here's what I’m going to do. I’m going to try to ask the questions and challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you.
I want you to ask me those questions.
Dr. Tara Swart, good to see you again. Thank you for coming back. You were our most viewed guest on the show of all time. Our last conversation did just over 20 million views and downloads, which is pretty staggering. But you're back to talk about something entirely different this time, which is this idea of science, which kind of intertwines with all of your work on neuroscience that you’ve done throughout your career. My first question to you is: what is it that you think you know that the vast majority of people don’t quite understand, comprehend, or have accepted yet?
I believe that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of now. And I believe that the brain actually filters down the capability of the mind so that we can exist on this material plane. And things that I found out during research for "The Signs" are going to shock you. The abilities that we have that we’re not aware of are way beyond what you might even imagine right now.
In what departments and facets of my life?
Let's just start with something really simple. How many senses do you think we have?
Five? Smell, touch, hear, see... is it five?
Have you heard of a sixth sense? Being able to see ghosts and stuff? Most people would agree that we have five senses. Some people would say, isn't there something like a sixth sense? I don't think it's agreed what that might be. So I actually did a literature review of several pieces of research about how many senses humans have, and we actually have 34 as we currently understand it.
And so what does this mean? What is the assertion that you’re making and what does that mean for the material consequences of my life?
I'm making a hypothesis based on both the analogy of the observable universe and the fact that we have this expanded suite of senses to challenge you to understand that you are capable of much more than you think you are. You’re a really good case in point for me because you love rationality, data, and science, and you don't really love intuition and the unknown or the unseen. I think if I can convince you of anything by the end of this podcast, then the impact that that could have on society is huge. I mean, the things I found out are going to shock you.
What do you mean by that?
I, as you know, was a psychiatrist in the past. So I'm able to diagnose people and say whether they have a mental illness or not. In the past four years, I've been keeping a secret. And there were times in that four years that I had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression, if I was psychotic, if I was manic, or if the way that my consciousness was expanding... I mean Steve, I've been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying that’s not that dissimilar to things I’ve experienced in the last four years.
So I guess we better get into the secret. Because I sat here with you almost two years ago now and we had a fantastic conversation, but there was something you didn't tell my audience at that moment in time. What is the secret, Tara?
I lost my beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago. And I've written this book which mentions my personal story. I trust you, so I really wanted to come back on the podcast and just explain a little bit to people about what's been going on for me for the last four years.
So your husband, Robin. You met him in 2016 and he passed away from leukemia in 2021. From 2021 when he passed away, what happened in your life? If I was a fly on the wall in your context, what would I have seen?
He'd been given two weeks to live, but he actually lived for three and a half weeks. And he died two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. So I was literally reading condolence cards on my fourth wedding anniversary. If it wasn't for the people that I have around me who became like a fortress, I don't think I would be here today. Never having had that experience before, it was just so, so devastating. And even though I'm a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, I just was like totally lost and broken.
And then I started seeing robins in the garden every single time I went to the window, both in Hampshire and London. I've never ever seen so many robins in my life. I noticed it; I thought, of course, that's what I want to see. I have no idea what it means, if anything.
And then about six weeks after he passed away, I was asleep and I heard a noise in the distance. We had been burgled once, so I went to check it wasn't the alarm in the garages. Couldn't work out what it was; thought maybe it was birds in the distance. Went back to sleep. It was about 4:00 AM. And then I got woken up by a massive thump to my shoulder. I wouldn't demonstrate it on you because it would be too much for me to hit you that hard. It wasn't like a tap.
So I opened my eyes and I could see next to my bed a very vague, hazy version of Robin, as if he was pushing himself through treacle to be seen. And I was just transfixed. And I saw him become more and more clear. I could see the outline of his hair and his face. And then suddenly he just dissolved from the top down and my eyes went like this. I remember seeing his shins and his feet and I was like up on my elbow watching and I just gasped out loud.
In my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums. And again, I had that dual conversation. I said to myself, this is the kind of thing that crazy, desperate people do. And within the same breath, it’s okay for me to be crazy and desperate right now. I’ve lost my best friend, my life partner. Everything I thought about how the world worked has crashed around me. And I ended up, you know, being not impressed by the mediums and just at some point—I can't even remember when now—thinking if it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away, and he was my husband and my best friend, and I am all about optimizing my brain and expanding my consciousness, then I should be able to do it myself. That's the start of my journey that I've written about in "The Signs."
And do you think you found the answer?
Yeah.
How sure are you?
100%.
If what you're saying is true, then that's a revelation. So many people have lost people or have gone through different types of loss in their life. And you're telling me that through the work you've done over the last couple of years and the research you’ve done, you understand how to communicate with them in some capacity?
Mm-hm.
And you're 100% sure.
100%.
So listen, here's what I’m going to do. I’m going to challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you sitting at home. So I’m going to try to ask the questions that the viewer might ask because this idea is quite a significant perspective-shifting one. My job in this conversation, although these are sensitive matters of course, is just to try and play devil's advocate where I can.
And I just want to say that, you know, you know me. You know that you’ve asked me to come back on the podcast several times and I’ve come when I’m ready. So I want you to ask me those questions.
So where does this journey begin then? You suffer this tragic loss, you go to the mediums, you’re let down by them. Where does your research, your journey of discovery begin?
It starts with this decision to try to communicate with him myself. There's a realization at some point that it's not a one-way thing, that when people pass away, they also have to learn. So it's like two people having to learn a language to speak to each other. Like two people who speak a different language having to learn a language that they can both speak. That's how it felt.
Obviously, as a scientist, I then wanted to find as much science as I could to try to back it up, which really comes down to the science of whether the mind or the psyche or the soul can exist separately from the body. And I will say that way before I even started thinking about this stuff, just the moment that he died—which he died in front of me—once he'd actually passed away, I remember a really strong feeling of looking at his body and just knowing that wasn't him. And that the essence of who he was, I didn't know where it was, but it was not there lying in that bed.
And when did you realize that you were going to start to collect research and do research on this idea of being able to communicate in ways that most people don't realize we can communicate through signs? And also, when you talk about being able to communicate through these 30-plus senses, is that just with the dead or is that with each other?
I mean, I think it starts with yourself. The fact that if you're not even aware that you've got 34 senses, then you’re obviously not consciously tapping into something that you're not aware of. And some of them are non-conscious senses anyway—things like the pH of your blood or the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood. You're not going to be conscious of those; you can't necessarily exert much control over them, although obviously if you slow down your breathing or you do a certain type of breathwork, it could have an impact on those things.
The conclusion that I came to: like I said, I went to the brink a few times. Let me give you the first example. I realized that the first anniversary was coming up on October 26th. And around a couple of months before that, I was doing the best that I had been doing so far, but I was very aware this anniversary was coming and I wanted to prepare myself mentally. But from the 4th of October, I suddenly was in aches and pains all over my body, which actually lasted for six or seven weeks and was accompanied by me feeling so depressed that I actually had to look in the mirror and go through the criteria for clinical depression and work out if I was actually depressed or not.
