Shawna Ristic's Near-Death Experience: The Council of Light

The Life Before

Shawna Ristic "really disappointed by it all" and says she told someone, half-joking, that she was ready to "renege my contract" with life. People weren't nice. It was more challenging than she'd been ready for. She would never actually do anything like that, she insists, it was just something she said out of the blue.

Christmas morning, 1994. She woke up, opened presents with her family, ate, and then they left to visit relatives in another town. She went back upstairs to nap. When she woke, she'd overslept. She was supposed to meet a client from the bar and fly to a football game in another city. She was going to be late. Really late.

She jumped in the car and jumped on the highway. She remembers looking down at the speedometer: 75 mph in a 65 zone. Seat belts weren't required by law yet, but she always wore one. She put it on. She was zooming. She thought, I need to call this guy, tell him I'm running late. This was back when cell phones were bag phones that plugged into the cigarette lighter. Hers was on the floorboard.

She thought: I need to take my seatbelt off and pick that up. Then she thought: I'm flying down the highway, let me just pass this car, get over this bridge, and then I'll do all that.

She passed the car, passed the bridge, took off her seatbelt, bent over to pick up the phone. As she came up, she came close to hitting the car she was passing. She swerved. Her car nosedived into the median, then flipped end over end across the entire median, then across the other two lanes of the highway. She was found 40 feet from the car, face down, turning blue.

The miracle: the car right behind her was driven by a nurse. The next car coming from the other direction was also driven by a nurse. Two nurses, immediately there, doing what they could to hold her airway open. Shawna doesn't remember any of that. She was completely out of body.

They ambulanced her to the town where she lived because a trauma doctor happened to be there that day (she was only there twice a month). The doctor stabilized her, did tubes down the nose so she didn't need a tracheotomy. Then they life-flighted her to Kansas City, where she spent a month in a coma.

That's what happened on this side.

The Room of Light

Shawna remembers swerving to miss the car, crashing, and then: opening her eyes and waking up in an amazing white-lit room. Completely bright white light. Six beings standing next to her. Very, very tall. Shaped like humans but glowing, white light radiating from them, this beautiful loving light just pouring out.

"It was like everything was okay," she says.

They put their hands under her and lifted her up out of her body. She was standing in the room with them. She remembers embracing them and feeling so grateful. "It was like finally home with my family," she says, "like the real family, like the one who doesn't judge and, you know, one without baggage and all that stuff that we deal with here in our human forms with families."

The thing she really learned from them, the thing she's spent years trying to find words for, is the quality of their love. When you say love, she explains, it comes with all the attachments and conditions we carry in our human perspective. What they offered was different: "It's really like reverence. They want nothing but what's the best for us, or for, at that moment speaking in first person, for me. They wanted what was the best for me, but not with the conditions of, you know, if I accept they're wanting the best, that they'll feel better, or, you know, with an agenda or with any of that that we're used to when someone offers you something. It was really just like this unconditional love, this total reverence and appreciation for what I had come to do."

And they shared with her what she had come to do. She understood later that she came here to help people find their way home, to remember and realize the same state she was in at that moment. When they looked at her with this reverence, wanting what was best for her, wanting her to succeed, wanting her to do what she'd committed to coming here to do, when she accepted that and received it, that in itself was reciprocity. That in itself was the gratitude and the receiving they got in return.

No strings. No conditions. Just this: I see you, I honor what you came to do, and your acceptance of that is the gift.

The Life Review

They showed her what she'd done up to this point, and this is where it gets uncomfortable in the way that truth often does. She didn't just see events. She felt them. She describes "seeing like a circumstance between me and my best friend at the time, but really feeling how he felt by my actions, and really feeling what I had done, how I had been with someone, really affected them, so that I understood fully my own actions."

She felt how her actions landed in someone else's body. She felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of herself. This wasn't judgment. It was education. It was compassion in the most literal sense: suffering with, feeling with.

Then they showed her what would be possible from here on out. She wishes she'd gotten a map, she jokes, but she did know things were going to have to radically change. Everything was going to be different. And boy, was it.

The Network of Light

There was a debate, she says, about whether she was going to come back or stay. She'd said she was ready to go. Here were her options: stay or go. For a long time afterward, she felt bitter, like she didn't have a choice, but over time she's come to understand it was a mutual choice.

At this point in her memory, they were showing her how it's all connected, how each of us is connected in infinite ways to everyone else. "It's like looking out of an airplane at night and you see over a city, you see all those lights on the city in the landscape, and each of those lights is connected to other lights, and they're all just this vast network of love and of light and of kind of basking in love, because that's sort of the foundation of it all. And if one light goes out, it creates like a power surge that creates dims or completely extinguishes other lights all around it, and some, you know, across the globe."

She saw how we don't realize how much our own light affects the entire grid of everybody around us. They showed her this on a concrete, personal level: how her leaving would affect her brother, how he would be with women, whether he'd ever have a relationship or be married, how it would completely change his trajectory in life.

