This week I am talking to Dr Joanne Coyle about her book ‘Showing Us the Way Home: The Gift of Near-Death Experiences’.
Dr Joanne Coyle (PhD) was an academic researcher until something happened to change her life. She read a book, or rather two books – Anita Moorjani’s Dying to be Me, and Dr Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven. Both telling the story of their near death experience (NDE).
As a researcher, she had interviewed thousands of patients and heard incredibly moving poignant stories about illness and resilience, life and death. Her job was to analyse and summarise these accounts, then present them to health care conferences and workshops. She also wrote numerous articles for academic journals. But she always felt these stories deserved a much wider audience, and could help many more people. Perhaps at the back of her mind was the seed – that one day she would help individuals tell their life changing stories to the world to benefit others.
When she came across Anita’s and Eben’s stories, she began to seriously investigate NDEs and other spiritually transcendent experiences (STEs) as a personal quest. She followed every lead she could on the internet and even went to America to speak with NDErs first-hand. Then something very strange happened. One day while browsing a second hand bookshop in St Andrews, Scotland, she came across an old tattered book called Twelve Scots Trials. She let the book fall open and she read about a murder trial that took place in 18th century Scotland, some twenty years after Culloden. She just knew something was terribly wrong, and the events couldn’t have happened the way they’d been recorded. Every time she thought about the people and the trial she got this knot in her solar plexus. Was there a serious miscarriage of justice? Her gut or rather her soul was telling her there was, and she had to retell the story in a very different way. So, she did – she wrote and self published ‘Deadly Love’, and to her utter amazement it became an Amazon best seller.
So after twenty-five years of writing for academics and experts, she began writing for a wider audience. She continued investigating near-death experiences from around the world. She found that you don’t have to have an NDE for it to change your life. Simply reading about them is profoundly healing, because it lessens our fear of death, allowing us to live more full authentic lives, and be our true selves. This, she believes serves an even greater purpose, which she shares in her latest book Showing Us the Way Home.
Click the link below to buy the book;