And I didn't meet all the criteria, but I was in this physical pain. I could not understand why. I went for a massage; it was so painful I didn't go again for a year. So eventually I looked through my diary/calendar on my phone and I looked back to October 4th, which was the day that it started, and that was the day that I had taken him home to die. That was the day I took him home from hospital. I didn't remember that date, but clearly my body had, and the trauma was just re-emerging as physical pain. And I only realized quite a lot later that I had to do some somatic work to actually get rid of the last bits of trauma that talking therapy can't actually get to.
Somatic work?
Body work. Whether that's massage or dance or art or craniosacral therapy or Tai Chi, you know, anything physical. Because basically there's an area in the brain—it's actually inside, so I can't really show it to you on this, but it's kind of inside there—and that part of the brain is to do with articulating speech and it basically gets shut down by trauma. So those sort of phrases like "I'm speechless" or "I'm dumbfounded" or "I have no words" indicates the fact that there may be residual trauma that's held in your body that you can't actually articulate and solve through talking therapy. So it requires some kind of physical therapy.
So that was obviously to do with my sense of pain. And it took me a little while to kind of put together what that might mean by really tapping into why was my body manifesting pain to sort of remind me of something or show me something. But also, in the first couple of weeks after Robin's body was taken away the morning after he died and it was just under two weeks till the cremation, in that time, I would wake up in the morning and I would be absolutely freezing cold, shaking and shivering. And it was October, it wasn't mid-winter. And I would blast up the heating. When someone else was in the house, I would realize it was like a sauna; it was actually a bit embarrassing and I had to turn it down and open some windows. And Robin actually hated being cold, and he would have been in the morgue in a refrigerated drawer that whole time. And again, I think it was my sense of temperature that was kind of on the same wavelength as where—I didn't consciously think of where he was, but I was feeling freezing cold.
Looking back, it was things like that that were coincidences, absolutely. But then over time, and I'm talking a couple of years, I could ask for specific signs and get them. Sometimes at first it would take a while, and then it became like it would happen that day. I could ask a question in my head and get an answer. I mentioned having, you know, being at the brink of my sanity, having to question things. I was experiencing something called thought insertion, which in psychiatry is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. It's when you have a thought in your head that you know isn't yours.
So I was experiencing that really vividly. But can you imagine experiencing that and at the same time being a psychiatrist that is saying, right Tara, you do realize you are having a psychotic symptom? And so in my research, one of the things I realized that maybe if you're going through grief and you don't know the things that I know, you can't articulate to yourself that grief in many ways is like psychosis. It's changing the levels of neurotransmitters in your head; it's changing the electrical and chemical signaling in your head. I just have so much empathy for people that have to go through that and don't have the wherewithal or the resources that I did.
Do you think one needs to cultivate their ability to see signs? Do you think it's like going to the gym?
Totally, totally. It took me years. And like I said, I believe it took him years as well. So yeah, I say it's like learning a language, but you're right, it's like going to the gym.
And what does one need to do in that gym to grow their sign muscle?
It always starts with believing, right?
Do you think that's one of the biggest issues in terms of being able to access these other dimensions or dynamics is most people just don't believe in it? A lot of people don't believe in it.
Or they secretly do but they're scared to talk about it because they think people will ridicule them.
My brain feels like I need to have the scientific evidence of things for me to accept them because I think sometimes I worry that if I don't have scientific rigor around my beliefs, then I'm susceptible to believe anything. I'll believe in the spaghetti monster at the bottom of the garden and I’ll believe every religion in the world and then I’m unanchored and then I blow around like a plastic bag in the wind and then I have no orientation. So I think okay, rigor is the basis of my beliefs. I have to have some sort of scientific evidence.
I know you do. It's not to say I'm not open-minded because I've had my mind changed so many times in my life that one would be dumb now to not be open-minded and to not listen. I agree with you about rigor completely. My entire career has been based on that. But I just was pushed up against a wall, so I had to think differently. And I think the question that I posed to myself is: what if?
So the psychologist Carl Jung talks about the collective unconscious. He talks about those basically three main things that all humans experience, which is birth, life, and death. And so we have this common experience which is actually part of our inherited gene and brain structure. So everyone who’s ever lived will experience those things.
But if we look at ancient wisdom, for a start, we are made of the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen that came from the Big Bang. So we're all made of the same thing. Our ancestors lived in the cycle with nature. I think us actually having broken our connection to nature is a huge part of why we're so disconnected and unhappy. So if you think of the lifecycle of a salmon, for example: it goes through its lifecycle and eventually its bones contribute to the phosphorus on the floor of the forest, so it never really goes away. In many other ways, our ancestors repeatedly saw the cycles of nature and therefore always kind of knew that everything gets renewed and nothing ever completely goes away. And I think that’s a really important thing to return to.
I think, you know, when we question things—which you’re absolutely right to do—I think we have to look at things that we didn't think were true that we now know are true as just ways of being open to the fact that things in the future might become obvious or known that aren't known now. I think that is an important place of open-mindedness to sit at.
And so for example, want to hear about slime mold? Slime mold are single-celled organisms like amoeba who go about their daily life on their own very happily as long as their basic needs are met. But if, for example, they’re facing potential starvation, they will come together and form a slug because the slug can move towards your vegetable patch, you know, a new food source, and they can survive. Equally, if they are facing potential extinction, they will come together and form a sporing body like a mushroom. So that's got a stalk and a fruiting body that can release spores that will go into the atmosphere to all different places where these new baby organisms can grow and thrive.
But if you think about it, the single cells in the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the greater good because there's no chance that they’re going to get released into the atmosphere as a spore because they're in the stalk. So some of them actually cheat and climb up the stalk to get into the fruiting body and displace other cells from the fruiting body. So things like that, and for example, the mycorrhizal network, which is how mushrooms and mycelium feed the roots of trees. Even trees that have been felled can be kept alive for centuries because the mycorrhizal network—which is the connection between mycelium and tree roots—can bring water and sugar to that tree stump to keep it alive. And trees and mycelium don’t even only do it for the same species; they do it because they're part of the entire forest in its symbiotic relationship and they care about each other.
Things like this would have been thought to be fantastical ten years ago. You know, we're in LA at the moment and I saw the driverless car for the first time. Now when I was growing up watching sci-fi, I never thought I’d see that in my life. So that’s all I’m saying. And I'm saying it from the point of view of being a cognitive scientist and I'm talking about the nature of consciousness. I'm not asking you to believe in other parts of science. But based on the fact that we don't know everything, we’ve learned loads of things that we thought weren’t true before. I strongly believe there’s a benefit to humanity of raising this kind of question and having this conversation which—I ask you why it’s a taboo conversation. Why shouldn't we be enlightened? Why shouldn't we feel better? Why shouldn't we be more connected? Whatever we’ve been doing up until now certainly hasn't been working.
