Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I’m Johnny Burke, and today’s guest is Nicole Kerr. She is a disabled US Air Force veteran. Multiple near-death experience survivor and author of You Are Deathless. Today we’ll be talking about her experience, how it changed her life, and how she’s still learning from it 40 years later. Nicole, welcome to the show.
Nicole Kerr: Thank you so much, Johnny. I am so delighted and grateful and honored to be here with you today and your audience.
Johnny Burke: We appreciate you as well. You’ve had quite a few experiences. you had not one, you had, three near-death experiences, which are commonly called NDEs, correct?
Nicole Kerr: That is correct.
Johnny Burke: Now the first one I believe was when you were 19, it was a car. Is that correct?
Nicole Kerr: That’s correct. They were all in the same timeframe related to that crash.
Johnny Burke: Were there any intuitive experiences prior to the first NDE?
Nicole Kerr: No. And if there had been in my body, they would’ve been shut down immediately because of, the religion that I was indoctrinated into. That would not allow me to go there. But I think that really got hammered away at me at six years old.
Johnny Burke: Oh my, you care to share what that upbringing was? Or is that a discussion another day?
Nicole Kerr: No, and that’s Southern Baptist, which is very much about the duality of God being a loving God, a protective God. But then on the other hand, if you don’t follow the rules, there are more rules than just the 10 Commandments, then the wrath of God will come upon you. Judgment, punishment. So you are paying for your sins, and the concept of hell comes in there that if you’re bad, you will be eternally separated from God and your family. So it’s very much a fear-based religion, and there’s no way you’re ever going to be good enough for God. And that’s where I think perfectionism comes in for so many people thinking they have to be perfect.
I was also raised Lutheran. My mother was Lutheran. And Lutheran aligns more with Catholicism. It’s just A different way of understanding God and they’re both claiming their right ways except, one of them has got to be wrong. For a little kid that’s six years old, one church is telling me one thing and the other church is telling me something else. I’m sure if I went to the Methodist or to the synagogue, they would be telling me something else. So, the messages get very confusing, especially for kids that take things literally. So I think God even gets confused about what he supposedly said.
Johnny Burke: We’ll circle back to that. What do you remember about the experience between the moment that the accident happened and when you actually woke up in the hospital?
Nicole Kerr: When the moment the accident happened, the last thing I remember was pulling onto the pavement. I was a passenger in a car. it was a 1965 Corvette convertible, and the driver was a senior cadet also at the Air Force Academy.
We weren’t allowed to have cars out there until we were, juniors and seniors. I was getting a ride back it was a Sunday evening; we’d been at a squadron kickoff for the semester party, and I was getting a ride back with him. We stopped at a bar and had two beers and then he wanted to watch the sunset. And I was really concerned about getting back before the curfew time of 7 :35.
The last thing I remember was getting back on the road and complaining that we were going to be late. The next thing I know, I woke up in the ICU the next day and my commanding officer is there and my squadron commander, and I look at them and I’m just like, “what happened?” they told me that I was in a car crash, and that I never made it back to the academy. The first thing that I thought was, don’t tell my dad he’ll kill me.
Johnny Burke: The car crash? Is that where the first NDE actually occurred? What happened during the experience, did you flat line?
Nicole Kerr: Yes, I did flatline. This didn’t come back for almost 20 years, the only thing I remembered after waking up and being in the hospital for four months was bright white lights, that was it. And I asked my surgeon if that could have been the operating room lights and she said” no, it could not have been” because I came in thought to be dead and unconscious and had a blood pressure of 60 over zero.
So I pieced together the medical records, the paramedic that came to my hospital room. He told me what happened when he got to the scene. Then my memory actually came back 19 years later when I came out of a Starbucks. I could remember how I sat in the car and, the rest of my memory came. I went to see my chiropractor instead of going to work. This is what I remember now, and this is what happened. I was sitting in the car; it was a Corvette convertible.
I had one leg on the dashboard, and the other one folded over. He had made a sexual pass at me, and I said no. And he got really mad at me, and he turned the wheel of the vehicle, and he was speeding. He was going about 70, 72 in a 40-mile-an-hour zone. And the back end of the car fishtailed, huge boulder right there, and my side of the car hit it and the car flipped over. We were both thrown out and I was pronounced dead.
