Malcolm: 0:46

Hi, this is Malcolm Stern and this is my podcast, slay your Dragons, and I'm very, very pleased to welcome this morning Bill Murther. Bill is a friend of mine from many years back and he has the most extraordinary story of survival and changing his life through adversity and it's one of the great stories. You wouldn't believe this story. You're going to believe it in a minute because he's going to tell you it but you wouldn't believe this story if you read it. There's so many sort of strange things in it. But very much a lot of the theme that we are doing with these podcasts are people who have had adversity in their lives and then made major changes. And, bill, you made a major change in your life. You were a semi-pro footballer, I think, at one time. Yeah, I was a salesman and fit and very fit.

Bill: 1:35

Yeah, yeah, and one day, but not so much now.

Malcolm: 1:37

No, I can see that you look a bit of a wreck these days, but it's. It's a surprise, but this is an extraordinary story and when I first heard the story it was almost unbelievable. But I know that this is true and I know that you have changed your life as a result of one freak incident. So would you like to tell us a bit about that? And what was the dragon you had to slay? What did you have to find in yourself to come through this and become who you are now?

Bill: 2:05

I mean the dragon. You know, start off with a dragon. The dragon was probably emotions, really, malcolm, for a lot of us British men I wasn't particularly good at expressing my emotions. I was very much kind of. You know it's all about outer achievement and so you know I had a job that was very busy. You know very much kind of 24, seven, repeat. You know more. You know it was all about accumulating more things. You know that was part of my accolade and identity and you know I wasn't in a very good place.

Bill: 2:39

You know, at the time this is going back to 1999, by the way and a time when, you know, on the outside my life seemed to look brilliant. You know great cars, new cars, big, you know, holidays every year, big bonuses, lived in a big house for my ex-wife and two children. Everything to the outside world looked perfect and yet inside, beating yourself up, not feeling good enough, and, like a lot of people, I'd use sort of substance abuse to to kind of shut down that inner critic and that kind of feeling of not enough. But what I used to do, which a lot of people do, we've all got different ways, malcolm. We have self soothing and my mind was kind of if it wasn't drink and drugs workaholic. You know, being a workaholic is a great way of shutting down those inner demons and those dragons, as we know today. But another good one was putting my through. You know, which I know a lot of people do as well, is putting yourself through a lot of physical pain. So my, my thing was either going out for a long run and really pushing myself to excess, or going out on the bike and on this one particular day or evening I I kind of really push myself for for three course of an hour in the place where I lived in Dawlish in Devon at the time, and cycling along the cycle path for anyone that knows right next to the railway line between Dawlish and Dawlish Warren, and it was a full moon.

Bill: 4:10

Some was going down and out of nowhere, on this high, 20 foot high sea wall, right next to the railway line, a freak wave came over and hit me and knocked me off my bike and for the first few seconds I kind of felt really embarrassed. I looked around and there was no one around and I kind of got back up and literally, you know, at the moment I got back up, the second wave come crashing in and caught me kind of off guard and off balance and it hit me against the wall and I kind of you know, sprawling down before I realized I'm sort of falling 20 feet down towards the rocks, and horrendous for those first few seconds, because I knew that stretch really well and I was just waiting for the crack, you know, like an egg kind of being dropped from high. And luckily I kind of managed to land in the freezing cold water and actually sort of as I resurfaced again, you know, I knew round about where the bike was, that had kind of just missed me. And as I surfaced, even though the water was freezing, I kind of punched the air in celebration, knowing that I'd had a close escape. But that was just the start of my worries. Really Within seconds the reality hit and another wave came slamming in, hit me against the algae covered kind of 20 foot high wall and before I knew it you know, another one coming in five seconds later and this continued for a few minutes to the point that I was almost being knocked out and thinking, well, I'm not going to get out of here.

