On the beautiful Niagara Falls evening of November 8, 2003, Dr. Yvonne Kason slipped on a piece of black ice and hit her head on the hard rock of the walkway. A flash of excruciating head pain quickly dissolved as she died. Her consciousness rose from her body and entered non-physical realms where she met her spiritual gurus and reviewed all her past lives.The tale of that Near Death Experience (NDE) would be riveting on its own. However, in Dr. Kason’s book, Soul Lessons from the Light, that story comes late in the book because it is the fifth NDE of her remarkable life.
Yvonne Kason was born and raised in Canada. Though her childhood included mystical experiences, she pursued a career as a medical doctor and planned to have a standard Family Practice when she graduated from medical school in 1977. Those plans were dramatically altered in 1979 when she survived a small plane crash on a medevac flight over the frozen wilds of northern Ontario. She had to escape the sinking plane and swim through frigid water in heavy clothing to reach a small sacred island, far from civilization. In that harrowing escapade, her consciousness slipped from her swimming body and watched the drama unfold, even as she also visited heavenly realms. That Near Death Experience eventually became the material for her book, A Farther Shore, published in 1994, and put her in the national limelight. Dr. Kason expanded her medical practice to counseling for people who struggled with Near Death or other Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STE’s), a phrase she coined that has been adopted into the common vernacular. She became a well-known speaker on talk shows, media interviews, and various conferences around the world.
While maintaining a high functioning professional life, Dr. Kason also developed a deeply devoted spiritual life through intense meditation practices and contemplative retreats. She experienced kundalini awakenings, visions, spiritual downloads, past life recall and pretty much all the clairs at one time or another. Thus, Soul Lessons from the Light is so much more than a spiritual memoir. It defines and explains a wide variety of mystical experiences. Chapter 10 lays out the abc’s of psychic/intuitive experience from “abstract intuition” to “UFO encounters.” Even though I’ve been studying mystical matters for decades, I had an ah-ha moment when I read her definition of a Kundalini Awakening and realized that was the name for something I experienced way back in 1983.
Because Dr. Kason has spent so many years helping people work through their life-changing spiritual experiences, she offers a perspective of professional guidance, even as she shares her very personal revelations.
Today, Dr. Kason is truly a walking miracle. For that 2003 fall on black ice caused a severe traumatic brain injury that left her disabled for thirteen years. The life she had carefully built, as a doctor, lecturer, author, and counselor completely disappeared. She struggled to perform basic physical and mental functions. Her income and ability to take care of her son became precarious. What she missed most was the ability to meditate and reach the blissful mental states she had known. Determination took her a long way toward recovery, but it was an eruption of liquid light in the center of her brain in 2016 during a meditation that healed her injury and allowed her to resume a high-powered life.
In 2020, she and Robert Bare, another NDE experiencer, were intuitively guided to co-found Spiritual Awakenings International (SAI), an organization dedicated to building a world-wide community of people who’ve had Spiritually Transformative Experiences. The SAI YouTube channel holds a growing library of fascinating people sharing their STE’s for the world to hear, often after decades of keeping their experiences a secret from family and friends for fear of being ridiculed or considered delusional. SAI’s third annual multi-speaker on-line conference is coming up on June 10-11, free to all (donations requested).
Soul Lessons from the Light opens the realms of heaven and earth for the spiritual seeker. As Dr. Kason says in her closing chapter:
Due to my personal experiences of multiple STE’s and miracles in my life, I know there is always hope for a better tomorrow. We must never lose hope. If we turn to the Higher Power in our hearts, the Divine hand might unexpectedly intervene, and invisibly reach out to offer assistance, healing, or guidance in our time of need.
Listen to Dr. Kason introduce her book and share the experience of her 2003 NDE at the Spiritual Awakenings International channel:
Schwartz also assembled a four-person team of mediums and trance-channels to access multidimensional information. Deborah DeBari, Staci Wells, Corbie Mitleid, and Glenna Dietrich each offer a unique vantage with their psychic gifts. Staci Wells stands out with her ability to relay the details of pre-life planning sessions, where incarnating souls meet in an other worldly room with their guides and prospective key people who will take on significant roles in their lives—family, mates, lovers, and even enemies.
When I read the first book, Your Soul’s Plan, I thought it a bit too neat. Everyone in that book managed to overcome their big life challenge and come to a higher consciousness and sense of peace. Looking around at some people I’ve observed in real life, it’s not always so triumphant. We all know people who sank into the depths of addiction or died in sad bitterness. Your Soul’s Gift is more sophisticated. Not every relationship is HEA. Some people plan challenges that don’t go well. Case in point is the woman who chose an abusive husband thinking she could bring out the best in him, but it didn’t happen. Her guides, and even the man himself, expressed doubts about the outcome of the relationship in the pre-life planning session, but she insisted she wanted to go with the scenario. She learned her lesson, but it wasn’t the one she had hoped for.
Lois Wetzel’s fascinating book,
Supernal Living with Dana Taylor 