“It was all love”: Central Texas native shares life-changing near-death experience

WACO, Texas (KWTX) - What happens when we die? Some say we cease to exist altogether. Many religions claim we continue existing in a different form, although the specifics are a bit different. One Central Texas native says she knows exactly what happens because she died and came back.

Researchers estimate millions of others have experienced that, too.

Ellen Wier was 12 when something happened that would shape her life forever. It was a beautiful September day in 1989 and she was taking a horseback riding lesson.

“The cinch wasn’t tight enough and I fell off. I tried to hang on but the horse kicked me in the right temple,” Ellen explained.

Unconscious, she was taken to a hospital in Hillsboro then transferred to the old location of what we now know as Baylor, Scott and White Hillcrest Medical Center. Ellen was in a coma for five days. And in that time, as her family prayed she’d pull through, Ellen found herself on a journey.

“I remember being on a raft of sorts, a wooden raft, and there were pink clouds everywhere. And I felt very loved and connected. And I remember seeing Jesus in front of me, I recognized Jesus,” she said, “And on my left there was a figure next to him in long brown robes, bald with bare feet who I didn’t recognize, but I felt safe. I felt this protector energy.”

That was just beginning. Next, she says she was taken into realm with bright white light, and an array of multicolored streams and trees. And then, another level.

“From there I was lifted into the real place of light and that’s what I remember the most,” Ellen explained, “I was taken into this realm of golden light, and it was all love. It was the most beautiful, connected, warm feeling you could have.”

Ellen says she was enraptured in this love, even becoming part of it, when she was taken back the wooden raft, and given a choice.

“And I was in front of Jesus and he communicated with me and asked me if I wanted to stay or go back. And I really wanted to stay because I felt so loved and so whole,” Ellen said.

But then she was shown something that changed her mind.

“I was shown the trajectory of my father’s life, and saw he wouldn’t actualize his life on this planet if I chose to stay,” she said.

The Backstory: “Near Death,” full interview with NDE survivor Ellen Wier

Ellen says she knew there was no right or wrong decision. It was up to her with no judgment. She chose from her soul.

“I remember choosing to live. And it was in that moment I chose to live that in my entire heart I felt this expansion, this warmth, this love, this complete expansion of energy. And I was so grateful to live. I knew it was a gift,” she said.

Once she fully emerged from her coma, she was released. Her family was told only one other person in Texas known to have survived an injury like hers, was a boy who ended confined to a wheelchair.

Ellen told us, “I knew I was lucky, and to have lived through and eventually be able to talk about it was a gift.”

Dr. Jan Holden, EdD, is an expert in near death experiences. She’s spent years as a professor of counseling at the University of North Texas. She’s also the president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. And she’s the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, an academic journal dedicated to NDEs. She says near death experiences generally meet two criteria.

The first is what she calls the material aspect dealing with the physical world.

“The person experiences their consciousness apart from their physical body, usually above, perceiving the material world,” she explained.

And next there’s what she calls the trans-material aspect, which involves what some may describe as a spiritual world.

Holder told us, “the person is in environments and interacting with beings that are not of the material world.”

She’s studied hundreds of cases of near death experiences contributing to several books. Holden says while no two NDEs are exactly the same, there are similarities including the physical and spiritual aspects she described and others.

“Some rapid movement through a tunnel or a void,” she explained.

Holden added, “being given a choice to return, so some kind of a return process, and then the actual experience of reentering the physical body.”

Some in the scientific community point to the body’s release of a psychedelic chemical called DMT at the point of death, or a lack of oxygen, as a cause for some of these visions. But Holden says there’s evidence to the contrary. She says people frequently return to their bodies with information should have no knowledge of, gathered while outside their bodies.

Holden described a case of a woman whose heart stopped during abdominal surgery. She was revived. And later in recovery she told the doctor what happened in the operating room when she died.

“She said I was above the ceiling, and you did this, and this person did that and all of that was accurate,” Holden said.

Holden says the patient also knew about a surgery happening next door, one not even the doctor was aware of. It was a leg amputation, and she even described the yellow plastic bag used for the discarded limb. The doctor checked for himself.

“He went back to hospital records and found out that while he was in his surgery, yes indeed they were amputating a man’s leg in the next operating room,” Holden said.

And the doctor visited the room where that surgery took place and saw the plastic, yellow bags.

That’s just one example of hundreds filling academic journals and books. She says about 80 to 90 percent of people describe what some might equate to a “heaven” experience. But what about the concept of hell? Holden has seen those accounts too, roughly 10 percent.

“They describe distressing experiences, terror, horror, profound and eternal isolation,” she said.

But Holden explained that even in those cases, people experience positive after effects like a new purpose and love for life. And a renewed outlook is something shared across the board.

“Near death experiencers, many of them, come back saying what they learned in their experience, was the purpose of human life, and that is to advance in our capacity to love. We’re here to experience and express our ability to love at every level,” Holden explained.

That brings us to Ellen Wier’s special mission, a revelation she experienced shortly before returning to her body.

Ellen said, “I knew it was such a gift to live. I wanted to give back. I said I want to come back and heal people with music. And I made a second vow. I will give gratitude every day for every experience, because I know it’s a gift because everything is a lesson. Everything is something to expand our soul.”

And as she returned to her body, she saw, and felt, and heard music, a verification perhaps of what she was meant to do.

“And I’m so grateful to be here, to get to use music because now I’m a music therapist and a psychologist, and I do exactly what I came back here to do,” Ellen said.

And she says we don’t have to survive a near death experience to live our lives to their fullest capacity.

“We’re so powerful, we are so capable, and we are all here for a reason,” Ellen told us.

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