Bill: 5:38

You know, the nearest walkway or the way you could get out was probably, I knew hundreds of meters away. So I knew it was kind of you know, how on earth am I going to get out of this, and very quickly in them sort of situations, as people know, when you, you know when you're kind of brushing with death, you know that you've not got much time. And so I looked out on the horizon towards the sun, where the sun was going down, saw the lovely big full moon there, and I realized that if I could swim out a certain distance, it would be a lot calmer and I've got much better chance of surviving. And even after a few minutes, malcolm, I could really feel that my body was starting to kind of adjust to the freezing, cold water. You know it was April, you know, which is March, april, one of the coldest times of the year because it's had several months of winter.

Bill: 6:28

And so I got to this point where I thought, right, I'm going to have to use all of my energy and thanks for reminding me that there was a time, one day, where I was younger and fitter, as we all were.

Bill: 6:38

But luckily I you know as probably as fit as I ever was in my life I managed somehow to swim against the tide with every bit of energy I had for the next kind of five and 10 minutes and I managed to get beyond the waves, you know, sort of 50 meters out, and it was then for the first time that I was trying to be able to kind of take stock of the situation.

Bill: 7:02

You know, I was almost semi traumatized in that first 10, 15 minutes and then it was it kind of suddenly dawned on me, you know the sun was going down and I'm not going to get out of this. And it's that first moment that you start to realize and contemplate death. No one's around, no one's walking their dog after dark. I knew that stretch really well. You know I got no chance of swimming to the nearest area to climb out and at that time even it doesn't take very long in freezing cold water before the hypothermia starts to come in and the first signs of it are your organs, because your organs are the softest tissue. So I started to feel it in my chest and my kidneys and you know my head was starting to really ache and getting a headache. And you know, in that next obviously I'm giving you time frames now, but at the time time seems to stop.

Bill: 7:56

And I just you know, unless you've been there in these kind of situations, you know we all hope that we're going to wake up, don't we in one day? And we've, you know or not wake up? You know we die in our sleep or we are the sudden death. But you know, when you're contemplating your death it moves you into a different mindset. And so I got to a period where I was doing a lot of contemplating.

Bill: 8:17

A lot of all weird kind of stuff starts to come in your mind, malcolm, and I was thinking you know I'm going to be in a very, very, very, very, very, very, very very. You know I'm never going to give my daughters away. You know someone else is going to inherit all the insurance money. They're probably never going to find my body. It's going to be washed out, and you know. And they're going to think I've taken it, taken off or something.

Bill: 8:43

I had a mental breakdown and moved to a different part of the world. Or you know there's a hundred things going through your mind Because nobody, if they ever find you, we're going to know what happened to you, and that sort of scared me. But the biggest thing is, once you kind of start to face death and start looking at it closely, which is something most of us will never do right until the end part of our lives, all kinds of emotions are stirring up from the past. We all have these moments where different emotions from the past are triggered. But it's almost like a super triggering event where all those emotions you've never reconciled, all those shadows you've never come to peace with, all seem to be coming up at once, and even 20-odd years later. It's hard to explain this.

Malcolm: 9:35

Well, it's interesting because the Greeks call it Chyros time. The Kronos time is the time of the watch, so we take an hour. We know it's an hour, but you went into a timeless zone because actually you were no longer living according to the laws of you as a human being, getting on with your life. Something was changing dramatically and at that moment you presumed you were going to die.

Bill: 9:59

Absolutely. There's a knowing. There's a knowing. There's almost like I wouldn't say I've accepted it, but you know it and that's a very kind of different thing.

Bill: 10:08

And the fear you can't even even quarter of a century later. I can't explain the fear that you get that starts to overwhelm your whole sense of body and all kinds of things are going through your mind and fast forward to you know, I'm literally going through a million different thoughts and feelings in this time and then they reached a time where I started to go. I know this. I started to go in and out of consciousness and I knew I was getting a bit scared and you know I lost a few seconds here and there, a bit like when we're kind of in the evening or you know, we're sat there and we fall asleep and having that for 10 minutes, we wake up, we know things have shifted. It kind of felt a bit like that. And the next thing I kind of was conscious of I wasn't there. I was almost in some kind of dream state.