One light goes out, and the grid shifts. Dims. Reconfigures. We are not isolated nodes. We are the network itself.

And here's what she found out later: while she was in the coma, there were many people on this side praying for her, sending prayer grams. When she came out, her mother had saved all the letters. Hundreds of prayer grams from churches, from people she didn't even know, putting energy out there to pull her back. Her family camped out in the waiting room. You could only see her twice a day for the first two weeks. They stayed anyway, just to have a moment to come in and see her.

Pulling her back.

The Broken Body

She remembers looking down from her hospital room and seeing her body in the bed, broken. "I saw my body in the bed, just broken, and remember seeing it, wow, and seeing this broken body there in this sort of lifeless form." She saw her mother sitting next to her, holding her hands, praying.

"I remember thinking, oh my God, what did I do."

Then she snapped out of it, went back into the dark space she was in most of the time.

The last thing she really remembers is the circle of beings. About 12 of them, in a really large circle in this room. She was among them. They were all debating whether she was to come or go. For a long time, she thought she didn't have a choice because she really remembered that circle, but over time she's come to realize it was a joint decision.

Once that decision was made, she began to come back.

It's not like the movies, she says. You don't just ping back into body and say, what did I miss, everything's fine. It took a really long time to get back into body, to integrate back in here after going so far out, so far away, back with these beings that feel more like home.

In the accident, she broke her chin off (metal plates now), suffered head injuries, broke six ribs front and back, punctured lungs, broke her pelvis, broke her ankle. Her jaw had been reconstructed, so she couldn't speak. They would strap her body into a wheelchair and wheel her to therapies. She wasn't in body most of those times. She kind of remembers being strapped in and hating it, feeling like her body was going to slip out and they were going to run over her.

She remembers one moment being wheeled down the hallway after a PT session. She saw a person coming toward her in a wheelchair. As they got closer, she thought, wow, what happened to that person, they are really messed up. It got closer and closer. She realized it was a mirror. That was her.

"I thought, wow, I've really done it this time."

She snapped right back out of body. Didn't remember much after that until they transferred her to the neurological hospital and gave her a hot bath. That was how her body had always relaxed. Once that happened, she started really coming back in, more and more.

The doctors told her parents to expect her to be in the neurological hospital for four to six months. They should not expect her to live on her own, go back to school, or be independent. She did it in four weeks. Within a few months, she was living on her own again, going back to school.

The Moment Everything Changed

Somewhere in the process of coming back, still not fully awake, Shawna came out of the coma for a brief moment. Her friend was sitting there. He'd been staying with her family in the waiting room. It was his turn to be in the room with her. This was about three or four weeks after the accident. She woke up, looked at him, just willed him to wake up. Please, I need you to wake up now.

She couldn't speak. He woke up. He said, oh, Shawna, you're awake. She kind of mumbled something. She thinks he understood she was asking what happened. He told her. She doesn't remember what he said.

What she remembers is the way the room felt. "I remember that full, pregnant potentiality, that loving fullness, was here, was on this side. That fullness and that okayness and that love and that everything is as it should be, and you are loved and you are okay, and we are grateful for what you're doing here. That whole feeling of support and love that I felt on the other side, it was here too. It's the foundation of this place too, of this side."

She could feel it pulsating in the room. She remembers marveling: "It's here too. It's all that is. It's all it is. We've just been, just the illusions of our day-to-day karmic life that we forget about what the truth is and who we are. And the truth of who I am and that feeling of wholeness and support and love that I felt on the other side, it's here too."

Then she couldn't hold wakefulness anymore. It was too much effort to stay in body. She fell back again, into that deep, deep space.

The Aftermath: Blasted Open

Coming back after all that, Shawna says, is like being totally blasted open. "It's like we all have our light inside us, this beauty that we are, that I really dropped into and became aware of there and saw that in these beings as well. And they have very much emphasized that I am like them, and so are you."

But over time, after working so hard and having all those filters kind of blasted off, being purely in that love space, seeing nothing but the light in other people (you can see it in each other's eyes, she says), she didn't have the capacity to notice the shadows that might influence how people would behave or react to her. She often got hurt, taken advantage of, manipulated.

It was challenging to see the hurtful things we do to each other. She went into a bit of a depression, started having thoughts that maybe she was wrong about coming back. She felt bitter, like she didn't have a choice. But she couldn't end it. After all they'd gone through bringing her back, she couldn't disappoint all those people now.

She started journaling. She would write and write, all these thoughts and questions pouring out. After a while, she'd go into a trance, just sort of regurgitating mental stuff. When she read it later, she noticed something had started to respond. Something was answering her questions. It had happened through her hand, but it was not her voice.

That's when she started communicating with the council she'd met on the other side. While she's on this side. They have become "huge confidants for me, huge supporters, and have helped me in my path."