When was it that you made the decision that you were going to write a book about this called "The Signs"? Was there a particular moment in this process where you realized that you were going to dig deeper and that then you would ultimately share this with the world?
I wasn't intending to write a book at all, but I’d got to the point where I had something that I could share with people that I actually thought would be useful.
And at this point you're communicating with Robin on a daily basis. Give me some color to that. What does that mean? Give me some examples if you can.
Well, either it will be that I'll ask a question in my mind and the answer will come in my mind but I know it's not my own thought. Or I'll just get a direct message from him in my mind that I know isn't me. But mostly it's the signs.
So I've talked to you about the first anniversary and how hard that was. By the time of the second anniversary, I was actually in America and I had been filming in the studio for a week and then I was on the road on the Navajo Nation. And that was due—I was due to fly out of the Navajo Nation on the second anniversary of Robin's passing. And by that point, I was feeling a bit like I'd completely burned out and I had a choice about how to re-emerge—whether that was going to be in a good way or I wasn't going to be able to make it. And I had this analogy of a phoenix rising from the flames in my mind.
So on that trip I said, "Darling, send me the sign of a phoenix."
You said that to Robin in your head?
In my head. And I chose the phoenix because it's really unusual. So it's not like if I said a dog, I'm probably going to see a dog on the pavement every day. But I chose something that is not an easy thing to see. And I was actually in Oklahoma City where you wouldn't expect necessarily to see something unusual. Every single day between my hotel and the studio, I went through Chinatown and I passed a restaurant called The Phoenix Garden with a big emblazoned sign.
And on the way there, I had had an indirect flight from Boston and the flight leaving Boston was late so I missed my connection in Chicago and had to spend a night in Chicago and then I was late for filming and stuff. And so when I was leaving to go to LA, I was leaving on a Sunday and from the Monday onwards I had a podcast every single weekday in LA. And so the team said to me, "We know that you cannot miss that flight. We are not going to put you on an indirect flight, we absolutely promise you, direct flight to LA so you'll be fine from Monday onwards."
We were in the middle of nowhere for like a week. And basically my flight wasn't booked because we didn't know which airport we were going to be at. We arrived on the eve of the anniversary of Robin passing and my flight was booked that day and it was from Flagstaff in the Navajo Nation to LA, flying on the day of his anniversary. No direct flights; I had to fly through Phoenix, Arizona, on the day of his anniversary.
You’ve probably heard of that old analogy of when you buy a car, you end up seeing the car everywhere on the road. I buy a new car and then I go everywhere and it seems like everybody’s got my car because of—do they call it confirmation bias in science and psychology?—where once you’ve got something in your head, you're more likely to see that thing. I think they've done studies on this where if you are exposed to something or you’re told to think about something, then you'll see it more in the world. How do you separate what you’re saying from that proven psychological phenomenon?
I don't. I say use it to your advantage.
But how do you know that wasn't what was happening in your life? Because if you thought about the word phoenix and then over the course of a couple of days you’re looking at everything, but you’re only going to register the things that are emotionally resonant. You know, I might have seen Phoenix a lot of times over the last seven days, but because it didn't mean anything to me, I didn't register it.
Again, I would say the number of times this has happened, the sort of like how narrow I make the criteria. So sometimes I say I need to see a button or a symbol of a button or the word button, but it's got to happen three times by 11:00 PM tomorrow. And one of my friends says that, you know, we share something which is if you see a pair of lions and we send each other pictures of it. But she says it has to be if you went out of your way and you walked a different way and then you saw them. If it's like, you know, the normal way that you go or somewhere that you know that they exist, that doesn't count. It has to be if you went out of your way.
So I had a previous thing with Robin which was about the figure of eight or the infinity symbol. And there's a story in the book of how that was cropping up for me when I actually met him. But there was a day recently where I had some space—I had three spaced-out meetings in the day—so I thought I'd take the opportunity to walk for an hour between them all. And for the last meeting of the day, I ended up walking past UCH, which is University College Hospital, where he was having treatment. And that had been a really traumatic time for me when he was in hospital there. And I have—I will have to say I kind of avoided that area since then.
So on this walk to where I was going for the evening for a book launch event, I ended up walking past the hospital. And I actually said in my head, like, why would you make that happen to me? Like, why do I have to walk past that building? I never want to see that building again in my life. And again, I said, you have to send me a sign. And by the time I got to Euston Station—so you know, people who don't know can Google this, it's not very far—there was an elastic band in the figure of eight sign on the pavement, and that means something to me.
So the thing about this confirmation bias thing is it's dependent on the reticular activating system, which is the system of your brain that filters out what's not crucial to your survival and filters in what it wants you to notice. And so actually, one of the things I've written about in the book is the art of noticing. Because really, we live in this world where life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour. You're not noticing things that could actually be crucial to you thriving rather than you just surviving.
And in this model called shared trait vulnerability, which falls under the field of research called neuroaesthetics: so basically creativity is a positive personality trait, right? But there is a high correlation between creativity and psychopathology, which is mental illness, particularly depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. And there are quite a few high-profile examples of creative people who had mental illnesses like Alexander McQueen, Kurt Cobain, Van Gogh.
So what that shows is that there’s an area of overlap of three particular ways of thinking that are underpinned by neurology that are the reason that people with mental illness are so creative. And they are basically hyperconnectivity—that's joining the dots in the material world of things that aren't obvious to other people, but it's also hyperconnectivity inside the brain. So if you think about all these lobes, the more lobes that are firing at the same time—and there’s also a cortex that’s known as the association cortex—the more interconnected all this firing is in the brain, the more the brain opens up to new ideas. And so that underpins creativity. And also this usually really involves the visual cortex which is in the occipital lobes and that's why sometimes people, whether it’s through psychedelics or altered states of consciousness through creativity, can see things that they didn't see before.
There's also something called novelty salience, which is noticing new things or just noticing things of importance that you would otherwise have filtered out. And there's something called attenuated latent inhibition or low latent inhibition, which is to do with that filter. And it means that the filter allows more things in than it normally does. So you can see we’ve got hyperconnection, we’ve got noticing more things, and we’ve got the filter loosening and allowing more things in.
Now if you've got a high IQ, high working memory, and you've got cognitive flexibility—which means you can think out of the box—that’s a really good thing. If you’ve got a low IQ, you’ve got deficits in your working memory, and you've got what's called perseveration, which is you just go over the same thought process over and over again, that can lead to you having a psychological crisis. So I took that model and thought if grief is like psychosis and I'm currently in a very vulnerable state, is creativity a conduit for me to get not only back to the state that I was in before, but into a state of expanded awareness where I can loosen the filter as I choose fit? I can notice things that I would have passed by before and I can think differently about how my mind works, how the world works, possibly what happens after someone passes away.