A group of bystanders in a home heard it came out called 9 1 1. They came to see if they could do anything, and they couldn’t get any kind of pulse on me.
So they went and got a blanket, covered me up, and waited for the volunteer fire department and emergency to get there. One E M T said,” I need to take a look at her “, so when he uncovered me, the only sign of life he could get after checking everything was my right eye flickered and my pupil dilated. If you know anything about the saying, our eyes are the window to our soul, my soul at that moment that he was working with me came back in through my eye.
It left when I went up through the windshield, and I froze there and I looked down and I could see, I knew I was going to die. And the thing is Johnny, is you can’t stop the motion. Mentally, and physically, there’s nothing you can do.
It’s not willpower that you can make yourself or control it in any kind of way. And I could see, oh my gosh when I land, I’m going to die. And that’s exactly what happened.
And this being, I called him Casper, the ghost initially, but I always knew it was male and I always knew it was a younger male, and somehow, and for years, I could never figure out what it was until this past August I am 58 years old, and my grandfather died at age 58 in August, at the end of August. And he came to me in a meditation. And he told me he was the angel that lifted me up.
So we went to a different plane and there were other beings there. Now they’re not in human form, they’re just different energy beings. Like when we breathe out that breath, that’s the soul part leaving us. It’s energy.
Johnny Burke: What did they, look like the other beings?
Nicole Kerr: They’re translucent, and I understood the conversation that two of them were having right next to me. And that was for us here on earth to ask for help from the angelic realm, from the spiritual realm. And what they mean by that is there is a whole realm of angels that are waiting to help us here on earth, but we have to ask.
Johnny Burke: Right, so the message was for earthlings, humans, is that we need to ask Angels for help?
Nicole Kerr: Exactly, because we can choose to ask for help or not ask for help. It’s called free will. When I asked my pastor at the time in the hospital,” I’m a good person. I’m a good girl. I really tried to do everything right. Why did this happen to me? ” And he said, “well, sometimes bad things happen to good people and it’s free will. That is one message that was very clear to me is, I don’t care if it’s even for a parking space. They don’t care how small it is or big it is. It’s just you have to initiate it and ask for help. And you may laugh at people that say, oh, I asked my parking angel for a space. But they do get a response and it’s about having a relationship with the spiritual realm. It really is your spiritual family that is working on your behalf. They’re just in a different dimension.
Johnny Burke: Which is exactly what another girl I just interviewed said, when she uh, described seeing spirits, and other beings, it’s like another dimension bleeds into this one. So going back to the experience when you were lifted through the windshield; when you connected, with the angelic realm, what did it feel like emotionally? Were you scared? Did you want to come back? Or what was going through your head at that moment?
Nicole Kerr: I do remember saying, oh my God, and then realizing I’m going to die. Then when the angel appeared I never felt the pain of the actual injuries at the scene of the accident. I don’t have that memory, because I fell physically, but that was a corpse that fell. My spirit had already flown out. Does that make sense?
Johnny Burke: Yes.
Nicole Kerr: okay, so when I got on the other side, the other message that I was told was that I was going to go back into that body.
And I was like, no, I don’t want to do that because I could see that body and I could see how mangled it was. And I thought, man, that’s going to be a lot of suffering and that’s going to be a lot of pain physically. But not only that, I’m going to have to go back in my family of origin, and instead of becoming independent at 19, I’m going to become dependent on them. There’s no way to escape it. I was like, I, I don’t want to go back. And they told me that I needed to go back because I had a specific mission.
Johnny Burke: When you say “they” again, were these angels?
Nicole Kerr: Angels? Yes. It was an angel.
Johnny Burke: Do you remember what they looked like?
Nicole Kerr: They’re translucent like you can see through them but then they can change and have a layer of light form. So you can kind of make out a shape.
Johnny Burke: not a face though, did you see faces or not?
Nicole Kerr: Mm-hmm. Mm. but you intuitively know who it is, it later realized, oh, this is my grandfather, but it’s not my grandfather at an older age. It’s my grandfather when he was in his thirties., around age 33, and I thought, well, that’s interesting okay.
