Ingrid Honkala's Near-Death Experience at Two Years Old

From Terror to Peace

The water in the tank was between 30 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Bogota sits high in the Andes, and in the early morning hours, the temperature drops sharply. The tank was made of cement, dark and deep, used for hand-washing clothes. Ingrid describes the moment of falling: "the first feeling I had when falling into this water was the intense feeling of being freezing cold... the first feeling I had like this intense cold and it was the feeling of my chest had imploded and I couldn't breathe."

She was drowning. Her sister, only four years old herself, stood helpless on the flat surface beside the tank. The maid who was supposed to be watching them was in her room, listening to soap operas on the radio, completely unaware. Ingrid could hear "my sister even screaming and trying to get me from the surface but there's nothing she could do. The last thing I could hear was my chest, my heart pumping in my head really loud."

And then the terror stopped.

"I went from this state of absolute horror to a state of absolute and complete peace," Ingrid says. The shift was instantaneous. One moment she was fighting for her life in freezing water, the next she was suspended in a state of serenity so profound that the struggle simply fell away. "It was just nothing to fight for anymore, just peace. I also experienced the state of absolute silence, so was what I call this silence behind the silence."

The darkness of the cement tank gave way to light. "Right there when the sense of calmness happened there was a light," she recalls, "and there was a light that happened, it came from below and now this light was illuminated my entire watery surrounding."

The Body in the Water

Ingrid began to look around. She saw bubbles suspended in the illuminated water, surrounded by light. She started chasing them. And then she turned and saw something that would change her understanding of herself forever: "I saw a body suspended in the water and incredibly at that moment I knew that that was my body."

She'd been a sick child her entire short life, constantly ill with respiratory problems. But now, in this state, she felt complete well-being. Looking at her drowned body, she thought: "I'm not going back to that. Why would I want to be there where I am seeing where I am NOT free where I feel trapped? So my first thought was like I'm leaving. I can leave this body behind."

This wasn't a child's confusion. It was clarity. She understood, with a certainty that would stay with her for the rest of her life, that she was not that small, sick body floating in the dark water. She was something else entirely.

Traveling by Thought

What happened next revealed the nature of consciousness in a way that no textbook could. In just a blink, Ingrid appeared in the maid's room, looking down at her from above. She could see the young woman lying on her bed, completely unaware of the crisis unfolding in the patio. Ingrid remembers the scene so clearly she can still recall "the soap opera that she was listening in the radio and I just said oh that's Maria but she was completely unaware of what was happening."

Then, in another instant, she appeared on her mother's path. Her mother had left for work about ten minutes earlier, walking to the bus stop. She didn't have a car. Ingrid watched her from above and "when I saw her from above again like with the maid I just said 'that's mom.'"

But something remarkable happened. "At that precise moment," Ingrid says, "she felt that something was happening at home. It's like I could sense her thinking. She stopped and she thought 'something is happening with one of my babies.' She turned around and started to run back home."

Ingrid watched her mother turn and run, but then she got distracted by a realization that would fundamentally alter her understanding of reality. "I got distracted by the realization that wherever I put my mind I could go," she explains. "So if like whoa if I put my mind at the end of the street I will be there. If I would just see an animal, whatever it was I will be there. So for me time and space vanished and I could be anywhere at any time. There was not limitations of anything."

She could feel and know everything happening with everybody. The constraints that define physical existence, the prison of linear time and fixed location, simply didn't apply to her anymore.

The Realm of Light

Then, in another flash, Ingrid appeared in a realm made of "absolute pure bright light."

This is where language starts to fail. She describes it as "extremely hard to forget" because "for the first time in these three years of my life I felt that I was home. So it was the sense of like ah I'm finally home."

The experience wasn't dreamlike or vague. "This experience was more real than its reality," she insists, "and I felt that I was being welcomed." At that moment, something even more profound occurred. "The sense of self started to dissolve," she says, "and I started to become one with the whole."

She calls it "the sense of non-self or the sense of nothingness." There was no sound, no color, no movement, no meaning, no description. "At this point that was not even thought. It's like all that was gone. You just complete a state of oneness. I became existence itself."

This is the heart of what Ingrid experienced: not a place, not a being, not even a feeling in the conventional sense, but a state of pure being, undifferentiated consciousness, the ground of existence itself. She was two years old, but age doesn't matter when you dissolve into the infinite.

