Anastasia Wesselink Moellering's NDE: Floating Into the Void

The question sounds logical until you consider what it means. Anastasia describes: "I'm not in my body but I am this other part of myself that I'm completely aware that I identify with and I'm up there saying why am I up here, meaning I didn't identify with the body below at all. What I identified with, who I really was and am, was this part of me that was in the ceiling looking down at my physical body."

All the anxiety she'd felt moments before, the discomfort of the rising and falling, vanished. She could have cared less about the body in the chair. She knew it was hers. She could identify it as a physical body. But she had no connection to it whatsoever.

Then came the second question: Am I dead?

With those two thoughts combined, she flipped upside down. She was now staring inches from the ceiling tiles. And here's where the experience becomes strange in a way that only near-death experiencers will recognize. She was captivated by the ceiling: "I had this just this awe about the dust and the cracks and the ceiling tiles. They were miraculous. They were beautiful. They were just something that I felt like I could have sat and stared at for hours. It was like a little kid in Disneyland. You wouldn't think something so mundane would be something so beautiful but reflecting back on it, the reason it was so beautiful was because I was looking at it through the eyes of my soul."

Ceiling tiles. Dust. Cracks. Miraculous.

Then she closed her eyes, or an aperture came down, and she was gone from the dentist's office entirely.

The Void That Felt Like Home

When Anastasia opened her eyes, she was somewhere else. She describes it as "this buttery warm rich cozy blissful complete place that paradoxically was also dark in what I call the void."

The void. Absolute darkness. No points of light. Nothing she could distinguish. But it wasn't scary. It wasn't uncomfortable. It was bliss: "It was like being home. It was like this awareness and this knowing that I'm connected to this Oneness, this bliss, this completeness, and I'm as much a part of it as it is a part of me and there is no separating it."

She calls it the Oneness because it was clear to her that this place represented every single soul that had ever existed and will ever exist. And in this place, all experiences of every soul were absolutely accessible. Not just accessible in theory. Accessible in the way your own memories are accessible, except infinitely more vast and immediate.

She tries to explain the scale: "Imagine every single experience that every single soul on planet Earth has ever had and will ever have. So right now we have eight billion people on this planet but there's been people before us and there will be people after us. Imagine all of those experiences, all those collective experiences, decades of experiences of all of those souls, and imagine all of them were to reside on one grain of sand. And then imagine all of the grains of sand on just this planet alone and all those other grains of sand represent all the experiences that the soul has outside of their experience here on Earth. That just begins to scrape the surface of how vast this place of Oneness and completeness was."

One grain of sand for all of human history. All the other grains for everything else.

She was expanding into it. Becoming part of it. All of those experiences were becoming part of her, and she was becoming part of them. And because there's no time there, no past or present, there just was. All of those experiences were available, completely and totally, in that single eternal moment.

Love Beyond Words

The love she felt defies description: "Even the most beautiful experiences that we have here in our physical bodies, the birth of a child, you know, falling in love, these are incredibly loving experiences. Even that pales in comparison to the completeness of the unconditional love that you experience on the other side."

Pales in comparison. The birth of a child. Falling in love. These are the peak experiences of human life, and they're a shadow of what she felt in the void.

There was no thought process when she experienced it. It became part of her. It became a knowing. Not information. Not belief. Knowing.

What's striking is what she couldn't do in that place. She couldn't form questions: "I couldn't form a 'why does this happen in life or why does that happen' because that part of you that's connected knows the answers there and all you have to do is bring it into your awareness."

She could only be curious. She found herself expanding into the completeness, becoming part of it more and more, and as she became curious about something and brought it back, she wanted to know more. The infinite knowing wasn't something she could bring back into physical life. There were aspects she could hold onto, but other pieces would take her entire life to process and understand.

She was in this place of absolute beauty and love and connection. She didn't have any desire to come back. There was no awareness of her physical life while she was there.

And then, without warning, she was snapped back.

The Return

She opened her eyes, disoriented. All she remembers is "this desire to hold on to this infinite connection, this love, because it felt like sand through my hands just slipping away and no matter how much I was grappling to hold on to it and to go back it was like the veil, the aperture, was closing."

Sand through her hands. The more she grasped, the more it slipped away.

And this: "There is not a single part of me that will ever fear death again because it is the most beautiful miraculous love filled homecoming."

Her dentist was over top of her, very concerned. She doesn't know if she was gone for a few seconds or several minutes. On the other side, you can live what feels like an entire lifetime, and the time that's passed in the physical could be ten seconds.

Who She Was Before

To understand what this experience meant to Anastasia, you need to know where she came from. She grew up in very rural Michigan in absolute poverty, in a family that was toxic and abusive. She describes it: "Imagine that you get off your school bus knowing that you may not have a meal that night. Depending on the day or the month you may not have electricity, you may not have a telephone. We didn't have neighbors and community like urban areas so there really wasn't anybody that I could reach out to and being an only child in that environment with very few resources around me I was really left to defend for myself."