Johnny Burke: The age that Christ died, according to legend. It’s interesting to bring that up because I’ve heard when people get a glimpse of beyond the veil, they encounter some of their relatives and friends that have passed. They’re always in their prime and they’re always around 30. I don’t know why that is. you have some evidence that it was not your imagination. tell us about that.
Nicole Kerr: I question just like everybody else when a memory comes back, any traumatic memory, Wow. Did that really happen or not? But I know, based on what I went through and then going through the hospital, staying in there four months, having a code blue, and then drowning in my own fluid okay, I am supposed to be here.
Things beyond me are intervening. to keep me alive. I was dead at the scene from anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. That’s how long it took the paramedics to get there.
Johnny Burke: At the scene?
Nicole Kerr: At the scene, flatlined out and when my eye flickered, they started working, me getting an IV in my neck. They couldn’t get one in my arms. They got me in the bus and got me to the nearest community hospital where of course they weren’t equipped to handle trauma, and it was basically praying that I would just stabilize and survive the night, and it took all night for me to stabilize. And just when they thought I wouldn’t, I would.
And that’s the kind of stuff that the doctors would just say, it’s out of my hands. And then stuff would happen. And that’s what happened on the second N D E when I had an emergency operation. I coded and they went and told my parents, Nicole has passed away. You’re going to have to start making funeral arrangements. And my dad started crying, which my mother said he’d never done. And my mother, said, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe she’s gone.” Then a couple of minutes later, here comes the surgical nurse. She’s going again. We don’t know how, but she’s going again. They had called the time of death on that too.
I have what I call a military angel, and that may seem like an oxymoron, but it protects and defends me, it has worked really hard to keep me here because I did not want to stay here. I look at the pain and suffering that not only went on with my life, but with other people’s life on this planet, and I just was demoralized.
I just didn’t want to be a part of that kind of place or energy or vibration.
I think it’s terrible what we do to each other, especially in the name of religion, hypocrisy, wars, and all of that.
Johnny Burke: During this second experience, were you able to see any of your family and the other people in the operating room or outside the operating room?
Nicole Kerr: I stayed in the operating room on that one because they didn’t fully anesthetize me because I was so sick, they didn’t think that they’d be able to bring me back. I remember seeing and feeling, actually them pulling at my stomach, opening me up. I remember my hands were clamped down. I couldn’t talk. Then I just went out of my body and realized I don’t want to go back in and once again, James was there going, “you’re going back in because you’ve got a mission, Nicole, that you are going to fulfill one day.”
Johnny Burke: James; is that your grandfather?
Nicole Kerr: No, he’s my military angel, but that is the name of my grandfather.
Johnny Burke: Now there was one more experience after this, right? That was two, and then the third one.
Nicole Kerr: I drowned. I drowned in my own fluid. Still to this day, I have a fear of not getting enough air. That was the third, and I was absolutely terrified of dying that time. I couldn’t remember what had happened to me on the other side. That memory was buried deep down because now I had a Lutheran pastor. So I was back in fear of, again, at 19 of dying and being separated from my parents because by this time they had blamed me, and I needed time to do good work in order to make amends so that I would get on everybody’s good side again.
Johnny Burke: You actually used a term called STE, spiritually transformative experience. So, would you say that not all near death experiences are spiritually transformative? Is there a debate about that?
Nicole Kerr: I think there is probably a debate about that, for me, being spiritually transformed means that the concept of God that I was raised with which was a vending machine concept. You put in the right behavior, you press the Coca-Cola button, and boom, you’ll get Coca-Cola. Well, what happens? when you get Mountain Dew or you don’t get anything, they blame you. You didn’t do something right, so it always comes back on you, and you stay in fear. And fear is such a low vibration you lose clarity. In order to regain your clarity, you’re going to have to address your fears, and that’s why I wrote this book ; to help people address their fears around the concept of death. Because if you are afraid of death, it’s going to keep you from living your life.
Johnny Burke: One of the things we can observe right away is, that you would think that going to church has that aim to raise our vibration. But since the teachings, especially the more fundamentalist teachings are actually of a lower vibration because it’s fear-based.