The Unwilling Return

While Ingrid was experiencing this state of absolute oneness, her mother burst into the patio. She knew exactly where to go. She found Ingrid's sister on the flat surface beside the tank, went straight to the water, and pulled Ingrid out. "She said that I was just like a raggedy doll," Ingrid recalls. "My limbs were blue. I was completely... there was no really life and there was no life in this body."

But Ingrid wasn't concerned. "I was so detached from this reality that I was not concerned with this at all," she says. "This was already gone."

Her mother had been trained in CPR because she worked with children. It was the only reason she knew what to do. She began resuscitation. And then Ingrid felt herself being pulled back. "In just a flash I felt that I had jumped from the tallest building in the world," she describes. "I felt the sense of being vacuumed back, like if you just jump from an airplane, from a building, and is this vacuum feeling like and I was being pulled and there was nothing I could do to stop this."

"I knew I was back," she says, "because all the feelings of discomfort, coldness and sickness, the lack of freedom was back. And I was not very happy to be back."

The Aftermath: A Child Who Knew Too Much

What followed was years of profound dislocation. Ingrid came back different. She started to get sicker than before. She refused to eat. She would go to the mirror, look at herself, and scream to her mother: "You don't understand, this is not me, this is not my name and I should not be here. I'm not this child. This is just the state of my body but I am NOT a child."

She had an awareness she didn't have before. When she looked at her parents, "I realized that they will not judge my parents. I felt them as my equal." She also came back with abilities she hadn't possessed. Not long after, she could read and write, solve mathematical problems, and put together complex puzzles. People around her, including her mother, were in disbelief.

She couldn't relate to other children. "To me it was like they don't know anything," she says. "What is going on with these people?"

This was Colombia in the early 1970s. There was no internet, no books on near-death experiences, no framework for understanding what had happened to her. "People didn't know any of these," Ingrid explains, "and Colombia was a country at war so my parents were more concerning how will we survive and leave the day-to-day life."

They hoped she would get better. And in a way, she did, but not through any conventional means.

The Beings of Light

When things were at their worst, help came in the most remarkable way. Ingrid began having out-of-body experiences during sleep. She was being taken back to the realm of light. "At the time I didn't know that I was having out-of-body experiences," she says, "and although all that was kind of disturbing I wanted it to happen because it was bringing me to that realm of the light."

One night, she was surrounded by figures "that were shining in all different colors." They approached her and touched her. At that moment she said: "You are a being of light."

Their presence made her feel at home again. "I started to heal," she recalls. "I started to eat and I started to communicate with everyone again and I just started to feel joyful and happy." Although the beings didn't do or say anything specific, "the sense of love was such that nothing else was needed."

The teaching she received was simple but profound: "Everything is going to be okay. And although I couldn't understand that many times, how this can be okay, that was always the teaching: everything is happening for a reason and everything is following a path of perfection. We just don't know this because we're just living and understanding a very little piece of the picture."

Later in life, she learned that the beings of light wanted to show her "that home was not a place. Home was a state of being. Home, heaven, is here and now."

The Question of Names

One evening, the new maid called Ingrid for dinner. Ingrid wouldn't come. When the maid approached her and said "I am calling you Ingrid, I'm calling you for dinner," Ingrid replied: "Don't call me like that. That is not my name."

The maid asked what her name was then, how she should call her. Ingrid said: "I do not need one."

That night, they sent her to bed, exasperated. But that was the first time the beings of light spoke to her. They said: "It is going to take time for them to understand." The communication wasn't like ordinary speech. There was sound, but "it's not the same kind of sound we hear here," Ingrid explains. "There's no female, there's no male. I don't think we're actually hearing with our ears. It's like the inner ears that is very clear."

They told her she had to remain quiet because people wouldn't understand. She didn't believe them at first. This was her reality. What was there not to understand? But she learned quickly. When she went to talk to a priest, he told her: "You have to sit there and pray because this is the devil talking to you."

She'd been born in a country where 98% of the population was Catholic, completely closed to anything outside that framework. At school, her abilities made her an outcast. Teachers would tell her to sit in the corner if she knew everything already. "In every instance I was ostracized," she says. "I cannot show these abilities. I cannot talk about these things."

But the beings of light also told her: "You will never be alone and people is going to appear in your path to help you."