Bill: 11:04

And I don't want to talk about having a kind of life review because it wasn't a life review, but the best way I always have explained this is that imagine the most profound, emotionally moving moments in your life, good and bad, you know, negative and positive. I seem to be reliving those particular experiences and I'll give you just one example of many. You know I got knocked down as a 11-year-old kid living in London. I ran across the road without warning and got hit by a car. Now that was a traumatic event. I just about survived. But I relived that experience in the water only on a more profound, higher level of consciousness level. So it's almost like I was living it with extra feelings that I would have been at the time as a 11-year-old.

Malcolm: 11:53

So the body carries the memories of these things and they can get triggered. I often see this when I'm running a therapy group. Someone will get ricocheted by something and then that feeling will get triggered as though it had happened yesterday.

Bill: 12:05

I mean, it's so true. It's so true that memory is alive and we just need to bring it to life again, don't we? The body does keep the score, as we know many years later. So this one particular experience, I seem to go through the whole experience again as a boy, up to the next scene, and I'm now, for whatever reason, life is showing me the experience from the woman who was driving the car that actually hit me and it was almost like I was inside her consciousness, seeing from her eyes. I could even see the hands on the wheel and I'm driving towards a version of myself and I hit myself. I hit the little boy, the 11-year-old boy, and crashed the car into the wall. And I can feel the woman's heartbeat and I can feel her emotions. She's crying hysterically in this kind of out-of-state kind of consciousness and I'm actually living our experience.

Malcolm: 13:06

So actually, you'd entered into the super conscious realm at that moment in preparation for dying. In fact, you were reviewing your life, say. Your life flashes before you. You were preparing to die, even though you didn't want to die. You saw no way through that, did you?

Bill: 13:24

No, I mean, you don't know all this. We're talking very contextually and kind of reflectively. Now, at the time You're not even sure. It's almost like a semi-dream.

Malcolm: 13:34

Yeah, and in fact that's one of the geniuses of shock system in the body is that it actually takes you out of that horrendous fear and actually takes you into a different and altered state of consciousness. Certainly, when you're preparing to die and I've heard this from lots of people who've had near-death experiences when you're preparing to die, something changes and it's almost as though you're lifted above your everyday consciousness.

Bill: 13:57

Yeah, yeah, and that's the way it was. In that I've been an out-of-body experience with a dream, like state. I'm living the experience of this woman and I'm crying hysterically, I'm feeling all the emotions in her body and she stumbles out of the car, she rips all her tires, she sort of almost stumbles across to the boy that looks like me on the floor dead, and she is wailing and everyone else is kind of coming around and literally, what was weird, I felt her emotions as if they were my own emotions. And the funny thing is, malcolm, I'd never, until that point in you know, my accident was what? 1976, you know I was an 11-year-old boy. I had the near-death in 1999. I'd never given much thought to that poor woman and what I'd put her through, whether I'd changed her life and what she'd gone through. I'd never, until that time in the water, experienced and felt what she empathically, compassionately, must have gone through. And you know, there were lots of other experiences like that which I won't go into, and anyway that kind of bit finished and then, as if that wasn't enough, you know I've gone then.

Bill: 15:09

I've gone through that anger stage you know of. I'm only 34 years old, I don't deserve to die. I'm not a bad person. You know why is life doing this to me? So I go through all the anger of dying early, or seem to be dying early, and I'm still in this kind of semi-conscience state.

Bill: 15:30

And the funny thing is, malcolm, once you go past all the regrets and the anger bit, I then seem to somehow, on the other side of it, come to some kind of acceptance, some kind of inner peace. And the weird thing is if, like the replays, the life review bit wasn't strange enough. I then started this amazing conversation in my head which seemed, I mean, it couldn't have gone on for more than two hours, because that's roughly how long I was ended up being in the water, apparently. But this conversation seemed to go on for weeks, literally. And the only thing I can sort of say about it is that this conversation and it is two way we all have an inner speak, we all have an inner voice. Call it wisdom, an insight. On the good side, you know the good hero, and then we've got the anti-hero, which is the dam, in kind of you know, constricted Well in religion they talk about the still small voice within.

