By Lisa Cedrone

It was a busy afternoon, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Lost in thought, sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep, I suddenly felt “The Presence” hovering over my shoulder. It communicated telepathically: “Look up, but don’t panic.”

At that moment my whole world transitioned into slow motion. I saw the speedometer jump to 50 and then almost 60 mph as we crossed several lanes of traffic, ran up onto the grass median—and headed directly into the path of oncoming traffic at a major intersection.

Jess was having a grand mal seizure! Convulsions, his foot smashing down on the gas pedal, cars veering everywhere, and the blur of restaurants and stores flashing by in my peripheral vision.

Somehow “The Presence” kept me focused. I knew who he was. I had faith in him, and his instructions were clear in my mind: Hold Jess in the driver’s seat with your left arm as you use your left hand to steer. Lean over and use your right hand to shift into neutral. Pull the wheel to the right and aim for the tree between the two buildings; don’t worry you won’t hit it...Prepare for impact; the Jeep is going to flip end over end.

Less than a minute later—suspended from the seatbelt, the Jeep now on its side with the two upturned wheels spinning—I was surprisingly calm. The driver’s side was flush on the ground, Jess was still there, and he appeared uninjured. How was this possible? The top was off, and he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. How did I drive back over the median and then navigate through four lanes of traffic without hitting any other cars? How did I manage to crash the Jeep into the only patch of grass in miles of suburban strip mall sprawl?

“The Presence” was still there, but my questions went unanswered. Instead, He gave me a deep impression—a knowing—that I was ready to move into the next phase of my life journey. Then, suddenly, as if a protective bubble had popped, I was overwhelmed by the sound of approaching sirens, people screaming, and the rush of nearby traffic. It was all over: the accident, my long-awaited second encounter with “The Presence,” and my season of personal apocalypse.

Our Introduction

I first met “The Presence” five years before this accident—at an even more precarious juncture in my life—during a near death experience (NDE) that proved to be my dark night of the soul. I was getting ready to attend an important business meeting in St. Louis followed by a conference in Chicago. At the time, I was depressed, apathetic, disillusioned with life, and drinking a lot to console my emotional pain. I had it all—the big job in D.C., the beautiful, expensive house inside the beltway, the wardrobe, the BMW, the successful soon-to-be-husband. But at the same time, I was completely empty inside. A black hole.

I was full of anxiety and unable to sleep the Sunday night before this trip, which I am sure had nothing to do with the whole bottle of bourbon I drank at a Redskins (Yes, not the Commanders) football game that day or the huge fight I had with my fiancée when we got home, which culminated with me wasting bourbon by throwing a drink in his face. So I marched upstairs and took an entire jumbo bottle of over-the-counter sleep medicine with the attitude, “Sleep or die—either option is just fine with me.” But I never did fall asleep that night, and I made the almost-fatal decision to board a plane the next day.

My body started shutting down about 12 hours into the trip. When I finally reached my hotel room in St. Louis, exhausted and sick, “The Presence” showed up to help me through it, along with a whole cast of other nonphysical characters. It’s really hard to explain all of this in linear terms because what I experienced was much more multidimensional than our collective waking world—but, at the same time, it was so much more real than what I had for dinner last night—even to this day.

I had an incredible encounter with what I would now call an angel, and I received a huge download of information and “knowingness” that was way beyond my pay grade at the time—but it wasn’t all fairies and unicorns. It was the good, the bad, and the really, really ugly all rolled up together.

I like to call this part of my story “Hotel Hell,” and it was like a remake of Stephen King’s movie IT, where the creepy clown manifests as the characters’ fears.

During the process of the near-death experience, which spanned from Monday morning to Wednesday morning, something truly evil connected with me, manifested my worst fears, and opened the door to let me bleed into my own personal Hell. That evil had a name, and I’ll never forget it: Lucifer. It had many forms and many helpers that were like wolves circling a dying animal on a cold night in the forest.

I bring this up because most of the NDE accounts you read about today are all beautiful stories of floating around and feeling peaceful or tales of loved ones waiting in the mist “on the other side” at the end of a long light-filled tunnel. Not so in my case.

I truly sensed that if I were to check out by suicide in that state of despair and fear, I would have landed in a very unpleasant afterlife world based on my emotions, my alcoholism, and the negative energy I had accumulated during years and years of drinking and hanging out with sick people in unhealthy places.

I somehow came to understand that the energetic baggage I was carrying was going to weigh me down into the depths of a Hell that I brought upon myself, and that it would not be easily transcended after I dropped my body. It wasn’t at all about judgement; it was energetic Karma, and, unlike the material stuff, I CAN and DO take it with me.