And then I went and looked into near-death experiences and terminal lucidity and dark retreats. Like I said, I went down a rabbit hole.
And what did you find in that rabbit hole?
At the border of life and death, usually within one to 24 hours of death, someone whose brain hasn't been functioning, who can't remember the names of their own children, suddenly becomes completely lucid and says, "Steve darling, come over here, let me, you know, let's have a nice mother-son chat." And then that gives a lot of people hope, but usually that means it's an hour or 23 hours until the person is going to die. We can't explain that. How can a brain that's irreversibly damaged suddenly function completely normally? There is no explanation for that.
With the near-death experiences, I was particularly compelled by three stories. Dr. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon—she’s in that Netflix documentary "Surviving Death"—she was submerged underwater for 15 or 20 minutes. She should never have been able to be resuscitated. She describes her whole journey of going to another realm, seeing a being of light, being told that her life isn't over, she has to turn back and return to the physical world, even though she could see her bloated body and her friends trying to reach her to resuscitate her and they couldn't.
Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote "Proof of Heaven"—he is a doctor, he was an atheist, he was in a coma with bacterial meningitis and was pronounced clinically dead and then basically came back and said that he saw heaven. And he now believes in a God that is benign, that cares about the future of humanity. So for me as a doctor, hearing these stories from other doctors was really, really convincing.
And then there’s one story that Dr. Bruce Greyson told me—he's a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia who has done 50 years of research into near-death experiences. And he told me the story of a patient in ICU who kept going into cardiac arrest and he had a primary nurse who was a young 20-year-old nurse and they had a really close bond. And one weekend she was—she had time off for the weekend and he had a different nurse looking after him and he went into cardiac arrest and he had a near-death experience. And in that near-death experience, he saw his primary nurse. She said to him, "Your life isn't over, you have to go back and get better. And please tell my parents I'm sorry about the red MG."
So he wakes up in ICU, he's got this replacement nurse looking after him, and he says, "The strangest thing just happened. I had this experience of being in this other world, I saw my primary nurse, and she said I had to come back and she also said tell my parents sorry about the red MG." So the temporary nurse starts bursting into tears, runs out of the room. He has no idea why. Someone comes in and asks what's just happened, he explains, and they tell him that his primary nurse was given a red MG for her 21st birthday, took it out for a test run, crashed it into a tree and died. Now he didn't know she was dead, but he saw her on the other side and she told him to come back.
And the guy that told you the story was who relevant to the patient?
Dr. Bruce Greyson. He has done 50 years of research on near-death experiences. He’s got over 5,000 recorded cases of patients of his own that he's looked after that have had near-death experiences and he also shared with me the numbers of cases that other people have on databases. So you know, we're looking at over 10,000 cases globally recorded at the moment.
What is it that you believe based on those near-death experiences like the red MG story and based on this phenomenon of terminal lucidity?
So Professor Alexander Batthyany, who wrote "Threshold" about terminal lucidity, put it really nicely when he said, "Maybe at the border of life and death, we see something that is true all along, but we don't for whatever reason see it or acknowledge it whilst we’re alive and well," which is that the mind and body can operate independently of each other.
It is quite shocking. There's this case from 2009 of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease who was non-verbal and non-responsive and had no apparent recognition of her surroundings or families for years. And then one day before her death, she suddenly sat up in hospital, looked around and recognized her daughter by name, spoke clearly, reminisced about the past, thanked her family for caring for her. Her speech was coherent, her memory was intact, and her personality recognizable as though she had never been ill. She fell asleep that evening and died peacefully during the night. And what do you think's happening there?
It's possibly partially explained by a surge in neurochemicals, but it's not explained by how can those neurochemicals act if the physical neurons and synapses are damaged? There is no explanation. The only explanation is that the mind is not emergent from material matter. The mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the psyche cannot be solely emerging from physical matter. That's the only explanation from what we understand so far.
And so what is it that you now believe? You believe that our souls and our bodies are two separate things. And where does our soul live if it's not living inside of me? Like, where is Robin?
So I believe that—whether you want to call it the universe, consciousness, collective consciousness, Godhead, cosmic soup—the word for it isn't important. There’s somewhere that that energy goes and it still exists in some form. And if you believe in reincarnation, then you may believe that it then enters another body as a vessel and has a different life. But it doesn't go away.
How do you know?
I'm going to say something that I know you're not going to like, but I know because I feel it personally. I feel it from the person I've been closest to in my entire life who I know would never leave me if they didn't absolutely have to. But I can back that up to the extent of I can say you can't prove that this isn't true. I can back that up with everything that I put in the book. And I'm not the only one. Dr. David Eagleman at Stanford says this idea of the brain being like a radio and receiving signals from outside: we can't prove it, but we categorically cannot say it's not true. Professor Donald Hoffman suggests that space-time is not the basis of how the universe works, suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe works. We can't prove that's not true. And I find that really exciting. I mean, as a scientist, you're supposed to challenge the status quo, you’re supposed to be curious. You can't as a scientist believe that everything we know now is all there is. There's no point to being a scientist if that's what you believe.
I asked you this question about the gym earlier on about training in the gym. Are there things you think people could do to heighten their ability to speak to loved ones that might have passed or to heighten their ability to tap into signs?
So I go through this in the book and I chose the order quite carefully. So I talk about neuroaesthetics, which is noticing beauty basically, if not actually engaging in the arts. There's a lot of evidence for engaging in the arts in terms of increasing your novelty salience, which is noticing new things, which is part of the journey of opening up that filter.
And then there's a whole chapter on nature because I think a lot of signs come from nature—like butterflies, robins, spiral formations, cloud formations. So noticing nature more can help you also to receive these signs. And then community is a huge part of it because, you know, if I had this conversation with you and you totally shut me down and said it’s not provable, this is ridiculous, I’m not airing this episode, that would have a very different effect on me to you even being open to asking me challenging questions that I welcome but also engaging in this conversation. And it feels a little bit like maybe questioning some things that you might do differently. So those are three very important parts of part two of the book. Part one is more about what are signs, what are you missing, have you been receiving signs already.
One of the things that when I was going through my transition from being religious to being agnostic, I'd say—because I wouldn't call myself an atheist—is I was watching all these atheist minds debate and talk and stuff. And one of the things one of them said is that if coincidence didn't happen in our lives, then that would be a miracle. Like statistically, mathematically, if sometimes you don't think of Dave and then the phone rings and it's Dave, that would actually be more mathematically improbable than it happening sometimes. If you had this on a distribution curve or something, it is likely mathematically that really unlikely things will happen sometimes.
So I've always had that in my head as a way to sort of rationalize coincidence. So when coincidence happens, I think well, probabilistically, really unlikely things have to happen and if they never happened, then that’s a miracle. Does that make sense? Like mathematically you'd say like likely things happen often, unlikely things happen less often, extremely unlikely things happen way less often. That’s like the nature of math, right? So when extremely unlikely things happen, I say actually that makes sense because probabilistically those things happen infrequently. They're not happening every single day. Like right now I'm thinking of 10 people. I guarantee when I go to my phone none of those 10 people have texted me. But if I do that every day, one day I'm going to go, "Hey Steve, checking in," which makes sense because of the laws of probability.