Malcolm: 16:25

So actually you accessed that still small voice, or whatever your version of it was. So what happened with this voice? What was it saying to you?

Bill: 16:35

Well, it started off with the actual first few sentences I can remember just like they were yesterday, which was along the lines of I'm not a bad person. What is happening to me? You know why am I going through this? You know my 34 years aren't enough on earth. I felt like I was going to do like a lot of us now. Can we wait for certain things before we start living our lives? Don't? You know? I'm going to start, you know, next year, you know 10 years time, when I retire, that sort of thing. But I started to feel a real sad once the anger had gone. I felt a real regret of all the life I'd not lived, really.

Malcolm: 17:17

And I think for most of us, we know intellectually that we're going to die, but we are not triggered with that. You got triggered with that which set in chain, and I know there's a very amazing end to this story as well, which is extraordinary. But so let me hear a little bit about this voice. Was it a wise person that was speaking to you?

Bill: 17:38

So we kind of know the signature, tune, the tone of our own inner voice, don't we? Yeah, but this voice was still a male, but a lot calmer, the only way I could probably describe it. Imagine that I live another 100 lives and become, hopefully, hopefully, he says a lot wiser. It's kind of a part of you, but it's not of you, this voice, because it was a lot calmer, more serene, more wise, more insightful than I knew I was or my consciousness was this.

Malcolm: 18:13

whatever spoke to you was not caught up in the everyday hubbub of the world?

Bill: 18:19

Absolutely not, absolutely not. It was gentle, loving, caring, compassionate, but also wise and insightful. And anyway, I started to have a two way dialogue with this voice and started to ask my biggest question. I've always been a curious child. I did have a bit of a shift after that 11 year old boy incident being knocked down, where I felt the next day something could shift it in me and I know it was some kind of intuition I picked up because I started to sense different things in my mother and other people and so something. So that kicked the chain reaction of 11 years old to start being very curious about the world and there's a lot more than we're told. But what? I got to a point with this conversation where I was asking all questions about the future of the world. Again, it's a dream state, a semi-conscious about the purpose of emotions and where we're going and compassion, how we're linked on an energy level. It was just kind of incredible really.

Malcolm: 19:22

And all this time, though you're 2000 freezing water and presumably someone less fit than you would be dead by then.

Bill: 19:31

Absolutely. I mean, you're not meant to really survive more than about an hour in freezing cold water. You know I'm not conscious of it as well, 100%. So I'm kind of semi-conscious. I'm not at this stage, malcolm, I'm not even sure if I'm still alive, because you're in, you're in that such a dream state, you know, you're not even really sure of what's kind of, and even today or these years later, I still can't, you know, properly, kind of understand it. So you know, the conversation, you know, became the book Dying for a Change, because I had to get this stuff out of me and what is funny, bill, you wrote a book called Dying for Change based on this experience.

Bill: 20:11

Based on the experience, based on what I learned and picked up in the you know, in the water, bearing in mind Malcolm, because of being a dyslexic, a dysfractic child which wasn't even kind of identified back in the 70s, I've not read a book for about 20 years since leaving school. So you know, that's quite incredible, not a single book. And so you know, this stuff was all new to me and it was all insightful. And you know, kind of I'm trying to absorb it all because it was just so big but in a weird way my consciousness could hold it and kind of understand it.

Malcolm: 20:50

I think that's the thing. It felt like you came to peace with whatever was happening for you. Even though you were in a sort of a semi oblivious state, you were still there. It was a peacefulness. I was wondering hearing the story.

Bill: 21:02

Absolutely.

Malcolm: 21:03

Absolutely. And was this voice calling you by name? Did it sort of like? Was like a loving father or mother, or what was the voice like?