But I survived in the end, and some truly incredible miracles happened over the course of those 48 hours. It was also humiliating on a practical level because people I worked with actually saw me in that state or heard about it through the grapevine, even though I held it together fairly well on the first day of the trip and during the flight from St. Louis to Chicago later that same afternoon. It was like somebody had unzipped reality and I saw what was behind the curtain in a weird Wizard of Oz kind of way.

On that first night in St. Louis, I was kept awake by nonphysical guardian angels—or guides or whatever you want call them (some even looked life fairies or Smurfs) so my body would not shut down and die. I also received an incredible “energy” healing from what I can only describe as a huge yellow angel with a ruby scepter (hello colors of Alchemy). The energy just ran through my body like a massive current down my spine. Then I got a quantum physics 101 lesson. I was told that “everything is energy” vibrating at different levels, which I now know is why we cannot see, feel or interact with 99.9 percent of what’s around us and interpenetrating us.

When I reached Chicago on day two of the trip and checked into the next hotel, I couldn’t take it anymore—I was on sensory overload—and I started drinking again. It was just too much to comprehend, and I wanted to kill myself again. I went to the store and bought a huge bottle of wine and then proceeded to clear out the minibar when that was gone. As my body started shutting down a second time, “The Presence” appeared and urged me to get dressed and go outside and run around the building to stay alive. It was the middle of the night at the four-star Renaissance in downtown Chicago, but I was compelled by some guiding “force” to do it anyway, and I almost got kicked out of the hotel. At one point, I shit you not, a police officer was sent to my room to tell me if I didn’t stay in there I would be escorted from the premises.

It was awful, and I just gave up.

Then I did die and leave my body, but “The Presence” was waiting for me, and he gave me a choice to “come back.” If I didn’t finish this life, he said, I would come back and “do it again”—but it wasn’t like a punishment. I had a goal I set out to accomplish, and I knew I absolutely didn’t want to rerun this story again in another life, so I came back. I was actually told that I was here on Earth to learn how to love. I didn’t understand it at the time. It seemed so simple, and, after all, I was getting married again in a month and I was in love with my fiancée Doug…

How wrong I was! As many of us come to understand, especially in recovery, love is an active state of consciousness—not an emotion—and I needed to get there.

Out of my body during the NDE, I experienced the energy of true unconditional love, and I can’t even explain how expansive and incredible it was. I was safe and wrapped in the most amazing cocoon. No fear, no judgement, only gratitude, wonder and awe.

Now it gets really weird: After I decided to “come back,” the Apostle Paul showed up for a chat. I swear, I didn’t even know who he was at the time other than being some old guy mentioned in the Bible, a book I had never actually read. Oddly, I remember thinking about the phrase, “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,” which never made any sense to me. And I had no clue why that popped into my mind.

I told Paul I was so upset with hypocrisy and religion. How could one group claim that it was right and everyone else in the whole world was wrong and going to rot in Hell? Why do we have religious wars and kill people over beliefs?

Paul actually told me we have to reach God in our own way, and there are many ways. The important thing is to focus inward to “keep what’s in your heart pure.” It was like another big download from the Cosmic Internet, and I somehow understood that we are all here learning. As we say in 12-Step recovery: It’s progress not perfection. Or take what works and leave the rest behind. Acceptance is the answer to all my problems…

So I went from believing in nothing to understanding there are universal truths weaving through everything.

I know that I had a direct experience of what Carl Jung called archetypes, the energy bodies that pervade through our collective unconscious and speak to us in symbols and motifs. It’s all out there in the quantum field behind our reality—the past, present and future—and wisdom comes to us in ways that we will comprehend it in a specific time, at a specific place, in a precious human life. I got a glimpse of how energies dance through different levels of existence, communicate information to us, and become solid matter. I understood that keeping my heart “pure” involved acceptance, forgiveness, non-judgement and releasing fear.

Overall, this was some pretty heavy stuff for someone half dead in a hotel room who thought religion was all bullshit for 35 years. And, I have to be honest, it took me a lot of reading up on Paul later to understand the impact of what he shared with the world.

I was complete agnostic and had been that way since my earliest memories in childhood. I grew up as an only adopted child of Catholic parents who were not practicing. However, they did send me to some CCD classes (which were like Sunday school on Saturday morning, which sucked because I wanted to watch cartoons). I would sit there and just say to myself: “This is a crock of shit.” I believe it was my first expression of “contempt prior to investigation.”

And it only got worse from there…I have no idea why I felt that way. I JUST DID. I remember reading social studies books in middle school and being appalled by the way Native American spiritual practices and Eastern beliefs on reincarnation were characterized as primitive nonsense. I would say to myself, but that’s more true than this fear-based crap that was battered into us by nuns on Saturday mornings when I should be home watching Scooby Do.

