Jan Christenson's Fall on Ice Led to Pure Love Beyond the Body

The Fall That Changed Everything

Jan Christenson was working as a community nurse when it happened. It was one of those ordinary winter days where ice forms in patches you don't see until your body is already airborne. She slipped on ice at work, tried to catch herself, got her feet wound up, and came straight down head first onto the ice. She was knocked unconscious immediately.

Twenty minutes. That's her best estimate for how long she was out. It might not sound like much. But in terms of where consciousness can travel when it's freed from the constraints of a functioning brain, 20 minutes is an eternity.

Arriving Somewhere Dark and Safe

Her first realization wasn't panic. It wasn't confusion about the fall or the ice or whether someone had called an ambulance. Her first realization was that suddenly she was just in this place that was very dark, and the thought came up of where am I, and then it was like a knowing: ah, I'm here. She felt completely safe. No fear. No human reactions to being in an unfamiliar place. She just knew she was fine.

This is one of those details that shows up again and again in near-death experiences, the immediate sense of safety in a place that should, by all rights, be terrifying. You're not in your body. You don't know where you are. And yet there's this deep, cellular knowing that you're exactly where you need to be.

In this state, Jan could see without eyes and hear without ears. She was looking around in this fairly dark place where there wasn't much to see. It was just her there. Alone, but not lonely. Present, but not in the way we understand presence when we're tethered to a body.

The Expansion

And then came the moment that's almost impossible to describe with language built for three-dimensional experience. Jan felt what she relates as like the air coming out of a balloon. She just went whoooosh and expanded in every direction, forwards and backwards and sideways, so there was no beginning and no end to her.

Read that again. No beginning and no end. She wasn't Jan anymore, at least not in the way we think of individual identity. She was everywhere and everything at once.

It was this absolutely ecstatic feeling of being everywhere and everything. She had this feeling of I feel so good that I could just stay here forever and never need anything else. She felt like she was pure love and was loved so deeply and so profoundly that there was no room for anything except that feeling. No fear. No worry. No doubt. Nothing except pure love.

This is the part of near-death experiences that makes materialist explanations start to buckle. You can explain a lot with dying brain chemistry, with oxygen deprivation, with the release of endorphins and DMT. But you can't explain the consistency of this feeling across thousands of accounts from people of different cultures, different belief systems, different expectations. They all describe this same thing: a love so complete it erases everything else.

Jan was in this state of oneness, of pure exquisite love, content to stay forever. And she might have, except for one thought.

The Choice

Suddenly the thought came up of but what about your daughters. And Jan thought, oh my daughters still need me. With that thought, she was back in the density of her body immediately. Not feeling any pain from the fall yet, but right back within herself as a human here on earth.

This is another pattern that shows up constantly in NDE research: the choice to return, often framed around unfinished business with loved ones. It's not that someone reaches down and yanks you back. It's that you make a decision, and the decision itself has power. Consciousness responds to intention in ways that our current models of physics can't account for.

But before Jan returned, there was one more element to her experience. While she was out there floating, before she had her thought about her daughters, she could see a very bright white light coming towards her very quickly. She felt an urgency, the question forming: am I going or am I staying? The thought about her daughters came, and she came back before the light reached her.

She knows there's more to see when she goes fully to the other side. But what she saw was enough. Enough to know that we are pure love at our core.

Coming Back to the Body

From there, Jan came back into her consciousness, and she was in quite a bit of trouble physically. A lot of pain. She couldn't speak. The body that had seemed so distant and unimportant moments before was now demanding attention in the way that injured bodies do.

But something fundamental had shifted. The woman who woke up on that ice wasn't the same woman who had fallen.

What She Brought Back

Jan says she feels that same feeling she felt out there here on earth, but with a much smaller intensity. She still knows that she is pure love. And she has absolutely no fear of death. Zero. Because she knows that where she's going is an absolutely phenomenal place and that death is not the end of her, just the beginning of a new experience.

She doesn't look forward to death tomorrow. She wants to stay here. Being human is phenomenal, having this ability to be here and have human emotions, that's the gift we've been given.

This is the paradox that near-death experiencers often describe: they've seen something so beautiful that earthly life pales in comparison, and yet they come back with a renewed appreciation for the very physicality they transcended. The emotions, the sensations, the limitations, they're not obstacles to spiritual experience. They're the point.

God Energy in Every Cell

Jan says people think about God as outside of themselves, but we are actually God in this flow of oneness. We are God inside of us. The energy that flows and is in every one of our cells is God energy. It's wisdom, it's love.

This isn't metaphor for Jan. It's direct experience. She calls it pure energy because that's what everything is, pure energy. And everybody else is the same. They are pure energy in form and formlessness, in our body and in our spiritual self.

Scientists have known for a long time that everything is energy, she points out. The planets, moon, stars, you and me, the earth, everything is this energy which has a consciousness. As Jan floated out there, she was perfectly and completely conscious.

This is where near-death experiences intersect with quantum physics in ways that make both fields uncomfortable. Consciousness without a brain. Energy that never dies, just changes form. An observer effect that might extend far beyond laboratory measurements.

The energy is love, it's consciousness, it's also wisdom, pure wisdom. And here's the part that Jan is emphatic about: all of this, the love, the wisdom, the consciousness, is accessible to anyone at any time here on earth.