So after this experience, can we assume that you can release all of those beliefs that ” either you do this, or you will incur the wrath of God?”
Nicole Kerr: Yes. That is a false belief system. That was in theology to help instill fear in order to control us. I do NET. Neuro Emotional Technique. I’m also a dietician, but I was working with a little six-year-old girl who was absolutely having anxiety attacks at night because she was going to a fundamentalist church and she thought if she was bad, she was going to go to hell and she wouldn’t have her family.
So when I asked her how she sees God, she eagerly told me “God is a blue spirit with colors and balloons in all different colors, no head, and can talk.” And clearly, this little girl is still having a direct experience with God. I think she comes closest to describing God that any concept that I have heard. Because what I realized when I went into the white light, it absorbs every other color.
On the other side, there are colors beyond the colors we have here on Earth, there are more than a hundred something in the Crayola color box. It is unbelievably brilliant and beautiful. If it absorbs all that light, you’re held in that and it’s like, God is all around you because God is that light. God is that energy. God is that love and thinking of love as an energy versus an emotion.
So God was in me. God was me. I was God. God was presence and fullness and oneness. But most of all, God was love and it is unconditional love, pure, non-judgmental love. As long as you were in a human state, I don’t believe that other humans can offer that, and in that state, it was not that I suddenly had been forgiven for my mistakes, it’s just that they no longer existed. Nothing I had done on Earth was being weighed and measured. It was simply the way my story had played out in one realm.
Johnny Burke: What kind of insight does this experience give you that there is an afterlife?
Nicole Kerr: When I got my memory back, absolutely.
Johnny Burke: Okay. Did you get any insight into past lives., or not necessarily?
Nicole Kerr: I have since, and I do know that the soul keeps incarnating, it’s not our first rodeo here. We can come from other planets. I don’t believe we are the only life that exists in this whole universe. I think there are other places that have higher vibrational states than Earth does, and that souls from these planets come to incarnate into an earthly body in order to help raise the vibration here. I think it’s very difficult for these souls. They have a hard time because they see all of the-
Johnny Burke: Density.
Nicole Kerr: Yeah. And stuff that’s going on that is really keeping people, from being the beings they were born to be and to be these lights and love and, beautiful souls. They’re dividing and hating each other, and, and that is not God at all.
Johnny Burke: The reason I ask is that I’ve noticed that a lot of people that have had near-death experiences often report an elevated sense of intuitive skills, psychic abilities, and even mediumship-type abilities. Did you have a similar experience?
Nicole Kerr: Oh, I’ve been going through that last two years. It took me a while. But yes, definitely I had to get through the emotional part and that is what I had blocked for so long because I was not raised to be emotional. It was “yes” or “no sir”. And then I went into the military and that system is yes or no, sir.
So there’s no room for emotions or a gray area. And then coming from the south, you don’t get angry. You don’t want to hurt your mom. There are all these implied concepts, emotionally. So you have to deal with your emotions because they are stuck in your body and you’re going to have physical reactions to them if you don’t process them.
So I’ve been working through a lot of that. And let me tell you, I feel like I had a haunted mansion of them, but as I work through them, now the spiritual aspect is coming in and I’m seeing my guides, I’m having conversations with them and my angels, we all have guardian angels. Some of us have more than one, but I am getting messages now because I’m asking, I’m also journaling and I’m doing the work with my soul and my spirit to have that relationship. If you never work with them and, and have this dialogue, you’re never going to learn anything.
Johnny Burke: Definitely something I’ve heard many, many times, regarding angels, spirit guides, especially. So what do you suppose are the biggest misconceptions about NDEs from your experience?
Nicole Kerr: Well, they’re not all the same. But I think they have the same major themes, and that’s what I talk about in my book. And the first one being, we do not die. Our soul does not die. It’s not something we ask for because it’s generally accompanied by severe trauma, meaning death. Near-death. Very scary, very traumatic. So you’re going to have to process the trauma to get to it. For me 20 years, I didn’t know what happened. I just went on with my life and was searching for what is God. I know the other one doesn’t really work anymore.