Yeah, but I don't want you to do that. I want you to just be open to naturally thinking of someone and seeing if that does happen, or asking for a sign and seeing if it comes into your life. That's all I'm asking. Just try it. It's not going to hurt you. And I'm not just saying that to you, I'm saying it to everyone.
And how do you think that would benefit me?
I think it makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.
And why is that so important?
Because I think a life where all you're trying to do is get through and meet your needs—life can be better than that. I think a life where you feel more connected to yourself, to others, to something greater, gives you purpose. There's a lot of research that shows that having a purpose that transcends just yourself is actually really healthy and important.
And what is that for you now, that transcendent layer in your life? How do you define it? Is it a religion? Is it something else?
It's definitely not religion. I guess it's spirituality in a form which will mean different things to different people. It's definitely about caring for humanity. 85% of people globally believe in religion and a God, so it's important. I think for me, it's about giving a voice of relevance and helping people to feel seen and heard because I think that's very lacking. And you know, I'm in the enormously privileged position that you have given me of being able to do that, and I want to use that in a really positive way.
How does this overlap with or sit alongside what people call intuition? Because you talk about that as well in the book.
Intuition is what it is—it’s accessing inner wisdom, right? But I've included it as a really important part of the book because I believe that it’s a way to receive and interpret your signs. But I just want to go back to something I said earlier, which is about how trauma can be stored in your body and to some extent it can't be retrieved through talking therapy because there aren't words for it because it's actually embedded in the tissues of your body. There's a really exciting new hypothesis for how that might work called the serotonin hypothesis.
So previously, I think it would make sense that if, for example, when Robin was in hospital, I would sit in a very hunched-over position and my fists would be clenched because I felt like I was fighting for his life all the time and if I relaxed for a millisecond, he could die. So it makes sense to me that those postural issues would show up for me later in terms of like aches and pains and perhaps sort of—well not perhaps, my Pilates and yoga teachers keep telling me—like issues with certain parts of my spine and stuff.
But the serotonin hypothesis is very exciting as a neuroscientist because a lot of people have heard of Bessel van der Kolk's work and the book "The Body Keeps the Score." And it makes sense intuitively that the body does keep the score. And like I’ve said, there's an amount of trauma that you can't express/articulate verbally, so we believe/understand that there are imprints of that in the body. But we've never really understood how that works.
And we—you know, I’ve talked before I think with you about intuition through a process called Hebbian learning, which is neurons that fire together, wire together, gets pushed deeper and deeper into neurons from the outer cortex, the limbic system, the brainstem, into gut neurons. And that’s why intuition is called gut instinct. And we understand that through stress postures, you could have bracing patterns in your muscles for the trauma that you’ve experienced.
Fascia is the connective tissue that holds your entire body together—all your organs, all your muscles. And until fairly recently, fascia was thought of as a vestigial organ; it was cut away in surgery without thinking of any—that it would have any effect on the rest of your body. Now it's understood more to actually be an organ of its own and an important one. And the serotonin hypothesis goes some way to explain how the level of constriction of capillaries and the amount of nutrients that's released to skin, fascia, and muscle is a mechanism for how trauma is held in the body.
And with that in mind, what do we do to get rid of that trauma held in the body?
Physical activities. So dancing, singing, drumming, humming, chanting, massage, yoga, craniosacral therapy. And you'll notice the ones I started with are very related to ancient wisdom. So our ancestors knew this. For example, in ancient Greek burials, they would wail and beat their chests. So they were getting rid of grief by screaming but also by beating their muscles and letting trauma exit their body.
I'm very well aware that there's probably a lot of people who have sent this conversation to a friend who is struggling right now. And that that friend who has lost a loved one, potentially a husband, potentially a wife, potentially—God forbid—a child or a grandparent or something, is listening to this because they are in search of answers for their own healing. You've been there. You may still be there in some degree. If you were to advise them on their own healing journey, what advice would you give them?
The first thing would be to not repress or deny how they're feeling and really feel the emotions that have to come along with grief. I've—you know, I had amazing talking therapy which definitely helped me a lot, so if people have access to that professionally, then great. If not, if you’ve got close friends that you can talk to, then talking it out does help. But I’ve really learned that there's a limit to how much that helps and that some sort of physical therapy is really helpful as part of it. Those would be the basics, I would say.
Time in nature has been so healing for me. Some form of creative outlet, whether it's making or beholding. So you don't have to be good at art; if you draw a picture of how you’re feeling emotionally or a sketch of your loved one, it doesn't have to be good. You get benefits from doing that; it's an creative outlet for your grief. That's probably the second level and the third level to me is if you’ve got any inclination to receive signs or just be open to a white feather landing at your doorstep or a bird coming to visit you or something that means something to you, then that can bring a lot of comfort and guidance and joy.
And you also assert that things like being in nature, creativity, honing into our intuition increase the probability of us receiving these signs?
Receiving and being able to interpret in a way that’s meaningful for you.
Gut instinct. In the book you talk about how strengthening one's gut health can have an impact on gut instinct. Explain that to me.
So the body is basically the physical foundation for all of your senses to be able to flourish, to your higher mental faculties to be able to flourish, and ultimately for whatever spiritual experience you have of life to be able to be at its fullest and best as well. So taking care of the physical foundations is really important. And we could talk about all the usual things like sleep and diet and exercise, mindfulness, stress management. But I want to really focus strongly on the gut-brain axis because a lot of new research has come up since I wrote "The Source."
So it's actually—we know a lot about this bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut. It's actually a three-way system, which is the brain, the gut itself—the gut neurons—and the gut microbiome, which is trillions of bacteria and fungi and organisms that are basically determining the health of our entire system because they're connected to our immune system, to our skin, to our oral microbiome, and the brain.
So the way that you—the most direct access you have to your brain is through your gut. The gut is the most direct way that you can influence your brain. And you can do that through exercise, obviously diet, supplementation, even meditation and art and music therapy have a beneficial effect on your gut microbiome, which has a knock-on effect on the neurons and the brain. And they communicate with each other in many ways, mostly through the Vagus nerve.
What's the Vagus nerve?
The Vagus nerve is a cranial nerve, so it comes from your skull. It’s Latin for wandering because it's the longest nerve that goes through your body. So it goes—there's two, the right and the left—and they go all the way from your cranium down your neck, they go through your diaphragm and to your intestine.
Also other nerves, so the nerves that innervate the gut organs—they’re called afferent intestinal nerves—they're also involved in this communication. Then there's hormones and there's cytokine messages which are chemical messages that aren't hormonal. Your immune system actually also produces neurotransmitters and there are immune cells in your brain as well. So those are all the ways that we know currently that the brain and the gut communicate with each other.
