Touched by the Light

Yvonne Kason MD is President and Co-Founder of Spiritual Awakenings International, and Past-President of IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In 1990, she was the first Canadian medical doctor to specialise her medical practice in the research and counselling of patients with diverse types of STEs. She is a retired family physician and transpersonal MD-psychotherapist, previously on faculty at the University of Toronto, with 40 years of experience counselling STE Experiencers. She co-founded the Kundalini Research Network in 1990, and later co-founded the Spirituality in Health-Care Network in 2000. She herself has had five Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), two in her childhood and three in her adult life, as well as multiple Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STEs – a term she herself coined in 1994). Yvonne is therefore uniquely placed to write this ground-breaking book as experiencer, clinician and researcher.

As Ken Ring remarks echoing William James in his endorsement, the book might have been entitled 'The Varieties of Spiritually Transformative Experiences' and is equally ambitious in its scope. The three parts explore definitions of Spiritually Transformative Experiences, a yogic model of consciousness, kundalini and STEs, and the after effects of STEs in terms of spiritual transformation. She herself had a kundalini awakening in 1976 while still a medical student as a time when such experiences were poorly understood, especially in terms of what William James called medical materialism. She could not find a satisfactory explanation for this and other experiences, and so began her research quest not only through study of experiences, but also reading the mystical literature - especially the work of Yogananda and Gopi Krishna.

The first chapter describes her extraordinary brush with death in 1979, when a small plane in which she was travelling as a doctor crash landed and sank in a snow storm into a semi-frozen lake. An inner voice said "Be still and know that I am God" and she was immediately flooded with peace. A part of her awareness remained with her body struggling to swim ashore, but 95% of her focus was expanded and looking down from above, then slipped into a white-light realm and mystical experience – the voice told her to swim to shore, which she just managed to do, and they were lucky enough to be rescued and taken to hospital. This powerful experience that she is in fact a soul living in a physical body results in a psychic awakening. Yvonne then looks in detail at a variety of STEs: mystical experiences, spiritual energy/ kundalini episodes, near death experiences, death watch experiences, after death communications, psychic experiences, and inspired creativity and genius.

She describes the characteristics and phenomenology with many illustrative case histories and people's personal conviction concerning the reality of the divine universal intelligence. Here again, she draws on her own experiences and their powerful aftermath. The most serious was a death NDE in 2003 resulting in a traumatic brain injury and a challenging 12-year process culminating in a miraculous brain healing in early 2016 and a resumption of her former writing and speaking activity. Death watch experiences refer to a number of well documented phenomena around the end of life and death transition - some of these provide highly evidential information, for instance a mother who asked for forgiveness from her daughter, who only subsequently discovered that the mother had been swindled and she had lost her inheritance. The chapter on genius contains fascinating accounts of musical inspiration from Brahms and Wagner.

The second part explains the yogic model of consciousness and kundalini derived from Gopi Krishna and Yogananda, which also involves prana as life energy. Yvonne sees the mystical light as a transformative upper chakra experience, drawing the conclusion that we are 'fundamentally spiritual beings, existing in a multidimensional universe' and here to learn and grow, ultimately realising and experiencing our oneness with the Spirit/Higher Power, becoming clear vessels for the Divine as exemplified by the great spiritual Masters. This leads into the consideration of long-term spiritual transformation that makes up about half of the book.

The coverage here is comprehensive, looking at patterns of physical, psychological, spiritual and paranormal STE after-effect symptoms and moving on to spiritual emergencies and psychoses while also asking who has spiritual emergencies and why, and giving strategies for living with spiritual transformation and for psychospiritual housecleaning. Many different patterns are differentiated and extensively described, so that readers can home in on parts relevant to their own experience. Physical symptoms may include energy movements, pain, metabolic, sexual and sleep pattern changes, and often result in increased sensitivity. Psychological effects can be positive or distressing, and can lead to tensions and conflicts in relationships, sometimes with apparent past life reverberations. The same applies to spiritual and paranormal after-effect symptoms, with some remarkable experiences and corresponding sound guidance on relevant coping strategies. One extraordinary case involved a 'walk-in' taking over the body of Bill after cardiac arrests during serious heart surgery who exhibited a completely different personality and abruptly walked out on their marriage. Only later does it become apparent what had transpired.

As a clinician, Yvonne was able to guide people through spiritual emergencies, and provides a helpful table distinguishing these from psychosis. She lists predisposing factors, including out of balance lifestyle, over intensive spiritual practice, inadequate psychological housecleaning, excessive greed and ambition, and unresolved conflicts with the God concept or spiritual guilt. She gives helpful strategies for living with spiritual transformation, recommending that we take care of our physical, psychological and spiritual health. Again, she provides detailed practical advice, which will also be useful to fellow practitioners. She regards meditation as the key to spiritual deepening and awakening, devoting a separate hands-on chapter to the topic. The book as a whole is powerful affirmation of a moderate rather than extreme transformative spiritual evolutionary path with a vision of an emerging harmonious planet 'blossoming in mystical consciousness.' For me, at any rate, this is undoubtedly the direction of travel even if the process of emergence proves to be slower and more agonising than we would like.