The Artist of Auras

When Ingrid was five and went to kindergarten, her mother discovered she was really seeing something. Ingrid started drawing everything with auras, painting star-like figures in all her notebooks. The teacher asked what they were. Ingrid said: "Those are my friends, the beings of light. I'm seeing these things."

She told her mother: "Mom, these are the colors that we wear and these are my friends, the beings of light." She wanted somebody to believe her. Her mom looked at her "with these mama eyes like don't say a word." They left the school, and on the bus ride home, her mother turned to her and said: "I believe you. I also see things that nobody see."

Her mother revealed that she could see spirits and had been seeing them since she was five years old. But just like Ingrid, she'd learned to remain quiet because it wasn't safe to talk about it.

Turning Off the Light

As Ingrid grew older, the dislocation became unbearable. She couldn't relate to her peers. She didn't feel what they felt. When she reached college age, her sisters were dating, hormones were peaking, and Ingrid felt completely alien. "I was so different," she says. "I didn't feel what anybody felt. I want to be like you guys. I want to be normal. I don't want to be this person. I don't want to be different."

Her parents were on the verge of divorce. Challenges were piling up. She reached a breaking point and asked the beings of light: "Why me? Why this is happening to me?"

They answered: "In 20 years you will understand." Twenty years. To a young person, that's forever. They also told her: "Someday you will pass these teachings to others."

Ingrid's response was immediate: "I've done it all my life. I'm not interested. I want to become a scientist. I'm not interested. I'm not teaching this to anyone."

She asked them to give her a break. She wanted to be like everyone else. And with no force, with pure compassion, they said: "Okay. You're not going to see us or hear us for a while. When you are ready it will happen."

Ingrid needed to ground herself. She needed an anchor. She decided to become a marine scientist. When she was four, her parents had taken her to see the ocean for the first time. She turned to her mother and said: "Someday I'm going to know what is under that blanket."

She put her dial on a different frequency. She describes it like being in a room full of furniture with the light on: you know where everything is, you don't trip, you know where the door is. But when you turn off the light, everything becomes an obstacle. "What is the purpose of those challenges?" she asks. "To bring you back to turn on that light for yourself."

So she turned off the light. And for 20 years, she walked in the dark.

The War Zone

Ingrid pursued her science career with determination. She became the chief of the marine biology and ecology department in Colombia, a remarkable achievement in a country where only 4% of the budget goes to science. But the job brought her to a war zone. She saw extremes of poverty, people being massacred. They did drills constantly because they could be attacked at any moment. The very first day she arrived, there was a shooting outside the base.

The area was also known for tsunamis and natural disasters. When she went to the field to collect samples, she had to go with two guys fully armed with M-16s. Rebels were dropping bombs everywhere. One evening, one of her coworkers said he wasn't going to remain a prisoner on the base. He left. He got killed.

Ingrid met her future husband, who was with the Navy. He told her she had to come to the United States, that things were getting too dangerous. But it was hard to leave. She had a good position, a career she'd worked hard to build. How could she leave?

But there comes a moment, she says, when "none of these was anything when your life is at peril, when now you realize that your happiness is gone."

They came to the United States and married. Three days later, he had to travel for seven months, leaving her alone in a country where she didn't know anyone. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her husband, a member of special forces, kept traveling. She got her PhD, worked with NASA, had a baby. But she was alone. Her husband spent all his time traveling. Her family wasn't in the US. She had to raise her son alone, and he was a very sick baby.

She reached the point where she was thinking: "Why all these is happening? It's been one hardship follow the other."

The Dark Thought

One night, lying next to her baby son, Ingrid had a thought that terrified her. The only thing keeping her alive at that moment was her little boy. He was the light of her life. And then she thought: "I love him so much that I cannot leave this world without him."

She looked at him lying next to her and thought: "What if I take him with me?"

It was just a second of thinking something so horrible. She screamed: "What am I thinking?" She'd lost herself. She was completely lost.

It's when she went back to pray again. She went back to the complete and absolute desire to be connected with the light. "I need some light," she thought, "and I pray like I had never prayed."

She'd stopped praying and meditating because she thought she'd made so many mistakes that she wasn't worthy of the beings of light. But once she prayed, the answers came immediately. She realized: "No one is judging me. I'm the only one judging myself."