Bill: 21:11

I mean almost non-binary, almost it was definitely a male voice. The energy was a very strong mixture of feminine and kind of masculine and that, you know, very loving but at the same time very authoritative. I still can't really, you know, probably kind of understand it, but the information that I got was incredible, which I later, you know, got together with the book. So, you know, conversation went on for what seemed like weeks and then, you know, a couple of things happened again in the water. I seem to come back to more of being conscious, suddenly, of what's happening around me and I remember by now that, you know, I'm kind of looking down and the sun had almost completely disappeared and the stars were starting to come out.

Bill: 22:05

And there was one particular scene that I'll never forget and, you know, along that coastline there's a really strong red rock, you know limestone rock, and I remember looking at the top of this rock, on the edge of a cliff, and there was a sea goal there and I just was mystified, you know, when we get captured by a particular piece of beauty and light or you know anything, art, and it just absolutely captured me. There's this sea goal with the light, you know the rest of the light just kind of captured on the sea goal and then the real bright red of the rocks and I just remember watching this sea goal sort of glide down. It was almost like Johnston's sea goal and glide down and the next minute I'm actually the sea goal. So my consciousness has somehow shifted from me in the water struggling to survive to this serene. The lined in sea goal that's kind of skimming the edge of the water and it was just sort of some kind of weird dreamlike state, amazing.

Malcolm: 23:12

Well, the mystics all say but a lot of the mystics say that actually we enter into a state when we become awakened and in that moment you were awakened and you were awakened by you. It's seemingly impending death arriving very shortly. And what I'm hearing is that in that awakeness, in that awakened state, you were one with everything. And I remember a friend of mine who fasted for three years because she said I want to know God and if I can't know God I'm going to start myself to death. And then something happened and she ate an apple and she was the apple and she was everything. And it's like for three weeks she lived in that extraordinary state and then finally she came back to to real, or she came back to the our everyday consciousness. But what I'm hearing is you had such a potent experience that you were no longer Bill, you were, you started to become the cosmos, all of life.

Bill: 24:08

And unless someone's experienced that, malcolm, hopefully your friend, you know, knew about other experiences as well, but unless you've been there and experienced, it's almost beyond words, isn't it?

Malcolm: 24:21

Well, it sounds crazy, but actually what I'm hearing is that you are absolutely sane. You know I mean I say it as you could possibly be, bill anyway but but actually you know, there's no, there's no trace there of sort of a delusion or of sort of psychosis. Well it's a dancing with death, as death started to approach you.

Bill: 24:40

Yeah, yeah. So cue, the end of the conversation, the seagull event. And then the next thing, you know, like click and another scene. And I'm in a hallway which is bizarre, and I'm looking around. You know where did the seagull go? Where did the water go?

Bill: 24:57

I'm in my hallway of where we lived at the time and a big kind of Victorian house in in Dawlish, and I'm looking around and I see some people brush past me and it's my ex wife with my two children.

Bill: 25:10

And I hear the doorbell go and my ex wife goes to the front door and she's got each of my daughters, one each side, and she opens the door and so police man and the police woman stood there and they said this is my friend, yeah, and they kind of stutter a bit and then they say I'm afraid we've we've found your husband's body in Timbers just up the up the coast and I'm sorry to inform you. You know that he's dead and you know all the rest of it. I'm not going to get here. And there was that moment that I'm going through, this vision, which I'm then now presuming is a future of this is what I'm. I'm now spirit, or wherever we go afterwards, and I'm now viewing the time a few days later where they find my body on the shore or in the water. I mean, that is, that is scary.

Malcolm: 26:04

But it looked like there was no other option than that. That was the direct, the only direction that had any possibility. It's dark, the stars are out, there's no, no one walking their dogs at that time of night, and you are there in the water waiting to die. And then a big magical happened in the middle.

Bill: 26:23

Oh, just magical, you know. So I'm in the hallway and suddenly I know absolutely that I've got a choice. I can make a choice and I decide that I'm not ready for death. I've got too much unfulfilled work. You know, I'd made my life about work, or you know, the wrong kind of work, not my creative kind of other side of work, which is always going to be tomorrow and so I decided that I'm not ready for death and then, minute, literally with every fiber of my being in the open, I made the decision to stay. The whole hallway and everything the police, my daughters, you know all disappeared.