She knew she came here to help people find their way home. She knew she wanted people to know what she discovered on the other side: that love is the foundation of it all, we are all this beauty inside, just step into it and love it, you know, in this reverence and reciprocity. It doesn't have to be so much baggage. But she had no idea how to do that.

In her journaling, they started explaining how to notice when things open you. When you drop into that truth of self (we call this intuition, she says, and plenty of people want to tell you it's not true), when you drop into it, not up here in the mind pushing forward and thinking about it, but when you fall back in that relaxed state and drop into your own essence, you can notice when something really resonates with you. It expands you and draws you to it. When it's not the right path, it contracts you and pushes you away.

She started playing with that. She was going through this how-do-I-find-my-way phase, and then, once she surrendered to it, things started lining up. She met a woman who was a massage therapist (at that time, she didn't even know that was a valid profession). Shawna told her: "I had this experience and I don't know what to do about it, and I don't know why I'm depressed all the time. I'm so unhappy. I'm working in this job, this restaurant, and I was supposed to, you know, I'm doing just fine. I have everything I'm supposed to want. I got a car, I've got a good boyfriend, I've got, you know, this good job." This was maybe two years after the accident. "Why am I miserable?"

The woman said, "Well, maybe you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"Go check out this massage school."

Shawna went. As soon as she walked in, it was like, ah, it opened. Yes. This is it. That started her path into doing healing work. "It's been quite a ride," she says.

Shawna has told her story in multiple interviews over the years, each time adding texture and detail to this extraordinary account. In [another video on the Coming Home channel](/video, she explores the unconditional love she encountered in even greater depth. In [a follow-up interview on The Other Side NDE channel](/video, she discusses the interconnected nature of all existence. And in [a two-part conversation on the Love Covered Life Podcast](/video, she goes into detail about the council of beings and how they continue to guide her work today.

What This Means

Shawna's account is one of the most detailed descriptions of what researchers call a "council of beings" encounter that I've come across in more than 5,000 NDE reports. These councils appear across cultures, across belief systems, across centuries. The experiencer meets a group of wise, loving entities who seem to know them intimately and who deliberate, with the experiencer's participation, about whether they should return to physical life.

What makes Shawna's story particularly significant is her description of the quality of love these beings embodied. She spent years trying to find the right word, and she landed on "reverence." Not love with conditions, not love with an agenda, not love that needs something back. Reverence. A recognition of the inherent worth and beauty of what you came here to do, with no strings attached. And the kicker: when you receive that recognition, when you accept it, that acceptance is the reciprocity. That's the gift they receive in return.

This is not how we're taught to think about love. We're taught love is transactional, conditional, earned, lost, withheld, given. Shawna's beings are describing something else entirely. They're describing a love that is the ground state of reality, the foundation, the grid itself. And we are nodes in that grid. When one light goes out, the whole network shifts.

The life review she describes is also classic NDE territory, but with a twist. She didn't just see what she'd done. She felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of her actions. She felt how her best friend felt. This is not punishment. This is education. This is what it means to understand fully your own actions. And it's offered not with judgment but with the same reverence they showed her throughout.

Shawna's recovery, too, is worth noting. The doctors said four to six months in the neurological hospital, don't expect her to live independently or go back to school. She did it in four weeks. This pattern shows up again and again in NDE accounts: people recover faster than predicted, often dramatically so. The conventional explanation is that doctors are conservative in their prognoses. The unconventional explanation is that something about the NDE itself, about that encounter with the light and the beings and the love, accelerates healing. Shawna's account suggests both might be true.

And then there's the moment she woke up briefly in the hospital room and felt the same fullness, the same pregnant potentiality, the same love she'd felt on the other side, right here. "It's here too," she said. "It's the foundation of this place too." That's the message, isn't it? The love isn't somewhere else, waiting for us after we die. It's here, now, pulsating in every room, in every moment. We've just forgotten. The illusions of our day-to-day karmic life make us forget what the truth is and who we are.

Shawna came back to help people remember. She's doing healing work now, helping people find their way home, helping them notice when things expand them and when things contract them, helping them drop into that truth of self that the beings showed her. She's in communication with the council still, through her journaling, and they're guiding her.

What strikes me most about her story is the practicality of it. She's not saying, go have an NDE and everything will be clear. She's saying, pay attention to what opens you and what closes you. Drop into that relaxed state where you can feel your own essence. Notice the light in other people. Accept the reverence that's being offered to you every moment, even when you can't see the beings offering it. That acceptance is the reciprocity. That acceptance is the gift.

And when you forget, when you get hurt or manipulated or lost in the shadows, come back to the truth: it's here too. The love is here too. It's the foundation of this place. We are nodes in a network of light, and every one of us affects the whole grid. Our light matters. What we came here to do matters. And we are held, always, in a love so vast and unconditional that the only word for it is reverence.