You Don't Have to Die to Access It

It's been sort of a misconception that you have to be a huge spiritual being to tap into this and to be a part of the oneness that we all are. You don't have to be deeply spiritual and have had a huge awakening to tap into all of this that we are.

Jan knows this because she had lots of experiences before her near-death experience which she didn't understand, but it was just tapping into the consciousness that some people call beyond the veil. The spiritual self that we have inside of us is always connected to everything out there, to the energy, to the consciousness and the pieces of all the people who have lived here. Because energy never dies, it just changes form, changes address, changes location.

She's describing something that mystics have pointed to for millennia but that our culture has mostly forgotten: we're not trying to achieve connection to something outside ourselves. We're already connected. We're trying to remember it.

When we're here as humans, we're actually here as spiritual beings having a human experience. And when we go from here, we do not die. We just simply go to a different location in a different form.

What Opens When You Believe

Jan says if you don't believe, you'll never see anything different than what's right in front of you. But as soon as you start to understand this energy, you are in for some absolutely wonderful surprises. The things that you can see and do and hear are of course beyond human comprehension because they're of this spiritual energy knowledge.

She's not talking about blind faith. She's talking about openness. About the willingness to consider that consciousness might be more than an emergent property of neural firing. That love might be a fundamental force in the universe, not just a pleasant neurochemical state.

In other interviews, Jan has expanded on these themes. In a conversation on Shaman Oaks, she discusses why fear is the opposite of what we should feel about death. On NDE TV, she talks about how her experience as a stressed-out nurse was transformed by what she learned on the other side. And in an interview with Divine Encounters NDE, she explores how understanding this energy can actually help us live longer, fuller lives here.

Nothing to Fear

We are always cared for here on earth and up there, Jan says. And if things happen that seem unfortunate here on earth and are painful, wait, there will be a reason for them and you will gain an understanding of what happened if you allow yourself to think in the ways of the energy, the spiritual stuff that you are.

There's a reason for everything and we all have a purpose. And we won't go until it's our time. So I don't have to fear anything about death. I know it won't come until it's my time, and when it comes it's going to be fabulous anyway.

Nothing to fear. No worries.

It's an extraordinary claim. And yet it comes from someone who has been there, who has felt her individual identity dissolve into pure love, who has seen the light approaching and made the choice to return. Not because she was afraid of what lay ahead, but because she wasn't finished here yet.

What This Experience Reveals

Jan's account is striking for its simplicity and its profundity. She wasn't gone for hours. She didn't have an elaborate life review or meet deceased relatives or tour celestial cities (though she saw the light that might have led to those experiences). What she had was something more fundamental: direct experience of consciousness existing independently of her body, and a felt sense of oneness that was simultaneously expansive and intimate.

The expansion she describes, that feeling of being everywhere and everything at once, is one of the most commonly reported features of deep near-death experiences. It shows up in accounts from around the world, across cultures and time periods. Neuroscientists have tried to explain it as a breakdown in the brain's sense of bodily boundaries, a kind of malfunction in the parietal lobe's spatial processing. But that explanation doesn't account for why the experience feels more real than ordinary reality, not less. Why it's described as an expansion into truth, not a dissolution into confusion.

Jan's emphasis on accessibility is important too. She's not claiming special status as someone who has pierced the veil. She's saying the veil is thinner than we think. That the consciousness she touched during those 20 minutes is the same consciousness flowing through every one of us right now. We're not separated from it by death. We're separated from it by belief, by the assumption that what we can see and touch and measure is all there is.

The choice to return, made in a single thought about her daughters, points to something that shows up again and again in NDE research: intention has power in that state. Consciousness responds to will in ways that seem impossible from our ordinary perspective. You think about staying, and you stay. You think about returning, and you return. It's as if the normal rules of causation are inverted. Mind doesn't emerge from matter. Matter responds to mind.

And then there's the aftermath. Jan didn't come back broken or traumatized by what she'd seen. She came back with zero fear of death and a deep appreciation for being human. She came back knowing she's pure love at her core, that everyone is, that the energy we call God is flowing through every cell. She came back wanting to tell people that there's nothing to fear, that we're all cared for, that death is just a change of address.

This is what near-death experiences offer us: not proof in the scientific sense (though the evidence is stronger than most people realize), but testimony. Direct, first-person accounts from people who have been to the edge and looked over. Who have felt their consciousness separate from their body and discovered that they're still themselves, still aware, still capable of love and choice and perception.

Jan slipped on ice at work. She fell head first. She was unconscious for 20 minutes. And in that time, she learned something that most of us spend our whole lives wondering about: what happens when we die? Where does consciousness go? Is there anything on the other side?

Her answer is simple and certain. We expand into love. We remember what we've always been. We go home.

And when it's not our time yet, when there's still work to do here, still daughters who need us, still a human experience to complete, we come back. We return to the density of the body, to the pain and the limitation and the gift of physical sensation. We return knowing that this life is temporary but precious, that death is not an ending but a transformation, that the love we felt on the other side is the same love flowing through us right now.

Jan is living proof that you don't have to wait until you die to know these things. You just have to be willing to consider that consciousness is bigger than your brain, that love is more than a feeling, that the energy connecting all things is real and accessible and waiting for you to notice it.

She fell on ice and woke up in eternity. And she came back to tell us there's nothing to fear. That's not a small gift. That's everything.