I just couldn’t find any answers about it.
I think the other misconception is that a lot of people think we’re weird in some way because we’ve had it, or that we’re different, and we are different in that we’re more sensitive. I would say most people that have had an experience,
I cannot tolerate loud noises. I can’t tolerate cigarette smoke, or any of that kind of stuff. I can’t tolerate alcohol toxins. So you come back, and your body is more sensitive to what most people do, and it really will make you physically sick.
That’s something that people need to be mindful of with people that have been through these things is they are going to be sensitive and more empathetic and compassionate and have these sensitivities and to realize that it happens more than most people know.
Johnny Burke: There’s been quite a few cases that are documented- I think it’s over a million cases, and that’s just in the states alone. Let’s talk about the book for a minute. Let’s talk about some of the takeaways as well as the timing of when you thought it was right to write the book
Nicole Kerr: My book just came out in August, and I’ve been working on it for 13 years. When I was told to get this message out of do not be afraid of death. Live your life and live it now fully. That’s a big message. How in the world am I supposed to get that out? And then I realized that I just needed to start writing to help me heal and that turned into 13 years of writing, and I worked with a writing coach on it. And then, when Covid hit, I started seeing all these people that were dying and they were dying alone. There was a lot more fears that were being brought up around death and that it can happen to any of us at any time.
People were really starting to get that message, that is one thing I want to say is none of us are guaranteed tomorrow, so I wanted to talk about the positive aspect of death, and instead of it being this doom and gloom and negative that we tend to write about in books or we talk about it that way. Other cultures don’t necessarily do that, so we can learn a lot from other cultures. But we here in the United States need to do a better job of reframing the narrative that death is like John Lennon said: it’s stepping out of one car and into another car. And I love that because he really was ahead of his time in so many things.
Johnny Burke: He was, there’s no question about that. Another one, I believe is from Instant Karma: we all shine on, like the moon, the stars, and the sun.
I thought, he got it.
Nicole Kerr: Absolutely. And when you look how brilliant the stars are from here, imagine if you can see them up close, it’s a different way of looking at things and we’re moving into a different vibration. and if people don’t want to go into that vibration, then they’re going to be stuck three-dimensional thought process and we need to raise that. And having our kids start understanding what death looks like, that it’s a part of life, and to be honest with them about what it looks like. So I didn’t even realize how much it healed me to write it. But I thought it was a way to get my message out the clearest. I do have a book club suggestion question in the book.
I do have a fear checklist. And I think the 10 common lessons from the NDEs that you were saying IANDS had put together. I want people to really understand that those are all positive. So let’s start focusing on the positive parts of it. Sure, we’re human and we’re going to grieve, and the pain and the loss, but I’m telling you where we go, it’s incredible. You start having that when you start your transition, you’ll see people grasping to the other side. They’ll go over to the other side for a little while, have a conversation, then they come back over here. They’re back and forth. A lot of people think they’re hallucinating, but they’re not.
I hope that my book will inspire others. I hope it will bring hope to others and I hope you don’t have to go through what I went through to get these messages and to start asking, what does my soul want to tell me today?? That’s a great journal entry to start dialoguing and start discovering, the being that you were meant to be, not who someone else told you are or should be.
Johnny Burke: Yeah, that’s definitely a good suggestion. Anything else that you want our listeners to know?
Nicole Kerr: God is internal, we need to quit looking. And I looked for a long time externally for the fix, and the fix is inside. And so to start connecting with that and to have a knowingness, when you get aligned with your soul, your spirit, your body, and your mind, you are grounded in a knowingness that makes you unshakeable. I think to love yourself is the most important thing, and when you think about the source of all that exists, God, that is love. Once again, experiencing love as an energy rather than an emotion is a whole different concept to get your head around.
Johnny Burke: It’s a very good point; when people talk about this overwhelming feeling of love, especially during these experiences, it’s not to be confused with romantic love. It’s much more powerful. Nicole, thanks for coming onto the show. Great stuff. How can our listeners learn more about you?
Nicole Kerr: My website. It’s www.nicolekerr.com. You can find the book at Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. I’m on Instagram, Facebook, and all those other things as well.