She married early, had two children, moved to Chicago, and climbed the corporate ladder all the way to vice president. She wanted to make sure she could provide for herself and her children. Climbing the corporate ladder is what we're told makes us successful, so that was her focus.

She was a soccer mom, soccer coach, PTA. She wanted to be everything for her children that she didn't have. She focused every ounce of her energy on giving them the life they deserved.

She was very, very busy. Her career was thriving. Her kids were involved in a lot of activities. She was go, go, go. And the things that pop up in life are the most mundane: the doctors, the dentists, the things we have to take care of. The things we maybe ignore for a little too long.

That happened to her. And it changed the course of her life.

December 2019

In December 2019, she went in for a really unusual and invasive dental procedure. It was a multi-step procedure that was going to take several hours. The dentist got her situated in the chair and put a mask over her face to give her some gas to relax her body, to put her in what she calls a state of twilight. That's where you're not completely unconscious but you're not fully aware. You're in this in-between place which makes a procedure as invasive as the one she was having more comfortable and bearable.

While she was being prepped, the dentist had his back turned to her, getting whatever he was doing prepared. She started to have this very unusual sensation. She began to experience this feeling of coming up out of her body when she was breathing and then falling right back into it. The next breath she would rise back up again and fall back into her body. Each time it happened, it felt like she was rising up higher and higher and falling back in just abruptly.

Having never had a procedure like this before, she wasn't sure if this was normal. Should she say something?

She took one more breath and her entire body just rose up and it felt like she was floating two or three feet above her body. She thought to herself: I should probably say something.

And with that, she was no longer in her body.

What the Experience Revealed

Anastasia has spent five years processing what happened to her. She's become a voracious consumer of all near-death stories. She finds them fascinating. The commonalities between them are really apparent. There are plenty of people out there who have researched them, doctors who have written books about them. And yet despite the commonalities that exist across all these NDEs, there are still pieces of every story that are different, elements of one person's experience that don't align exactly with somebody else's.

She's often asked how her experience can be different than another NDEer's experience. She likes to compare it to physical life: "Your physical life is going to be different than somebody else's physical life or somebody else. No two people have the exact same experiences as humans so why would we all have the exact same experience on the other side? Our experiences are going to be unique to us but just like there's a commonality of human experience, you know we all are born, we go through these trials and tribulations, these joys, we feel this you know pull towards something that's greater than ourselves, there's that common element on the other side of who we really are as well and that is what unifies us together, the what I would call that Oneness that I was connected to that we all share."

Yet we don't just merge into this infinite void where we don't have any individual point of consciousness. We have this ability to have our own point of awareness but yet also have this greater connection to everything.

One of the things she's often asked is: Did she experience God?

The challenge with that, she says, is that God can be a term that we personify. It can be this image that we create of something that we relate to in physical life. She would define God after her experience very differently. She wouldn't define it as something we can personify. She would actually describe it more as a verb rather than a noun: "It is this essence, this love in action, this movement and it's not something that is static. It's not a person, a place or a thing. It is something that represents motion and love and the element of completeness which just isn't a static thing."

God as a verb. Love in motion. Completeness that moves.

The Aftermath

Following the experience, she was on a search for what happened to her. Many might consider it an out-of-body experience or something drug-induced. She'd had those experiences before and they were incredibly different than anything she experienced on the other side. This experience created a knowing with her that she didn't have before. And nothing can undo that knowing.

It wasn't until days, weeks, months, years after, through the process of connecting to IANDS (the International Association for Near-Death Studies) and connecting to those groups and research, that she was able to even put a term to it.

The biggest shift or change in her life after her experience was that over the next couple years she began to find that she wasn't quite as driven in her corporate job. She wasn't quite as interested in the idea of climbing the corporate ladder, of finding this success that she was so driven to have before. As a matter of fact, she ended up resigning from her corporate job and opened up a wellness studio that was focused strictly on helping people connect and find that soul part of themselves.

She's also explored other interviews about her experience, sharing different aspects of what she learned. In another conversation on Crossing Over NDE, she discussed truths about the soul and consciousness. On the Love Covered Life Podcast, she described how she could see through the eyes of everyone who had ever existed. In another episode of that same podcast, she talked about how her NDE changed her religious and spiritual views. And she shared her story on NDE TV as well, each telling revealing new facets of what she experienced.

She developed a very frequent meditation practice after her NDE. She found herself drawn to being in that place of stillness more and more. Over the course of many years, that meditation practice has evolved into using more sound to help herself get into that place of connection. But she's nowhere near the connection that she had on the other side.

One of the things that can be difficult to talk about as an NDEer, she says, is that there's a time (it happened to her about two years ago) where you go into a feeling of depression almost, because that longing to be a part of that connection is so strong and everything in your life just pales in comparison. You can still fall into that very human place of despair and it can be hard to talk about that because from the outside looking in, somebody can say: How is it you can be depressed when you've had this beautiful experience? You have all of this knowing. You understand things that other people don't understand. Why are you depressed?