And so what does this mean in terms of my gut health and ways to influence my brain? Does it mean that I need to be really big on my prebiotics and my probiotics to make sure my gut's intact and if I do that then my intuition will be sharper?
That's true, but I always like people to understand what's behind that, not just mindlessly take prebiotics and probiotics. So what we're trying to do is reduce inflammation throughout the system. And so basically because the brain is a small organ in our entire system but it uses up at least 20% of our energy, it's very vulnerable to what we call oxidative stress or free radicals. So every time there’s any turnover of cells in our brain or our body—basically as we live the wear and tear of daily life—we release free radicals which are molecules that can damage cells, particularly nerve cells.
And because the brain has such high turnover of energy, it's particularly vulnerable to free radical attack. So reducing inflammation and putting things that are neuroprotective around it like certain vitamins and minerals is really important. And the hippocampus part of the brain—it has high cell turnover because it’s to do with memory, laying down memories, and obviously well into adulthood we're still doing that—that’s also very vulnerable to free radical damage and that’s why we can get memory and cognitive impairments and dementia as we get older.
So the modern Western diet causes something called dysbiosis, which is that your gut isn't in a good state, and that creates a cascade of inflammation and releases molecules, some of which can cross the blood-brain barrier and therefore cause inflammation in the brain. So we want to minimize that as much as possible and put in as many protective and beneficial factors as possible. If we're doing that, the system's in what we call homeostasis, which is good balance. It's kind of starting to take care of itself; it’s got all the nutrients that it needs, it’s hydrated, it’s oxygenated. That's when you've got extra resources to do the higher mental functions.
And up until today, pretty much, I've described those as being able to solve complex problems, being able to think flexibly, creatively, override your biases. But now I'm proposing that there's more than that that we can do. There's accessing levels of intuition that we didn't know we had. Very much through the same mechanism of how I described trauma being stored in the body, hidden wisdom is also stored in the body, it's not just in your brain. And therefore the same therapies like beholding and making art, humming, drumming, storytelling, dancing, yoga, just movement can help us to access that intuition that isn't just in our brain and our mind, it's physical.
I've just invested millions into this and become a co-owner of the company. It's a company called Ketone IQ. And the story is quite interesting. I started talking about ketosis on this podcast and the fact that I am very low carb, very, very low sugar, and my body produces ketones which have made me incredibly focused, have improved my endurance, have improved my mood, and have made me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast, a couple of weeks later these showed up on my desk in my HQ in London—these little shots. And oh my god, the impact this had on my ability to articulate myself, on my focus, on my workouts, on my mood, on stopping me crashing throughout the day was so profound that I reached out to the founders of the company and now I'm a co-owner of this business. I highly, highly recommend you look into this. I highly recommend you look at the science behind the product. If you want to try it for yourself, visit ketone.com/stephen for 30% off your subscription order and you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. That's ketone.com/stephen. And I'm so honored that once again a company I own can sponsor my podcast.
Used the word "dark retreats." I've never heard that phrase before.
So dark retreats come from a Tibetan religion or philosophy, but it’s seen throughout the ancient civilizations. So the ancient Greeks and Romans used to bury people actually for days and then they would come out and be like the seers and the mystics of that community. But there's most research available in dark retreats because it's still happening today.
What is a dark retreat?
A dark retreat is—have you heard of silent retreats? Silent meditation?
Yeah, my girlfriend went on one.
Yeah, so that’s the kind of thing she would do. So basically you can go away for a few days to a few weeks and you're in silence and you're meditating and doing breathwork most of the time. In a dark retreat, you are in pitch black for—I mean you can go and do it for a few hours or a weekend, but it’s meant to be in sevens, so seven to 49 days. The monks do 49 days. If as a person who's interested spiritually you wanted to do it quite seriously, you would go for seven days. And you would be in a room or a cave that's got double walls so it's completely dark.
And the reason for doing this is that not all of us can have a near-death experience, right? So this is a way of emulating it. It's the closest way of emulating that for anyone like you or I to get access to the benefits of a near-death experience, which I’ve outlined them all in the book. So in a dark retreat, at first you sleep a lot because it's dark; you're releasing a lot of melatonin from your pineal gland. So you fall asleep in darkness, you awake in darkness, and basically that kind of makes you feel more sleepy so you sleep a lot. After a couple of days, you start to see like pulsations of light. It might be like little shooting stars or kind of just like little sparks here and there. And then eventually it feels like the walls are dimly alight. So in complete darkness you start to see light.
Obviously there's an element of hallucinating at this point. And so after three, four, five days, you will actually start to see animals, real or fantastical, and eventually people see deities or beings like people do in near-death experiences. And when people come out of these retreats, they experience many of the same benefits like a real joy for life, less fear of death, more compassion for other people, less fear of failing (so taking more healthy risks). So it's a way basically of emulating a near-death experience.
And it therefore convinces you that there's more than you can see in your day-to-day life and therefore that expands your mind in a way that's beneficial.
Yeah, it's another example of an altered state of consciousness. You can also get altered states of consciousness through conscious connected or holotropic breathwork and through the use of psychedelic plants as well.
How do we know that it's not just a changing of our neurological state or the chemicals in our brain that are causing us to interpret things differently with our senses? Because we've all experienced having some kind of stimulant or psychedelic or something at a rave or at a festival that's made us see the world differently for a moment. And science would say that's just the neurochemicals in our brain doing different things which are changing our perception. They wouldn't say necessarily that it's a different realm or a different dimension.
Yeah, and I think you're right. I think it is that. So as a neuropharmacologist, I understand as much as the research says about—it's mostly, like I said in the body, in the brain with psychedelics, it's mostly 5-HT (or serotonin) 2A receptors and there's a level of hyperconnectivity within the brain, particularly as I said in the visual cortex here, which allows people to see things that they don't normally see. And I think the way to apply that in your life is that it's a glimpse into what's possible. Once you've experienced that, it could either be that you find other natural ways of experiencing that.
So there's a paper I can forward to you that shows that certain forms of conscious connected breathwork produce the same effect as a moderate dose of psilocybin. And this research came out after psilocybin was banned and practitioners thought well, what are other ways that we can help people to achieve these altered states of consciousness? And personally I believe that having a completely awe-inspiring experience in nature or for me, like the ballet, particularly when I've been so lucky sometimes to sit in the wings and you just completely feel like you're part of it—I mean, I've literally had a spiritual experience sitting in the wings watching actually it was one of my friends, the principal dancer, dancing. Just so overwhelming, it was completely an altered state of consciousness.
So there are other ways of accessing that. But I think it depends why you want to and what it means to you. But at minimum, these sorts of things that I'm talking about are ways of understanding that there's more to life than what we know.
And how does that meaningfully change the concept of what happiness is and contentment is and living a good life is?
