“How are you doing?” a friend said to Lidia at a party. “I feel really strange,” Lidia responded. She actually felt well and wondered where the words had come from. “Something huge is going to happen,” she continued, “and I’m completely open to it. I’m agreeing to it.”

Two days later, after a medical misadventure, Lidia’s blood pressure waned until she was unable to move or open her eyes. Still awake, she heard doctors discuss her grim prognosis, saying she wouldn’t survive a transfer to a larger hospital. Still, she was perfectly calm.

Lidia felt the center of her soul being pulled upward, her limbs trailing behind, like a feather drawn through the air as the edges tilt backward in the wind. That’s when she realized she’d left her body.

She knew she wasn’t alone. Someone witnessing her experience communicated that hers was “a life well lived.” In an instant, she saw eternities of her existence, before and beyond earth, time, and space. She felt both humbled and honored to see the evolution of her soul.

Lidia accelerated away from earth toward an increasingly bright light. “I’d never felt such unconditional love and forgiveness,” she later recalled. She realized how hard being human had been. “It was like grinding a diamond,” she said. She understood the infinite array of human emotion—love, hate, discouragement, euphoria, everything, the collective human experience—is the energy that drives the universe.

“What do you want?” a voice asked. “Thy will be done,” she said, secretly hoping to stay. “What do you want?” the voice said again. This time Lidia’s soul understood the words differently. She knew she would return to earth and her life was up to her. Her choices were paramount and sovereign.

Lidia saw things come into existence, even as she thought them, creating instantaneously and solely by the power of her intention. From that perspective, she understood the frustration of the physical realm where souls must slowly push physical matter through cumbersome processes over time in order to create.

She saw in all directions simultaneously. When she focused her attention on earth, she saw innumerable tiny lights grow into brilliant orbs and ascend. She understood they were souls returning home.

“Is there a God,” she asked. “I Am,” came the immediate response. She understood the simplicity of life. Instantly, she knew our job here is simply to experience, that just being is enough, and that religions are manmade complications. As infinite understanding flowed, Lidia heard her deceased mother say, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

Days later, from her hospital bed, Lidia heard voices in the hallway. One complained of being called into work on her day off. Even as the nurse complained, her Polish accent took Lidia from a tiny hospital in New Jersey to her childhood home in Poland. When the nurse entered the room and commenced the discharge process, she said, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“Did you see her nametag?” Lidia’s daughter said after the nurse left. They’d both seen it. The nurse’s uncommon Polish surname was Lidia’s mother’s maiden name.

Just 18 months after her transformative experience, Lidia shared it with me. Now she’s given me permission to share it with you. “It was a blessing,” she now says of the medical disaster. “It was meant to happen.”

Our choices are ours. Life is about being. And we all agreed to it.