By the time I was in my early 20s, I had deep-seated contempt for religion of any kind. And I moved smack into the heart of the Bible Belt—Columbia, SC—after growing up in South Jersey and going to college in Philadelphia. I was appalled by the fact that there were actually dry counties in the state of South Carolina and no liquor sales on Sundays in Columbia! What’s an alcoholic to do on the day of rest?

I sensed hypocrisy everywhere behind that Southern politeness, for I grew up in New Jersey, where everyone cursed like a sailor and talked like a truck driver. I once got so pissed at a Jehovah’s Witness at work who left a pamphlet on my chair that I later told her, “I was born on Christmas because they had to do something to counteract Jesus.” It wasn’t my finest moment and, yes, I actually was born on Christmas.

But I digress. Let’s go back to Hotel Hell in Chicago and that fateful business trip in October, 2002. Finally—Wednesday morning around 10:30 am—a full two days after leaving my house, I was instructed telepathically by “The Presence” to leave my hotel room—where I was almost comatose—find the front desk, and ask for help. I kept walking out of my room toward the elevator, and then turning around in fear and running back to the room. I can only imagine what the housekeepers on my floor thought.

And this was the first day of a huge advertiser conference my own company was hosting. We published 30 magazines, and I was one of the chief editors. I was so afraid of coworkers or clients seeing me that I just couldn’t leave the room. I was a mess, wearing the same clothes I ran around in outside the hotel during the middle of the night. It was also misting rain at 3 a.m., and my hairspray-filled hair now looked like a petrified rat’s nest.

In the end, my luck was even worse than I could have imagined. I was horrified and humiliated when I finally made it into the elevator because when the doors opened on the way down at another floor, there stood the president of my division. He looked at me like I had three heads after seeing the state I was in, and then followed me to the lobby and had the front desk call an ambulance.

After 12 hours in the ER at Northwestern Hospital, I was admitted to the Stone Psychiatric Institute, the first of many trips “to the flight deck” over the five years to come. I can assure you, a hospital is not the best place to end up when your psychic bandwidth is blown way outside of the human bell curve. It was like being stuck in a torture chamber of fear, voices and trapped soul fragments of people who died there. I remember getting the visual of moths bombarding a flame.

Maybe you think I’m crazy. Everybody else did—including the psychiatrists and doctors at the hospital, who couldn’t seem to explain why I wasn’t dead or didn’t have liver failure after taking a massive overdose of sleeping medicine with acetaminophen. My divine energy healing explanation didn’t fly with them, but initially I didn’t care what they thought because the experience was just so incredibly profound.

The universe had opened up wide to show me many of its secrets! Then society quickly slammed the door shut in my face.

In the months that followed my NDE people were not open to my experience, and, as time marched on, I couldn’t reconcile my new perspectives with my old world. My life began to fall apart. I left my marriage. I lost my 15-year-old dog and my 18-year-old cat. I suffered from terrible depression. I went through a string of psychiatrists who overmedicated me. I took a “mandatory” leave of absence from my job, and I spiraled out of control. Finally, I moved to Florida for a yearlong sabbatical, and, as that time drew to a close, I found myself on that highway in the jeep facing death once again.

This time, however, when “The Presence” stepped in to guide my fate, I knew that the door to my Higher Guidance and the nonphysical universe and would remain open—and I was going to walk straight through it.

My Confirmation

When our belief system is shattered, we tend to doubt our direct experience with Higher Guidance, especially when it cannot be accepted by our friends, family and peers or easily explained by mainstream science. At times like this we must remember that every apocalypse ends with rebirth, and that our traumas and challenges serve as catalysts for spiritual growth.

I truly suffered through those five long years between the NDE and the jeep accident, always looking for confirmation from “The Presence,” sometimes praying for more insight about the encounter in Chicago and its legitimacy, and other times doubting myself and feeling devastated by loss. In the end, the accident (as horrible as it was) turned out to be a true blessing—a crash course in Higher Guidance that renewed my faith.

So who or what is “The Presence?” A guide? An angel? An aspect of my Higher Self? I once had the opportunity to pose this question to THEO, a group of angelic mentors channeled by Shelia Gillette, and the consensus was: “All of the above.” I was disappointed by this answer at first, but over time it slowly started to make sense.

Our Higher Guidance is co-created through our ability to have faith in its existence. How we label and perceive it is a personal exercise in shaping and expanding our own reality.

Lisa Cedrone currently serves as the editor of Transformation Coaching Magazine and was the executive director of the C. G. Jung Society of Sarasota from 2016 until 2022. She is a mentor and teacher with a passion for sharing the experience, strength and hope from her own life-changing near-death experience and recovery journey. Lisa also spent 15 years as an editor and editor-in-chief for two of the largest business-to-business publishers in the United States. Her universal worldview changed following a profound near-death experience in 2002, during which she was given the opportunity to come back to our world and finish her learning journey in this life.