Bill: 26:58

I'm back in the water. Wush, it was like an electric shock, the cold kind of come back in again and I'm back in the water and, unlike that first few kind of minutes, I'm like what's just happened? I can't even contextualize it, I can't even explain it. And so I looked to the shoreline and there's a three, four story building and there's a light at the top of this building. So this is like 50 odd meters away, on the other side of the railway line. I look up at this building and do something I've never done up to my up to then, at 34 years old, I started praying. I didn't know what or who I was praying to. I was just praying for savior, for another chance for redemption. And you know, I could see a silhouette at the top of this sort of flat and I was praying to whoever was there that they could see me. And then I kind of looked away again and very quickly I then had a voice shouting at me and I was so scared, malcolm, to turn around in the water, to look towards the shore, you know, to see if there's a shadow there, because by now it's starting to get dark. I was too scared that it was in my mind. You know that it created this hopeful vision and noise. So it took me a few minutes. But then, when I did turn around, there was a guy waving to me from the, from the, you know the side next to the railway line, and the first thing he said which has kind of really got me angry the first one thing he said was do you want help? And so I was.

Bill: 28:31

I was so kind of incensed, you know, of everything I've gone through and how I was feeling, and so, long story short, they managed to fire somehow one of these orange boys with a rope on out to me and because of the hypothermia I couldn't grab the rope or the boy. It was, like, you know, a hot knife going through butter. So I kind of managed to somehow grab the boy. And this is where the funny thing comes in. There was another. That voice that I'm talking about said literally, you know word for word look for the noose at the end of the boy. So I kind of grabbed the boy, you know, frantically struggling around in the freezing cold water, I'm grabbing the boy and at the end there was a meter long noose which I managed to slip my arms through. And then what they managed to do by now a few more people are kind of on the, you know, on the water side and they started to all haul me in almost like a fish about several hundred meters along to where there was a break and of course by now there was there was flashing lights and an ambulance waiting and they kind of whisked me off quickly to Torbay Hospital. And even then, you know it was half an hour from Dawlish to a weave in road to Torbay on the back road, on the coastal road, and even then I knew it was touch and go because I was in and out of consciousness and I got to the sort of you know the hospital. I knew it was serious because they wanted to get a lot of you know chemicals and everything and into me to kind of bring my body temperature up again. So they managed to do that and you know I had a. They kind of knocked me out and I was gone most of the night and anyway I woke up next morning.

Bill: 30:18

One was up, I was in Torbay Hospital and it was that kind of weird feeling of, oh my God, I've lived an amazing ordeal. Who on earth is even going to believe the half of it? And I got to a point where I was trying to make sense of it and I thought this is just like for another day. You know it's too much for me to take on board. And my wife came in in the morning and you know I was talking to her about it but I could only share the very basics. I didn't mention about the conversation or anything about that. It was too big and I didn't want people to think I'm kind of mad.

Bill: 30:58

And anyway, in the afternoon the matron come over and she seemed a bit flustered and irritated and she said Mr Murther, there's a journalist downstairs for you. He wants to talk to you. And I thought it was because we were, you know, doing quite well with that football and we were in the papers every week. I thought it was to do with the football and she said, no, this journalist wants to talk to you about a guy that had spotted you. And, that course, this is the first news to me. And so I go down and talk to this journalist and there are apparently a lot of national papers, the local papers, having this big story. I knew nothing about all this. I was talking to the journalist and he, sort of in the outline, he told me that, yeah, the guy had spotted you.

Bill: 31:44

And what transpires is that and you've heard that story, this story many times the guy had been asking his friend in the apartment below for nine months that he wants to borrow a telescope to look at the stars, look at the moon. And on the very afternoon that I'd gone in the water, that evening, he had finally brought the telescope up for this guy, nathan, to borrow, and so Nathan had kind of set the telescope up. It was a full moon. He'd gone away to make a drink on the other side of the apartment come back and the telescope had dropped and he thought that's a bit strange. And he actually looked through it and there was like seagulls kind of you know what he thought was seagulls flashing around. And it turns out he took a closer look and, oh my God, there was me thrashing around in the water. So he kind of. He apparently was the guy that called the emergency services and he was the guy that was waving to me from the side and you know, the next day, because I wanted to meet Nathan, because this was just the whole thing was too big for me, so Nathan, come around at home and we kind of had a chat and then we had pictures for the media and that and it was all in the papers.

