Something happened to me today. During one of my regular spinal procedures, I experienced aspiration/regurgitation, vomiting while under anesthesia, which can lead to death. When I first became conscious, I was laying on my back with a team of doctors around me, telling me to breathe. But my body was totally paralyzed, and there was no air to be had. I was literally suffocating.

I wanted to open my eyes so they could see my panic, reach out to grab someone’s arm, scream that I could not breathe, but all of that was utterly impossible. At some point, I found some movement in my legs and began wildly kicking to signal them. Someone was squeezing a plastic object over my face and I could feel air being forced through my mouth.

I believe I went out again, though, unable to take in breath on my own, and at one point in the alarming inability to take in air, I felt my head fall to the side of the table and heard my consciousness say, “Well, this is it.” I knew the feeling of someone dying. I had felt the struggle of my body fighting with everything possible within in it, to live, until there was nothing left. It didn’t feel like I was doing that, it felt purely like the biological impetus to live, in action. Which might sound strange coming from a spiritualist.

I do remember when the anesthesia was being administered at the beginning of the procedure, asking my angels to be with me. You can’t make sense or understand an experience like this until more time passes.

But I want to bring up the reaction I involuntarily had, which most humans do, once I had been restored; a reaction generated purely by fear and an effort to cope. I began looking for fault. Something went horribly wrong and it must be someone’s fault. I had done everything the same as every other time, in preparing for the surgery. My regular anesthesiologist wasn’t there, nor was the doctor who usually works on me. This shouldn’t have happened and someone had to have done something wrong.

But after reading up on what happened, I realized it was highly probable it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It occurred halfway through the procedure, even though I stopped eating the night before well before midnight, I had had a very late dinner and hadn’t been digesting things well, and acid reflux could have played a part.

At home, on the very same night of my recovery, I was able to let the misguided quest to find fault go. Instead, I felt relief for the illumination and was appropriately/extraordinarily grateful for the excellent team of doctors and nurses that saved me. Everything in me calmed down, my mind cleared and my heart opened – to myself in compassion for the traumatic experience, and to all the support that was present for me, both seen and unseen.

When things don’t go our way, when there is tragedy, betrayal, loss, bad news, death, or any number of awful life events, we are so conditioned to blame, fault, point fingers, attack, and be suspicious of others. It’s one thing to seek justice and have people take accountability, but I’m speaking to the part of our minds that immediately grasps in pain for false relief. Our heightened polarization and collective fear makes it all the more easy to go there.

But we are consciousness. And when we give our consciousness some space to reveal truth and guidance, it does. Its very nature leads us out of the darkness and into the light of clarity, wisdom, unity, connection, love, and trust.

That is a different path forward.