So what I think is really interesting is that we don't actually have to experience certain things ourselves. So there's a lot of research that shows that students from various different areas of expertise who simply learn about near-death experiences actually get some of the same benefits and that these can last for over a year later. So understanding that when someone sees that there's something greater than us, when someone sees the interconnectedness of everything, when someone understands how small some of their problems are in the greater picture of things, helps people to be more compassionate, more grateful, kinder to others, less materialistic.
It is really interesting and I think anything that we can do to help us free us from some of those chains that I think hold us down in the material world, particularly in the Western world, is healthy for us physically, mentally, emotionally. But it also brings in this element of spirituality that I think is just so lacking in the world at the moment and could be so helpful. Because if we look back at the way that our ancestors used their senses and their intuition to interpret the land—like a cloud formation could mean that rain's coming but it could also mean that your ancestors were talking to you. It just seems like such a beautiful way to live. And when we lived in Paleolithic times, we didn't have spare resources for having fun, but we adorned ourselves, we danced, we told stories, we made cave art. So I think that just really reminds us that those things that are often seen as luxuries or frivolous, they’re not at all, they're fundamentally important.
Believing in these things itself is good for us. Is that what you believe? You believe that believing in something transcendent, whether it’s spiritual or religious, is actually just good for us, so that's reason enough to believe it.
It's reason enough to believe it, but I think it will naturally change what you do once you believe it. You're not going to live in the same way if you believe some fundamentally different things.
I mean, sometimes it causes people through human history to do awful things, right? To kill themselves, to strap bombs to themselves and do horrific things because they believe in something transcendent. It can also lead to like destructive behavior.
I mean, I don't think there's any evidence from near-death experiences that that's the case. I think I know what you’re referring to is something that's, you know, more fundamentally religious.
These people flew themselves into buildings because they believe in—they were obviously radicalized in various ways, but they believed in going to an afterlife that would be better than this one and that they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good. So it's just—I guess it's a side point that the belief in transcendence itself in some regard isn't necessarily always going to guarantee our behaviors on this planet are productive.
Yeah, and I was going to say like perhaps it’s something more dogmatic, but I think you're absolutely right to raise that point. And I'm not sitting here and saying I've found like the perfect solution and everyone should do this and it's all good. I know that's not true. I'm not trying to say that at all. I think we should absolutely be questioning everything that I'm saying and I will keep questioning the way that I'm living my life and keep trying to learn and grow.
I guess the point is just the belief in something transcendent—does that make our lives necessarily better? I guess the answer is it can.
Yeah.
I’m really obsessed at the moment actually with this idea of purpose and meaning. Because obviously we're living in a society that's more and more individualistic and independence is kind of vogue and because of a variety of things that have happened over the last 50, 60, 70 years, we have more independence. Women in particular have a lot more independence, which I think everyone is very—most people are very supportive of. We have more choice than ever before, and with choice comes independence. I can choose now when I have a family and maybe I couldn't choose before. And with choice and with freedom, I think some of our more short-term hedonistic desires and temptations take hold and we end up sacrificing the tribe and shared responsibility and dependence. And a lot of our meaning came from those things. So I feel to some degree that when we think about how we ladder up from like me, to my family, to my city, to my nation, and then maybe to my God, those layers have fallen away now for many of us—it’s just me. And that's causing a crisis of meaning and purpose in life because we’re kind of unanchored. What’s your perspective on this and do you think it's true that we’re like more unanchored than we've ever been?
Yeah, well I actually called this in March 2020. And it's on record because I was on a podcast and I said I foresee a huge mental health crisis, but we could choose for it to be a spiritual revolution. And so then obviously the rest of the pandemic happened and then there was sort of a return to society, which I think people found really hard mentally as well. And at the same time, there was the cost-of-living crisis, the wealth gap, a new war, the crime rates, you know, certainly in London like just for my life experience they had significantly grown for reasons that we're all contributors to too, but you know it changes how safe you feel in society. And I'm a big fan of technology, obviously I'm a scientist, but it is ironic that we seem to be more disconnected than ever when in one way we're more connected than we've ever been before. I think the way out of that is a return to ancient wisdom, to true connection, which I believe can coexist with being technologically connected and advanced. But yeah, I just think we've lost what it means to be human, which means, you know, really being in touch with yourself and being part of a community and caring about something more than just your own life and your immediate inner circle.
And what is true connection in your definition of the word? Because I guess there's false connection if there's true connection.
Well, I'll just go over what I've said before because it's about connection to yourself, to others, and the world or something greater. And I think, you know, it's about something that's deep and not transactional. It's about something that's meaningful. It's about something that's altruistic. I think it's about contributing.
That day when you walked past the hospital, what did you experience?
It triggers me seeing that building. And I, you know, had obviously looked on Google Maps but not really realized I would walk past it. And if I had realized, I would have walked a different way. And I remember just thinking it's unfair that I had to see this building, it was unnecessary—an unnecessary trigger for me. And obviously saying to Robin, "You need to send me a sign." But there’s a reason for that, which is, you know, I mean I went to that hospital every day for a month for his first stay and I think about three weeks for the second one.
But he had two admissions to ICU and one of them I'd been to visit him for the day, he'd been bedridden for quite a few weeks by then. And I came home, I was just sort of de-escalating and sitting on the sofa and getting ready for the evening and then suddenly I saw the emergency line was calling. And I could hear them saying his heart rate went up to 200, ICU were here now, we did a crash call. They’re just talking, talking, talking and I suddenly just said, "Should I come back to the hospital?" And she said "Yes" in a tone of voice that was like, you need to get here as quickly as possible.
Got in the Uber—it's a 30-minute Uber ride from my house. And messaged my best friend and said, you know, I've got to rush back to the hospital. He was on the 15th floor, so I was waiting for the lift. Got up there, saw the matron coming to unlock the door, and I just said, "Is he in his room?" And she said, "Yes, he's in his room," but she—her face looked like not good. Ran round and saw all the machinery from ICU in the corridor with like a hundred wires coming out of the room. Ran into the room and just saw Robin sat up in bed, huge smile when he saw me. And he just said to me, "When I thought this was the end, I just kept thinking, please let me see her face one more time."
And you know, after that he did get a bit better but then—well, in that first admission, eventually I said to him, "You've got to start sitting out... well the doctor said you've got to sit out of bed." And the therapist had come round, he said "I don't want therapy, I've got you," so like I took the therapy. The reflexology lady came round, he pretended he was asleep. And eventually I said, "Darling, you've got to play the game. I cannot do this by myself. And you can't just keep lying in bed, you've got to sit up."
So he got helped into the chair. And that day when I went to say goodbye to him, I hugged him like face-to-face. And I didn't quite realize that the whole time I'd been kissing him from the side of the bed because he'd been in bed. And when we hugged face-to-face, I just burst into tears and I had never shown him anything but a smiling face the whole time. And I left and I just got this barrage of text messages saying "I'm not spending one more night away from you. I'm wasting away in this hospital when I could be with you. When you come in tomorrow, we're going to tell the doctors that I'm leaving."