Bill: 33:02

But you know, I was still struggling to understand the enormity of this coincidence. You know serendipity, you know meaningful coincidences and it actually took me a year and a half before I could even talk to anyone about the conversation and everything Didn't even start writing about it, because a lot of people won't realize this when they're deaf. You believe that you're going to change your life the next day. It doesn't happen like that Sometimes. We all know this, that the enormity of it can be so big that you'd rather put it all in a box and just get on with your life and keep being destructive and getting worse.

Malcolm: 33:45

I think the thing is, at those moments we have the opportunity. We've flipped our lives 180 degrees, or our lives have flipped 180 degrees and you've got the opportunity to go. What am I going to do with this one wild and precious life? How am I going to live? And I know that you made enormous changes. You went from being a sort of guy who was hungry for money and experiences in life and all of this sort of stuff to someone who's actually using your skills now to assist people who struggle, and you've become a very successful life coach and also you've written a number of books. So there's something that's something got hatched in you from that experience. And you're right, it doesn't happen overnight. It's a bit like we end a relationship. We think we've ended a relationship, but it takes ages for it to actually unpick itself. And what I can see is that you have unpicked yourself over the years and you've become something else, someone else, but actually who you are now, you wouldn't choose to go back to who you were then, would you no?

Bill: 34:49

no, and you know there is. I believe now we've all got a different concept to this. I believe that we all, when we go through an ear death, that is a post traumatic stress event and what we forget is that, because it's hard to land the motions around that experience, that extraordinary traumatic event, we literally, if we do the work, we go through a dark night of the soul, don't we? And what we have to do is realize that one follows the other. So you're going through the dark night of the soul when you're doing the work and if you do the work, you're hopefully going towards post traumatic growth. And I believe you know I've kind of thought about this a lot.

Bill: 35:34

I've talked to other near death experiences. Well, evelyn Valarino, kenneth Ringer, wrote a book called Lessons from the Light. You know, I kind of connected with Evelyn a few years after my accident. They've studied 30,000 near death experiences, so they know what they're doing and actually there's a similar format, a similar growth spur, similar post traumatic growth if you do the work. And I truly believe now that you know, on a mini near death scale the whole planet has now just gone through the last three and a half years a mini near death experience and I think we're collectively, consciously going through our own dark night of the soul. Whatever that looks like to everyone, before we can get to the post traumatic growth, it's funny.

Malcolm: 36:22

I remember talking to Sir George Trevelyan, who was known as the grandfather of the New Age up in the 60s, and he said he said that it has to get right to the edge before we change. A little bit like the Alcoholics Anonymous map. You've got to go down to the bottom before you start to find your way out. And I think what you're looking at is your individual scenario and then you're looking at the global scenario. Actually, we are getting closer to the point where we can't continue the way we were. So you, and in a microcosm couldn't continue the way you were. You could have done, but life wasn't going to let you do that, and what you're seeing is actually acting out in the world as well.

Bill: 37:03

Now yeah, and I think for me, where I was at that moment in 99, I was doing a lot of acting out, I wasn't expressing my creativity and true, authentic self, I wasn't being vulnerable it was all that ego, it was all that outer, it was all about materialism. I mean, we could be writing the script for the last few years, couldn't we? Before we hit the pandemic. You know, the pandemic has upended people's beliefs and conceptions and ideas about who they are and what they want to do with their life.

Malcolm: 37:34

Yeah, yeah, but you are now living a life that you are proud of.

Bill: 37:40

Yeah, yeah, it's an authentic life. You know, don't get me wrong.