And it's because there's such a stark contrast. There's this awareness of something that is so beautiful and yet there's also your immediate experience of being human. To integrate that and balance that takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a level of self-love to know that even though you're experiencing this very human thing right now, you also know simultaneously that that's not who you are. That's your human experience. And who you are was this part of you that's unconditional love that you connected to on the other side. That's the real you.

The Purpose of Life

Throughout the course of her childhood, Anastasia always found herself asking what was the purpose of life. That was a very natural question to ask given that she was experiencing everything she was experiencing. It didn't seem like life had any meaning or value at that time.

Coming back from her NDE, she can say without a shadow of a doubt she doesn't question what the reason of life is anymore. Our purpose for being here is to experience and ultimately to experience unconditional love.

She loves to paint. When she's in the middle of a painting and she's completely in the flow and she's in this place where time just zips by, at no point in time would she stop and ask herself: I wonder what the meaning of life is.

You have your own individual response to everything you experience in your life. Some people call it intuition. Some people call it a gut feeling. That's your soul guiding you. So now she doesn't take them for granted. She tries to become very aware of them. She tries to slow down. It's not a race. There is no ultimate goal in this physical body.

We are not here to learn anything, she says. Lessons. And there is no getting this life wrong. And the reason being is because that soul part of us, that part that she connected to, the Oneness, the completeness, it is just that. It's already complete. There is nothing that we can do in this physical life that is going to take away from or add to the soul.

So to take this physical life that is just such a brief moment and to put this pressure on ourselves that there are things that we have to do right and there are things that we have to avoid getting wrong because it may impact our experience on the other side (meaning we may go to a heaven or we may go to a hell if we don't get this life right), it just absolutely wasn't part of her experience. It wasn't part of the knowing that she brought back from the other side.

We are here in this physical body because our soul just wants to know what it is like to have this physical experience. All of the senses that we have in our physical body is what our soul wants to connect to. Tastes and sight and sounds and feelings. And as a matter of fact, she would say that the feeling, the part of us that isn't emotion, that isn't seeking pleasure or trying to avoid pain, but that part of us that's still part of us that is a state of being, that is the language of our soul.

We're all striving to feel something. We're all striving to get to this place of love and joy and contentment. And we're kind of like a pinball machine sometimes. We're looking for that experience or that relationship that's going to give us that fulfillment.

When we strip all the things away in our lives, when we strip away the career or the house or the car, and if we find that that fulfillment is not there, then there's a deeper part of ourselves that we have yet to connect to. It's that soul part of ourselves. Because when we can connect to the soul, then it's no longer about any of those external things. Because what you feel inside is so complete that you bring value to the things that you do versus looking for value to yourself from your external world.

What This Tells Us

Anastasia's account is one of the clearest descriptions I've encountered of what researchers call the "void" experience in NDEs. Not everyone goes to a place of light and landscapes. Some, like Anastasia, enter absolute darkness. But it's not the darkness of a cave or a closed room. It's the darkness of infinite space, pregnant with possibility, suffused with love.

The detail that strikes me most is her inability to form questions while in the Oneness. This isn't unique to her account. Many NDEers report that in the presence of this infinite knowing, questions dissolve before they can form. Not because answers are withheld, but because the questions themselves are based on a false premise of separation. When you're connected to everything, when all experiences are accessible, what would you ask?

Her description of the scale of the Oneness (all of human experience on one grain of sand, all other grains representing the soul's experiences beyond Earth) is one of the most evocative I've read. It suggests that our earthly lives, as significant as they feel to us, are a tiny fraction of what the soul experiences across dimensions, across time, across whatever "across" means in a realm where time doesn't exist.

The fact that she had to spend years even finding the term "near-death experience" to describe what happened to her is telling. This wasn't a woman seeking a spiritual experience. She was a corporate vice president getting dental work done. She wasn't meditating or exploring altered states. She was trying to fix a tooth. And she was thrown into the deepest mystery of existence.

What she brought back is both simple and revolutionary: We are already complete. There is nothing to learn, nothing to fix, nothing to earn. The soul is whole. Physical life is the soul's way of experiencing sensation, emotion, relationship, limitation, time. We're not here to graduate to the next level. We're here because the soul wants to know what it's like to taste coffee, to hold a child, to feel grief, to watch dust motes in sunlight.

And when it's over, when the body stops and we slip out of it like Anastasia slipped out in that dentist's chair, we go home. To the place that is dark and light, empty and full, silent and singing. To the Oneness that we never actually left.

Anastasia can't get back to that connection through meditation, not fully. None of us can while we're here. But she can feel the edges of it. She can remember. And that memory has reordered her entire life. She's no longer climbing. She's no longer chasing. She's slowing down. She's paying attention to the feelings that are the language of the soul. She's painting. She's helping others find their own connection.

And she's not afraid of death. Not even a little. Because she's been there. She knows what's waiting. And it's home.