So I thought, okay. Came in the next day, it's ward round. And I was pretty much like part of the ward round, like the consultant would say everything and then say "Is that okay Tara?" kind of thing. And he said, "I want to leave, I'm leaving today. I want to be at home with my wife tonight." And she was very clever. She looked at me and said, "What do you think Tara?" because she knew I’d never put him in danger. But also, I'm standing in front of the man that I love, and I'm either going to tell him that I don't trust him, I don't trust his decision-making—the person who always, always had my back—or I'm going to have to show him that I have his back just like he always had mine. And I said to her, "I understand why you wouldn't be in favor of this, but I think I can manage." And within two days he was discharged from hospital.
Off IVs, still on oxygen. We still had to go in to have like the bone marrow tests and get blood transfusions and platelets and things. But he slowly started to recover—it was a slow recovery. So normally within a week you would get the second round of treatment; he wasn't strong enough for that. But we got to the point where she actually said that we could go to Hampshire, and then he stopped using the walking stick, he stopped using the oxygen. We came back to London for the second round of treatment; she said "I could not have imagined you would bring him back in as good a state as he's in." But the second round of treatment was totally brutal and it didn't work. So he was in hospital again for a few weeks and then like I said on October 4th, I took him home.
Even then, the female consultant said to me, "The last time you took him to Hampshire he got so much better, if anything changes bring him back to London." And the male consultant gave me two syringes of bone marrow stimulating drugs and said, "You cannot use this without our permission, but if anything changes, inject him with this and bring him back to London." So I still had like a glimmer of hope which I shouldn't really have had. And like I said, he lived for three and a half weeks instead of two. Yeah, and right towards the end because he was in a hospital bed on an air mattress, he said "Maybe you could like come and lie on the bed with me." And you couldn't move; he couldn't raise a glass of water to his lips or anything. But he somehow moved his arm because I always used to sleep on his chest. And then after a few seconds he said "I'm just really claustrophobic," and you know I had like had to put the rails up to stay in the bed because it was so small and I was going to fall out and I said "It’s okay darling," and I think—I think that was his way of saying goodbye to me because he died two days after that.
What's on your mind?
Just very sad. I don't want him to get forgotten. I've dedicated my book to him. But I also know because we've had this conversation that there's something—there’s still like something that I have to do in this life which was the reason that I had to stay. So yeah, I think there's like a purpose to fulfill that Robin wants me to, so that's what I'm going to do.
How do you think about falling in love again? Because I've played out the horrific thought myself in my own life of losing my partner and how difficult it would appear to be from this vantage point to fall in love again and meet people and to think about those things again. How do you think about that?
So I actually experienced unconditional love which I didn't believe in. So the first time Robin said to me "I love you unconditionally," because I had some baggage from previous relationship, I said "Don't say that because I don't think that exists." And he never said it again, but every day for the rest of his life he showed me that it was true. So at some point I just knew it was true. I would say, you know, obviously people say things like "He would want you to be happy." And you know, I was still wearing my wedding rings for over two years and even some of his friends said "You don't need to wear them anymore," but I said "I want to." And I wore them for as long as I still needed to. I—I'm open to receiving love but I'm not going to go and look for it, let's put it that way.
Why?
I don't know. I mean, it's not really my style anyway. But I think I've been so lucky with what I've had that I don't—I’d be okay if I didn't like have something like that again. Obviously, I'm too young to like not want to have that again, but I'm also—I feel quite vulnerable, so I'll just like see how things go.
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And if I told you I'd been through what you've been through and I asked you the question: should I go and look for love again? What advice would you give to me if I'd lost my partner and I was, what, four years now away from that? What advice would you give me about love?
I think it's very personal. I think, you know, if you want to be in a relationship, that's absolutely fine. If you're not sure, that's fine too. I think there's different levels of how long it would take people. I do know that when the majority of voices were around me were sort of saying like "It's okay for you to do that again," that one of my friends who’s engaged to someone who was a widower, he said to me at the time, "I'm telling you right now, two years is not—it’s not long enough." And that felt like a relief. So obviously it's almost another two years now. I, you know, I think I believe that if love is meant for me then it will come to me. So I'm not—I'm not—I'm just calm about it.
How are you different? What are the very material or very obvious ways that you're a different person on the other side of this? What would your friends say if I said, "How is Tara different?"
Well, I think they would say that I'm a lot more like fragile and vulnerable because they're like very, very protective of me still. I know—I know what they would say because some of them have said it and I didn't really like to hear this at first, but they said, "You're going to be able to help so many people." You know, the first time someone said that I was like, "I've been a doctor, I've been a coach, I—my whole personality is about helping people. I didn't need my husband to suffer horrifically and die so that I can help people." But now I do actually feel that I can and I want to.
And what do you want to help them with? And who do you want to help? People that are grieving?
Not just people that are grieving. I think people are struggling and suffering in different ways and people really, really want to feel seen and I think that’s an important place where I would love to do something.
I think I’ve got more and more curious about the idea that I might be wrong about subjective reality and how I see things. And so I wondered if there's a clearer definition of the subjective reality that you see? Like, do you think we are these spirits that inhabit our body? And then like why? Is there a reason why I've come into this body? Is there some bigger karmic purpose as to why I live? This ultimate question of what is the meaning of life. In the worldview that you have, what is the point? Why did I need to live?
I don't know if I can answer that, but I’m just going to say what’s coming to my mind. Which is: so like you and I might never have met in our lives, right? And for some reason we did. And we had never met before I did the podcast with you last time, but people cannot stop talking about like the level of chemistry as if we'd known each other our whole lives and I've always said I felt like I was talking to my little brother. And then that episode goes on to have like the number of views that it does. I don't believe that that's random or a coincidence. I think there's a reason for that and for me, in a way, you were the worst person for me to come and tell this story to for the first time because you were the most skeptical person of all the podcast hosts that I can think of that I'm going to go on. So there's obviously some importance to that. I can't explain it. I'm not—I didn't come here with all the answers. I'm just lucky enough to be someone with credible qualifications that's had a, you know, an experience that most people don't talk about that I can open up for people.
That's what I would say that it all is. But I want to add something else that I'm feeling is relevant as well, which is: because of my friendship group and the kind of conversations that we have, I wasn't allowed by my publisher to include personal stories from my friends. I had to source stories from people I had either never met or only met once or were friends of friends. So every personal story that you read in "The Signs," which has the person's real name and is written by them and gifted to me for this book, are people that I don't know. And they're all saying the same thing. They see light disturbances when they think of their lost loved one, or they get unmistakable signs, or robins visit them. I haven't made that stuff up—there's something to it. I don't know exactly what it is. I hope I find out before I die, but maybe I'll only find out after I die. I don't know.
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