Malcolm: 37:43

I know it's an authentic life, and so this is what looks like adversity. This is very much the theme of what we're doing with the podcast. We go through what looks like adversity. We go through adversity. I went through the death of my daughter to suicide. You go through adversity going. Why am I being punished by this nasty God who's sort of like raining down sort of hell on me? But actually we are being refined and educated by our experiences and our suffering and, interestingly, the word compassion means with suffering. If we're to have compassion, we have to go to the place of suffering with others and because you've suffered and you went through a hell of a doozy of a story, you are actually more available for other people suffering now.

Bill: 38:28

I mean, as we get older, we kind of understand that actually pain and suffering is the root out of this, don't we? We understand, if we're looking for what that pain and suffering is giving us in the moment. If we could take a more holistic level, a more futuristic level, we would understand that actually, usually a bit, like I always say emotions and messengers. Malcolm, they've got big lessons for us. That's why emotions are showing up. I think these big events of pain and suffering are helping us almost with an invisible cloak, because they're not looking like growth and personal development up close, are they? To begin with, we're just thinking that it's suffering trauma.

Malcolm: 39:12

When you get your life upended in the way that you've described, in the way that I've described, you can't go back. You can go back, but it's almost like something won't let, you, won't leave you in peace, and I remember James Hillman, the psychotherapist, wrote about inside everyone of us as a diamond D-A-E-M-O-N. Not a demon, but it's like a spirit that's inside us and it will drive us nuts until we do what it is we were born to do. And so I'm hearing that you've got one hell of a powerful lesson and that you have actually turned your life 180 degrees into something you are now proud of. And you're now not looking to look after number one, you're looking to be a part of the healing of the world. That sounds a bit over the top, but I think that's. We all play our small parts in that as well.

Bill: 39:56

And what's really strange, the last few years especially since March 2020, you know the pandemic. We've done our coaching now for a long time, me and Jane and I've noticed this last few years that more and more people are feeling that they're almost wearing the wrong coat in their life, the wrong size shoes, and that they need to be doing something that brings out their creativity, ingenuity, imagination. You know anything that you know. The job that they're doing is no longer fulfilling them, giving them passion, purpose and meaning, and this is always the case, and it's always been the case for therapy and it's always been the case for coaching, but something seems to have happened that's put it into fast gear the last few years.

Malcolm: 40:41

Well, I think we are going through a major shift in consciousness on our planet and we need to go through a major shift in consciousness, and will we survive as a species? Well, I think we are being woken up, and I'm not too about the woke culture, I'm just talking about that actually coming to terms with who we really are, not the persona that we've established in the world.

Bill: 41:02

Yeah, yeah, cool, that's an amazing story.

Malcolm: 41:05

So if you were able to sort of quantify what was the dragon you had to slay in order to move forward from this experience.

Bill: 41:14

Right. It's never kind of simple, but if I had to put a headline show reel on it, the dragon is trying to live up. The dragon I had to slay was the belief that you had to live a certain way, which society and culture say, you know, in the matrix we should be living that materialistic outer accolade. You know, what you've got is kind of a sense of your identity. You know, the dragon for me was not getting in touch with your real inner self, your feelings getting connected to your emotions in the body, showing your vulnerability being fabulously flawed. You know, all those good things that we've kind of, those have been waking. We're all waking up, we just don't realise it. But I think what is a realisation that is waking up in all of us is that the old story, that patriarch, top down, materialistic chase, the money we've all bought into, a story that actually is not true and it doesn't sustain until it's done.

Malcolm: 42:19

Very good. Well, that's lovely. Bill, thank you so much for coming along today and doing this with me. We talked about your story quite some time ago and I was blown away by it, and I'm blown away again today, hearing the extraordinary Jung said everything is synchronicity. That guy gave me a telescope that day. It, pointing down, was pointing upwards. There was a whole bunch of stuff that came together in order to give you a very profound experience, but then to actually save you and to pull you through into a different place.

Bill: 42:51

Lovely. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Malcolm: 42:54

Great. Well, I look forward to further conversations with you.

Bill: 42:58

Thank you, bill. Thank you, malcolm, take care.