Why Not You?

The next day, Ingrid woke up with an answer. The answer was simple: "You need help." Not just any help. The guidance was clear. She went to her office, looked for a psychologist, found someone on the web. It was the right person.

She went to talk to him. Sometimes what we truly need "is just to be listened. And this person was opening to listen. This guy is not judging me."

She asked him the question she'd been asking her whole life: "Why me? Why this is happening to me?"

He said: "Why not?"

That was it. Two words. "This was like the switch I needed at that moment," Ingrid says. "The light I'd turned off was on now." He started to point out what she'd accomplished because of these challenges, connecting the dots. All her neurons were firing, everything was connecting, accelerating.

This was the first time in her life she put herself at the cause of everything, not at the effect. She started to see purpose in absolutely everything. She also realized that none of what had happened was here anymore. It was in her mind. She could decide what to do with it, how to use it, how to start fresh.

The true feeling of forgiveness happened. It was the realization "that there was nothing to forgive because nothing had ever been done to me to hurt me. It's being done for me to bring me to wake up."

This was one of her very first big awakenings. She was in absolute knowing that source, the creator, God, ultimate reality, whatever we want to call it, "was the essence of absolutely everything."

And then she realized: 20 years had passed, exactly as the beings of light had said. The two questions she'd asked 20 years before were answered. How did we stop being one? How is it possible to forget who we truly are?

The answer came: "One never stopped being one. One never left the source. One just became distracted and seemingly forgot."

The purpose of time and experience "is to help you remember who you truly are, is to bring you back to source."

What This Tells Us

Ingrid's story is one of the most detailed childhood NDEs on record, and it contains several elements that appear again and again in accounts from experiencers of all ages and backgrounds. The instantaneous shift from terror to peace, the light appearing in darkness, the recognition of one's body as separate from one's self, the ability to travel by thought alone, the dissolution into oneness: these aren't unique to Ingrid. They're the common grammar of the near-death experience.

But what makes her account particularly valuable is what came after. Most NDEs are brief, and most experiencers return to relatively stable lives. Ingrid came back at two years old and spent decades navigating the chasm between what she knew and what the world would accept. Her struggle to integrate the experience, her request to the beings of light to be "normal," her 20 years in the dark, and her eventual awakening form a complete arc that shows us something crucial: the experience itself is just the beginning.

The detail about her mother sensing something was wrong and running home is one of those small pieces of evidence that skeptics have trouble explaining away. Ingrid was out of her body, watching her mother on the street. Her mother stopped, felt that something was happening with one of her babies, and turned around. This kind of shared knowing, this transmission of information across space without physical means, appears in NDE after NDE. It suggests that consciousness isn't confined to the brain, that we're connected in ways we don't yet understand.

The beings of light who visited Ingrid in her childhood and returned to her decades later are another common feature. They don't lecture. They don't demand. They simply love, and in that love, healing happens. When Ingrid asked them what she should say to people who don't believe, they told her: "Do or say nothing. The light of your awareness is all they need." This is the teaching at the heart of nearly every profound NDE: it's not about convincing anyone of anything. It's about being the love you encountered on the other side.

Ingrid's question, "Why me?" and the answer, "Why not?" is a pivot point. It's the moment she stopped seeing herself as a victim of her circumstances and started seeing herself as the creator of her experience. This is what the near-death experience ultimately teaches: we are not bodies that happen to be conscious. We are consciousness that happens to be embodied. And that changes everything about how we live.

The 20-year gap between the beings of light telling her she'd understand in 20 years and her actual awakening is a gift to those of us trying to make sense of our own lives. Sometimes the answer isn't immediate. Sometimes we have to walk through the dark, turn off the light, experience the full weight of forgetting, before we can remember. And when we do remember, it's not because someone told us. It's because we lived it, earned it, chose it.

Ingrid is now a marine scientist with a PhD who has worked with NASA and traveled to 56 countries sharing the intersection of science and spirituality. She teaches that home isn't a place. It's a state of being. Heaven is here and now. And the purpose of every challenge, every hardship, every moment of suffering is to bring us back to the awareness of who we truly are: eternal beings, individuated expressions of infinite love, here in the classroom of physical life to remember what we forgot.

You can learn more about Ingrid Honkala and explore her other interviews, including her discussion of beings of light with IANDS and her account on Coming Home.